Choosing a Channel

   The TV camera zooms in tight on the squinting eyes and pleading lips of K.C. MacRoberts. He is beseeching viewers for large donations.

   But it isn't MacRoberts speaking: It's the stilted voice of RamBash, a disembodied entity from the 27th Ray, using MacRoberts as a mouthpiece: "Indeed, that which is called money in your plane of existence is necessary in order or me to keep manifesting through the medium of television, as you call it. Putting it simply, darlin's you create my own reality; we need $8 million from the lot of you by the end of the month of March, as you reckon it, to keep me on the air. Otherwise, blessed ones, the great Keeper of the Karma will call me home from your realm of consciousness, as it were, and recycle me into a three-toed sloth. Indeed!"

   Channeling. It's yesterday's seance medium, palm reader, crystal ball-gazer, and fortune-teller dressed up in high-tech drag and often packaged by Madison Avenue.

   As of this writing, there are no prime-time TV mediums or trance channelers rivaling the touted televangelists. The scene above is purely fantasy. But in New York you can flip on a locally produced cable TV program and watch dozens of amateur channel-it-yourselfers imitate big-timers like J.Z. Knight, Kevin Ryerson, and Jach Pursel.1 And in Los Angeles, Gerry Bowman channels John the Apostle every Sunday at midnight on radio station KIEV.

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   Channelers — often simply called a channel — go into a trance state to establish contact with a spirit, ascended master, off-planet being, higher consciousness, or even an evolved animal entity. The channel then receives and repeats the messages and impressions from the "other side."

   The channeling spectrum includes receiving information through "automatic writing," such as the Ouija board; "dictated" poetry, art, and music composition from the "mind pool" of the masters; and "physical channeling" — such things as table-tipping, levitation, and the materialization and movement of objects without physical contact.

   Since the New Age channeling craze hit — with a big assist from Shirley MacLaine — these mediums have multiplied like hobbits. Mundane requests jam the ethereal wavelengths.

   Maria, a California attorney, says she uses channeling to create a parking space at the courthouse.2 The New York clients of channel Gerri Leigh ask her spirits for mink coats, BMWs, summer homes in the Hamptons, and cabs at the curbs in rush hour.3 When Sharon Gless won an Emmy for her role in "Cagney and Lacey," she announced in her September 1987 acceptance speech that she owed her success to Lazaris, a disembodied entity channeled by Jach Pursel, the retired Florida insurance supervisor who is one of the fastest-rising channel superstars.4 At the time, Lazaris had a two-year waiting list for private consultations — at $93 an hour.5

Other upscale channels:

   Kevin Ryerson, the medium on MacLaine's TV miniseries whose expanding repertoire of other-worldly entities, includes John, a Middle East scholar from Jesus' day, and Tom McPherson, an Irish pickpocket who served the English diplomatic corps during the Shakespearean era.

   Penny Torres-Rubin, who came up to medium stardom from housewifery by channeling to the Hollywood decaf coffee-klatsch crowd. She represents a highly evolved "entity from the seventh dimension" named Mafu who last incarnated in A.D. 79 as a leper in Pompeii.

   Former illustrator-designer Darryl Anka, channel of Bashar, an extraterrestrial humanoid from Essassani, a civilization roughly five hundred light-years in a future time line "in the direction of the Orion constellation."6

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   Brazilian Luiz Antonio Gasparetto, who runs a "spiritist center" for the poor in Sao Paulo, airs a weekly psychic TV show and claims to channel about fifty "Old Master" artists, including Renoir, Picasso, Goya, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Latrec. They reputedly mix the colors, put them in Gasparetto's hands, and rapidly move his arms and hands over the paper or canvas while he paints furiously — with his eyes tightly shut.7

   And there's the Rev. Neville Rowe, a graduate electrical engineer, who channels dolphins as well as Soli, an off-planet being from the Pleiades.

   Two of the best-known mediums of the recent past are Jane Roberts (1929-84) and Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). Roberts's books about the highly intellectual "energy personality essence" known as Seth were a breakthrough because they were published by a respected major-market house (Prentice-Hall). Cayce, whom New Age writer Jon Klimo has called "one of the biggest stars in this unusual firmament,"8 was idolized as "the Sleeping Prophet" by millions because he diagnosed ailments and prescribed remarkably helpful cures during a sleeping trance state. Some 30,000 case histories of his work were amassed during his lifetime. Cayce also practiced telepathy, clairvoyance, and fortune-telling, but always spoke in his own voice.

   "Mediumship" dates to the Spiritualist movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. New Age enthusiasts, however, claim that trance communication has been present throughout history and that early Egyptians, Greek oracles, Moses, the Hebrew prophets, and Jesus and the Gospel writers brought forth spiritual information through channeling.

   Jesus is still speaking, according to the many who channel him: "Death is the creation of humanity, not of God. This is the simple truth," Cayce said through channel Virginia Essence.9

   "Our Lady of the Roses" — the Virgin Mary — purportedly speaking through ultra-traditionalist Roman Catholic channel Veronica Leuken of Bayside, New York, has revealed that radical Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) is in hell and that the late President John F. Kennedy is in purgatory "for his mishandling of the missile crisis in Cuba."10

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   The basic messages of the channeled entities exhibit a striking commonality:

   "Channeled material tells us that when we die, the intact higher frequency of our nonphysical being moves on to a new realm," explains Stanley Ralph Ross, narrator on a "how-to-channel" tape. "Through channeling millions of people are discovering experiences — their own and others' — that satisfy their hunger for meaning."11

   Ross uses the TV analogy to describe what happens in channeling: Imagine, says he, that you and all other humans are like TV stations, sending out and receiving signals, but only on channels 1 to 13. At the same time, UHF and other signals are coming in though you're not receiving them: "They're just not on a frequency you're tuned to." But if you adjusted your equipment, you could receive them. Channeling is like that, says Ross. It is receiving signals you don't normally receive with your five senses.

   But who or what is sending out those signals? And how do you tune into them?

   There seem to be at least six alternatives:

   1. The entities are real and are telling the truth about themselves.

   2. The entities are demonic and lie about their real nature.

   3. The entities don't exist, and the channelers resort to fakery and/or acting to simulate their reality.

   4. The entities' messages come from the intuitive, subconscious mind of the channeler.

   5. The entities are the products of hallucinations and/or their messages are induced under a hypnotic state.

   6. The entities are not objectively real but are a part of the "Higher Self" or what psychoanalyst Carl Jung called the "Collective Unconscious."

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Checking the Channels

   During nineteenth-century mediumship almost all the sources being contacted were considered to be spirits of deceased human beings.12 There seems to be convincing evidence that some accurate information has been transmitted from beyond the grave, and that the mediums through which it was communicated could not have otherwise known about it. Psychic researcher Colin Wilson cites numerous examples in Afterlife.13

   For example, he tells of a medium who passed on a message to a Professor Hyslop from a spirit calling himself William James. James, who had been a friend of the professor, had died some years earlier. The two had agreed that whoever died first should try to communicate with the other. The medium's message to Hyslop was to ask him if he remembered some red pajamas.

   At first, the professor drew a blank. Then suddenly he remembered, reports author Wilson: "When he and James were young men, they went to Paris together, and discovered that their luggage had not yet arrived. Hyslop went out to buy some pajamas, but could find only a bright red pair. For days James teased Hyslop about his poor taste in pajamas. But Hyslop had long forgotten the incident. As far as he could see, there was no way of explaining the red pajamas message except on the hypothesis that it was really James who had passed it on."14

   Other accounts from people I know and trust also seem plausible but equally difficult to prove. H. Newton Malony, director of programs integrating psychology and theology at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, told me about a 1977 investigation he and several of his students conducted into the Rev. Richard Zenor and his Agasha Temple of Wisdom in Los Angeles. At the time, a spirit guide supposedly spoke through Zenor to one of Malony's students. The message apparently duplicated exactly the tone of voice, accent, and wording of terms of endearment that the student's deceased lover had used.15

   J. Gordon Melton, author of the Encyclopedia of American Religions, told me he had seen and heard things that were "either genuine clairvoyance or amazing coincidences." He

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said these included a medium's ability to correctly state Melton's grandmother's name and the unusual circumstances of Melton's father's death. The medium, in Melton's opinion, could not have known that information before the unscheduled "reading." Nevertheless, Melton added, the reading did not offer convincing evidence of life after death.16

   Much channeled information, however, is filled with inaccuracies or communication so vague as to be inconclusive; or if it contains verisimilitudes, it is, at best, a bit of lucky guesswork. And most channeled material is simply unverifiable, especially reports about persons being "regressed" into past lives."

   F. LaGard Smith, the Pepperdine University lawyer who wrote Out on a Broken Limb, was admittedly out to "get" channeler Kevin Ryerson. Smith tells of purposely misrepresenting that his mother was no longer living. Ryerson's entity "wrongly assumed the truth of that misrepresentation," Smith gloated, adding: "Wouldn't the Akashic Records [the energy records of all that has ever occurred, according to New Age belief] know whether or not my mother were still on the earth-plane?"17

   Conservative Christians often equate channeled entities with evil spirits or demons. In this view, the entities are real but are lying to us.

   "Impersonation is one of the central ploys in the Adversary's [Satan] seemingly inexhaustible arsenal of devious strategies," wrote cult critic Robert Burrows in the Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal. [A]ttributing the 'revelations' to God or Christ himself . . . is the height of demonic hubris, a direct and brazen assault — like robbing a bank dressed up as police and Brinks security guards."18

   Some channeled material identifies the possessors as "lower" or "bad" spirits, entities waiting to gain control over human bodies or resume some form of human existence. Most channels warn that using a Ouija board can be the entry point for these entities. The voice said to speak through J.Z. Knight during the hometown prayer meeting alluded to earlier in this book identified itself as a demon named Demias, according to an alleged witness.19

   So if all entities are demons, then sometimes they lie, sometimes they don't.

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   Another alternative is that channelers are perpetrating a hoax for material gain or fame, or both. James "the Amazing Randi," the magician who has debunked various faith healers and parapsychologists, summarily dismisses channels as "actors," while there is no doubt about LaGard Smith's view of channeler Ryerson: "Kevin's act is simply one of the best road shows in America." He adds: "If someone wants to believe that he or she has lived before it's easy to imagine it!"20

   Then there is always the possibility that some channelers are sincere but have blurred the line between grand imagination and unclouded reality. In other words, the medium is the message.

   "Perhaps they are pretending," suggested Dr. Joseph Barber, an expert on hypnosis and a psychiatrist at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute in Los Angeles. "Maybe trance channeling is a form of self-hypnosis . . . Anyone can learn to do it if you make up your mind to do it . . . A person's wishes and beliefs and expectations play a big part."21

   Ray Hyman, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a member of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, said 95 percent of psychics are "not conscious frauds. Some are split personalities. Everyone has the potential. People have enough information to act out hundreds of personalities with details. Creative artists and writers have learned to tap this. Most of us haven't."22

   In a lengthy article on channelers in the October 1987 issue of OMNI, Katharine Lowry tells of spending time with amiable, bearded Jach Pursel, Lazaris's channel, in Beverly Hills:

[E]ven when Pursel is just being Pursel, he's clearly well-read, exceptionally bright, articulate and funny — a lot like Lazaris. This leads me to suspect that Lazaris is simply a "higher self" or unconscious part of Pursel's mind which he has learned to tap into. The other possibility, of course, is that he's consciously making this all up . . . . When we talk for an hour alone . . . he is friendly, relaxed, helpful, and seems genuinely modest and kind. But whenever I ask about Lazaris or the mechanics of channeling his eyes — those windows to the soul — slide this way and that.23

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   Penny Torres-Rubin, who channels Mafu, was unabashedly egotistical in her assessment of whether Mafu is a fraud. "What if I am an actress?" she said in a Life Times magazine interview. "Those things used to terrify me . . . because I was afraid that there was some part, a subconscious part of me, creating this. My answer to that is that if this is coming from me, then I think that I am absolutely incredible! And I'll take all the credit that they want to give me!"24

   What about the role of intuition and the subconscious mind?

Could channeling tap into the vast resources of a shared primordial memory — the so-called Akashic Records, or the "Universal Mind"?

   The theory of new religions expert Carl Raschke is that most channels, after considerable study in metaphysics and meditation techniques, attain a heightened sensitivity to their own unconscious minds. He also thinks a form of "mass hypnosis" often occurs in group channeling sessions: "A process of collective suggestion and transfer of unconscious content" takes place.25

   Concurs channeling counselor Stanley Ross: "Much of what you receive may come from you, although it may seem to some from something other than you."26

   The entities communicate their information by thought-transference, according to Los Angeles medium Lyssa Royal, who channels Raydia, a multi-dimensional consciousness system. "Therefore, in communicating with you, they form a link with your Higher Self (your higher consciousness, so to speak) and your Higher Self provides many of the answers that they share with you."27

   In the view of New Ager Jon Klimo, channeling "is the growing awareness of any part of the one Being that it can access any of the rest of itself." In other words, he says, "we are all of the one Universal Being; or, as some say . . . we are God."28

   Perhaps in the final analysis it's immaterial who or what these trendy channeled spirits are. The fact that so many people believe in them and become emotionally dependent upon their often banal and sometimes dangerous "advice" should concern us all in our most rational and lucid moments.

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1. Hilary Abramson, "Altered States," Sacramento Bee Magazine, 25 October 1987, 11.

2. Ibid., 18.

3. "Cosmic Chic:: Channeling to Success," New York Times, 30 May 1987, 11.

4. Martin Gardner, New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1988), 202.

5. Brooks Alexander, "Theology from the Twilight Zone," Christianity Today, 18 September 1987, 22.

6. Caryline Waldron, "Bashar: An Extraterrestrial Among Us," Life Times Magazine, no. 3, 107.

7. Dick Roraback, "An Artist's Brush with Immortality," Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1988.

8. John Klimo, "The Psychology of Channeling," New Age Journal (November–December 1987): 35, 38.

9. Virginia Essene, "Secret Truths," Life Times Magazine, no. 3, 101.

10. William Lyman to Russell Chandler, 11 October 1987.

11. "Channeling," narrated by Stanley Ralph Ross (Los Angeles: Audio Renaissance Tapes, 1987).

12. Channeling: A Resource Guide (Los Angeles: Audio Renaissance Tapes, 1987), 30.

13. Colin Wilson, Afterlife: An Investigation of the Evidence for Life after Death (Garden City, N.Y.: Dolphin / Doubleday & Co., 1987), 127–31.

14. Ibid., 130.

15. H. Newton Malony, interview with author, Pasadena, Calif., 20 November 1987.

16. J. Gordon Melton, interview with author, Santa Barbara, Calif., 16 November 1987.

17. F. LaGard Smith, Out on a Broken Limb (Eugene, Oreg.: Harvest House Publishers, 1986), 102.

18. Robert Burrows, "At Issue,' " Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal 7, no. 1 (1987): 5.

19. Katharine Lowry, "Channelers," OMNI (October 1987): 146.

20. Smith, Out on a Broken Limb, 103, 104.

21. Joseph Barber, interview with author, Fullerton, Calif., 9 March 1988.

22. Quoted in Beth Ann Krier, "Crystal Craze and Rock Mania," Los Angeles Times, 5 December 1987, pt. 5, 1.

23. Lowry, "Channelers," 148.

24. "Interview with Penny Torres," Life Times Magazine, no. 3, 93.

25. Quoted in Lowry, "Channelers," 146, 46.

26. Ross, "Channeling" (audiotape).

27. Lyssa Royal and staff, Channeling and Mediumship – A Guideline (Los Angeles: Bodhi Tree Bookstore, 1987), 2.

28. Klimo, "The Psychology of Channeling," 67.

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