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02 16 07 The Channeler's ChairThe updated sections are below! My name is Roy and I'm the guy who channels all of the ethereal beings who are part and parcel of the Outlands Community. If you are not familiar with channeling, I will provide an explanation below, and provide a reference or two that I feel worth reading. However, for the moment I will provide some information about myself, about my life so far and my relationships with the good folks of the Community; if you wish to learn about the Community, please go to the FAQ page, "Who we are and what we are about." As I write these words, January 1, 2006, I am 57 years old, male and have always been employed as a blue collar worker. When I was younger I was a voracious reader of books all kinds, but as I got older I turned more to those concerning religion, spirituality, philosophy and psychology. I have used entheogens and empathogens for most of my adult life, nearly forty-five years. I've always had an abiding interest in what is termed the 'occult' or 'paranormal' since I was a little kid; sexually I am ambiguous, not preferring one gender over the other. Both have their charms. I have adult children and am not married to a flesh-and-blood partner; however, some of these ethereal folks are very close to my heart and we have taken love-vows. Chief among these is Sara Jane van Beeuwelan, who will be writing a lot of the material for the site. When I was small I was aware of a religious group called Spiritualism, or the Spiritualist Church. These folks have mediums as part of a unique Christian religious service; if you are unfamiliar with what a medium does, think of John Edwards. John Edwards, technically is a medium, and a very good one. Raised as a strict Prrresbyterrrian, I was not allowed to go near one, although I wanted to! As I reached puberty I began my life long interest in the occult, sexuality and mind-altering chemicals. The year was 1960. Up until I was in my mid-thirties, I foind myself peculiarly bereft of any psychic abilities whatsoever. However, my life was in a shambles at that point, and every day was one long bout of stress and anxiety. I did not seek professional help simply because I could not afford it and what health insurance I had at my jobs did not cover things like that. There were times for months on end where I slept little more than an hour a night. I began drinking heavily and smoking a lot of weed. As this period stretched on (and on and on) I found myself being able to do things thatbefore I could not: sometimes I knew what people were thinking. Sometimes I went to answer the phone before it rang. Sometimes I knew when the car was going to break down, and would check it out before it did; one time I found that a tie-rod had loosened and was about to let go. One fatal accident prevented. I knew whether my kids were boys or girls before they were born. These are little things that happen to everyone occasionally, but I asure you, they were happening all of the time. To fast-forward a few years, I began to sense that there were 'others' around me, only I did not accept the occurances as genuine. As I like to write, I wrote out 'imaginary conversations' between myself, the ancient Roman emperor-philospher Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the Christian writers Saint Justin Martyr and Jan van Ruuysbroek and Friedrich Nietzsche. My friends were aware of these things (I was told that they made good reading) but treated them for what I had said they were, imaginary conversations. One day I was asked if I could channel Dracula for a Halloween party that the teenaged daughter of one of my friends was having. "Why not?" Honestly, I knew at that point what channelers did and how they did it, but I had never done so myself. Come the party. We sat in a circle and held hands. I called out for Vlad Dragool and within moments I felt an icy cold envelop my body. I have no idea what Drac told those kids but it scared a lot of them and knocked me almost unconscious. The girl's mother swore that my face changed shape and that my hands had too. I was bugged out by it all, but the gate was now officially open. I returned to writing literary converstaions, but with unamed persons. By this time I was working alone at night and began to distinctly 'hear' their voices in my mind. This was Seima, my personal guidiing angel, with her two 'aspects,' Etha and Alma; Reth the fire elemental; a being who asked to be called Sproingy because his 'real' name was over 6000 syllables long; a being named Red Rain; and the poet William Blake and his wife Catherine. Honestly, I thought that I had cracked up. Subsequent visits and therapy showed that I had rage problems, was a narcissicist and subject to deep depression. Crazy? No. One therapist told me that people were always telling him about their unseen friends; as long as these 'friends' were not telling them to start picking off the locals with a 30-06, he accepted the phenomena without explanation - he had none, and felt that his job was to help folks like myself suffering from - yeah - rage, narcissicism and depression. I asked another one about my lifelong use of mind-altering chemicals; he said that some would have aggravated my depression, but had not made me psychotic. Or schizophrenic. I didn't have MPD /DID. I accpeted it all as genuine. It was 1992. In 1997 I was alone in my truck one night and out of the corner of my eye saw someone appear in the seat next to me. It was Sara. She was a succubus, she said, and had been looking for me for eighteen years. We fell in love. We married. Since then more tha 200 entities have appeared and stayed with me. In 2002, we informally decided to call ourselves the Outlands Community. This was when we were about twelve in number. Shortly thereafter we were visited by Llam and four other angelic presences, who stayed with us. For most of my life I had always considered myself a spiritual person, but I wasn't, not really. Actually I was by conventional terms an atheist. I could not and do not believe in 'God' as represented to us by most religions of the world, East and West. This came about in conversations I had with Llam and Seima from 2002 into 2004; we vowed as a Community to reach out to God as God was. One morning, after fifty hours of nonstop tripping, Llam said we were heard; we would get an answer, to just go about our business in the meantime. In July of 2005 I was with Sara in my truck and we felt it happen. Some part of every member of the Community was consumned, or transformed, somehow altered by That Which Does. To paraphrase my old friend van Ruuysbroeke, we were "pulled into that dark wild sea from no created thing can ever draw us back." This is all a very brief synopsis of my part in the foundation of the Community. I had promised a brief explanation of channeling, and here we go: To channel, one must relax to the point where you are not monitoring what you are thinking, what your emotions are 'saying,' how your body feels, what you should or could be doing. Takes practice. After a while (takes a lot of practice) you ought to find thoughts in your head that are not yours. This is a very distinct hallmark of an entitiy which is attemtping to communicate with you: these are not my thoughts. No, they're not. I would add a caution, that you will get someone like yourself on your first attempts. Think about that! Lastly, I cannot recommend Dr. Jon Klimo's Channeling enough. It is a thick book and an easy read, and will tell you quite a bit about the subject at hand. So allow me to close this page and say, Welcome to the Outlands! February 16, 2007 A couple of years ago I had wriiten extensively about channeling at a blog I'd maintain at Blogger, which I have since closed. I was asked by Dioth to save the texts by Dioth, which I did, and am presenting for your perusal:
Channeling is like my second full-time job. I don't get paid for it in money, but the satisfactions of it and the at times incredible stuff I see flowing from my fingers onto the keyboard and screen are beyond price. I have been at it for nearly twenty years now. Among those with whom I've had contact are William and Catherine Blake, Stanley Kubrick, William Butler Yeats, Epictetus, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Joan of Arc. In addition to these well-known historical figures are the dozens of ethereal humans, archons, angels and occasional non-human entity which comprise the Outlands Community. Nowadays the path to channel is always open so that I am in continuous contact with many entities; this contact even extends down into my dreamlife. The rare times I need or want to be alone, I am alone; but this is rare, for I have fallen in love, and I do mean I have fallen in LOVE with a number of the ethereal humans. However, as that is actually a separate subject, and I wish to write about my experience of channeling, I shall reserve for the future some words about my life with the Community members with whom I am in love.I was not aware that I was channeling when I began to channel. I was always reading things by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Saint Justin Martyr, Friedrich Nietzsche and William Blake. I've kept a (handwritten)journal since 1973, and when I transferred my personal journal to the word processor in April of 2005, I had left off on page 5500 something in the handwritten one. This blog is a kind of extension of them both. But I digress - in the 1980's I would wish that I could have thirty minutes in which to talk with these worthies, ask them questions and so forth. It was inevitable, as a writer, that I one night began an imaginary conversation with Saint Justin Martyr. I found myself writing furiously when it came to Justin's part in this imaginary conversation, almost as if I could not stop the flow of words. A veritable flood-tide.Now, any writer will tell you, they get to analyze their writing style, looking for faulty grammar, over-repetition of favorite words, pet expressions and the like. Oftentimes such analysis is the precursor to editing what has been written, because writers seldom write anything that cannot use a little polishing and clarification: something may not be expressed clearly, or logic may be lacking in something; occasionally, a fiction writer will find he or she has contradicted the basic facts upon which the fiction is based. In analyzing "Justin's" words, I often found myself saying, "This is not my writing style." Curious, I set about rereading his two substantial works, the Apologia and the Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew.My conclusion was that I had so well absorbed his works that I was able unconsciously to mimic it quite well. I am certain that there are any number of psychologists who would agree with that conclusion. Yet, in the back of my mind was the nagging sense of there having been a presence, someone other than myself who was doing the writing. This must be experienced to be understood - or believed. Also, I should mention that at that time (1980) I was getting over a severe case of born-again Christianity; in that context I would have understood "channeling" as "mediumship" and a snare of the Devil. I went on to "mimic" the writing-styles of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius (somber!), Jan van Ruuysbroek and eventually, Fritz Nietzsche himself. It was in such a dialogue with Fritz, with him gently asking me questions, that I was lead to the conclusion that I was not a Christian. That was a very scary episode for me, and the presence was intense - it was almost like I could feel his hand on my shoulders as I penned the words, "I am not a Christian" in my journal. And yet it was a flood of relief. I was no longer a prisoner to that which is, as the Church has created it, a system of spiritual slavery so awful, so total, it is no wonder that many people will tell you: "Hell is this life! There is no Hell when you die, it's right here and now!" I do not, by the way, subscribe to this view. When a person dies, they take with them what they are; if they are a bundle of fear and rage, it is all that is needed to get the brimstone burning in the afterlife. Word to the wise here, folks.Since that time, my knowledge of what channeling is and how others experience it has grown a tad. If you are curious, may I highly recommend Jon Klimo's book Channeling. It is a thick book, but it has the delightful feature that you can dip into it anywhere and come away better informed. My own personal experience, that is, reading other people's channeled works, were those of the late Jane Roberts' "Seth" material. Seth was an entity, a very charming and wise entity, who made endless variations on the very simple and very true theme, "You create your own reality." Jane Roberts herself, as she came across in her various books with and without Seth, was a no-nonsense poet and writer who often wrote about how her days passed as she created this or that book; she was a very down-to-earth, almost funky woman you would really liked to have met. Alas I did not; I have channeled her VERY briefly on two or three occasions, but each time I got the impression of someone who is having so much fun, wherever she is, that all she could say was "Hi! Love Ya! Bye!" in a way that made me giggle each time. If it means anything, when I gave away/sold my library of 7000+ books, among the few I kept were all of hers. To me, they are precious.The first time that I knowingly and willfully channeled someone, it was a person that today I would not for the life of me do again. The fact that I did channel Vlad Dragool is more a reflection of how my life was at the time. But that is another story for another time. As are my thoughts about channeling in relation to the Bible, the Qu'ran and the Book of Mormon. I am certain that my opinions will be upsetting to some, but when I do get around to writing that one, it will not be done to piss people off. Hopefully that will be understood.
Channeling is associated with a number of other paranormal skills, at least by we who channel. Out-of-the-body-experiences are one of them, bilocation is another. But channeling discarnate entities is a fascinating thing to experience. For myself, I am acutely aware of who is using my fingers at the keyboard - in earlier days, it was pen and paper - and I am still capable of direct voice channeling, allowing the entity to use my vocal chords, and depending upon our mutual comfort, the rest of my body as well. I hate to use the word, but I allow the entity to possess me; the distate for the word stems from the association it automatically calls up about the Church's use of the word, or perhaps the Exorcist movies. I had mentioned in the previous entry that I'd allowed a 12th century Roumanian duke named Vlad Dragool the use of my facility and faculties. Channeling Dracula as a first attempt was a lesson almost learned, for a couple of years later I made the same mistake with the Reverend Jim Jones. At the outset let me tell you, at the very least, people like these guys are no fun. I'll take Joan of Arc or an angel any day.
I channel because it's what I do. It's become so much a part of me, like eating and breathing, I imagine I would be bewildered if the ability suddenly left me. (Bear with me, folks, I'm thinking out loud to myself to you) It's an extension of being creative. I write. I draw pictures. I do music. I make things out of wood. I channel.I suppose this post wiil deal with at least a couple of the questions that I get asked. The questions are usually short and to the point. The answers are not always so simple. Let me give it a whirl!Question 1: Is it possible you're schizophrenic? You hear voices, you've said. Schizophrenics hear voices.Answer: I've been to therapy. Not for voices, but for suicidal depression, rage and being narcissistic (read: pathologically self-centered). The neighbor's dog has not told me to kill anyone, Jesus has not assured me that I can handle live powerlines, no-one or nothing is telling me how awful I am and that I must cut or burn myself, or kill myself. Or other people. Those with the type of schizophrenia who hear voices usually hear the kinds of things I've listed. If you wanna know what life is like for a schizophrenic, let me recommend two books; since I no longer have them I can only give the titles, but one is by a former schizophrenic - Operators and Things - and the other is by the therapist who saw a young woman through her experience, it is either The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl or The Biography of a Schizophrenic Girl. With the second book, I can give you the author: Margarite Schechehaye. Either way, that ain't me. When I told my therapist about Sara, he more or less said, "Nu, I hear a lot of that these days. So, bubby, what were you saying about your mutha?" Before I leave this question, let me ask one back atcha: How do you perceive your own thoughts? I perceive the voices of Sara, Seima, Llam, Joan of Arc in the same way that I perceive my own thoughts. But they are not my thoughts.Question 2: Okay, so let's say you're not schizophrenic. Is it possible you are in a dissociative state? By that I mean, one part of your brain doesn't know that there is another part that is claiming to be Sara, or Seima, or Joan of Arc?Answer: Yes, it's possible. But not likely. It is possible that a part of my mind of which I am completely unaware is playing a baroque form of hide-and-seek on me, constructing an elaborate and convincing charade to get the "aware" part of me convinced that I am in touch with Sara and company. Human minds will do that; many people lie to themselves their whole lives, convinced that they are good people, while those about them know that they are really total bastards. With me personally, you must acknowledge that in many ways I can see lots of trees but not the forest, that is, I have only my subjective experience about which to talk. Except.Item: Fifteen people (at last count) have seen Sara. The most dramatic of these was at a poetry reading in Bloomfield New Jersey in 2002. About a dozen people, none of whom were aware of my life with her, came up to me after I had read and wanted to know, "Who was that little blond woman on stage with you?" I was startled, but not at a loss: "Oh, that's Sara, she's my wife." To the couple of people who pressed me with, "Where is she now?," I merely answered, "Oh, she's floating around here somewhere. Our lives are so busy I rarely see her." Tongue in cheek.Item: My personal angel Seima has appeared in the dreams of six different people that I know. One person was totally unaware of her presence in my life and yet he got the name almost right: "...and I think she said her name was Saymir." I shrugged and asked, "Big woman? Over seven feet tall?" (Seima, by human standards, is about 7'5") "Yeah!How'd you know?" To which I replied with a straight face, "Oh, all guys dream about a woman like that sooner or later!" Which is true; 99% of them never recall the dream, though. Pity!Item: Back at the beginning of all of this, I thought I would go to the one group of people who had the repuation of having a handle on channeling, so one terribly hot day in June of 1990 I went to a meeting of the local Spiritualist Church. I was given five minutes with one of the ministers, a man who utilized the rocking table technique for yes-no answers. But he was aware of "a red-haired man of powerful build, twinkling eyes and an infectious smile, about five foot five. High forehead. Looks like he's ready to burst out laughing." I had told him I wanted to ask a question of someone named Will; the question was, should I publish his writings? The answer, which I already knew, was "Yes." The minister looked puzzled and said to me, "Will seems to be possessed of great charm and immense mental clarity. Who is he, anyway?" Smiling, I told him, "The poet, William Blake. I came here just to make sure I'm not going crazy." With a warm and understanding smile, the minister began reciting, "Tyger, tyger, burning bright..." which Will had been singing while I sat with the minister.Question 3: "I'm a writer. I've read some of your material very carefully. I've read your essays and other non-channeled material, and you have a very distinctive 'voice' on paper. Some of your channeled material bears no relation to your writing style. But some of it does. Care to comment?Answer: I'm the first one to notice the same thing. There are times when I relax so completely that I just sit in the chair and watch kinda dumbfounded as the words speed acroos the screen. At such times, my thoughts, my writing techniques, my life experience are neatly out of the way of whoever is in the control booth. Then there are days when I am acutely aware that whatever the person is composing is being filtered through my brain and my use of English. Three notable exceptions are Irlene Davis, who writes with a southern drawl; Catty Cutty of Edinburgh who writes with a Scots burrrrr; and Joan of Arc, whose syntax is French and said syntax shows up quite often in her English. By the way, someone once presented Mr. Blake with a genuinely good question. Blake had claimed he had been in touch with the spirit of Voltaire. The questioner asked, "Mister Blake, Voltaire wrote and spoke in French, and you know English only; how is it that you comprehend him?" Blake had obviously given just that question a good deal of thought, and without hesitating replied, "It is as if Voltaire sat at a pianoforte and struck a key in French, whereas I hear it in English." That may be too cute for some people, but it happens to be the truth. As it is, I have some short sentences in French, Aztec and ancient Chinese that I really must check out someday; the "language barrier," as we call it here at Outlands, sometimes opens a tad and some few words leak through. Joan of Arc has produced a number of these.Question 4 : I've been given to understand that you at one point owned over 7000 books, had read most of them, and remember huge portions of each, sometimes down to individual page numbers as to where something can be found. Is it possible that you're being creative with historical facts about historical figures, but facts of which you are only subliminally aware? To be blunt, isn't it possible you are doing masterful fiction-writing, based upon your prodigious memory?Answer : That too is possible. In the mid-1970's I began writing a series of dialogs or plays set in fourth-century AD Corinth, in Greece. This little hobby of mine occupied me on and off for about five years. They featured the same five or six people, one of whom was a wine-seller. Throughout this whole period, the only things that I at all knew about Corinth in that era was it was a seaport, it had a huge markeplace called an agora, and at one end of the agora was a place for the local Roman magistrate to sit and hear legal matters; this place was called the bema, and it was a kind of little throne set up slightly so that the magistrate could look down at the petitioners and the petitioners had to look up at him. Logic and the bare political facts of the era said there had to be a small barracks for a few soldiers to act as the local constabulary near the marketplace. In my dialogs I had put the two wine-sellers diagonally opposite each other in the middle of the market. Again, in my imagination, I had placed the magistrate's quarters and the barrack slightly off the market proper on a gently downhill road that lead to the next town over, Cenchrae. In 1981 I stumbled across the records of the archaelogical team who'd excavated quite a bit of Corinth, and I found it unnerving in the extreme to find out that there were indeed two wineshops diagonally opposed to each other in the middle of the market, and the barracks were where I had placed them. This was long before I'd even heard of channeling.Question 5 : What one chaneling episode sticks out in your mind as the most prominent? I imagine after 20-plus years there are a number of them, but tell me a good one.Answer : You're right! There are a lot! Meeting Sara is one; meeting Seima is another, and Hurrain's story is a book unto itself. But I think this one could be quickly told, and again it was before I had ever heard the word, "channeling." In 1981 I began rehearsing music with a woman who was on a spiritual path similar to mine in many ways. We hit it off extraordinarily well, and worked together flawlessly for a few months. One night I went to sleep and dreamed that I was with her backstage at Albert Hall. Onstage we could plainly see the late John Lennon with an acoustic guitar and he was playing his song Imagine. For a moment he looked towards us, smiled, and I seemed to sense him saying, "It's up to folks like you now." I awoke in a sweat and began to cry; John's death disturbed and hurt very bad. The next night was rehearsal night, and my partner and I sat chewing the fat for a few moments. I wanted to say something about the dream when she picked up her guitar and began to play Imagine. She stopped, her eyes full of tears, and looked at me, shaking her head, no, no, no, it can't be, to which I said aloud, "You were there with me at Albert Hall. You heard him, it's up to us." She had; it is.
In psychological terms channeling is probably to be considered a dissociative stae; I think that that is the proper term. (See my Q & A post of a couple of days ago) Although to be in such a mental state can be a pathlogical condition most of the time it isn't. If you've ever had a great time with a good friend, just sitting and having an animated conversation, sooner or later one of you will say, "Oh! Look at the time! Have we really been talking for two hours? It seems like ten minutes!" This is the simplest example of being in a dissociative state that comes to mind at the moment, and no-one would say that either you or your friend were in a pathological condition. On the contrary, having such a good time with your friend would probably leave you both rather bubbly, spirits in a bouyant and happy frame. One of the things I've had to put up with over the years originates in the bias inherent in Western culture, especially since materialist/reductionist ideas, memes and views took over much of modern psychology, starting with Papa Freud back in the 1890's. Before I get into that, to be clear, the "thing" to which I refer comes out as a question, "How do you know that what you are experiencing is real, and not the product of your imagination?" To be able to answer that properly, I want to invite you on a quick tour of the history of Western culture as we know it. Some of what I am about to write will repeat some of the stuff I wrote in a post I made a couple of days ago, but rather than have you bounce back and forth I shall contain evrything here. Also, I am not adding footnotes, simply because any of the statements I make are easily verifiable and are in accord with most historical overviews of Western cultural history. At the time of Jesus' birth, "Western culture" meant the empire of Rome. All of modern-day Europe and America is descended from this edifice that held historians, philosophers and theologians in awe for nigh unto two millenia. In the childhood of Jesus and his siblings, the emperor Augustus had succeeded in unifying and administrating a good chunk of Europe, northern Africa and the middle East. There were roads, paved roads, throughout much of this empire; couriers ran regular despatch routes to and from Rome; soldiers were sent to frontier outposts, roataed on a regular basia; virtually very seaport in the Mediterranean was a hub of international trade of breathtaking proportions. Although the empire favored the rich and upper classes, "common folk" had access to the most just legal system since the days of the Babylonian king Hammurabi some eighteen centuries before. The primary objective of any political power structure, whether that of Augustus or George W. Bush, is to keep itself intact and functioning. Anything that might rock the boat was watched, and if needs be, eliminated. Unfortunately for Augustus, the people of his day were woefully out of touch with this singular political reality. There were all kinds of spiritual movements going on, and not just in Palestine where Jesus lived. In what is now modern-day Turkey, there were groups of people who followed ascetic ideals and lived in communes; the same held true for upper Egypt. Some of these groups were directly evolved from some form of Judaism, although many more were strictly the end result of revelations given to this or that teacher. In the first century AD alone, there appeared "prophets" with names like Elkhesai and Cerinthus, and the notorius Apollonius of Tyana. There were literally hundreds of wandering teachers proclaiming variations of the philosophies of the earlier Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Plato. Of these, many were little more than clever charlatans out to make a few bucks, but there were quite a number who were sincere. The government of Augustus kept a wary eye on the more popular of these prophets, especially those who might have gathered a sizable following. The reason for this watchfulness ought to be transpaerent; should any one of these "prophets" get it into his head to start saying, "Hey, you know, Augustus is a Nazi/liberal nutjob, he ought be knocked off!," the financial interests of the empire - not to mention the life of Augustus himself - would perceive said prophet as a threat, and rightfully so. Jesus got caught in just such a situation: the King of Israel was not recognized as such by either Roman law or the Roman government; furthermore, the environment which had produced Jesus was decidedly unhappy with the presence of Roman soldiers everywhere, and often small guerilla groups would lose no opportunity to knock off Roman soldiers and government officials. (As a sidebar, if this reminds you of present-day Iraq, it is no coincidence; just goes to show how some people never take lessons from history) To nutshell this, Jesus was a political threat in a land full of political threats. I wish now to fast-forward to about200 AD. The Church, which had gotten itself into every corner of the empire and beyond, was deeply divided between "Gnostic" Christians and "Orthodox" Christians; the latter became the Catholic/Orthodox Church axis as it is today. The Gnostics claimed that every believer, that is, every Christian, was entitled to and would receive after some diligent spiritual development, a very personal revelation from the Risen Christ. Some of these revelations as they have come down to us are quite extraordianry and colorful, having in some instances little reference to Christianity as it is understood today. On the other hand, the Orthodox maintained that there were no more major revelations coming from Jesus; what revelations there were, were considered to be in the writings of those believed to have been His earliest followers. Eventually the Orthodox group became a part of the Roman government and spent several centuries eliminating the Gnostic and Pagan competition. Human nature being what it is, however, the Church would no sooner finish mopping up one dissident group when another would pop out of the revelatory woodwork. The most successful of these was a young German priest named Martin Luther. The Church countered by labeling anyone whom they caught espousing Luther's ideas - or anything remotely similar to his - as followers of the Devil. These poor buggers were treated with the same legal severity as those accused of witchcraft, indeed, the line between "Lutherans" and "witches" became extremely blurry in the minds of many canon-law experts, who usually had the local soldiers at hand to enforce their edicts. This resulted in extraordianry bloodshed across Europe, thousands being burned for not being quite in line with Church policy. Of course, this resulted in many devious people coming up with simple plans to get rid of rich Uncle Pietr or an annoying neighbor: tell the local magistrate that the uncle or neighbor was a witch, and buh-bye! It was not until the eighteenth century that there was any clear-headed examination of this whole odious situation. With the rise of the French philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau, the supernatural basis upon which the Church's existence was based was seriously seriously challenged. Because the Church had had nearly fifteen hundred years to accumulate all kinds of marvelous and unprovable stories, it was by now a sitting duck for the clear reasoned barbs of Voltaire and the not-so-clear, not-always-well-reasoned but colorful attacks by Rousseau. Things did not change in the next century as a polymath named Karl Marx saw through the whole social structure in economic terms - the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - and this did, for a short while, set social and psychological scientists free to explore things of the mind and soul (if, in fact, there was such a thing as a soul). One of the jobs of any scientist is to accumulate facts. The next step is to analyze and explain these facts within a system of hopefully rational hypotheses: because of this, that happens. In Great Britain and in America, two pioneer psychologists, F.W.H. Myers in England and William James in the United States, began to tackle the thorny problems which arose from many phenomena which by now had been relegated to the social broomcloset by the combined efforts of the Church's attitude and the unwitting assistance provided by the rationality of the philosophes of the previous century. And so it was that Myers and Jmaes tackled things like ghosts, telepathy - and spirit mediums. In so doing, they each uncovered much that was either delusional or downright fraudulant. Myers, who died in 1901, was convinced that there were genuine ghosts, real telepathy, and some spirit mediums who were what they said they were. James, who died in 1910, was not quite ready to give full validation to such things, but any reading of his last essays showed that he wanted to. Something else appeared to muddy the water and that was the appearance of Sigmund Freud. Freud was a medical doctor whose training made him able to see only what was plainly observable. Unfortunately for the good work of Myers and James, anything that smacked of the supernatural originated in childhood sexual trauma or in the regressive, infantile stages of personality that Freud hypothesized. It went downhill from there to the utter reductionist model of people like B.F. Skinner, and all of this in spite of the considerable sqwauking of protesters like Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung. Although much of Reich's work is derided as nonsense, the man had a much more scientific mind than Jung, and many of his ideas cannot be lightly dismissed - even things like his much-boohaha'd orgone energy...which, it turns out, is a real phenomena. This is not to belittle Jung, whose mind worked more in mythological terms, and whose work is plainly that of a literateur. All this is well and good, but generally, in America and Europe, if you are hearing voices, or channeling, you have a pathology, bub! Or so they say... It's not as bad as it was when reductionist/materialist philosphy hit its zenith in the 1950's with the work of Skinner and Harry Stack Sullivan. Out of that school came one of their own, dyed-in-the-wool as like them as could be. This man was vacationing in Mexico in 1959, his thirty-ninth year, and he ate some mushrooms as he sat poolside. His name? Doctor Timothy Leary. Long forgotten is the fact that first and foremost, Leary was a doctor. he was trained in scientific method by the most rigorous of the Harvard psychiatrits of his day, the afore-mentioned Sullivan. Leary was no dreamy-eyed prophet. That came later, but if you ever met or knew him, he could be a ball of energy, but he was always the scientist and doctor. Let me close this long trip into the past. We who channel make claims. Some of these claims threaten other people's secure vision of How Things Are. This is nothing new; what I dread is the day people like myself inevitably get drawn into the power structure, as did the Orthodox Christians and the Freudians. I hope we do better than they. What follows here is an entry I had made in my journal at Deviant Art in September of 2006 ~ (Irlene Davis hade made a comment that "Everything around here [Outlands Home] is normal!" Sara and I were having a chuckle over this when she said, "Ya know, it really is normal for us, but to the world at large it's kuhrayzee!" From there we fell to talking about channeling, something which I rarely do with the ethereals anymore, and she suggested I go over the basics at my DA journal)
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