TRANSCRIPT

Her profound wisdom has been such a blessing in my life and it's been the blessing in many people's lives, and I think that's what's really special about my mother. She's not just blessed her nuclear family. She's blessed hundreds, thousands, of people through her writing, through her outreach, that's selflessness. She's not just concerned about her children because she truly is concerned about all children. 

“Nothing You Do Matters Unless What You Do Matters”
I’m Amadon DellErba and this is “Get Real or Die Trying”

How we doing tribe? Welcome to a very special episode, Episode 20. It's been great to kick these out every week, stay committed we’re 20 weeks into my podcast. 

Today is special because I'd like to do an ode to my beautiful mother, Niánn Emerson Chase. It's going to be her birthday this Monday, August 17th, and so I'd like to honor my mother today. You know, many people call my mother a saint and she really doesn't like this, but honestly she actually is the most saintly human being I think I've ever met. My mother has always reminded me to walk gracefully through life and I know she's a saint because she's continued to forgive me for doing the opposite of that for years and years. Graceful is not a beautiful word that is used to describe me much, but it certainly, certainly is, to describe her. 

My mother is a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She grew up on Native American reservations in Arizona. Very humble beginnings. She went on a spiritual journey about 34 years ago where she met my father, Gabriel of Urantia. They went on to found together a spiritual community, Global Community Communications Alliance, as well as a university, The University of Ascension Science and the Physics of Rebellion. This spiritual community is one of the largest, longest-sustaining communities in the world, with a hundred missionaries from all over the world, together, serving on 225 acres in Southern Arizona. It's quite special and it's quite amazing what she's achieved with my father Gabriel of Urantia. My mother's an author, she's a spiritual teacher, she's the director of the university, she's a grandmother. You know really though, to me, what stands out about my mother is that she's a true sojourner. She's an explorer. What does she explore? Well, to me, she explores the highest planes of consciousness and uncharted lanes of spiritual progress. I think that she's really spiritually intelligent. She's a pioneer and she's an intellectual, but beyond being an intellectual, she's a spiritized and humble intellectual. She's one of the greatest minds and writers that I've ever come across. She's rooted in the earth and she's dancing in the cosmos. She's an example of grace and womanly honor. She really is real. She's not pretentious, but she's so elegant. I'm so grateful to have a mother like her and so I did write a poem that I would like to read today as a tribute to her.

But first I want to read some of her work, a couple of quotes by her. I'm talking about her being real and you know what I appreciate about her is she's practical to her approach to spiritual progress, yet elegant at the same time. One of her quotes is, “True spirituality is not the words that we speak, but it is how we live our lives.” It's pretty simple, but it’s a profound truth. Another one is, “Love is an action, and it's the hardest one to stay committed to.” I've learned a lot about that over the years in our illusions of love, but truly to be a loving person takes tremendous work; tremendous spiritual work to be full of love, to be a love saturated soul. Another quote that I absolutely love of hers, “As gardeners of your own character, through your cooperation with the Threefold Spirit, allow your lower thoughts and emotions to be composted into something much more wonderful and life-giving.”

Another thing about my mother that I love and respect and parallels, I think, a lot of people in the world is that she's a teacher. She was a teacher for many, many years, and she taught Native American children on the reservation. She was in the education system. I genuinely feel that teachers are very under-appreciated. It's a profession that is not desired by many because it doesn't make money, and people want to make money, so they don't choose to be teachers. But really, being a teacher is one of the most honorable and noble things a man or a woman could do. The amount of time, and energy and love that my mother has given to her students for 30 years or more…  actually more like 45 years... First, starting with her children students, and now adult students, because she's a high level educator of adults now in a university system is incredible. What she's done for people is incredible. How she's able to merge spiritual teachings, philosophies, virtues, and concepts into our practical daily life and use examples and bridge the gaps of some of these lofty concepts and how they apply to our everyday life, is truly amazing. And she does it in her writing. She does it in her teaching. She's an amazing author, she's written many, many articles. She's written books, highly suggest you check out our website: Niannemersonchase.org to see those things more for yourself. 

But, you know, for all teachers out there, I applaud you because I've seen the energy and the output that my mother has given and the time it takes to write the curriculum and what it really is, is selflessness. She has the virtue of selflessness. She's truly other-oriented. These are virtues that are very hard to act in and to live in all the time. Spiritually ascended masters  do it. People who want to be spiritually ascended strive for selflessness. She's in it all the time. When it's so much energy and time and thought is put into developing something for somebody else to help them to grow, to be educated, to get where they need to get, is outstanding. She first started doing it with children, like I said, and now it’s adults and now she's providing curriculum to, you know, adults in spiritual lessons and teachings. It's incredible. And she walks the talk, you know, she truly is a teacher that lives the teachings. Of course she falters like all human beings and makes mistakes, I’m not elevating her to a level of perfection. But she's one of the most perfected human beings I've ever met. Now, of course, some of you may be listening to this and think, “Oh, he's bias. Of course, he's saying that... he loves her. He's, you know, he's her son.” It's not that. It's not why. Plenty of us have family members that we do not think highly of and that we're not going to speak highly of just because they’re our family members. I'm saying this because I truly believe it. And I've met many people. I've studied other people's spiritual work, and their lives, and what they're saying, they don't match. 

And another thing that my mother has taught me, unfortunately it's taken me awhile to get and to still get, is the respect and adoration and correct love for women. And, you know, as a man I falter and make mistakes. I have to learn that. But my mistakes don't come from not being taught. And I'm clear about that. My mistakes come from not listening, like I said already. And so I can draw upon the deep well of things she's taught me over the years. And now that I'm more humble, perhaps, older, more receptive, I can go back to the teachings and the things that she's been saying to me for many, many years that are truly profound, that I just wasn't at a place to receive and get, but the seeds were planted and now I can activate those truths within me more... And I'm so grateful for that. Some of my greatest memories are the nature walks we would take. She implanted in me and my siblings a profound love for nature and appreciation, but not just love, a respect for nature… to walk carefully through nature, and to learn from nature. She was always teaching, not just teaching me the names of the plants, and the trees, and the bushes. She was teaching me the interrelatedness of all things. She was teaching me the concepts of spiritual unity and using nature as an example, she was teaching me interdependence. She was teaching me how man is dependent upon nature. She taught me so much on these walks as a child, that these things did go into my heart and they're a seed, they were planted and the meaning of them has expanded more and more as I mature more and more.

Her profound wisdom has been such a blessing in my life and it's been the blessing in many people's lives. And I think that's, what's really special about my mother. She's not just blessed her nuclear family. She's blessed hundreds, thousands of people, through her writing, through her outreach. That's selflessness. She's not just concerned about her children because she truly is concerned about all children. And so some of these saintly qualities that I talk about are hard to, you know, pinpoint why people call her a Saint, but she is truly saintly in so many ways. 

I always appreciated how my mother brought nature into everything. She brought the understanding of the natural process, as she mentioned before, you know, let those negative things in us turn to compost, and then they can be enrichment for our souls; for the soil of our souls. She's always been a cosmic cheerleader, an inspiration, an understanding person in my life, and a teacher, a gentle teacher, and someone who's taught me to approach life carefully. And even though I failed at doing that many, many times, it's not because she didn't teach me, it's because I didn't listen. So I'd like to read an ode to my mother, a poem that I wrote for her. I actually wrote this on her birthday 11 years ago and I thought it would be a wonderful tribute to her for this podcast. So this is called “Ode to my Mother,” 

“My mother nursed me sitting atop the commanding red cliffs that towered over the gentle waters of Oak Creek.
As a young man I would leap from those same cliffs into the deep cool water of the earth, swim under the water, and look up to the sun and see the rays dance across the water and penetrate deep into the body of water, engulfing my senses with a certainty of life, a love for the living.
I would run to shore and scurry back up the mountain of ambition to stand atop it and leap yet again like a thought breaking free from the confines of my consciousness to sink deep into the water of your mind where I would then swim through the sunlit tides of your happiness.
Yes mother, you gave me this happiness, this extrusion of higher reality to soar from.
The water to feel weightless in, free of burden.
You gave to me the tears that escape the storm clouds of my consciousness and fall from the sky of my mind, to water the seeds of deliverance.
You taught me to feel the wind on my face and the rain on my brow.
Wind that you taught me to whisper words of love into that float across the world and land into another child's ear to soothe.
To cast handfuls of seeds into so that they carry and fall into the soil of opportunity.
The rain that you taught me to be grateful for when we as children saw it as a lost opportunity to play in the earth that you taught me to walk gently on so I don't hurt the same seeds that fell from the grasp of the wind into the garden of appreciation.
You gave me the aroma of perspective, by lighting the sweet incense of purpose, of love, the essence of passion, the aspiration fire that burns in my soul.
You taught me to kneel when I found it too hard to stand.
You taught me to love when my heart was broken.
You taught me to be real when I was naive -
To realize that very few people on the planet are trying to be better people each day.
Clouds of apathy hang low and dark as I look up at them wondering why it never rains.
Like the clouds, the people never gave anything of themselves.
But you taught me to have hope, that the flowers of my virtue paint the desert of my mind.
You taught me that artistry is the capacity of the mind to dance to our thoughts with the music of our heart.
You taught me that being noble is not hereditary, or dependent upon class.
It is based upon your honor and the pureness of one’s heart.
In the true sense of the word, there are few noble men among the lofty ranks of nobility.
You asked me once: ‘How much of my happiness do I base upon the smile of another, the touch of another, the love of another?’
The emptiness inside of me that is filled with adoration, like water poured into an empty glass and handed to me to quench my thirst?
You told me once: If time were perceivable on the eternal level, we would not function in agony of the now, but in the bliss of the moment.
You gave to me life and I am eternally thankful.
You taught me that it is in the autumn of my soul that the thoughts and aspirations of my mind fall like leaves from an old tree.
It is only when I am naked and cold that God will bring the awesome spring… Rebirth.”

That was written in 2009 as a tribute to my beautiful mother Niánn Emerson Chase. Thank you so much, mother, for bringing me into this world, for raising me, for doing your utmost to make me the man that I am, to help me grow. I'm thankful for your intuition, your soft guiding touch, your soft guiding light. I'm thankful for your gentle persuasion. I'm thankful for your grace. I'm thankful that you are an example of a truly graceful and nurturing spiritual woman; an example to all women on the planet. I feel like if women could just see you day to day, see how you act, how you speak, how you live, how you think, that they would truly be inspired to do it better themselves. Not just women, men, too. You're an example of the triumph of human spirit. You're an example of grace and you're an example of long suffering, really, and living through pain, but with joy and with a heart of service to others. Because I know that you have suffered, mother, and I know that you have given up much, but in turn you will receive the blessings of so much love, so much gratitude, for you have co-created a special, special world, a subculture, a reality here in this community with my father that you've created, and that you've nurtured, that is irreplaceable and not found anywhere else in the world. And you've given to me, mother, so much. I can't even put words to it. So I love you. Happy birthday. And there's many more to come. Thank you.

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And remember: "Pain is Temporary. Victory is Eternal."