© 2000 Ken Glasziou
© 2000 The Brotherhood of Man Library
“When the progress of events on an evolutionary world indicates that the time is ripe to initiate a spiritual age, the Trinity Teacher Sons always volunteer for this service. You are not familiar with this order of sonship because Urantia has never experienced a spiritual age, a millennium of cosmic enlightenment. But the Teacher Sons even now visit your world for the purpose of formulating plans concerning their projected sojourn on your sphere. They will be due to appear on Urantia after its inhabitants have gained comparative deliverance from the shackles of animalism and from the fetters of materialism.” (UB 20:9.1)
Both in the western world, and the formerly communist world of eastern Europe, the fetters of materialism are well and truly broken relative to what things were like during the first third of the 20th century. Certainly the process is not yet complete but we are well past the first major steps to the burying of materialism.
Much of the credit for our new freedom rests with the bizarre but empirically confirmed findings of quantum theory. Quantum theory was already well advanced in the 1930’s when the Urantia Papers were being received—but was little understood outside of a highly specialized group of enthusiastic physicists.
However, in recent years, the entertainment industry has exploited and publicized the most outrageous proposals of quantum physics by producing “Star Wars” types of film and TV adventure series—and thus made the concepts of time warps and wormholes a constituent of even children’s vocabularies. At a level above, quantum phenomena, such as Bose-Einstein condensates that are large enough to be visible to the naked eye, still amaze us by behaving as a wave and particle at the same time. This and other demonstrations have now broken the major barriers separating the sub-atomic and macro worlds.
Prior to these relatively recent discoveries, it had been possible for materialists to claim that the bizarre nature of the sub-atomic world was irrelevant for what, to them, was a real, solid world of dependable facts. But now, the indeterminacy of the quantum world has reached out to include the “reality” of the materialists’ world.
Along with the breakdown of the strict causality relationship essential to materialism, our confession to believing in God no longer labels us as weird and gullible simpletons.
One result of this new found freedom to search beyond the boundaries of the directly observable, is the New Age movement, a collection of people searching for something deeper and more meaningful than the godlessness of the materialism in which they were reared. For many, the lack of spiritual values which they discern in orthodox religion has sent them on a fruitless search “outside of themselves.” While in reality, that for which they search must be sought within.
Many adherents of orthodox religion, too, are searching—a search made more necessary by state-introduced universal education that has removed much child education as being the sole prerogative of the church.
The fall of materialism has mainly occurred over the last fifty years. But the effect of that fall is now expanding at such an ever increasing rate that it appears destined never to return.
So have we inhabitants of Urantia at last qualified for a millennium of cosmic enlightenment under the control of the Trinity Teacher Sons? It appears to be so. What should our expectations be?
The amount of information in the Papers concerning the role of the Trinity Teacher Sons is not great. When operating on our planet, they are invisible. Their contact with mortals is somehow made through the agency of angels called the Brilliant Evening Stars. One of their functions is described as being “to make real the spiritual counterparts of material knowledge and temporal wisdom.” (UB 20:9.2)
Another mode of communication may occur by means of “superconscious techniques,” brought about in liaison with the Inspired Trinity Spirits. Apparently there “is a vast body of essential spiritual knowledge, truth indispensable to high spiritual attainment, which cannot be consciously received; self-consciousness would effectively jeopardize the certainty of reception.” The liaison between these two orders of Trinity Sons is conjectured to bridge a gap “in the universal scheme of moral enlightenment and spiritual advancement.” (UB 19:5.9)
The Trinity Teacher Sons usually remain on the planet of visitation for a full one thousand years. During this time they are “wholly concerned with the initiation of a spiritual age, with the dawn of the era of spiritual realities on an evolutionary planet.” (UB 20:9.2)
Apparently these Teacher Sons have some kind of personal revelatory role for we are told, “In the Trinity Teacher Sons, the love, mercy, and ministry of the three Paradise Deities are coordinated on the highest time-space value-levels and are presented to the universes as living truth, divine goodness, and true spiritual beauty.” (UB 20:10.3)
Subsequent to their first visit, the Trinity Teacher Sons may return to our world many times (UB 52:7.8), their final visit culminating in the induction of the age of Life and Light. And that is about all we are told.
Whereas it would appear that the peoples of our planet are many thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of years away from the actual age of Life and Light, the signs of the present times really do appear to indicate that our “millennium of cosmic enlightenment” has already dawned. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could help its advance in some way? Maybe we could all make a start by fulfilling our Master’s behest in proclaiming his “gospel of love and truth by the lives which we live in the flesh.”
Riddle of destiny, who can show mat thy short visit meant, or know
What thy errand here below?
Charles Lamb