A process whereby an individual (the "channeler") claims to have been invaded by a spirit entity which speaks through the channeler. Actress Shirley MacLaine and the ABC television network have given this modern version of ghosts speaking through a medium a kind of credibility. [note 1] Channeling has become big business in the San Francisco Bay area where $15 gets you in to hear "Michael"--an entity said to have had 1,050 beings over time--give personal advice to enthusiastic young professionals. After the show, the customers are offered "Acu-Kinetic Repatterning". For $520 anyone can become a "certified practitioner", and for $150 anyone can purchase the program "Change Your Life Through Colors". The latter, the customers are told, is usually $275, but this is a special introductory offer.[note 2]
Even more popular than Michael is Ramtha, a Cro-Magnon warrior from Atlantis who appeared in the kitchen of a Tacoma, Washington, woman in 1977. J.Z. Knight claims that she is Ramtha's channel. The pretty blonde pretends to go into a trance and speaks medieval or Elizabethan English in a guttural, husky voice. Shirley MacLaine believes Ramtha speaks through Knight. Ms. Knight has thousands of followers and has made millions of dollars performing as Ramtha at seminars ($1,000 a crack) and at her Ramtha School of Enlightenment, and from the sales of tapes, books and accessories.[note 3] She must have hypnotic powers, as otherwise normal people think her command that they spend hours blindfolded into a cold and muddy, doorless maze, is rational and will somehow help them realize self-fulfillment. These people are in the dark in more than one way as they seek the `void at the center.'
One would think that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the likelihood of a 35,000-year-old Cro-Magnon ghost suddenly appearing in a Tacoma kitchen to a homemaker to reveal profundities about centers and voids, self-love and guilt- free living, or love and peace, is close to zero. Yet, the will to believe is so strong in many people that even such an obvious absurdity seems reasonable. Plus, for many followers, believing in Ramtha "works." As one follower put it, "I watched great changes come over people around me--people who lacked hope came alive again." The fact is that many people's lives are so void of meaning and significance that even the ridiculous--if it offers meaning and direction--appears reasonable, if not profound. Their lives are made better, at least for a while, by their newfound beliefs.
One might say, then, that it would be good to leave the Ramthas of the world alone. After all, they're helping people, even if they are frauds. Their message is basically warmed over and thinned down Zen, Jesus, Nietzsche, Jung, Freud, etc. As long as they're not hurting anyone, let them be. Even if they are hurting people, the victims are adults who freely choose to be exploited and abused. Don't we have the right to be victims if we so choose?!
Sometimes. But sometimes those adults bring their children. Sometimes those adults are not as free as the rest of us. Sometimes a Ramtha takes more than your money. No one should ever forget the reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide in 1978 of more than 900 cultists in Jonestown, Guyana.
See entries for dianetics, Bridey
Murphy, Rama, and reincarnation.
further reading
Gardner, Martin. The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988).
"Voices from Beyond: The Age-Old Mystery of Channeling," in The Fringes of Reason (New York: Harmony Books, 1989).
1. ABC showed a mini-series based on MacLaine's book Out on a Limb. It depicts MacLaine conversing with spirits through channeler Kevin Ryerson. One of the spirits who speaks through Ryerson is a contemporary of Jesus called "John." This "John" doesn't speak Aramaic--the language of Jesus--but a kind of Elizabethan English. "John" tells MacLaine that she is co-creator of the world with God. MacLaine, a consummate egoist, becomes ecstatic to find out that she is right about a belief she'd expressed earlier, viz., that she IS God. Cf. Martin Gardner, "Isness Is Her Business," New York Review of Books, April 9, 1987.
2. Alice Kahn, "Channeling for Dollars," The San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 1987. Kahn's article was based on her attendance at one of the sessions. She also notes that for $125 anyone could attend the 3rd annual Michael Retreat at Harbin Hot Springs for "shamanic rituals, dream-sharing, breakfast and dinner."
3. "Do You Believe in Magic - New Light on the New Age," by Nancy Clark and Nick Gallo, Family Circle, Feb. 23, 1993, p. 99. According to Clark and Gallo, an estimated 3,000 people are enrolled in Knight's school, with as many as 1,500 living in the Tacoma area.