Glendower: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”
Hotspur: “Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?” - Henry IV, Part I Like that character from Moliere who was delighted to learn that he’d been speaking prose all along and never knew it, each and every one of us is channeling all the time; and the only difference between ”professional” psychics and mediums and the rest of us is that the psychics are aware of what they’re doing – they make a special point of (call special attention to) a completely natural process that everybody already knows how to do. Everyone has spirit guides who talk to them constantly; however, most people don’t listen to these messages, any more than they listen to what other people, such as their parents, spouse, or children, are trying to tell them.
When a thought or feeling prompted by a spirit guide pops up in their consciousness, they just pass over it or reject it. In this essay we will discuss thought forms, spirit guides, and other beings which can be channeled, together with a simple technique for consciously channeling them.
In order to get an idea of what spirits are, it is first necessary to get a handle on what we are. Contrary to popular opinion, we are not solid, abiding objects that have individual self-existence. Although it certainly appears that the world is “real” and consists of solid, discrete objects, in fact our world is more like a movie screen, hooked up to other people’s movie screens, on which we’re all projecting what we’re feeling inside outwards as symbols – solid objects in a physical world.
To ask Heidegger’s question, “Why are there things rather than nothing?” is like asking, “Why can’t soccer players use their hands?
Why did God so construct the universe that soccer players can’t use their hands?” In the same way, our perception of the universe as a world of solid, discrete objects is a wholly man-made restriction on our senses. Plants and animals don’t perceive the world in this fashion, and neither, for that matter, do infants and lunatics. They still use their “hands” (their feelings rather than their minds) to play the game of perception. As a result, they don’t “play soccer” very well, but they still have the free use of their hands –their intuition – which most people have learned to repress. The belief that we are discrete entities in a world of solid objects is just that – a belief – that makes the world of concepts, of thinking, possible.
Admittedly, the belief that we are discrete, abiding entities in a world of solid objects certainly seems to be true most of the time we are awake – it’s a pretty convincing belief.
But that’s only because we have the door tightly shut on any evidence that contradicts this belief. That door is called “fear of going crazy or of being thought crazy.” Keeping our sanity is equivalent to screening out lots of information about ourselves and the world around us which would be available if we could just loosen up a bit and drop the pretense that we exist as solid objects. In fact, our existence is multidimensional. We not only exist in an infinite number of past and future lives, but we are also infinitely ramified in all the probable realities which branch off from this present lifetime.
Every time we make a decision – big or little – we create a probable reality in which that decision was made, and another or other probable realities in which that decision wasn’t made. For example, that person whom you wistfully smiled at from afar once but never spoke to nor saw again, is your spouse in another probable reality in which you did go over and strike up a conversation. Thus, not only does the totality of who “we” are encompass infinite lifetimes in other worlds and realities, it also encompasses infinite probable realities within this present lifetime as well as all those others. Not only that, but within the confines of a single probable reality of a single lifetime, which is all we normally pay attention to or consider to be “ourselves”, we are still multiple personalities. That is to say, we are not the same person from moment to moment, but in fact shift from one to another subpersonalities or thought forms in response to this or that changing stimulus.
The only difference between an Eve, Sybil, or Truddi and the rest of us is that their slips are showing: they’re acting out the multiple personality role openly, whereas the rest of us are marching around with our dress uniforms – our fear of going crazy – buttoned down tight. Most of what we consider to be “ourselves” – that is, the thoughts, feelings and perceptions which occupy our conscious minds most of the time we are awake; our sense that there is a continuing “us” there – is just a collection of habits and predilections learned from our parents and society. Each of our habitual thoughts, moods, beliefs, etc. is a thought form – a learned behavior which is a being in its own right.*
Most of what we think we think, believe, or perceive is actually just what our parents and society think, believe, or perceive; and these thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions have an awareness, a sense of selfhood, and a will to live all their own. We create them with our decisions and we breathe the breath of life into them with our attention.
Basically, every time we think a thought we are channeling a thought form. However, this is an unskillful way of channeling because it’s mindless. Thought forms grab our attention and say, “Think this! Think that! Think the other! In response to this, do that! Remember this! Desire that! Blah blah blah!” all day long every day.
Thought forms are our automatic pilot – although we ourselves create them, we are subject to their control thereafter. We go along and just think whatever our thought forms want us to think. It rarely occurs to us to stop and ask, “Why? Why am I thinking this thought? Is entertaining this thought going to benefit me? From whence does this thought arise? At what point in my life did I first begin entertaining this thought? When did I make it a part of my inventory of habitual thoughts? Etc.”
To ask these sorts of questions (and pay attention to the answers) is called Active Imagination, and it is a more functional form of channeling thought forms than is normal thinking. In Active Imagination we interact with our thought forms, whereas in normal thinking we just snap to and salute whenever a thought form barks a command at us. Active Imagination is facilitated by automatic writing (which we shall learn how to do presently); i.e. automatic writing is a refinement of the technique of Active Imagination, but it’s by no means the only way to do it.
Thoughtful, introspective people are doing Active Imagination all the time without calling it that or giving any special attention to it; but, in fact, Active Imagination is a wholly different form of channeling thought forms than is normal thinking. So thought forms – habitual patterns of thought picked up from our parents and society – account for most of what we consider “our” thoughts and feelings; and spirits – both good and evil – account for most of what’s left. The chief difference between thought forms and spirits is that thought forms are within us, created by us, a part of us; whereas spirits are outside of us. When we channel (e.g. by automatic writing) we run across a whole menagerie of entities – both thought forms and different kinds of spirits – so it’s helpful to know the differences between these various kinds of beings. There are lots of different kinds of spirits in the world. We are spirits, for that matter.
Some spirits are entirely useless to humans – we cannot even communicate with such entities. Others are nasty little things which are best avoided altogether. And still others can be quite helpful to humans, for a multitude of purposes. There are spirits which oversee particular human activities such as agriculture, art, construction, cooking, healing, mathematics, mining, etc. etc. Every human endeavor has a cadre of spirits proper to it, which guides individual practitioners and also helps humanity as a whole expand its knowledge of the various arts, crafts, and sciences. A competent, inspired professional in any field is constantly receiving inspiration and new ideas from the spirits who oversee his or her field.
However, as is the case also with thought forms, most people believe that any inspiration they receive in this fashion is “their” idea, when in fact it’s being passed to them by spirits. To be a competent professional in any field is to be a clear channel for the spirits who oversee that field. Finally, we come to personal spirit guides – what some people call angels.
These are spirits who are assigned to individual human beings, who tend them as wards. Everybody has at least one personal spirit guide at any one time, but most people have several or lots of them, which may come and go in the course of a lifetime. Although both thought forms and spirit guides can be channeled in the same ways (as can other spirits: Jesus and Mary, Krishna, nature spirits, demons, recently deceased people, etc.), thought forms and spirit guides are completely different kinds of entities.
Thought forms are created by us: they stand in the same relation to us that we stand to God. Guides, on the other hand, are a bit above us in the sense of being wiser, possessing broader viewpoints and more loving hearts, but they aren’t that far above us. Many spirit guides have had human incarnations. Sometimes deceased friends, relatives, ancestors, or even aborted fetuses become one’s spirit guides; and one of my own guides has told me that there are lives / realities in which I am her spirit guide. I presume that similar relationships between people and their guides obtain for everyone. Up until recently in human history (last few thousand years) magical knowledge – the practical application of intuition – was handed down from generation to generation, as agricultural or mathematical knowledge is.
However, because of the nature of the times, most of that knowledge was lost as skilled practitioners died off without leaving heirs. In the interim, the White Brotherhood, the “guild” of spirit guides, came in to fill the gap – to steer humanity in more or less the right direction during its sleep-walking (rationalist-materialist) phase.
There’s a great network spread out across the world now, a linking up of groups of spirits and human channels, sending out filaments of light around the earth to love it and heal it. To learn to consciously channel your spirit guides is to join this fraternity of light. As long as there is light, no evil can overcome the earth. Now we will describe how to channel spirit guides by automatic writing. But it must be pointed out that automatic writing is just a way of making channeling deliberate or special, of endowing it with an aura of mystery. By distinguishing the process of channeling in this way it is easier to understand and learn – to learn in the sense of separating it out of normal thinking and feeling, and to understand when “our” thoughts and feelings indeed arise within ourselves, and when they are being passed to us by a spirit. Channeling can be done via normal thinking and feeling; in trance; in dreams; and by automatic writing.
Automatic writing, albeit not as clear as trance channeling (more admixture of the person channeling in the final product), has the advantage of providing a written record of a spirit’s messages – something which is often useful for future reference. A lot of things spirits say to us make more sense in retrospect.
