Messages from Michael

Paperback Cover 

 

During my interviews in Oklahoma in 1995, I recall an incident that happened when my tape recorder was turned off.  Maxine Mc Wethy showed me a paperback that somebody had apparently given her.  The family often referred to the unexplained phenomena occurring in their presence by the nickname 'Michael' and this had motivated someone to bring their attention to this book Messages from Michael (1979) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.  I took one look at the paperback cover and professed my dismay.

Months later, some aspects of the case aroused my interest.  A friend gave me a new edition of Messages from Michael and the recently published Michael for the Millennium.  I noticed that the pseudonym surname of 'Lansing' was used for a medium involved with the case and she was described as being a publicist by profession.  At the time, Sherry Lansing was the studio head of Paramount Pictures, the company with whom I'd been associated as a publicity writer for more than seven years.  I began reading Yarbro's series of books.  The first book's complete title is Messages from Michael on the Nature of the Evolution of the Human Soul.  

Earlier Playboy Press Hardcover First Edition

The book incorporated transcribed messages and discourses transmitted via a Ouija board and planchette.  The other books in the series are More Messages from Michael (1986), Michael's People (1988) and Michael for the Millennium (1995).  The messages eventually were also communicated through automatic writing and trance channeling although the precise details of each session were not described in the books.

Berkley Trade Paperback Edition (1995)

Here are some of the quotations of 'Michael' to be found in Yarbro's first book.

We are here with you tonight.

Each soul is a part of a larger body, an entity.  Each entity is made up of about one thousand souls, each of which enters the Physical plane as many times as is necessary to experience all aspects of life and achieve human understanding.  At the end of the Cycles on the Physical plane, the fragments once again reunite as we have reunited.

We are an ancient entity that comes to all who ask.

The name we are called is Michael.  That is a convenience and not a truth.  Only one small fragment of this entity had that name.

There are few large carnivores roaming the city streets and yet most of you behave as though there were. 

The battle for survival is but another tape loop that plays on and on, even to the point of starving large portions of the culture, while others waste and hoard.

There is a time axis about which parallel universes of physical reality revolve.

Concerning the association described between a soul and 'entity,' this did not refer to the numerous incarnations of a single individual.

The entity which includes David fragmented at the same point in history as did the entity which includes Jessica and Leonard.

The 'Messages from Michael' creed has always been disturbing for me to consider as, in particular, it is iconoclastic to the belief that one's "individuality" (the I expressed throughout one's entirety of incarnations) will survive (at least in the way one might expect) in future realms of existence; however, it is readily apparent that all living things are each individual aspects of a Oneness and this is another message from 'Michael': "All souls, or fragments, as we choose to call them for now, are of course a part of the universal creative force, which we call the Tao."

'Michael' is quoted in the first book:

The continuous creative force that is universal casts out entities into physical lifetimes.  These entities fragment and become many different personalities.  Their integration is the evolutionary pattern for all souls.

When I went on to read the declaration "There is no more a Devil than there is a God," I contemplated if this was a problem of semantics in understanding the intended meaning.  As someone whose investigation of 'paranormal' phenomena confronted me with evidence of an Omnipresent Superconsciousness dedicated to improving the circumstances of human beings, 'God'—in conjunction with a 'Christ Consciousness'—seems an appropriate term while the 'Devil' is an obvious metaphor.

Many of the messages are thought-provoking about society and human relationships.  Messages from 'Michael' encompass such subjects as reincarnation, karma, the planes and levels of existence, and the nature and evolution of the soul (or 'fragment').  Michael summarized some of the teachings during a session recorded in Chapter 14.

All ensouled species or conscious creatures of the Physical plane have the same Roles in essence: Slave, Artisan, Warrior, Scholar, Sage, Priest, and King.  All have the same modes: Caution, Repression, Perseverance, Observation, Aggression, Passion, and Power.  All have the same Goals: Rejection, Retardation, Submission, Stagnation, Dominance, Growth, and Acceptance.  All have the same Attitudes: Skeptic, Stoic, Cynic, Pragmatist, Realist, Spiritualist, and Idealist.  All have the same Centers from which to act: Intellectual, Emotional, Sexual, Instinctive, Moving, Higher Emotional, and Higher Intellectual.  All have the same Chief Features: Self-destruction, Self-depreciation, Martyrdom, Stubbornness, Impatience, Arrogance, and Greed.  There are different emphases put on these overleaves from planet to planet, from species to species.

The 'Chief Features' are explained:  "There are no good Chief Features . . . The Chief Feature rules you.  Enlightenment is gained by the extinguishment of the Chief Feature in adult life.  This does not happen often.  More commonly, the Chief Feature is changed; for example, the fragment may trade Impatience for Martyrdom."  These Chief Features are each said to have a "positive pole" — sacrifice, humility, selflessness, determination, audacity, pride, and egotism.

There are statements in Messages from Michael that present contradictions, such as those shown by the following quotations from the first chapter.

We are not the path to spiritual enlightenment.  We offer a way to human understanding based on our own experience . . .

Our purpose is to teach some understanding of the evolution on the Physical plane so that the student can reach some insight into human behavior which will enable him to stop brooding over interpersonal relationships or the lack thereof and concentrate on personal Life Plans.

. . . the lies must be told before the truth can be sought.

. . . the word God in your society has become masculinized and requires the use of the masculine pronoun, thus perpetuating the personification of the universal creative force, which is ethereal and not physical.  This cannot be personified, even for teaching purposes with this cadre [the groups of students in contact with the entity Michael].  It would be treading on thin ice for this entity.

Some comments from 'Michael' suggested that every remark should not be accepted literally, as shown by this quotation from chapter 3.

We are not here to give you a new dogma.  Remember that when the medium through whom we are transmitting is fatigued, contradictions occur. 

25th Anniversary Edition (2005)

For the "updated" and expanded 25th Anniversary Edition, Yarbro identified transcript additions with brackets and explained these circumstances in a "New Introduction" to the book.

During the last decade, two members who were part of the group before I joined have offered me their transcripts of early sessions, in order to augment or supplement some of the early information in this book, which, when comparing the transcripts they had made to those from which I worked, felt that some important parts had been left out.  I have accepted their generosity gladly, and pass along thanks to them, without mentioning their names, as they requested.  One is a Mature Priest and one is an Old Scholar; when I use material from their transcripts, I will identify whose transcripts are being used.  In the early years of the group, exact transcription of the Michaels' communications was not required, even though the answers were read back, but over time, the standard of transcription steadily increased.  Now, where the transcripts disagree, the variations will be included for your comparison.  In preparing this new edition, I have spoken with many present and former group members, asking what they would like to see added, deleted, or changed.  Where such alterations are present, they will be identified as such.

The following statements are from the original Epilogue dictated by Michael.

. . . what is true for a Baby Slave in the Power Mode is almost never true for an Old Priest in the Observation Mode.

This we offer as the purpose of the life cycles: Man begins as a solitary hunter, an animal on the prowl.  During the life cycle, man must learn to merge with his fellowmen . . .

We are not the way.  We offer you our own experience of the entire life cycle and what it taught us collectively.

While reading Messages from Michael as I wrote this article, I was reminded of some cryptic elements in another mysterious case study among the annals of 'paranormal phenomena.'  In Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller (1974) by Andrija Puharich, the book's Introduction offers an account of a trance-channeled message from the final hours of the year 1952.  Here are the first two paragraphs of the discourse from intelligences speaking through Dr. D. G. Vinod in the presence of Puharich:

M calling: We are Nine Principles and Forces, personalities if you will, working in complete mutual implication.  We are forces, and the nature of our work is to accentuate the positive, the evolutional, and the teleological aspects of existence.  By teleology I do not mean the teleology of human derivation in a multidimensional concept of existence.  Teleology will be understood in terms of a different ontology.  To be simple, we accentuate certain directions as will fulfill the destiny of creation.

We propose to work with you in some essential respects with the relation of contradiction and contrariety.  We shall negate  and revise part of your work, by which I mean the work as presented by you.  The point is that we want to begin altogether at a different dimension, though it is true that your work has itself led up to this.

In Uri, Puharich recounted his experiences testing Geller.  Prior to his work with Geller, Puharich had studied the Brazilian trance channeling spiritual healer known as Arigó, the subject of the biography Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife (1974) by John G. Fuller.  The following anecdote from Uri occurred during the day of January 1, 1972 when Puharich was accompanied by Ila Ziebell for a countryside drive.

We drove north toward Haifa in the dazzling bright winter sunshine.  As we reached the area of the Carmel Hills near Ma'agan Michael, an unbelievably multicolored movement of clouds came in from the sea.  I stopped driving, to set up my Hasselblad camera, to take purely artistic pictures of the cloud forms and colors against this incredible sky-blue background.  There were mini-tornado funnels in the clouds, patches of dark thunderous clouds; I have never before seen such a display of cloud beauty in the sky.

Further observations about the Messages from Michael books are included in Part 2 of this article:


http://metaphysicalarticles.blogspot.com/2011/12/messages-from-michael-part-2.html