Channeling
Using this analogy it should be obvious that tuning is all-important. There is intuitive tuning and there is discriminative tuning. First, one must tune the passive, intuitive mind. This is the mind in relation to itself. Meditation is intended as the chief tool for perfecting this process. In meditation you are relaxing and releasing the self from its conscious boundaries. But you are doing work of active intuition also, generating a receptive, active particular invitatory vibration, turning actively towards the source of the signal which you will receive and declaring yourself ready to receive fresh thoughts into your waiting conscious mind. In no way does a receptive attitude connote anxiety or anticipation. You must be meditative, relaxed and accepting of whatever may come.
Too much concern and one can easily channel a high percentage of
one’s own barely unconscious material, delivering not a majority of
cosmic thoughts but a mishmash of your own half-digested
perceptions. Without the overconcern, even if you are channeling
some aspect of your own being, you will be channeling a much clearer
version of this same material.
Only you know what you can hold as a steady state. As you are adjusting, you might try singing, chanting or praying. I use a selection from my store of songs and chants, plus music on tape, for preliminary tuning, and then use prayer for the finer adjustments. My favorite is The Lord’s Prayer, since it is without doctrine or dogma, and can be prayed equally by Muslim, Jew, Christian, Buddhist and honest skeptic, as long as the skeptic will accept the hypothesis that there is a Creator.
For the very fine
tuning I prefer the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. I have known
several channels who favored the Great Invocation, and there are
many other acceptable and beautiful prayers, including the ones that
you make up on the spot, the latter being perhaps the best, as they
are the expression of your heart at that exact moment.
You cannot expect to challenge in the name of Christ if you are of a nature that does not find faith a comfortable emotion. You are not going to be able to challenge in the name of truth if you believe there is no truth, and that man can know nothing. Let us say that you are one who believes—as the majority of new age channels seem to do—in the Christ, not as Jesus the man, but as a consciousness which Jesus attained during his incarnation, but which is also attainable by any being who can keep his mind, soul, heart and strength fixed upon the Creator.
You wish, then, to challenge in the name of Christ-consciousness. You feel, or you guess, that this is something that you can believe in. In this very complex society we are not used to saying things in a way which implies no relativity. We are used to situational ethics, wrong things being “right” under certain circumstances, and people leaving our religious beliefs pretty much alone in the interest of getting along with each other. It may be difficult for you to say unequivocally that you would die before you would deny the supremacy of the force of Christ-consciousness in your life. It is possible for you to doubt the ideal because of the age in which we live.
This is not an age of faith, unless it is
faith in empirically derived knowledge. We know that all technology
is going to be improved upon, and so even the newest gadgets are
looked upon with a mixture of awe and the cynical thought that if we
wait just a little longer the technology will improve and the price
of the gadgets will go down. It is difficult to put our minds back
into the world of unshakable ideals and eternal truths. And yet, if
channeling has a real place in expanding our knowledge of the way
things are, then it has that because it speaks of unchangeable
truths, helping us to perceive them better, more simply and more
directly.
When you wish to become
a channel you are wishing to communicate with what has often been
called the spirit world. In fact, in libraries using the Dewey/Sears
system most channeled material is classified under the heading
“Spirit Communications,” including the work that I have done, which
is in the area of alleged extraterrestrial channelings.
When you have tuned correctly, so that
each prayer and thought with which you tune is a meaningful and
substantial statement of your belief system, then your challenging
should be very easy, because you will have attracted an entity which
is capable of communicating about that which you embrace. Presumably
an advocate of the same committed, biased interest as you will be
easily able to answer your challenge, whether it be in the name of
Christ, Christ-consciousness, Truth, the White Light or whatever
else you feel is for you the essence of what you believe.
Never have I met a person who could honestly say that channeling would be impossible, after having tried to learn for a significant period of time, two weeks intensively, or once a week for two months, say. There are many who discover that they are very uncomfortable with channeling. I have taught two disc jockeys, for instance, how to channel. One was a happy-go-lucky man, rather irresponsible, although charming and gentle as a lamb. He channeled immediately and with great facility, although I could never teach him any discipline and his channelings became repetitive enough that soon he lost interest in the whole process. He became bored with the new game, because he was not doing enough tuning to move out of his own perceptions into the carefully tuned openness necessary for impersonally transmitted information of interest to him.
The other
student, although in precisely the same job—morning man on a highly
competitive rock and roll station— took his work in a different
light. Both men were paid good salaries to be unpredictable and
outrageous. However, the second student left none of his
outrageousness to chance, doing hours of research and a good deal of
preproduction before each show, tying it into the morning’s
headlines and the latest happenings of the town. Faced with the
responsibility of channeling, the sober-minded DJ found himself
unwilling to abandon his powers of discrimination long enough to
allow another’s voice to put concepts in his mind.
The one who ends up doing fairly well is often the
one who numbers perseverance and persistence as character traits
along with sensitivity and an interest in metaphysics. Sheer
practice is a tremendous teacher and the twentieth year of
channeling is as informative as the first. The mental and emotional
effort required to be an instrument does not slack off with time,
but, if anything, becomes greater as experience accumulates. The
reason for this is repetition.
And even though
I enjoy being an instrument, there is a certain amount of energy
involved in opening one’s physical and perceptual doors, freeing up
the necessary time, and readying one’s self to be host for yet
another weekly meditation meeting—our group has been meeting since
1962, and I have been holding weekly meetings since 1974. My
dedication needs to be greater now than it needed to be years ago.
It is hard for me to imagine someone so very sociable by nature
that, after twenty years, the mechanical aspects of holding a
meditation will be the same.
He was taking intensive lessons, learning to channel. During the course of the session I channeled some information for him which seemed highly meaningful to him, having to do with the transformation of caterpillar into butterfly. He explained to me after the session that butterflies had always had a special significance to him. As I nodded my understanding, I saw, crawling towards his foot, a large light-brown woolly worm.
It was a couple
of months late for seeing these little harbingers of Jack Frost, and
so I was surprised to see it at all, much less twenty feet into the
house, crawling industriously towards one of the couches in our
thirty-four-foot living room. The student sighted along the
caterpillar, which had struck both of us with its continuation of
the butterfly theme, and saw his winter coat, in a little roll
bundled up by the door.
When you let go is up to you. If you take a long time to let go you are not a bad channel. If you open up right away you are not necessarily a good channel. If letting go is something you do very easily, then you probably need to work harder on tuning and challenging than you do on getting the contact. If you are having trouble getting your contact, stick with it. It just takes you longer to learn than other people. It took me two months, working every day, before I was able to deliver my first channeled message.
It went as follows:
If I can channel, just
about anyone can!
Consider the public humiliation, for
instance, of any woman who announces that she has been told that she
will bear the incarnation of Jesus Christ only to be noticeably
un-pregnant six months later, or the rueful grin of one who makes a
terrifying prediction of certain doom for a certain day, changes his
circumstances to a great extent in order to prepare for this dread
date and then sees it come and go without incident. These examples
only offer embarrassment, which is bad enough—not nearly as bad as
another possibility: being repeatedly troubled by a negative entity
who, having discovered you, has no desire to stay away.
In that case it
is often fruitful to put a notice about forming a meditation group
in the nearest library, health food store, Unitarian or New Age
church, or even in the newspaper. Once you have found or formed a
group it is ever easier from that point on to add teachers as
needed.
But it still seems to be the case that some things really shouldn’t be available—the plans for a do-it yourself atom bomb, and the instructions for precipitating spirit contact are two pieces of information I would just as soon not have readily available. If I taught you in these pages how to channel—and I could—I would, by my own code of honor/duty, be responsible for being available to each and every reader as a teacher thereafter.
Since that is not possible, I prefer to teach only those who
correspond with our group and come to a decision to embark with us
on this experience of adventure and service in person.
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