EXCEPTIONAL ABILITIES IN CHANNELING by Arthur Hastings
EXCEPTIONAL ABILITIES IN CHANNELING by Arthur Hastings
Arthur Hastings finds exceptional abilities in the channeling of health
information, literature, music and the arts, mathematics, and
philosophy.
Channeling is a situation or a process in which a person purports to
communicate messages that are coming to them from the outside—that is,
from the outside of their consciousness, although the messages may seem
to come from inside of their head. This might occur in several ways.
First, the person may be getting messages through automatic writing.
Second, a person may receive information through the Ouija board.
Third, there are cases involving what we would call an inner voice.
(Some people, for example, experience hearing words spoken inside their
head; these words are communicative and benign.) Fourth—going a little
bit farther on the spectrum of channeling—the person may be in somewhat
of a light trance in which they experience, as it were, a kind of
overshadowing by another being or another presence inside their own
experience. Finally there is what I would call the full-bodied trance
personality. During this experience, the person is in a total trance
and his or her consciousness steps into the background, as it were,
while his or her body is taken over by another being or personality.
Often this personality claims to be an independent, outside being.
Regardless of their source—whether it's the inner self, the outer self,
or great spirit beings—the messages from "channels" are important ones
for our time because they reflect certain needs to which we otherwise
would not pay attention.
What are the exceptional abilities that show up in channeling? What are
the abilities that we would like to know more about, and that we
suspect might tell us something about exceptional human performance and
the greater self?
Health and Healing
Let me start with health information. Here I will draw upon the person
who is probably the most famous psychic in America, Edgar Cayce. He was
born in 1877 and died in 1945; the Association for Research and
Enlightenment carries on his work now. He is best known for his
clairvoyant readings on people's health, though he actually did many
more readings concerning the nature of people's lives and their
existential significance.
Cayce's health diagnoses can be summarized as follows: First, he would
be given the name of the person to be diagnosed. Then he would go into
a trance and describe that person's health condition. His diagnoses
might include high blood pressure, circulation or nerve disorders,
organ malfunctions, spinal misalignments in the language of
chiropractic, and so on. He would also talk about stress, exhaustion,
over-exertion, poor mental attitudes, and the mental and spiritual
state of the person. Finally, after this diagnosis, he would give
various recommendations for treatment. His recommendations usually
involved a strong framework of natural remedies (formulas that you
would mix up yourself—such things as castor oil packs for skin problems
and for stimulation), plus recommendations about exercise, diet and
attitude change. He would also recommend surgery in certain cases, even
doing this in one case for himself!
Now none of this is necessarily unusual, except that he did this while
separated from the person he was diagnosing. He or she might be in the
next room, or anywhere from a few miles to a thousand or two thousand
miles away. Yet many of the diagnoses were confirmed by physicians or
by other people involved, and many of the treatments were reported to
be effective—even in some cases in which regular medical treatment had
failed. In one sample of one hundred and fifty cases—according to the
spontaneous reports that came in afterwards—forty-three percent
reported good results, seven percent reported negative results, while
fifty percent failed to report. Of those who reported, the success rate
was rather high; I think any physician would be satisfied with that
kind of response.
Literature
A second ability, besides health diagnosis and treatment, pertains to
literature. This is where the channeling mode really stands out. The
visionary writing and art of William Blake, for example, were highly
responsive to his spiritual perception, and his major prophetic work—a
long poem entitled "Jerusalem"—apparently came to him entirely through
dictation from an inner voice. He said that he had written "from
immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a
time without premeditation and even against my will, the time it has
taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent. And an immense poem
exists which seems to be the labor of a long life all produced without
labor or study."
The most striking literary abilities that have been accessed by
channeling involved a woman named Pearl Curran, who was not a
professional medium at all. She and some friends were playing with a
Ouija board in 1913, when a spirit came through claiming to be Patience
Worth, an Englishwoman of the seventeenth century. Over the next twenty
years, Patience Worth dictated high-quality poems, award-winning short
stories and novels which were highly reviewed all over the world. They
even received rave reviews in The New York Times. Her poetry was ranked
with that of Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, William Carlos Williams,
and other accomplished American poets. It was written in blank verse,
but since it's not in style now, her poems are generally forgotten.
Patience was a tour de force. If you said to her, "Patience, give us a
poem on such and such a topic," she would produce one with two or three
seconds lag time. At first she would spell them out on the Ouija board;
later she spoke them directly into Mrs. Curran's mind.
Her novels were quite stunning. One, called The Sorry Tale, was a
biblical epic set in the time of Christ. It contained 325,000 words,
and was very favorably reviewed. Another was Telka: A Medieval Idyll,
and this was written in an archaic dialect: Ninety-five percent of the
words were Anglo-Saxon or had Anglo-Saxon roots. That's very unusual.
Shakespeare only had seventy percent to eighty percent Anglo-Saxon
roots in his writing. And not only that—much of the prose was actually
in iambic pentameter, in verse! So it, in particular, was a really
exceptional production. Then there was Hope Trueblood, which was a
novel about Victorian England. It received favorable reviews in
England, where most of the reviewers assumed it was written by an
English person rather than by a spirit on the other side of the
Atlantic. The book jacket said "By a pre-Victorian writer", which is an
interesting comment on the book's source.
The exceptional qualities in channeled literature are several. First,
it often involves non-stop dictation without any effort. Second, there
is rarely a need for changes or corrections. Third, the channel can
stop in mid-stream and then, the next week, start right up with the
next sentence as if there had been no break. Patience Worth also could
dictate two or three novels in one evening—doing a few hundred words on
this one, a few hundred words on that one—compose two or three poems,
and converse with people, never missing a beat. Those are literary
exceptional abilities.
The Sciences
There are fewer exceptional capabilities in mathematics and sciences.
The most outstanding case was the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. He
was born in India in 1887, and died in 1920. He grew up poor and
uneducated in a small village. Given an out-of-date mathematical book
at the age 16, he promptly devoured it, learning all of its theorems
and then making up his own. Eventually he sent some of his work to
Cambridge mathematician Godfrey Hardy. When Hardy first saw Ramanujan's
formulas he said they must be true, because if they were not true,
nobody could have had the imagination to invent them. Ramanujan said
that he got many of his mathematical concepts and formulas from the
Indian goddess Namagiri, and from Saraswati, who is also Manjusri of
language, song, and mathematics.
Ramanujan was considered a real mathematical genius at least the equal
of Gauss, Euler, and Jacobi. Yet some of the formulas that Namagiri
gave him were incorrect. They were brilliant conceptually, but wrong.
Others, of course, were brilliant and correct. So he was channeling
extraordinary material, but some of it was simply not accurate. It
might have been accurate in an alternate universe, but not in ours.
For the other sciences, there is not a very stunning picture for
exceptional abilities through channeling. Almost no channeled materials
in fields such as physics, astronomy, evolution, or geology are useful.
They tend to be impractical when they are not simply incorrect.
Moreover, predictions in a scientific field generally reflect where the
science is at that time—they do not carry it forward at all.
Channels, and channeling, show us that the abilities of the self extend
beyond the boundaries of our own individual consciousness.
This illustrates a very important principle. When channeling occurs,
whatever the source, that source has to draw upon the background
knowledge and experience of the person doing the channeling. So the
more that person is capable of doing personally, the more he or she
knows, the more the channel has to draw on.
Music and Arts
A surprising number of high quality music compositions have come
through channeling. One of the most famous is "The Devil's Sonata",
which was written by Guiseppe Tartini after he dreamed that the devil
was playing the violin. Tartini said, "How great my astonishment when I
heard him play, with such consummate skill, a sonata of such exquisite
beauty as surpassed the boldest flights of my imagination." When he
woke up, he tried to recapture what he had heard.
Painting is another area in which exceptional artistic abilities are
sometimes channeled. William Blake painted figures directly from his
own spiritual perception. He could call spirits up, he said, look at
them, and then paint them. When the poet Robert Southey said that this
"spiritual vision" was just his imagination, Blake commented, "Notice
the lengths he will go to deny the value of spiritual perception."
The Brazilian medium Luis Gasparetto brings through paintings that he
says are inspired by famous artists such as Picasso, Monet, Manet,
Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Raphael and so on. Gasparetto goes into a
trance, takes pastels or acrylics, and then does very rapid sketches.
Sometimes he will do these upside down, and sometimes he will do them
in darkened rooms. He almost always plays very loud music, especially
Vivaldi, while he does this. The drawings themselves are not
exceptional; in this case, it's the ability to draw, at that speed, in
the style of different artists, under very difficult conditions, that's
exceptional.
Note here that sometimes channeled abilities are truly extraordinary,
as in the literary productions mentioned above. In other cases, the
ability is no more than that of a reasonably talented person in that
area, but the person doing the channeling doesn't have that talent,
ordinary or otherwise. So there are very interesting variations to look
at.
Philosophy
Finally, there are transpersonally derived philosophical teachings. In
the old time, Old Testament prophets such as Jeremiah and Isaiah could
be considered channels, while Mohammed was given the Koran by dictation
from the Archangel Gabriel. In Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead
is a transmitted, or channeled, teaching. In contemporary life, A
Course in Miracles is probably the most striking example of a
transmitted teaching, though not the only one. The Course was dictated
to Helen Shucman by an inner voice, over five years. Again, it was
dictation which could be simply stopped and picked up again in
mid-sentence, whether a week, day, or month later. The material has a
very complex, interlocking structure which leads one to believe that it
was all composed right from the beginning, and "rolled out" through
Helen's mind. It is very sophisticated psychologically. There are now
440,000 copies in print. The following is lesson number 188 from the
workbook.
"The peace of God is shining in me now. Why wait for heaven? Those who
seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them
now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all. Light is
not of the world, yet you who bear the light in you are alien here as
well. The light came with you from your native home, and stayed with
you because it is your own. It is the only thing you bring with you
from Him Who is your Source. It shines in you because it lights your
home, and leads you back to where it came from and you are at home."
What conclusions can we draw from these rather unusual modes of
accessing exceptional abilities? First, in the channeling mode, there
are skills that go beyond the training or the capability of the person
who is channeling. Some literary productions, and some compositions in
music, are examples. Sometimes, however, the abilities are beyond the
normal range, and would be considered exceptional no matter who had
them. Second, it is almost effortless creation—it is immediate,
spontaneous. There appears to be no mental work involved. Third, there
is often transmission of information or concepts of an extraordinary
social, spiritual, or transpersonal nature. This is sometimes very
sophisticated material and often reflects social patterns or cultural
needs in a very significant way.
Now, channeling is not a totally different dimension of human
capability, and the people involved are not abnormal. In fact, the
models discussed are on a continuum. On one end of that continuum, some
channeling seems to involve the person drawing on his or her own deeper
self, or on a sub-personality which is part of the landscape of the
self just beyond conscious awareness. Just a bit farther along on the
continuum are cases in which the person is tapping into archetypal
principles or energies. One channel described this as "holding hands
with something else", and the result is a personification of the
channel's own personality plus some archetypal or more general
transpersonal principle. At the end of the continuum, there are cases
where the person actually serves to communicate from entities, or from
an outside personality, other than his or her conscious self. Yet even
in these areas, the outside entities have to use the language,
experience and conceptual frameworks of the individual.
What these point to is the presence of greater reaches of the self.
There are more principles and powers and forces and processes available
to human consciousness than we ordinarily assume. Channeling provides
an opportunity, albeit an unusual one, to explore ways of accessing and
processing these. So channels, and channeling, show us that the
abilities of the self extend beyond the horizons of our own individual
consciousness.
Arthur Hastings, PhD, is Professor of Transpersonal Psychology and
former Dean of Faculty at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in
Menlo Park, California, and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at John F.
Kennedy University in Orinda, California. His books include Health for
the Whole Person, which he co-edited in 1980.
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