Chapter Three Preparing Yourself To Be A Channel
When one is dealing with
friends, family or associates, one has a good deal more to go on
than the basic purity of consciousness of the person dealt with, as
indicated through the words being used. Even in a telephone call,
someone can communicate to you by the tone of voice and the
placement of phrasing and hesitations much more than the words
themselves can convey. When one is face-to-face, one has body
language and other visual signals, as well as the full range of the
five senses, to aid one, at least potentially.
Yet in channeling one is very often in the position of receiving an
uninvited guest, and it is most persuasively important that you as a
channel begin and persevere in the process of knowing just who you
are—what the makeup of your mind is, what your basic and pretty
unchangeable biases are and what sort of contact you feel you can
welcome and share with others as the highest and best contact of
which you are capable.
Consequently, the rational-minded channel will tend towards being an instrument which produces information of a highly ethical content. Conversely, if you rely for many things on your intuition rather than your rational processes, your channeling will contain a large percentage of material having to do with ideals. The rational channel may produce very good day-to-day advice but probably not a satisfactory metaphysical system which works without reference to any situation.
One who channels from faith without
regard to the intellectual mind may well produce large amounts of
lovely-sounding, inspirational marshmallow fluff which will help
those already faithful, but have no power to inspire the uncommitted
seeker. There is the need, in any channel, for balance between these
two dynamics.
I have no objection to the century, its achievements or its biases. I would have died several times over had it not been for sophisticated technology, for I was a victim of kidney disease in late childhood and twice came close to death. I embrace the television and all the other media, thankfully dine on meals made simple by microwave cookery, not so thankfully receive and dispense telephone calls thanks to Mr. Bell’s drop-dead idea, and earned my living, before I became involved in paranormal research, as a librarian, which is in essence an interpreter and conserver of information for people who may find libraries a bit confusing. I realized just how far behind the technological power curve I had gotten several years ago when I was accompanying two young friends to a movie.
After the picture, James and Jennifer, then no more than eight and ten, asked to drop by a neighboring video arcade. James settled down with “Tron” and Jennifer, a mature and serious young lady, courteously inquired as to my entertainment before securing her own. Bewildered by the dazzling array of games, I turned toward another “Tron” and said,
Then I found out. After
playing an entire game without discovering any connection between
what my hands were doing and what was happening on the display, I
turned again to Jennifer for help. She taught me patiently and I
tried again, with only limited success. It would cost me a fortune
to learn video skills, unless my family and school both had
computers, and I began early. This generation’s children often have
that set-up.
Were out-of-balance channels all equally helpful this advice would be superfluous although probably helpful in the general sense since we all have both faculties, and it is well to use the whole being in one’s thoughts and actions for the most effectively lived life. However, if you are completely rational and accept no intuitive influence, or if you are completely intuitive and accept no rational thought, you will be an off-balance channel, channeling off-balance information, helpful only to those distorted in just the same way as you.
The closer to an equitable blend of these faculties that you can come, the more people besides yourself there are who will find your channeled material helpful to them. You see, your mind is just a radio in terms of the telepathic process. Just as a radio must be tuned, so the mind must be tuned to the station that you wish to get. Furthermore, there is a drop-off of stations towards both ends of the band, and a large percentage of desirable contacts are to be found pretty much in the middle, in terms of a balance between intuition and rationality.
Balancing your mind is
part of the tuning process.
Conversely, if you find your opinion being
that nothing, in the end, is what it seems, and that science is
deluding itself if it thinks it has the deeper answers, it would be
reasonable to expect that you would have difficulty accepting the
universe as a thing which yields best to scientific study. Now
although it is widely accepted that religious people live a moral
life by virtue of faith in their intuitively perceived source of
wisdom, it is not so often clearly seen that those who believe in
the world of relative values and empirical data can have faith in
themselves and their ability to acquire wisdom and live a morally
committed life. However, both paths are viable; passion and
commitment of self can ensue from either bias of thought.
Whatever you choose, keep the pressure up to be constantly faithful and regular in your pursuit of and devotion to that which you believe. The more profound and vehement you can make that choice and that decision, the more grounded you will be as a channel, and the more powerful your “magical” personality and, as a result, your telepathic receiver will become. I have said often, in speaking to groups, that when you know what it is you would die for, then you know what it is you wish to live for.
All things are acceptable, in an absolute sense, as far as I am concerned. However, not all things are helpful avenues for a channel’s mind to run in. For instance, it is a perfectly acceptable philosophical point of view that experience through the senses is everything and that wisdom will come only from excess. The artist’s suffering is the understatement of this philosophical system, with wondrous drunken poets like Rambeau, Dylan Thomas and James Morrison trying always to “break on through to the other side.”
It is the agony of confrontation carried further and further, to the limit of the mind’s ability to express or receive meaning. It is a philosophy that fires the imagination, as well it might, since those who adhere to it destroy themselves in the service of communicating their special wisdom to others. It is not, unfortunately, a very helpful attitude for a channel, for there is no allegiance given to any truth to which one can cling in the face of the enormous influence of excess. It is to be noted that excessive asceticism runs into the same problem.
There have been many saints, in religions the world
over, who have inspired disciples by their presence, but were far
too finely turned to offer themselves as instruments for that which
overshadowed them.
The intuitively
felt desire for a peaceful world becomes far more articulate when
one learns a bit about the function and nature of wars in history
and the dilemma of the arms race. The gut feeling that no one in the
world should be hungry gets real teeth when you leave your
comfortable dwelling place and walk for hunger while missing a meal
or better yet, volunteer to aid the homeless and hungry in finding
their way back through the cracks in society’s social floor. Get
your hands dirty, so to speak, and not only your awareness will be
raised, but also your ability to function as a channel. Social
naiveté is almost as inexcusable as cynicism.
Take it as given that you cannot tell another soul on this planet what is right for him. Then realize that you are responsible for your own stance. When you decide what is right, your world view will come into perspective and your discrimination will equal your faith. The great value of the intellect is that it is a marvelous workhorse and to leave it out of the equation is as foolish as the opposite choice.
Remember, I am not attempting to judge the thinking process of those who do not channel but only attempting to indicate what makes it more possible to be an effective instrument. For those of you who consider yourselves to be largely creatures of rational bias and highly articulate social awareness, but not primarily competent at grasping the dynamics of worship or beingness’ ascendancy over all manifestation, it would be an excellent idea for you to invest in a series of classes or lessons in whatever discipline you feel would be most instructive to you.
Some of the world’s best thinkers have reached an awareness of the possibility and necessity of a balanced mind and a balanced life by investigating the Roman Catholic or Episcopal faith, which are by far the most rich in magical and mystical illusions which have been rationalized by a series of stupendously gifted writers. Others may find Sufi retreats to yield a more clear understanding of the seemingly holy nature of all experience, when the “doors of perception” have been cleared and purified. Mountain climbing, jumping out of airplanes, and any and all investigations into religious or meditative disciplines offer a varied and helpful tapestry of choices for those of you who wish to balance an overwhelmingly rational consciousness.
What I am
encouraging in you who think rather than feel the majority of the
time is not that you become dedicated to the worship of any unseen
God or practice, but that you become aware enough of the
consciousness which attends spontaneous worship that you may
transfer the seeking of that consciousness to your commitment to
that statement of the truth about the creation and the Creator so
that you may be a passionate advocate of that in which you believe.
Advocacy, or a clear expression of who you truly are, what you
believe in most deeply, and that to which you are committed, is the
structure or skeleton of your magical personality, and without
passion, without bias, your ability to deal effectively with
invisible entities is quite small.
Now it is time to subject
both intuition and rational thought to the catalyst of intuition and
faith. The most effective way of immersing yourself, during your
waking hours, in the subconscious powers of your mind is to
meditate. If you are one of those people who has decided that you
are some orthodox religious follower such as a Theosophist or a
Christian, you are already going to church and may well have daily
religious devotions and prayers. Meditation is recommended in
addition to these things. Meditation is silent. The basic idea of
meditation is that no rational processes are accepted in the
practice. For this reason, those who teach meditation are usually
interested in finding ways to still the conscious mind with all of
its complex worries and chains of thought.
The length of your silence may vary although it
is a good idea to become regular in your habits in order that you
might do it at all. If you set yourself too ambitious a schedule of
meditation you will surely miss one when you are fatigued, and after
the first miss or two, you will be far less enthusiastic about doing
it again. You can say to yourself, “Oh well, I have already missed
so many, one more day won’t hurt.” Meditating a modest fifteen or
twenty minutes a day will be of inestimable value to you if you are
faithful in doing it every day.
Meditation allows new programs to surface, programs designed to assist in decision-making, the only purpose of the computer, and programs designed to feed more data into the base from within the mind itself, its far memory and so forth. However, the conscious programs block out the program assists and the special programs which are offered by the subconscious mind. For the two to work together, these controls must be lifted. Meditation will accomplish this if done faithfully and daily for long enough. It is not often an astonishingly quick process.
This explains, by the way, why great trauma creates a heightened rapidity of learning. During traumatic times, the programs of the mind are being urged to change. Computer programs cannot change without dying and being restructured. The computer strives to maintain, and must dump the program instead. This releases an enormous amount of power, because any time the conscious programming is loosened, the program assist from the subconscious mind springs into action, and a very enhanced field of data, and program for organizing data, goes into effect.
This is why
it is not necessary to achieve a perfect meditation each time. It is
an aesthetic joy to worship by offering a perfect service, whether
ritualistic or silent, to the Creator—but not biologically
necessary. It is only necessary that the intention be strong and
that the mind will accept instruction at some level and begin to
loosen the logical programming compulsion, thereby automatically
completing circuits into the subconscious mind and into the frontal
lobes. It is as though heart and mind were at once linked—a very
helpful state.
This is not
recommended for the Occidental meditator because our entire way of
life is active rather than passive. For the product of the western
hemisphere, aids such as background music or soothing sounds of some
kind such as recordings of wind through trees or even white noise
are often very helpful, since it gives the rational mind something
to chew on, something to follow and become entrained to while the
deep mind does its work unhindered by the noisy chatter of
rationality.
I think that one of the things that Jesus’ parable of the Sower and the Seed was meant to demonstrate was the nature of intention. The sower had control over the seed, in that he chose good seed. However, he had to sow as he walked, and he could not choose whether he walked over good soil or bad. His intention remained steady. The growth of the seed once it was sown, was governed by the circumstances of the soil onto which it fell. So no matter what the results of the meditations, keep expecting and intending your very best effort.
The exercise of your faith, backed
up always by the power of your discrimination, will propel you into
a more and more powerful position as an instrument.
Rededicate yourself
to the service of others and open yourself to the power of whatever
redemption you believe exists, by forgiving any who have harmed you,
and by praying to whatever you may call God, for redemption and
forgiveness. In this way, you are constantly dying to yourself as a
personal being and opening yourself up as a more polarized, more
service-oriented impersonal being in which you are not caught on the
tenterhooks of your own feelings and ego but are freer and freer to
serve that principle of truth that we all seek, in whatever manner,
and its reflection in all of those we wish to serve.
If you
are not fully comfortable with your own degree of literacy, by all
means put yourself to the task of reading. It is relatively “good”
books that are usually recommended but one cannot, unless one is
very special, live on a steady diet of culturally uplifting
material. In order to make your tongue wrap itself around a larger
vocabulary and become more able to articulate concepts, it is
equally helpful to read any good mystery, pot boiler, science
fiction, romance or suspense story—or anything that exercises your
vocabulary and your reasoning processes. I am not one of those who
looks down upon the lesser genres of literature, for I have been a
voracious reader of both “good” and evanescent literature all my
life and enjoy both enormously.
This may be an incorrect view; however, the great bulk of channeled information is produced by those in a light trance, or at least those not asleep, and it seems to me that as it is impossible to eliminate the personal factor from channeling, it surely would be considered desirable by both the instrument and the one who offers the channeled material to the instrument for the instrument to have a disciplined and predictable share, obviously in the minority, but not insignificant, in the material.
If you are a new channel and one of your objections to
channeling is that you fear that you are channeling yourself,
attempt to lessen the influence your personal thinking may have on
the channeling, but—and again, this is only my opinion—do not try to
eliminate it, for you are a valuable part of the channeling process.
You will be receiving, most likely,
concepts rather than words, and your ability to clothe concepts in
examples and telling vocabulary will make the difference between a
so-so channeling and an inspiring one.
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