Channeling is the practice, prominent in modern New Age spirituality and continuous with the older tradition of spirit mediumship, in which a person allows their body and voice to become the vehicle for messages held to originate from a source beyond the ordinary self, a spirit, a deceased person, an ascended master, an angel, an extraterrestrial intelligence, or a higher aspect of the channeler's own being. Entering a trance or a state of receptive passivity, the channeler speaks, and sometimes writes, words attributed to the communicating entity, delivering teachings, guidance and prophecy to those who seek them. A number of influential New Age texts have been presented as channeled works, dictated, their recipients say, by non-physical beings.
Channeling continues the practice of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spiritualist mediums, who similarly served as intermediaries with the spirit world, and it has close analogues in the possession-mediumship found in religious traditions across the world, in which a deity or spirit is understood to speak through a human host. Sceptical investigators and psychologists have generally accounted for the phenomenon in terms of the human mind, as the productions of the imagination, of dissociation, or of unconscious processes given voice, and in some cases of deliberate fraud, rather than as communication from external entities, and the messages delivered have often been noted for their vagueness and their conformity to the expectations of their audiences. The practice nonetheless remains widespread within contemporary alternative spirituality, where it is valued as a source of guidance and of teaching held to come from a wiser or higher source than the everyday self.