A Brief History of the Teaching Mission—
a Cocreative Movement in Service to the Urantia Revelation
By Byron Belitsos
Beginning in the late 1980s, and especially since 1992, something unprecedented entered our planet—an outpouring of profound celestial teachings and energies that has persisted and grown ever since, culminating in a vast archive (see: TMarchives.com and Daynal.org) and in other compilations such as the acclaimed books The Center Within and The Adventure of Being Human.
Back then, new religious movements were mushrooming all over America. And transpiring on the edge of one of these movements was what appears to be an unique phenomenon in the history of religion: coordinated celestial contact across multiple locations. In the many years that have passed since then, hundreds of of people worldwide (but mainly focused in the U.S.) have been gifted with well over 5,000 transcribed sessions of interaction with the unseen realms. During these dialogues, which are often open to the public, those participating would also find it necessary to learn a new skill: a method of discrimination that Christians commonly call discernment of spirits.
The immediate locus of these contacts was the Urantia movement. Dozens of individuals in cities all over the country—almost all of them participants in groups studying The Urantia Book, a text they believe to be a new “epochal” revelation to our planet—were reportedly experiencing verbal input from unseen beings, receiving their messages by apparent telepathic means. These invisible teachers were said to be linked to the mission of the Urantia Revelation. According to plan, they were now making themselves known almost thirty years after its publication. They were purportedly sent by the same metaphysical beings who had originally authored it!
By all accounts, the messages being offered were loving, benign, and compelling. Usually the “contactees”—later called TRs or transmitter/receivers—would be able to speak the transmitted words audibly so that they could be easily recorded and later transcribed; other TRs would sit at their keyboards and “hot pen” the messages, as if taking gentle dictation.
Not all of the newly initiated TRs accepted a public role. But those who did were soon invited by their invisible mentors to begin holding transmission meetings with interested friends and fellow Urantia Book students. In addition, most of the active individuals were soon given a “spiritual name” and assigned a personal celestial teacher from whom they could receive private transmissions directly, or with the aid of a TR. I myself was unable to make verbal contact, so such personal sessions proved especially helpful for me. Yet I also found the group setting to be highly beneficial and sometimes thrilling.
And so, before long, participants in several dozen locations came to believe that practical spiritual teachings were being downloaded from the etheric realms, in a synchronized program of instruction based largely on the Urantia Book’s teaching. Ad hoc groups were assembling in living rooms across America to receive the celestial grace.
In the sessions, opening statements were made by highly communicative beings with names like Abraham, Ham, JarEL, Bertrand, Daniel, Will, Josephine, Jared, Tarkas, Welmek, and Tomas. Each explained to their newly assembled groups that an experimental initiative was under way that was authorized at the highest levels. To our surprise, its ostensible purpose would be to supplement and amplify the published teachings of the Urantia Revelation.
This planetwide project actually would, they said, have a twofold designation: It was to be called the Teaching Mission (now popularly known as TeaM, TM, or the Mission) when linked to existing readers of The Urantia Book; but it was to be dubbed the Correcting Time when referring to conscious or unconscious celestial contacts with social, religious, and spiritual groups and individuals across the rest of the planet who were not necessarily connected with the Urantia Revelation. In other words, the Correcting Time was far broader—and included healing energy and other energetic gifts. It’s contacts were with folks high and low who had no personal knowledge of or belief in the Urantia Revelation; however, much of the same celestial teaching faculty was involved, and a similar curriculum was being pursued.
Further, The Urantia Book was to be the reference text or class textbook for the Teaching Mission, and the TM was in turn a subset of the much larger Correcting Time project that would continue for centuries. Plus, indications were given that the TM was to go through a variety of stages itself and would interact with the Correcting Time in a myriad of ways over many decades, including the inaugural of a new phase called the “Magisterial Mission.”
The TM groups were to receive systematic instruction by what we now know is a organized corps of “ascended masters” working in collaboration with various orders of angelic beings. Overseeing the entire initiative, and its actual creator, was Jesus himself. Jesus Christ is known as Christ Michael or Michael in the parlance of The Urantia Book. He is depicted there as our compassionate brother, all-loving father, and omniscient guide through his Spirit of Truth. As we have noted elsewhere in this book, he is also the cosmic creator—along with his female complement known as “Mother Spirit”—of our local universe of millions of inhabited planets.
Meanwhile, down on this planet, the celestial authority immediate in charge of the TM was Machiventa Melchizedek, a key personality in the narratives of the Urantian revelation. With the formal inauguration of the Teaching Mission announced on February 1, 1992, we were told that Machieventa had been elevated to the status of “Planetary Prince.” This phrase was Urantia lingo for the “chief executive officer” of Earth, also known as “resident governor general”; in other words, he was the head of the planetary celestial administration.
As contact groups began to transcribe the lessons and send them out to other groups, often using the new email technology, it soon become clear that the teachings contained in these varied streams of transmitted wisdom was relatively uniform across all the transcripts—that is, in regard to terminology, content, and even style of presentation.
But how could such an uncanny feat be carried out? Well, the Mission has been planned for centuries. Our celestial “masters” and their angelic collaborators had been carefully recruited to come to our planet explicitly as spiritual teachers when the age was ripe. They would teach from a common curriculum provided by a celestial class of educators known as the Melchizedeks—and specifically adapted for the TM by Machiventa Melchizedek himself.
But who exactly were our unseen instructors who would teach us? They had originated from scores of advanced planets, but they were not material ETs. They hailed from the spirit worlds; they had survived death on their home planets. In other words, they had ascended by natural means (i.e., resurrection after death) to higher realms, also known in the UB as “mansions”—as Jesus put it somewhere in the Bible. It was here that surviving souls continue to live and grow in the afterlife, at least according to the Urantia Revelation. (For a description see papers 47 and 48 in The Urantia Book). And in these metaphysical worlds our intrepid teachers-to-be had received the advanced intellectual and spiritual training that all heavenly ascenders are entitled to, in some cases for periods of up to 50,000 years. And now, they had volunteered to condescend (in the best sense) to come to Earth for a most unusual mission.
Put another way, these ascended humans were not “brothers from outer space” contacting earthlings from UFOs, and not beings from the lower “astral” realms who were offering ad hoc “channelings.” They were enlightened beings speaking from domiciles in the higher etheric realms, and they were charged with the task of offering us lessons that they themselves had long ago mastered. These teachings were in fact based on the standard curriculum as taught on the initial levels of the heavenly mansion realms in first stages of the afterlife.
It should be noted here that most of our instructors were not true “Ascended Masters” in the sense used in the Theosophical tradition to designate teachers like St. Germain and Djwal Khul. In that system, Ascended Masters always originate on Earth; our TM “masters” had as a rule ascended to higher planes from other planets—specifically planets that were not dark and warlike as was ours. But there were a few exceptions: many TM transmissions over the years have been received from Abraham—whose story is told in Genesis in the Bible—and a few from Yogananda, the great Indian guru and saint of the twentieth century, and even from Martin Luther King. These would technically be Ascended Masters as Theosophists understand that phrase, but they are the exception in the TM. The Teaching Mission groups also received transmissions from a wide variety of angelic beings and high teachers who are the indigenous citizens of the upper worlds.
This was all well and good, but why was this daring celestial mission under way now?
The late, great (and soon to be restored) planet earth
We all knew from our studies of The Urantia Book a fact that should not surprise those who don’t read this text: that life on Earth deviates greatly from that on a normal planet. This was owing to events in the distant past that had occurred both off and on our world. Genocide, world war, mass starvation, and ecocide are highly atypical for a planet in our state of technological evolution; these ugly phenomena are an outgrowth of the tragic default of two previous revelatory missions, according to the Urantia Book’s narrative of the history of Urantia (the celestial name for planet earth)—a long and tragic saga that sounds like eerie science fiction to some.
Our Earth is, in fact, what is known as a rebellion planet: Out of the 619 inhabited planets in the local inhabited planetary group, 37 worlds had suffered from a turbulent and tragic history. Our blight resulted from of a very rare event—an angelic rebellion that had erupted eons ago in this local system of inhabited worlds. These planets had been under universe quarantine ever since those distant times. When a planet is quarantined, it is cut off from the so-called celestial communication circuits that naturally link material planets to one another and to the higher realms, not unlike the way that fiber optic lines connect cities on Earth.
Urantia Book students believe that this heavenly mutiny, celebrated in allegorical works such as poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost, was a real fact in our planetary history. It had been led by the angelic rulers of the local system of 1000 inhabited planets, Lucifer and Satan (yes, of Biblical fame), and is thus called the Lucifer Rebellion.
By the way, our planet “Urantia” turns out to be among the two or three worst-affected planets of the 37 rebellion planets. Are you surprised?
Remedial emergency measures have long been under way for Urantia and all of the other rebellion planets. In our case, one of these measures was the spectacular event of the incarnation and life of Christ; the other was the gift of The Urantia Book itself, with the Teaching Mission being a planned extension of that work. The TM was being offered to us and to all 37 rebellion planets.
Bear in mind that a large portion of the lengthy Urantia Revelation is devoted to explaining this hidden history of planetary rebellion that is only hinted at in the Bible as the doctrines of Original Sin and the “fall of mankind.”
The stunning premise of the Teaching Mission, first revealed on February 1, 1992, was the news of the final adjudication of Lucifer Rebellion in heavenly courts. It is well known to Urantia Book students that the tribunal for the so-called case of Gabriel vs. Lucifer was long under way, and had already begun before The Urantia Book was completed in the mid-twentieth century.
And now, in living rooms around America and elsewhere, the celestials were transmitting the grand news that the Adjudication of the rebellion had been finalized in the fall of 1985. This ruling was carried out by high juridical beings in heavenly courts located on the capital of the intergalactic “superuniverse” (that is, the administrative center of one trillion inhabited planets, according to the Urantia Book’s cosmology). This meant, significantly, that Urantia’s planetary quarantine would gradually be lifted, allowing the reinstatement of the celestial circuits that had long been severed. This in turn would permit such celestial transmissions as were now occurring to readily take place, among many other benefits. The Adventure of Being Human is just one example of this phenomenon.