Since we have used Seth channeled by Jane Roberts frequently, it is important to understand what is involved with this particular type of information. The thing to remember in relation to understanding the phenomenon of channeling is the principle of Oneness. There is one mind, one source and one expression. All Creation flows from the Implicate Order as energy and manifests as physical forms or thought forms. Note how Suzanne Malkin working for many years as a “channeler” came to understand this as she experienced the present moment.
“First, while channeling initially serves as the means to bring Spirit into our world, it eventually and inevitably keeps Spirit at arm’s length. Channeling makes Spirit an authority, a stranger, a distant uncle, who drops in for only occasional visits. In fact, our Knowing is an integral, vital, and beneficial component of ourselves. So channeling—or anything else that leads us to distance any aspect of ourselves—cannot help but disempower us over time.”[i] What Malkin is touching on here is the importance of self-reliance and trusting our own wisdom and power, and she continues to affirm this in the next paragraph speaking of those who work as “channelers.”
“The moment they give a channeled message greater weight than their own intuitive truths, their focus is off-center, they’ve renounced their own insights for someone else’s and, as a result, have disassociated from themselves.”[ii] Notice her mention of the key Simple Reality principles of self-reliance, intuition and insight. And finally, Malkin comes to a key realization about human self-delusion in P-B.
“I was also astounded to find that, in a way, channeling felt ridiculous, contrived—like trying to install an illusory on/off switch between Spirit [an experience of the NOW] and myself. I realized that over the past year my relationship to both my Knowing and my Feelings has so grown that Insight was available to me on a much more consistent basis. I didn’t need go into any ‘altered state’ to Know any more—now I can actually walk, talk, chew gum Feel and Know all at once! It was a delightful realization.”[iii] She had learned the distinction between reaction and response and indeed it is a delightful experience.
Our second story for this article involves the well-known channeler, Jane Roberts, who channeled Seth for many years and wrote many books related to that experience. In her book The Nature of Personal Reality, she talks about another famous author, Richard Bach, who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull and attended Roberts’ channeling groups for a time. “Dick Bach felt that he didn’t really write Seagull himself. Late one night in 1959, Dick was walking beside a canal near a West Coast beach when he heard a voice say, ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull.’ No one else was around. He was astonished. He was even more so when, on his return home, the voice initiated images that gave him the bulk of the book in three-dimensional form. Then it stopped. On his own Dick tried unsuccessfully to finish the manuscript. Nothing happened until one day eight years later, when he suddenly wakened to hear the voice again—and with it came the rest of the book.”[iv]
“Who wrote it? Dick didn’t claim authorship. He came across The Seth Material, saw similarities in Jane’s and his experiences, and came here to see if she or Seth could explain the phenomenon.”[v]
Seth in a subsequent session answered the question of authorship. “Information does not exist by itself. Connected with it is the consciousness of all those who understand it, perceive it or originate it. So there are not records in terms of objective, forever-available banks of information into which you tune. Instead, the consciousness that held, or holds, or will hold the information attracts it like a magnet. The information itself wants to move toward consciousness. It is not dead or inert. It is not something you grab for, it is also something that wants to be grabbed, and so it gravitates to those who seek it. Information, then, becomes new and is reborn as it is interpreted through a new consciousness as Seagull was.”[vi]
[Seth to Bach] “The truth came to you and was given to you, but the originality and uniqueness was provided by your own inner being, which may now be so separated from your conscious self that it seems to be apart from it.”[vii]
This may help to explain why Helen Schucman, the channeler of A Course in Miracles, was so little identified with the work she was doing. Information flows from the Implicate Order according to our conscious seeking or unconscious desiring. The obvious caveat here is to assure that we are contained in a wholesome narrative with a healthy identity before we undertake a project that the false self can use for its own purposes.
Now we get an explanation of channeling from the discipline of psychology and C. G. Jung warning of the pitfall just mentioned. “During states of semi-somnambulism or preoccupation, such autonomous elements may assume control, producing ‘automatisms’ of various sorts: hallucinatory visions, sensations, or voices (which may be interpreted as of spirits), automatic movements, writings, etc. If the composition of such an autonomous complex becomes, in the course of time, reinforced, a second, ‘unconscious’ personality can be built up, which can then, under releasing conditions, take over.”[viii] We can create many personas or false selves but there is only one True self and that is the only one that is not an illusion.
Channeling as a source of information is not needed by a self-reliant person who is in the present moment. In P-A we are the only source of wisdom that we need. Nevertheless, channeled information can be productively used by the intellect in the creative process while in P-B as long as we remember that the intellect serves and is subordinate to intuition.
[i] Malkin, Suzanne Kluss. “Confessions of a Former Channeler.” New Realities. September/October 1989, p. 29.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Roberts, Jane. The Nature of Personal Reality. New York: Bantam, 1974, pp. 54-55.
[v] Ibid., p. 55.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Ibid, p. 56.
[viii] Jung, C. G. The Portable Jung. New York: Penguin Books, 1971, p. xii.
