Channeling
Channeling refers to the practice of communication that takes place when a spirit takes over a person’s body. This practice has been around us for many centuries, along with the countless legends that came along with it. There have been stories of everything ranging from shamen, witch doctors, and prophets to anyone who claimed to have a connection with the supernatural. These channelers heard voices and received knowledge from the world of the spirits and shared thus obtained knowledge with anyone interested.
This process is primarily undertaken by people to achieve inner wisdom that they lack in their worldly lives. However, most people have experienced channeling as a way of communicating with spirits through mediums of the present. Numerous books have been written on these experiences and are available in the New Age sections of bookstores and libraries all over the globe. Famous American writer-channeler, Jane Roberts, claimed to channel an ancient and wise entity named Seth. She talked more about this entity in her 1972 best-seller “Seth Speaks,” where she wrote about the information that she dictated as Seth. This information revolved around the soul, the nature of consciousness, spiritual truths, higher planes of reality, and much more.
Channelers usually achieve this state of elevated consciousness via meditation and concentration. Through their practices of meditation and concentration, they believe that they are breaking free of worldly boundaries and influences, which is of utmost importance while becoming a part of this process. This process can be understood as one’s way of comprehending forbidden knowledge from dead spirits that wish to communicate. For instance, actress Shirley MacLaine was a prominent channeler in the 1980s and 1990s who wrote a best-selling book and a popular TV miniseries.
Channeling has indeed dwindled in the past years, but its presence is still widely accepted by the scholars of the new generation. Still practiced and read about, this is a general area of study for many.
The legitimacy of Channeling
There has been no genuine evidence of this knowledge from its sources. Spirits, as we call them, or even an omniscient cosmic consciousness, has not been understood as a real experience yet. Some even postulate that the information we understand coming out from these spirits is from the channeler themselves. Hence, all this information has been tampered with and is subjective, mystical, or unverifiable. This information includes the themes of universal love, messages from God, cosmic unity, and so on.
This channeled information is contradictory, primarily because they come from numerous spirits. Even if these spirits are said to exist in the same afterworld, they impart a dozen different accounts of the same scenarios, all based on their perspective.
Studies have shown that knowledge imparted through channelers is mainly influenced by the idea of cultures of the society of their times. This information tends to reflect the popular context of the present and is in no way verifiable. There is no way to know if the descriptions of this nature are truthful or correct.