Article on: The Original Michael Group, Brief History.
There were five people who formed the core of the original study group that would channel the Michael Teachings — Alice and Richard Hannah, Sarah and Richard Chambers, and Eugene (“Gene”) Trout. The history of these people and this group is quite fascinating. While we hope to have the detail history available eventually, here is the brief* outline.
The members of the original group were complex individuals with full lives. They had teenage children; some of them had been divorced and remarried. Their ages ranged from mid-thirties to fifty-ish. Richard Hannah and Gene Trout were medical doctors, Richard Chambers was a civil engineer, Alice Hannah was a biochemist and Sarah Chambers was a life long educator (as she described herself). They lived in Northern California during the time when the “New Age” movement was very active. They were also spiritual seekers –- they had sessions with local psychics, they studied the Seth material, Alice Bailey’s theosophy, Rosicrucian hermeticism and A Course in Miracles, among others. They went to workshops taught by Robert Monroe (Journeys out of the Body) and got to know him very well. Many in the group attended Werner Erhard’s EST seminars.
The core group members were serious students of the Gurdjieff and Ouspensky “Fourth Way” teaching, and belonged to a local Fourth Way group for a time. According to one of the members, after they read about Jane Roberts and the Seth material in the newly published books at the time, several of them wanted to see if they could get messages themselves. They came together as a group in late 1972 or early 1973, to begin their attempts to get information through a Ouija board used by several different members of the group as they experimented. They had many questions about a wide range of subjects. They contacted at least three non-physical beings before the Michael Entity showed up on August 12, 1973. After that, attendance at the group’s sessions grew larger and larger for a couple of years until the large public sessions were disbanded in June of 1975. After mid-1975, Sarah Chambers, who had become the primary channel, continued to have sessions with small groups of friends up until about 1983. Some regular attendees formed their own small study groups of friends, to continue their own personal growth and study, after Sarah stopped channeling publicly. During that time, other student’s began to learn to channel Michael and study groups formed around their work.
A couple of years after the large group sessions ended in 1975, Sarah met author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro at a Science Fiction convention. Ms. Yarbro became interested in the transcripts although she never attended any of the study group meetings herself. There were some special sessions done for her to help in writing first her book, Messages From Michael (MFM), which relied heavily on some of the original group transcripts and dealt with the teachings’ structural aspects. Ms. Yarbro would put together her own channeling group and eventually wrote three other books which concerned the Michael Teachings.
After a hiatus from Michael for quite a few years, Sarah returned in the 1990s as an active channel and teacher, in partnership with several other long-time channels. She left California and moved to Santa Fe, NM in 1998, where she died unexpectedly in December of that year. The rest of the original core group, and many of the students that gathered around them, went on with their lives. Of those that remain, several have been kind enough to assist us in reconstructing the group history.
Since the late 1970s, there have been more than 25 additional books written about the Michael Teachings, with new e-books coming out by several authors. The Michael Teachings continue to grow and expand as students become more experienced and as their questions become more varied. Michael has continuously said that they are available to anyone who asks and reminds that the whole purpose of their teaching is to help us learn Agape — unconditional love.
There is a part of the work of the original group has not been widely discussed among Michael Teachings students. For this reason, posted here are a collection of discussions on little known concepts from the transcripts of the original Michael group:
- Synthesis
- The Balanced Self
- Meditation/Concentration
- A Session with Soleal
- Religion, Spiritual Growth and Acceleration
- Mediums [Channeling]
- The Path of the Adept
- The Logos / Infinite Soul
There are also two issues of the original Michael group magazine available:
- Dimensions! April 1975
- Dimensions! June 1975
All of the work of the original Michael Teachings group has been determined to be in the public domain.
* A much more detailed history of the original group members is currently in progress.
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