Mediums: Channels for the Spirits?
CHANNELING
Shamans have many roles, one of which can be as a medium, and in more than half of twenty-one cultures where shamans journey, they also act as mediums.284 Korean shamans describe their first experience of mediumship as the “opening of the gate of words.”385
The process of mediumship, or channeling as it is now popularly known, involves a supposedly spiritual entity speaking through a person. The medium’s state of consciousness may vary from full awareness (conscious channeling) to complete unawareness and amnesia (trance channeling).35 The medium’s voice, accent, and behavior may change dramatically, suggesting that the original personality has been replaced by one quite different. The effect can be dramatic.
MEDIUMSHIP THROUGH THE AGES
Mediumship is a worldwide phenomenon, and in a survey of 188 cultures it was found in over half of them.30 It has been called by many names: prophecy, revelation, oracle, spirit communication, possession, inspiration of the muses, or channeling. But whatever its name, its impact has been remarkable. It sculpted many religions and, on several occasions, changed the course of history.
Of the many famous examples, the best known is probably the Greek oracle at Delphi. For over 1,000 years the Delphi temple priestesses regularly became possessed, supposedly by Apollo, the god of prophecy, purification, and healing, and dispensed advice to princes and paupers alike. It was the oracle who famously dubbed Socrates the wisest man in Athens, much to Socrates’ surprise.
The king Croesus, whose fabulous wealth inspired the saying “rich as Croesus,” was one of the oracle’s more famous customers. Craving yet more wealth, he wanted to know whether to attack his neighbors. The oracle’s sage advice was: “After crossing the Halys [a river], Croesus will destroy a great empire.”158 Greatly inspired, Croesus crossed the river and, in fact, did destroy a great empire: his own.
The oracle was also approached for military strategy to defend against the marauding Etruscans. The oracle’s advice was to “use as few ships as possible.” Displaying admirable faith in the oracle, the people sent out a mere five ships against the entire Etruscan fleet. Not wishing to be embarrassed by seeming to need a larger force, the Etruscans also fielded only five ships. These were promptly sunk. The Etruscans then sent out another five. These were also sunk. The scenario was then repeated yet a third and fourth time. Finally the Etruscans retired from the scene.158 Of course, not all advice was so dramatic or accurate. Yet the oracle had a track record respectable enough to impact Greek history and to stay in business for over a thousand years.
Mediumship has also figured centrally in many religions. Among the great religions, there are references to it in Christianity’s Old and New Testaments, and it played significant roles in Jewish and Taoist mysticism.162, 421 Some influential religious texts that are widely regarded as profound were apparently produced in this way, including parts of the Islamic Koran, Jewish Kabbalah, and Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.158
MODERN MEDIUMS
Mediumship has become popular in the West where it is now known as channeling, and its influence continues to be surprising: Witness the remarkable popularity of the book Conversations with God.386, s Like historical mediumship, today’s channeled productions include literary, musical, metaphysical, and spiritual works.
However, there are also novel features. An emphasis on psychology is new as are some supposed sources. In ancient times, gods and angels kept themselves busy being channeled, while in the nineteenth century Orientals, American Indians, and deceased spirits were much in vogue. Today, however, spiritual masters, extraterrestrials, and more evolved beings on other planes are all the rage.
The range of quality of channeled materials is enormous. They include the abysmal and trite, the ego serving and self-aggrandizing, as well as the clearly erroneous and ridiculous. Some of the more amusing examples include “Leah, a sixth density entity from the planet Venus six hundred years in the future.”325 Since the surface temperature of Venus is some 500°C, hot enough to melt lead, Leah and her friends must be impressively heat resistant. Likewise, the nineteenth-century astronaut Mademoiselle Helene Smith journeyed to Mars with her spirit guide Leopold, “whence she returned with colorful descriptions of the Martian countryside and samples of the inhabitants writing and language.”255 This is considerably more than the dry dust and rocks that recent space probes have found. Productions such as these led the philosopher Ken Wilber to sigh, “Higher intelligences have got to be smarter than the drivel most of these channels bring through.”406
If this were all there were to channeling we could happily dismiss it with a laugh. But channeled works also include, though much more rarely, remarkable artistic and intellectual creations. Artistic works include favorably reviewed poetry, novels, paintings, and music.158 On the intellectual side are sophisticated mathematics, complex and coherent (though not necessarily verifiable or correct) metaphysics, and helpful—even profound—spiritual works.
Famous literary productions include those of William Blake, William Butler Yates, and Pearl Curran. In fact the most renowned of all such literary productions were those of either (depending on your belief system) Pearl Curran, a little-educated St. Louis housewife, or of Patience Worth, the spirit of a seventeenth-century Englishwoman.
Beginning in 1913, Pearl/Patience performed many remarkable feats. She could dictate a poem on a specified topic faster than a scribe could write it in shorthand. She could even alternate lines from two different poems as she did so; the first line from poem one, the second from poem two, the third line from poem one, and so on. The author Edgar Lee Masters witnessed one such writing session and shook his head in disbelief, saying, “It simply can’t be done.”158 Altogether, Pearl/Patience channeled over twenty volumes of poetry, novels, and advice, which were widely published and favorably reviewed.
Among the many contemporary spiritual works, one of the most interesting is a three-volume set with the unlikely name of A Course in Miracles.10 The Course is a Christian teaching channeled by an astounded Jewish psychology professor at Columbia Medical School. “Having no belief in God,” she said, “I resented the material I was taking down, and was strongly impelled to attack it and prove it wrong.”342
But no matter how negative the reluctant scribe felt about it, others have felt just as strongly positive. The first review stated that “the three books comprise one of the most remarkable systems of spiritual truth available today.”342 A Stanford University professor called it “perhaps the most important writing in the English language since the translation of the Bible.”342 Ken Wilber’s comments about channeled “drivel” suggest that he is no big fan of channeling. Yet he concludes: “The Course is clearly inspired. Its insights are genuinely transcendental....I know of no other channeled material that even comes close to it.”409 Needless to say, not everyone is a fan, and some theologians and Christian fundamentalists have assailed it.
The Course displays several remarkable features. It is psychologically sound, philosophically penetrating, and eminently practical. Practically, it offers a series of 365 lessons—one for each day of the year. Psychologically, these comprise a kind of cognitive therapy that aims to eliminate painful, false beliefs and to substitute healthy, accurate ones. Philosophically, it embodies a Christian form of the perennial philosophy (the common wisdom at the contemplative core of the great religions).t In his well-researched study of channeling, With the Tongues of Men and Angels, author Hastings concludes that “the Course is the most systematic spiritual system that has come through a channeling mode.”158 Its practical and psychological appeal is suggested by readers of a psychotherapy journal, Common Boundary, who rated it as the most influential book they had read.
Features such as these help explain its astounding publishing record that includes over one million copies sold, all without advertising. When one also considers classic texts, such as some of the prophets of Israel, parts of the Koran, as well as certain Taoist and Tibetan Buddhist writings, it becomes clear that a few channeled spiritual works may be profound and have a great impact.
Of course, skeptics deny that channeled productions are ever profound. For the determined skeptic, all such productions “consist solely of strings of loosely associated gobbets of naive ideas” produced by people “of hysterical personality, displaying dissociative features” and in some cases “all the hallmarks of schizophrenia.”301 Now there is no argument whatsoever that most channeled productions are trite or nonsensical. However, this does not prove that all of them are, and shallow skeptics tend to carefully ignore challenging cases such as classic channeled religious texts or the writings of Pearl Curran.u
Clearly, mediumship is no simple matter. Meaningful and profound productions occasionally occur so that the phenomenon cannot be simply dismissed as pure nonsense or pathology.
Unfortunately, most people take extreme positions. On one side are true believers who doubt not a single word of their favorite spirit guide. On the other side are skeptics for whom every word is necessarily false, and channeling is summarily dismissed as self-deceit at best. Either approach serves as a pleasant anesthetic that saves having to investigate the issue in any depth. Yet channeling is clearly a complex and curious phenomenon from which we can learn much about little known mental capacities.
EXPLANATIONS OF CHANNELING
Many theories, none entirely satisfactory, have been offered. These range from fraud to dissociation to possession by spiritual entities. Needless to say, it is easier to explain trivial works than profound ones.
Fraud may account for some cases, but certainly not for all. Dissociation is perhaps the most common explanation. In this process, aspects of the psyche are split off from conscious awareness and control. These aspects can then function independently as sub-personalities or as more or less full-fledged separate personalities in multiple personalities. Thoughts from such personalities are then perceived by the conscious personality as coming from outside itself.
Multiple personalities provide dramatic examples of dissociation and divided consciousness. However, the implications of research on dissociation extend much further and suggest that all of us live in some degree of dissociation. A book with the suggestive title Divided Consciousness opens with the claim, “The unity of consciousness is illusory. Man does more than one thing at a time—all the time—and the conscious representation of these actions is never complete.”160
One crucial implication is that anyone—ancient shamans, modern channelers, and all the rest of us—may be able to receive information from aspects of our own psyches that lie outside conscious awareness. This information may seem to come not from our mind but from another entity, as hypnotists can easily demonstrate. Moreover, some of the information may consist of long-forgotten facts and memories, a process called cryptomnesia that is sometimes mistaken for evidence that the message is from a separate entity.325
So purely psychological mechanisms may account for most, if not all, superficial channeled productions, and there seems little need to invoke spirits. In addition, the long-standing philosophical “principle of parsimony” argues for keeping explanations as simple as possible.
Unfortunately, very little experimental research has been done on channeling. Sarah Thomason, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, made an interesting beginning. She analyzed the voices of eleven different channelers and found curious contradictions and peculiarities.
Several findings were highly suspicious. Two entities sported British accents yet claimed to be thousands of years old. However, British accents as we know them have probably not existed for more than 1,000 years at most. Likewise, another entity’s pronunciation became increasingly inconsistent and American the more excited he became. According to Thomason, this is a real giveaway and “just the opposite of what one would expect, if he were a non-native speaker of American English.”368
Yet other findings were puzzling. The well-known “entity” Lazaris, who does telephone interviews and has a waiting list over two years long, was a case in point. “Lazaris’s accent sounds fake to me,” said Thomason, “but there are no obvious inconsistencies in his sound pattern.” Channeling is nothing if not puzzling, and it clearly needs more research.
This still leaves the problem of accounting for the occasional profound channeled work. For while it is easy to conceive of a sub-personality producing trivial nonsense, it is more difficult to imagine it creating major literary or spiritual works far beyond the channel’s level of knowledge and skill. However, it is possible to imagine such creations coming from the psyche if we grant that there may be transpersonal aspects of the psyche that are “transcendent” to the ego or conscious personality. Indeed, some channelers find that over time they eventually come to experience their “spirits” as aspects of their own mind and unacknowledged wisdom.223 Sadly, we understand remarkably little of ordinary creativity—which is one of the great mysteries and miracles of human existence—let alone of channeled creativity.
However, if we are honest, we need to admit that none of these ideas actually rule out the possibility that “spirits,” whatever they may be, are the actual source of some channeled materials. Therefore, we need to examine a tricky question: “What is a spirit?”