Channeling

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.

Two channelled sources did more than any others to establish the practice as a recognisable feature of late twentieth-century American spirituality. Jane Roberts, a novelist and poet, began in 1963 to produce material she attributed to an entity called Seth, delivered initially through a Ouija board and later spoken directly in trance and transcribed by her husband, and the resulting Seth books, published from 1970 onward, set out an extensive philosophy of a multidimensional self and the idea that individuals create their own reality through belief, a phrase that entered New Age vocabulary directly from this source and is still commonly used without reference to it.

J.Z. Knight, a Washington state cable-television executive, began channelling an entity she calls Ramtha in 1977, describing him as a thirty-five-thousand-year-old warrior spirit, and built around the material a large following, a retreat centre and, from 1998, her own accredited institution, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, making her channelling arguably the most commercially and institutionally developed example of the practice in the United States. Both cases display the same pattern the practice generates repeatedly: a body of philosophical or cosmological material, often extensive and internally consistent enough to sustain years of published output, presented by the channel as originating from a source other than their own conscious authorship, while critics and some psychologists studying the phenomenon describe the same material as an unusually productive form of automatic composition, a disagreement about mechanism that neither the volume nor the coherence of what is produced settles on its own.