“If we ardently will to believe a certain thing, it greatly helps us in transferring our memory images and our imaginative creations from one psychic association to another; that is, to transfer the “feeling reality” which comes of an external visual sense to an association that is purely and properly a visual image of consciousness; or to transfer a “feeling of reality” connected with the reception of sound waves through the external ear, to a concept or sensation of sound which is internal in origin, but which is made real to consciousness by such a transfer.”

“Much of the disagreement between the spiritualist and the scientist of today hinges upon the proper definition and understanding of this “reality feeling.” Mediums insist that the images which they see in their minds are real – that there is a corresponding spirit entity, separate and apart from their minds, which gives origin to these images and their associated emotions. The scientist grants that the medium has seen these things in her own mind, that they really do exist in her consciousness, but he believes that the “reality feeling” which she attaches to them is a form of “transference” which she has unconsciously indulged, a feat of psychic legerdemain; that her subconscious has juggled the associations – transferred, shifted, and substituted on her; that she is honest when she says she “saw it,” but that the beginning and end of the whole experience are confined to the medium’s own inner consciousness.”

“In general, belief is but the conscious recognition or expression of an unconscious desire or wish. One of the dominant wishes is for glory, power, and self-aggrandizement. All down through the ages, outside of the military hero and the sovereign of the realm, a seer was the most honored of all men. We looked with reverence and awe upon the men and women who were supposed to be in touch with the unseen power. We are inclined to worship those of our fellows who have been able to push aside the veil and peer into the realms beyond. In modern times, the medium has become the would-be successor of the ancient seer.”

“The ordinary clergyman, it is true, reads his Bible, and prays, and then orates his message from the pulpit; but the medium leans over the threshold of another world, and there – so he claims – actually hears the voices and sees the forms of spirit beings, angelic hosts, departed souls. And so the medium is adored as a seer by the faithful believers in spiritualism – until such time as the deception is disclosed; and even then many of the faithful are slow to abandon their belief in the powers of their chosen medium.”

AUTOMATIC WRITING AND SPEAKING (channeling)

In his book, The Physiology of Faith and Fear (1912) Sadler goes on to say: “Automatic writing is not essentially different from the experiences of crystal-gazing, shell-hearing, and hypnosis. In automatic writing the activities of the marginal consciousness are projected outward along the motor line of writing. In this case the subconscious activities are not sensory; the primary cause rests neither in auditory nor visual sensation, as in shell-hearing or crystal vision, but in sensations of touch and movement – they are entirely motor. The central consciousness does not become aware of what is going on in the marginal consciousness until it sees the thoughts expressed by means of words automatically written. It will be apparent that to the central consciousness these messages would indeed appear as coming from another world; and so many a psychically unbalanced person, who has been exercised by automatic writing has been led in this way verily to suppose that these written messages were from the dead, or from the spirits inhabiting other planets.”

“The phenomenon of automatic speaking occurs in the same way. It is another case of a motor expression of psychic projection. This time the subject is concerned with spoken words, instead of written words.”

TRANCE MEDIUMS (channeling)

The inclusion of a paragraph or two on deep trance channeling is included here because of the religious significance to shallow medium reception and to the commonality of experiences shared by both states of channeling. They both only channel that which is common to their belief system. If one believes in reincarnation he channels that belief.

“It is not uncommon for persons in a cataleptic trance to imagine themselves taking trips to other worlds. In fact, the wonderful accounts of their experiences, which they write out after these cataleptic attacks are over, are so unique and marvelous as to serve as the basis for founding new sects, cults, and religions. Many strange and unique religious movements have thus been founded and built up. It is an interesting study in psychology to note that these trance mediums always see visions in harmony with their own theological beliefs. For instance, a medium who believed in the natural immortality of the soul was always led around on her celestial travels by some of her dead and departed friends. One day she changed her religious views – became a soul sleeper, and ever after that, when having trances, she was piloted about from world to world on her numerous heavenly trips by the angels; no dead or departed friends ever made their appearance in any of her visions after this change in her belief.”

“Nearly all these victims of trances and nervous catalepsy, sooner or later come to believe themselves to be messengers of God and prophets of Heaven; and no doubt most of them are sincere in this belief. Not understanding the physiology and psychology of their afflictions, they sincerely come to look upon their peculiar mental experiences as something supernatural, while their followers blindly believe anything they teach because of the supposed divine character of these so-called revelations.”

“Man has only a single mind, but he has a dual consciousness. This dual consciousness is never separated by hard and fast lines. The conditions of health, of the nervous system, of the psychical centers, are all concerned in constantly moving back and forth the lines of demarcation between the central and the marginal consciousness….”

“We know that certain individuals are highly susceptible to being hypnotized – that is, to having their consciousness thrown clear over into the marginal state. We likewise know that other individuals are subject to enormous and sudden fluctuations – sudden shiftings of the boundary line between the conscious and the subconscious – and that they bring up from the depths of this marginal state of their psychic life certain ideas and images which impress them vividly. So new and strange do these ideas appear, that they seem to be the recipients to have been whispered by intelligences or spirits outside of their own minds and foreign to their own personalities…. Observation makes it certain that many of the messages perpetrated by mediums, and purporting to be of spirit origin, are nothing more nor less than the insidious flow into the medium’s consciousness of messages from the unconscious memory centers of that great lower stratum of the medium’s mind-the subconscious intellect.”

Regarding the spiritual headquarters on our planet mentioned by several channelers: Manitoba, Canada; Yosemite, California; Sedona, Arizona etcetera, already they are beginning to challenge the validity of each other’s information, and this is what any rational group should have done in the first place. The arbitrary affirmations validating each other’s claims have momentarily precipitated a minimal dissension (one group no longer believes in the promised materializations and visitations of divine personages set forth by another group – as far as we know, no celestial entity has ever materialized) and this inter-dissention of trust through further scrutiny will reveal common and widespread fallacies in the so called teaching mission that in the long run may prove quite beneficial in the sense that it will lead all of us eventually to greater truth discernment.

Whether it is the ultimate criteria or not is debatable, but it is definitely an important criterion that cannot be easily dismissed; it’s certainly the thing that discredits much of the channeling and it is due to their own mistakes – ego mistakes in making statements of future appearances by entities that most of us would expect to hold to their promises. My friend Machiventa is coming to my meeting next week so be sure and be there. Don’t most rational people feel that if such was the case, that if Mac couldn’t appear, that he would certainly send an emissary in his stead, rather than deliver some lame brain excuse? And this goes for all the others that have failed to show. I think that most Urantians would be just as happy to see the local transmitter/teacher materialize. Just materialize one of the hundred or more that are supposedly already here on the planet – of course no one would complain if you could get Jesus.

Making a statement that Manitoba is the spiritual capital of the planet when told it is the Mariposa Grove in central California and receiving a response that: Well they both sound a little bit alike – they both begin with an M - just doesn’t cut it. The frequent flagrant mistakes cannot be justified by employing the simple explanation that it is just a common mistake in reception on the part of the mortal recipient.

I am convinced that the embolden paragraph on the previous page presents a very reasonable account of what is currently taking place within the channeling movement today and this insight from Sadler should be on the mind of every objective person engaging in this activity. And while I do not profess to be the expert that Dr. William Sadler was, neither am I a complete neophyte in the psychological field. I have spent 25 years in this field and can only hope I know what I am doing. Sadler on occasion would state: “I’ve been at this long enough that I think I know what I am doing.”

THE DYNAMICS – A HYPOTHESIS

The reader by now inevitably must wonder, what are the physiological and psychological dynamics involved in producing this phenomena called channeling if indeed it is a fantasy of the imaginative/creative resources of mind experiences of solely human origin. (If channeling is real you can throw out this entire discourse.)

I can present two appropriate analogies that immediately come to mind, based in part on the extensive research that Sadler has personally experienced, which I hope will partially contribute to an understanding of the dynamics involved with the subconscious memory bank of one’s acquired personal information.

OUR PERSONAL TAPE LIBRARY

The collective subconscious is merely that complex level of mind below the level of immediate awareness (the unconscious, embracing all stored memories). Those experiences that one is not immediately aware of are stored in a vast warehouse (library) of information in the shallow recesses of one’s mind. Think of a personal library of thousands of video tapes stored and classified on shelves of your personal mental library. You may have them classified or catalogued under personal experiences, cars you have owned, pets you have had, grandparents, girl friend, boy friends, etc. All are presently below the level of awareness, but the experiences are recorded and stored somewhere in the recesses of mind – to bring a tape to the surface one has only to think of a particular tape; lets say a past friend; for example, Barbara, a life long friend. When the name Barbara comes to mind almost automatically a picture comes to mind and we bring up the awareness of an experience; from there we can mentally fast forward or rewind to any memorable event, and can even consciously create scenarios of what we should have done or could have done during any interaction of the past. In other words we can fantasize in any direction we wish to go – the experience being manipulated by the conscious mind. Unbeknownst to us in our subconscious library Barbara’s tape might be on a shelf next to Betty, Brenda, Camille or Carol, etc. When we think of anyone, or thing, or event a video tape emerges and the mind can then direct the images to the area one wishes to recall – one can go backwards or forwards in time as one wills. When he is tired of Barbara he may desire to move on to Carol or Betty. The same, of course, is true with any event experienced in one’s life, as long as we can recall it. By the time one is only a teenager there are already thousands upon thousands of mentally recorded tapes.

We will explore the relevancy and relationship of certain dynamics of the subconscious storehouse of information to channeling in the following paragraphs. But first to further clarify the position of the subconscious to the conscious we have a modern implement to elucidate that which was not available during Sadler’s lifetime – the computer.

OUR OWN MENTAL COMPUTER

The conscious mind can topographically be compared, at least in a remote sense, to the emails that appear when one brings up his or her emails. The emails that visibly appear are a part of our awareness of some happening, some kind of information. When we focus in specifically on a highlighted email we are vaguely aware of other emails on the page presented, but more so on the highlighted line. The information if previously read remains below the level of awareness – in the subconscious. When we click on the line the rest of the information emerges and is presented to our conscious mind, word for word as it was recorded and stored – far more accurate than the human mind. To remove this from awareness we either click on a different experience (another email) or delete the experience directly to the delete page or by analogy to the subconscious. The deleted material in the computer is not really deleted but rather is stored in the delete section of the hard drive and can be resurrected at any time. The delete file itself can be deleted, but I can’t say for sure whether it is further stored in the hard drive or vanishes into cyber-space permanently. The human mind being on loan to us allows for the deletion of mental recordings when we arrive on the next set of worlds; until then these past mental impressions probably remain in the deep recesses of the human hard drive.

Now what is peculiar and quite different from the above analogy is an additional component of the mind that the computer cannot duplicate (at least in their present state) and that is (according to Sadler) a creative capacity to invent. This is a very significant psychological finding not mentioned in other psychologist’s diagnostic or theoretical paradigms that I am aware of. Sadler maintains that on a level below our awareness this subconscious storage bin entirely bypasses our conscious clearing house of the mental images emerging into our consciousness. It possesses on its own the capacity to create related images – to invent things that have not really been experienced, giving rise to a reality feeling that in the case of channelers might be entirely unreal.

As previously mentioned in part three under THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF DECEPTION more specifically the imaginative powers of mind, and in the same part (3) THE REALITY FEELING – TRANSFERENCE AND PROJECTION these mental impressions from an outside source of information (celestial beings, etc.) actually emanate from a somewhat deceiving aspect of an individual’s own mind – a level of interaction easily attributed to a celestial entity, but according to Sadler comes entirely from within, from a mind fabricating its own thoughts, thoughts obviously confirmed by the conscious clearing house of that mind, based entirely on the pseudo-reality that since they have not been consciously experienced and recorded they must have come from another source. Being that these sensory images (spiritual messages) remain outside the purview of the channeler his/her limited understanding convinces them of the reality of an external source – something Sadler discounts and has aptly defined, and something that has been presented throughout this report. This is a quite common mistake, an almost ubiquitous mistake among all channelers according to psychological investigators. This sort of self delusion usually appears, as has been noted above in individuals who have a deep desire to reach out to the mysterious world of the spiritual unknown in order to activate their own desires for confirmation of their own spiritual existence and an inordinate self generated need to express their own acquired spiritual needs to others via their associations with what they believe to be valid sources of spiritual information – celestial beings from on high.

Of one thing I am certain – as the Urantia religionists become more sophisticated to the techniques of channeling and as they employ more discriminate reasoning, their enhanced judgment will enable them not only to better understand the process of channeling, but eventually it will cause many to back off from the superficial acceptance to these sources as valid and factual; moreover, it will force channelers themselves to comprehend the forces and interplay at work within their own minds and then hopefully they will examine and scrutinize their own folly. In bygone eras the court jester stood close to the court seer, and both were favored by the King, but the jester seldom lost his head when things went wrong. Many Urantians in the 1980’s surrounded themselves with what they were certain was the seer of the 20th century, even going so far as assuming he was the second John the Baptist mentioned in the Urantia book. Some even sold their homes and their belongings to prepare for the ensuing end of civilization. Today, metaphorically speaking, several Urantians in the FOG movement would like to have the head of this fallen star. In a past era the King would literally have his head removed. The channeling movement today offers much that is spiritual from very spiritual people, evident from the content of their messages, unfortunately as a predictable and reliable barometer it is not.

There are over one billion people on the planet following the delusional teachings of the self proclaimed prophet Muhammad; it’s therefore easy to see how various small cults can embrace leaders that they think will offer quicker passage to the delights awaiting them in the next world. Osama Bin Laden recently made the statement that Americans live for life, we live for death – and his religion (Islam) is accepted by a fifth of the world’s inhabitants. They are obviously missing the reality of life; by embracing this philosophy they become very unreal to the rest of the world. It is not mere presumption to state that Channelers too have become unreal to the mainstream Urantia movement. I think that God wants us to experience reality here, isn’t that why he put us here?

End of Part Four

Originally compiled and presented in 1992 by Richard Ziglar – Updated in 2007

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