The Network of the Heart Teaching Mission Gathering in Fayetteville, Ark. in 1995 was a sharing that gave the author three new insights into the phenomenon of receiving and transmitting celestial teachers. Each insight is preceded by a quote from the Urantia Papers.

From Paper 100:

You cannot truly love your fellows by a mere act of the will. Love is only born of thoroughgoing understanding of your neighbor's motives and sentiments. It is not so important to love all men today as it is that each day you learn to love one more human being. If each day or each week you achieve an understanding of one more of your fellows, and if this is the limit of your ability, then you are certainly socializing and truly spiritualizing your personality. Love is infectious, and when human devotion is intelligent and wise, love is more catching than hate. But only genuine and unselfish love is truly contagious. If each mortal could only become a focus of dynamic affection, this benign virus of love would soon pervade the sentimental emotion-stream of humanity to such an extent that all civilization would be encompassed by love, and that would be the realization of the brotherhood of man.

Insight #1: The teaching mission is as much about spreading love as it is about the dissemination of information

Imagine that you are exploring a deep dark forest. It is getting late, darkness is approaching, and you feel the need for a campfire for light, warmth, and safety. You gather kindling, twigs, small branches, and some logs. You build a tepee like structure with logs on the outside and twigs and kindling on the inside. You strike a spark and get a fire started in some dry grass. You blow on the spark and it glows brighter and brighter until you begin to see smoke and flames. You continue to blow until the fire is well established, then you transfer it to the kindling in the center of the campfire. You continue to blow on the fire, nursing it so it won't go out.

After a certain point, you have enough flame so that you are confident the fire will burn. It will still be some time before the fire becomes bright and hot. It may take all night to burn the logs you have placed on the outside. But, in making a campfire there is a point of no return where you have enough heat and flame to sustain combustion.

The teaching mission is a spark to the dry kindling. A handful of humans have been contacted, the fire of love has been lit in their hearts, and the flames of service are beginning to glow. The fires may smolder for a long time, but eventually they will spread.

Fire can be used to do work. Iron can be heated and worked, clay pots can be hardened, food can be cooked and so forth. The campfire metaphor has helped me understand the teaching mission much better.

When I first learned that thousands of teachers had come to this planet to help us, I was elated. I read that they were working on our spiritual welfare, on health problems, and on saving the planet from environmental destruction. At first, I focused on the work that would be done using the fire. At first, it was the content of the teachings that I considered most important. The new insights, the new information, and the expanded perspectives were what I thought the teaching mission was all about.

Part of the work of the mission is to spread the truth of the fifth epochal revelation, but that is not the entire purpose of the correcting time.

After spending the weekend at the Gathering of the Heart, I came to realize that an equally important purpose of the teaching mission is to light a campfire in the dark, cold, wilderness. The teachers are sparks that have started smoldering little fires in small groups all over the world. The teachers have gently blown on the fires to keep them from going out in the cold and rain that is part of life in the wilderness. I wonder if we have reached the point of no return. Are the small little fires burning all over now strong enough to both sustain combustion and to eventually spread?

This important aspect of the teaching mission has to do with person to person contact and the spreading of love in every day interactions between people. It may take a very long time for the small campfires that have been started to blaze into bonfires and then spread into a massive forest fire of love. But, sparks have been struck and a few campfires have been lit.

It may never be necessary for the great majority of people on this planet to know anything about the teaching mission for their lives to have been dramatically changed by it. Christian, Moslem, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, and others can all catch fire with love, even though they will still conceptualize religion differently. Millions of people will embark upon a spiritual quest and will discover the source of love that is within them. Some will call it God, some Allah, some the Thought Adjuster, and some will have no particular words at all for it.

It is not immediately necessary for everyone to embrace the teachings of the Urantia book in order to learn to incorporate more love into their lives. It is not necessary to believe that any contact with celestials has occurred to begin trying to understand and love one more brother or sister each day.

From Paper 43:

On the mansion worlds you completed the unification of the evolving mortal personality; on the system capital you attained Jerusem citizenship and achieved the willingness to submit the self to the disciplines of group activities and co-ordinated undertakings; but now on the constellation training worlds you are to achieve the real socialization of your evolving morontia personality. This supernal cultural acquirement consists in learning how to:

1. Live happily and work effectively with ten diverse fellow morontians, while ten such groups are associated in companies of one hundred and then federated in corps of one thousand.

2. Abide joyfully and co-operate heartily with ten univitatia, who, though similar intellectually to morontia beings, are very different in every other way. And then must you function with this group of ten as it co-ordinates with ten other families, which are in turn confederated into a corps of one thousand univitatia.

3. Achieve simultaneous adjustment to both fellow morontians and these host univitatia. Acquire the ability voluntarily and effectively to co-operate with your own order of beings in close working association with a somewhat dissimilar group of intelligent creatures.

4. While thus socially functioning with beings like and unlike yourself, achieve intellectual harmony with, and make vocational adjustment to, both groups of associates.

5. While attaining satisfactory socialization of the personality on intellectual and vocational levels, further perfect the ability to live in intimate contact with similar and slightly dissimilar beings with ever-lessening irritability and ever-diminishing resentment. The reversion directors contribute much to this latter attainment through their group-play activities.

6. Adjust all of these various socialization techniques to the furtherance of the progressive co-ordination of the Paradise-ascension career; augment universe insight by enhancing the ability to grasp the eternal goal-meanings concealed within these seemingly insignificant time-space activities.

7. And then, climax all of these procedures of multisocialization with the concurrent enhancement of spiritual insight as it pertains to the augmentation of all phases of personal endowment through group spiritual association and morontia co-ordination. Intellectually, socially, and spiritually two moral creatures do not merely double their personal potentials of universe achievement by partnership technique; they more nearly quadruple their attainment and accomplishment possibilities.

Insight #2: The teaching mission is a partnership!

Once the fires have been lit, there will be work to be done. My original understanding of this work was that only humans could do the things that needed to be done and the teachers would be here telling the humans what to do. I think this vision of how the teaching mission will work is not quite correct. I think that something new and unique is being tried here. Humans and ascenders are forming teams that will work together creatively.

I think the most accurate idea of how the mission is designed to work is through a creative partnership. By forming working teams, problems can be addressed at many different levels. The teachers, mostly former human beings from perfected worlds, do not understand how our nasty little planet conducts its business. These beings do not comprehend the kind of unmitigated greed that drives our economic system. They have never seen the kind of violence and selfishness we take for granted. They do not have much insight into our distorted religious beliefs and cannot always predict how we will comprehend their teachings. They need us to do the leg work, but they also need us engaged in the creative process.

A single individual is able to creatively solve problems at a certain level of efficiency. We are taught in the Urantia book that adding personalities together to work on a problem increases the creative potential exponentially not linearly. We who have been contacted have been given a fantastic opportunity. We are given a taste of how life in the universe usually works.

Universe education is about assigning groups to accomplish tasks and solve problems. The groups often mix beings of different talents and levels of experience. We have the chance to work in groups as partners with morontia beings and to use these working groups to solve spiritual, social, medical, scientific, artistic, and environmental problems.

The benefits of the partnership go two ways. We the humans benefit from the input of wiser and more experienced beings. We benefit greatly from the love, support, and friendship these sympathetic and dedicated workers offer us. We actually become friends with the members of our working groups. The phrase, "our unseen friends", is quite literally true.

Our unseen friends benefit in ways that may be difficult for us to fully understand. Clearly the
highest goal in the universe is to be of service, and the need on this planet is great. Our unseen friends crave opportunities to serve. There will be great insights that develop on the other side by those who work with us day in and day out. I also think that the agondonters have much to teach the morontia visitors about faith, trust, and courage. They observe us struggling to cope with life on an isolated planet. When we can show steady spiritual growth under these conditions, I believe those who developed under conditions of light and life learn much from observing us.

From Paper 186:

The Father in heaven loved mortal man on earth just as much before the life and death of Jesus on Urantia as he did after this transcendent exhibition of the copartnership of man and God. This mighty transaction of the incarnation of the God of Nebadon as a man on Urantia could not augment the attributes of the eternal, infinite, and universal Father, but it did enrich and enlighten all other administrators and creatures of the universe of Nebadon. While the Father in heaven loves us no more because of this bestowal of Michael, all other celestial intelligences do. And this is because Jesus not only made a revelation of God to man, but he also likewise made a new revelation of man to the Gods and to the celestial intelligences of the universe of universes.

Insight # 3: The teaching mission is a glorious extension of Michael's seventh bestowal (as Jesus), and in the larger universe will result in new revelations of the Father to the creatures of time and space.

For a moment, consider the problem from Christ Michael's perspective. There was a major rebellion in one of your local systems. In your perfect wisdom, you allowed free-will to go unviolated. The rebellion ran its course. In the midst of the rebellion, you made your final bestowal as a mortal on the most backward and isolated of the planets marred by rebellion. In all of the Universe of Universes, a Creator Son had never before been assassinated during a final bestowal in mortal form. Your ordinary local universe out towards the edge of settled space suddenly has become the focal point for much attention. You have the bully pulpit, all are aware of the "world of the cross". Your actions in resolving the rebellion, restoring the isolated planets, and especially dealing with the planet of your bestowal are of interest to the entire Superuniverse. How would you go about setting things right given you have the opportunity to make a unique contribution to the history Orvonton?

While it is impossible for me to truly understand the perspective that a Creator Son must have on this problem, it is not hard to see that the correcting time on Urantia is an opportunity for Christ Michael to continue to reveal the majestic perfection of the Universal Father to the creatures of time and space. It is a great opportunity to reveal the Father's love and perfection and to make a unique contribution to the evolution of the Supreme being. I don't pretend to understand how he will accomplish this, but I fell safe in suggesting that much good will result from the correcting time on every level of reality in Nebadon.

The correcting time has many different levels of meaning depending on who is looking at it from what perspective. From our human view here on the ground, it is a period of increasingly rapid spiritual growth and development that will eventually lead the planet into light and life. It is the provision of the assistance we lacked because of the rebellion, and it is emergency aid to help us overcome some of the terrible problems the rebellion has created on this planet.

From other perspectives, however, the correcting time may have even more profound meanings as well. Numerous forces are converging. There is the work of Michael and his administration. There is the planning and activity of the Melchizedeks. There are the thousands of teachers who are here to form working partnerships with us, and there are the millions of seraphim and others who are here to help put plans into action. Perhaps most important, the Universal Father is present in the very midst of all this activity. The Thought Adjusters are in many ways the wild card. The teachers, who are adjuster indwelt or fused, encourage us to form a working relationship with our own thought adjuster. We then work together in groups with supervision and help from the Melchizedeks. The whole, being greater than the sum of its parts, may be a greater revelation of the Universal Father to the Universe.

When Michael walked the planet as Jesus of Nazareth he lived a life that revealed the Universal Father to all of his universe. Is he creating a situation in which thousands of his children can use the opportunity of the rebellion to continue this revelation in new and profound ways? As the universe watches, we are called to collaborate with Michael and our older brothers in a project called the correcting time. What new insights, meaning, and revelations will come of this unique partnership?

On Working Together, transmitted by TARKAS at the conference:

I am Tarkas. I daresay that over the past year your perspectives have broadened as to the actual intent and purpose of this Mission and you have settled into a comfortable base of understanding on which we can logically and experientially grow together.

For in the beginning the phenomenon itself is even distracting, calling attention to itself, detracting from the purity of the message, and the real live Mission, which is to radiate the Father's love, one on one, to each person, each day, each hour and each moment, building from within, from within the hearts, the souls, the minds of each of you, outward.

There was some discussion tonight about how long this would require, and of course you know that this hinges a great deal upon your own minds and bodies and spirits and the free will decisions that you will make to activate this Mission, make it live, make it love, make it shine. And you have grown more patient and knowing that there will be time required for this outworking, for time is indeed a great tool, a great catalyst, also a great catharsis attimes. And so you must learn to use the Father's great gifts of time and space. As you can understand them, you can use them for divine purpose.

If the basic spiritual lessons, the various truths of the heart are to be learned, you know now that, as with a great book, they must be learned a page at a time, and as you turn each page, what you have learned grows increasingly greater. And what you're intended to learn in this classroom of material experience grows shorter, so make use of your time each moment of the day, each conference when you can come together and manifest greater and more profound energies, and day by day, week by week, this Mission will grow.

Be patient as you turn the pages of this book of experiential knowledge, absorb these pages, learn day by day. Your teachers will continue to inspire and to provide insights for your consideration as we feel you are equipped to absorb these learnings, and in turn teach these pages to others, for you know as well that learning is not complete until the student is able to share and give that knowledge, in love, to another.

During this meeting, much as you, we will be together sharing, smiling, being invigorated by the phenomena which we have experienced, and indeed it has been a great phenomenon to be able to come here in this Misssion and work with humans.

You are our minds on Urantia, you are our hands, and you are our feet. You are our hearts. And we welcome your hands and feet and hearts and minds to this room. And so together we are quite, quite optimistic that the Father's plan will come to full fruition as you radiate the Father's love all around you. Peace to all of you. Thank you.