Channelling

What it is

The claimed transmission of teaching from a non-physical intelligence through a human speaker or writer.

It differs from the mediumship it descends from in what the communicator is and what it says. A medium relays personal messages from a specific dead person to a specific relative. A channel relays teaching — cosmology, metaphysics, instruction — from an entity that is usually not a recently deceased individual: an ascended master, a group consciousness, an extraterrestrial, an angel, or an aspect of the channel's own higher self.

The output is a body of literature rather than a conversation.

Where it came from

Nineteenth-century Spiritualism supplied the mechanism. Theosophy supplied the idea that the communicators are teachers rather than relatives — Blavatsky's Mahatmas, and Alice Bailey's twenty years of material attributed to "the Tibetan", Djwal Khul, from 1919.

The modern era begins in the 1960s and 70s:

• Jane Roberts and "Seth", from 1963. Roberts, a science fiction writer, produced the Seth material over twenty years while her husband transcribed. Seth Speaks (1972) is the founding text of modern channelling and the origin of "you create your own reality" as a phrase.
• Helen Schucman and A Course in Miracles, taken down between 1965 and 1972.
• J.Z. Knight and "Ramtha", a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior, from 1977 — the most commercially organised, with a school in Washington State and, unusually, a trademarked entity.
• Esther Hicks and "Abraham", from the 1980s, whose vocabulary of vibration and alignment supplied much of the language now used in manifestation.
• The Law of One / Ra material (1981–84), and the very large Seth-derived literature.

Since 2010 the practice has moved online and multiplied. Anyone can channel publicly, and a great many do.

How it is done

By entering a trance, light or deep, and speaking or writing. The channel may or may not remember what was said. Some describe it as dictation, others as translation of impressions. Nothing here instructs.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the psychological account is available and sufficient. Dissociation, automatism and what Frederic Myers called the subliminal self describe this well. Automatic writing has been studied since the nineteenth century; hypnotic suggestion reliably produces apparently autonomous secondary personalities; and creative work commonly arrives with a felt sense of not being authored by the person producing it. Novelists say their characters take over, and mean it fairly literally.

We can say there is no evidence of an external source. Channelled entities have never provided verifiable information unavailable to the channel — no successful predictions, no technical knowledge, no historical detail that checks out and could not have been known. Ramtha's Lemuria is not a real place. The Tibetan's Tibet is Theosophical.

We can say the material's quality varies enormously, and that this is worth saying honestly. The Seth books are intellectually substantial, internally consistent over two decades, and taken seriously by people with no interest in their provenance. A Course in Miracles is a dense 900-page theological work. Much online channelling is repetitive and vague. That a text has a psychological rather than a discarnate origin says nothing about whether it is any good, and the best of this literature is better than its origins would suggest.

We can say the sincerity question is usually the wrong one. Most channels appear to be genuinely experiencing what they describe. Helen Schucman was an atheist psychology professor at Columbia who found the entire process distressing, resisted it, disliked the material's religious language, and refused to have her name on the book. That is not the profile of a fraud. Fraud exists, particularly where money is large, but sincerity is the norm and it settles nothing — sincere people can be wrong about where their own thoughts come from.

And we can say the authority structure is the real risk. A teaching attributed to a non-physical source cannot be argued with. There is no one to hold accountable, no lineage to appeal to, no possibility of correction, and the channel is the only access point. That combination is close to the ideal conditions for the guru problem, and the documented abuses in channelling communities — financial, sexual, and coercive — have generally followed from it. Where the entity's instructions happen to benefit the channel materially, that is worth noticing.

We cannot say what is happening when someone channels. What can be said is that the psychological explanation covers it, that nothing external has ever been demonstrated, and that the question of where a text came from is separate from the question of whether it is worth reading.

Further reading

• Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks (1972).
• Wouter Hanegraaff's treatment of channelling in New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996).
• Michael Brown, The Channeling Zone (1997) — anthropological fieldwork, sympathetic and clear-eyed.