Celestials over Cincinnati

We sat in a suburban living room, surrounded by people we didn’t know very well, waiting and wondering if this first-time “channeling” experience would truly be spiritual -- or just bizarre.

The hosts had brought out an assortment of chairs to seat the incoming curious.  Our small readers group, which had been studying the Urantia Book cosmology casually once a month, was being swelled on this night to meet this new celestial  “teacher” that we had supposedly been assigned. 

The Urantia Book is a history and explanation of the universe and our place in it, and purports to be a spiritual revelation transmitted from celestial sources.  But its many study groups are hardly a haven for the crystals and incense crowd.  Reading this complex 2,100-page tome is much more of an intellectual workout.

The transmitted and foundation-published papers are beautifully wrought prose explaining, among other things, the history of our planet, and a full and detailed history of Jesus.  As a cosmological synthesis of our science, philosophy and religion, the book has been studied by scholars and students for years.  Since its publication in 1955, it has never been disproved or discredited.

Though still little known to the mainstream public, the Urantia Book is truly an amazing, illuminating, and inspiring book, worthy of a lifetime of study. I wasn’t interested in any shortcuts to spiritual growth if it involved trances and background music.  Still, being a journalist, I was open-minded and exploratory.

I had heard of channeling but had never read any material.  My knowledge of spiritual paths was limited and I had only a modicum of interest.  I had long ago chosen not to affiliate with either the Baptists or the Catholics in favor of a more personal relationship with God and had found the Urantia Book to contain all the information I needed about the universe and my place in it.  It reconciled evolution and creationism for me and that was the big thing. I was pleased to just accept the reality of a God and intellectualize and speculate about the details of who we are and why we’re here. The Urantia Papers seemed to have all the answers I needed.

But if a “teacher” had been assigned to our group, I wanted to be here for the introduction.  That connection had come from a similar Urantia study group in Indianapolis, a phone call from a member there asking if we wanted a spiritual teacher to be assigned to us. One of our number asked some members, and we basically said: We don’t really know, it’s kind of strange, but why not?

A second call came later, stating that their teacher, “Welmek,” had noted that our assigned teacher, “Tarkas,” desired to make contact with us.

Tarkas?  What kind of name was that? 

Our Indianapolis friends said that we would have to make our own contact with this teacher and learn to speak his lessons to the group ourselves... if we chose to work with him.  Our free wills would always be in charge in the process.  We would be, more or less, conscious. He was simply available to provide dictation if we would verbalize. It required no special status or superhuman state of consciousness. For the human, it would simply be a service to the teachers and the group.