extraordinary%20encounters

60 Channeling
Gerry Bowman channeling the spirit of John the Baptist, August 15, 1987, Shasta National Forest, California (Roger
Ressmeyer/Corbis)
phenomenon of channeling. Channeling
seems ubiquitous in human experience. Historically
prominent practitioners include Nostradamus,
Emanuel Swedenborg, Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky (founder of the theosophical
movement), and Anna Lee (founder of the
Quaker sect known as the Shakers). In the latter
half of the nineteenth century, spiritualism
became the rage, and hundreds of mediums
claimed to be in contact with dead people
who, through the mediums, spoke with the
living. The communicators were not always
the deceased, however; in some cases space
people and other nonhuman intelligences
came through. Some mediums spoke of otherworldly
journeys in their astral bodies.
After World War II, when flying saucers
entered the popular imagination, benevolent
extraterrestrial entities such as Ashtar and
Monka—starship commanders who came
here to oversee the transformation of the
human race into cosmic citizenship—channeled
through individuals who became
known as contactees. As the channeling
movement grew, reaching its peak in the
1970s and 1980s during the height of the
New Age movement, channelers created a vast
alternative-reality literature, fusing traditional
occultism with modern science and pseudoscience.
Some channeling entities made predictions,
often of some cataclysmic or otherwise
seminal events, which inevitably went
unfulfilled. More typically, however, channeling
consists of spiritual platitudes, self-help
suggestions, and unverifiable pronouncements
about the nature of spirit and cosmos.
To its critics, it is nothing more than a form
of automatism, “automatic behavior ove r
which an individual denies any personal cont
ro l” (Alcock, 1996). Its sources are within, not
outside, the channeler’s psyche. Pa r a p s yc h o l ogist
Rodger I. Anderson writes, “It has been inc
reasingly evident to re s e a rchers that automatism
of whatever kind is neither a psyc h i c
ability nor a pathway to higher knowledge. Appearances
notwithstanding, it is only too clear