Thank you all so much for your replies, I appreciate the effort you put into them… and Bonita, how do you do it!?
My reason for joining the forum is to eventually air the odd bits and pieces I feel about the Book as I want to read your feedback. I read the book a couple of times years ago and have dipped into it on and off, but it’s not the only source I draw from in my spiritual life. And the relevant quotes you give are fantastic as I doubt I’d find them myself and probably miss focusing on them and connecting all the dots as you have all obviously spent a lot of time doing.
From all you said concerning my focus on feelings, this morning things slotted into place and for the time being I’m happy with my latest understanding, which I will try to convey.
I understand that all our experiencing systems within our aura are of the mind, so our feelings are of the mind too. So it’s not about focusing on only feelings to the exclusion of the thought part of the mind. My parents severely retarded me in my self-expression as I was growing up. As a result I learnt how to repress many of my feelings, and so much so even to convince myself that I didn’t feel such things. I managed at great cost to myself to deny so many of my feelings all of which I still had but refused to fully acknowledge. I too like most people grew up being made to believe that bad feelings in particular were bad things, and that we should all do all we can to get rid of them, such as focusing on: higher things, feeling-good things, God, Divine Love, understanding all the UB says; whatever it is, all which will help us succeed, be happy, and even spiritually progress in life; all so long as you don’t let those bad feelings dominate and overwhelm you. So don’t dwell on them, don’t try to psychoanalyse them, don’t go anywhere near them, because after all, why do you want to feel bad anyway – as if we have choice in it.
However as hard as I tried I couldn’t apply my thinking mind to cancel out all my bad feelings, even though that was how I was trained. Life didn’t work for me by simply applying my mind, and I couldn’t make myself feel better by using my thoughts. And now I understand that my feeling repression and resulting self-expression retardation was like having a foot that is deformed retarding my full physical expression. Imagining I couldn’t walk on it easily, I’d compensate for that by doing all sorts of strengthening exercises building up my good leg. And so it has been with my thinking mind, I’ve gone off into it building it up mostly through fantasy and self-delusion, adding all the information to it I thought would help, all so as to compensate for the lack of my personality expression in the feelings department.
And ideally I’d have liked to have chopped off my bad leg altogether, just be rid of it, and if I could have, got a new proper functioning leg, which in a way I’ve hoped the various spiritual belief systems I’ve indulged in would do for me. But since meeting my wife and her helping me understand that really I should go the other way, instead of trying to deny my bad foot, feeling humiliated and ashamed and then angry with it, I should feel sorry for it, and look to help myself favouring it. It is the weakest part of myself, the part I hate and least want, so instead of pretending it doesn’t exist, I should focus on it, look to love it, look to be nice to it and support its self-expression, because after all it is still part of me.
So this is what I’m learning to do with my feelings. They are the weakest part of me – my expression of them. I try to dismiss and deny them, the bad ones I don’t want as if they were a deformed leg. So now as I do what I call my ‘Healing’, I go the other way, trying to focus on them, fully accepting and acknowledging that I am feeling them. I am trying to bring them out of hiding; all the ones I’ve repressed since my earliest days I want to come up and out and be fully expressed. But it’s hard work having to reverse the process of denying their existence when it’s all I’ve known how to be.
The Urantia Book I feel has been written mostly for people who are true and normal and not living on a Rebellious world. The revelators acknowledge some of our difficulties, however in the case of how they portray the mind and how it functions and how it deals with feelings, it makes me think it’s speaking to people who aren’t severely repressing many of their feelings, to people who’ve not grown up their whole life being made to be afraid of their own bad feelings. So they portray the feeling and thought parts of the mind in balance, with both parts fully honoured, and then, yes, I can see because of the presence of the adjuster so it is the higher mind that leads us in our quest for Light and Life with the feelings being important yet not the central focus.
But as I said, because of my heavy dysfunction, which TUB doesn’t really say anything about how to heal, so far as I’m concerned, I have to look more to those aspects of myself that I am aware of that aren’t functioning properly, hence my perhaps over-focus on my feeling-expression and my allowing my feelings to fully have their say, so as to unblock all those blockages that are stopping me from naturally growing in truth as the book points out.
Anyway, I feel happier about understand that for myself, and again thank you for your help. So I feel I understand more about why focusing so much on my feelings and doing all I can to express them whilst longing for the truth they will help me see and feel, has helped me so much, compared to when I was trying to work it all out through my mind, all at the expense of my feelings.
Sorry for the length of the post, but instead of posting this separately, I will continue.
This is another quandary I’ve had which I’d like to ask you all about.
If I’m correct the notion of soulmates is not broached in TUB – at least I don’t remember reading anything about it. So is that because they don’t exist; or was it simply not included as part of the mandate for revelation because of some undisclosed reason. However as you are all no doubt aware, the notion of soulmates other than being just a fanciful romantic fantasy is taken seriously in other systems of belief. And I subscribe to it too.
So I’d like to hear your thoughts on this line of thought:
If one accepts we are created in the image of God, which I take to mean on the soul and personality level; and if we start off our lives needing two people to bring us into Creation on the physical; and those two people being our parents become the initial pattern of relating to God with them being for all intents and purposes ‘mini-gods’; and with our starting off life with parents of the opposite sex, looking to meet up with (in theory) our soulmate so as to become parents ourselves, surely all of that ‘image’ suggests that God as we know as our Heavenly Father is but one personality expression of a Soulmate pair, with our Heavenly Mother being the – as yet, so far as TUB is concerned – unrevealed ‘other half’.
So what do you think and feel about this idea: that God is one Soul, and that Soul is actually expressing two Personalities, and we can get to know Them both?
And then, wouldn’t it make more sense that the Mother and Father give rise to the Eternal Son and Infinite (Daughter) Spirit – their Deity ‘children’?
And, is TUB a revelation that keeps within the boundaries as defined by our rebellion; meaning, that because mankind so heavily denies the feminine and women in general being considered as second class, all stemming from the relationship breakdown between Adam and Eve, so it toes the line by sticking to the masculine side of things and keeping certain feminine personalities from us? That TUB is forbidden within its mandate to actually interfere with the Rebellion as it’s manifesting on Earth, all of which is now of our own making since Lucifer, Satan and the other Evil Ones have effectively been dealt with by Jesus, so leaving certain things out of the revelation which if included would greatly interfere with us and how we view ourselves, Creation, and most importantly – God.
