The Illusion of Conscious Will (40 page)

Yet people do experience these radical changes, and it is important to understand how this happens. It is essential to get a grasp on how such a transformation occurs in order to see whether this might fit into the notion of virtual agency. So we examine some of the major features of the psychology of spirit mediumship and channeling as practiced in this culture, and of the psychology and ethnopsychology of spirit possession worldwide.

Mediums and Channels

The traditions of channeling and mediumship in Western cultures represent widespread experiences of the transfer of virtual agency from self to a nonself agent. In these cases, an individual experiences a partial or total reduction in the usual sense of self as the author of consciously willed action. A spirit or entity replaces self as the agent. This unreal agent does not exist physically, of course, and is thus brought into being entirely in the experience and behavior of the person. It is possible to chalk such cases up to the fantastic delusions of a few unusual people—channeling does seem to happen mostly in California, and why are mediums in old films always wearing headwraps and speaking with bad accents? It turns out, however, that there are many historical case accounts of mediums (e.g., Brandon 1983) and widespread contemporary accounts of channels (e.g., Brown 1997), suggesting by sheer numbers that this experience may not be entirely explicable by the “odd person” theory. There are commonalities in the experiences and behavior of such people that are worth examining.

7.
Kirkpatrick (1985) reports that in the Marquesan society it is common to credit certain body parts with a kind of autonomous agency. Sex organs, in particular, are said to lead the person around. This happens all over the world.

Spirit mediumship was associated primarily with the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century. Although most of the historical mediums who became famous at the peak of the movement were charlatans (
fig. 7.3
)—indeed, their great fame came from the outrageous tricks they performed as “evidence” of their spirit contact—there were also many who merely produced the basic phenomena of possession without added tricks. Typically, this involved some ritual of induction to produce the possession—a transitory change in body position or facial expression, temporary eye closure or blinking, an apparent trance state (eyes closed, sometimes head down or tilted back)—followed by the production of messages, perhaps with a change in vocal quality or pitch, ostensibly from some entity other than the medium. The entity was usually a spirit of the dead returning to communicate from the “other side.” The medium professed that the experience of possession was involuntary and that the will of the spirit entity would determine what was done during the trance.
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Figure 7.3

Cover illustration for an 1891 book debunking charlatan spirit mediums. From Farrington (1922).

Modern channeling is the descendant of this practice, and it appears to take two forms: one more like mediumship and another that is not so dramatic. In
trance channeling,
the practitioner, like a spirit medium, loses consciousness of self during the session and afterward usually can-not recall the experience. So, for instance, one popular channel, Kevin Ryerson, who does “workshops” rather than séances, describes his state while he channels as “benign amnesia.” He says he recovers the experience only by listening to tapes made during his trance (Brown 1997). This oblivious state can be contrasted with
conscious channeling,
in which practitioners remain aware of what happens around them from their own subjective perspective and yet speak and behave in the manner of their channeled entity. The experience of conscious channeling has been described as “blending with an other” (Hughes 1991). Brown (1997,25) quotes one conscious channel saying, “When I channel, it’s like being at a party and overhearing another conversation. At the same time, the entity uses my mind, my vernacular, perhaps my memory.” Various degrees of trance versus consciousness are experienced by different practitioners, and occasionally one practitioner may alternate between these formats on different occasions.

8.
The term
trance
seems to be controversial in this context and in others, as it is difficult to define when a person is in a trance. Some commentators have taken issue with the term on the grounds that a trance is merely a descriptive term for outer appearances but is often taken to be an explanation of the unusual behaviors that it often accompanies (Iglis 1989; Spanos 1986). Because people who exhibit such trance states often describe them afterwards as having been associated with unusual states of consciousness, and may also be amnesic for the experience of trance, it seems a worthwhile term to keep in our psychological lexicon despite the quibbles. We should merely remember that calling the person’s state a trance doesn’t explain the state or the behaviors that occur during it.

Channeling seems like well-developed play-acting because channelers often produce what seem to be caricature-like impersonations of known individuals. Paula Farmer (1998), for example, is among the several people who claim to channel Elvis Presley. Her channeled book,
Elvis Aaron Presley: His Growth and Development as a Soul Spirit Within the Universe,
claims to offer “an emotional and inspirational account of Elvis’s past life that gives you insight to the man behind the music. . . . Elvis shares his innermost thoughts with us on life, sex, drugs and religion, [and] reveals his experience with death, his understanding of his life on Earth, his meeting with God and his aspirations for his next incarnation.” So, unlike the many people who impersonate Elvis in song, Farmer channels Elvis in print, producing the book he apparently needed to give the world. There are also reports of people channeling Barbie (Baskin 1994) and Babe Ruth (Polley 1995). However, the far more common case involves channeling of individuals who are not known but who have distinctive vocal characteristics, such as high, deep, or droning voices, or accents ranging from the recognizable (Irish, Scottish, English, German, old English) to the bizarre (ancient Babylonian, Etruscan, spacealien, a future being from NewJersey). There is cross-sex channeling and channeling of children as well as channeling of the younger self (Brown 1997; Hughes 1991).

Although some of these characterizations are so skillful as to be uncanny, there are often flaws in the role-play. Linguistic analyses indicate that accents produced by channels are often erroneous (when claimed to capture a known dialect) and are marked by unusual syntax and hybrids of different dialects. The channeling of archaic speech may sound potentially archaic to the untrained ear, but it is often strangely anachronistic, peppered with modern idioms (Roberts 1989; Thomason 1989). In channeling Atun-Re, a Nubian priest who lived around 1300 B.C., for example, Kevin Ryerson “joyfully plagiarized the punch line of a popular country-western song by referring to Cleopatra as the ‘Queen of Denial’” (Brown 1997, 29). Channels rationalize such lapses by saying that the entities must necessarily work through them, using their memories and vocal apparatus. Ryerson explained that Atun-Re speaks English rather than Nubian, for example, saying that the “spirit must use the neuromotor responses that I’m conditioned with” (Brown 1997, 29). And, indeed, if channelers are blending with another person, it makes sense that their speech might be an odd admixture. This explanation is not very satisfying, however, to those who hear a channel’s accent break down over the course of a lengthy session from a fairly convincing Scottish brogue, for instance, to something more like a whiny Canadian.

The literature on “how to channel” also has the suspicious ring of instruction on how to pretend. In
Opening to Channel,
Roman and Packer (1987) give a detailed set of instructions (which they channeled, of course) for conscious channeling. You should set up a tape recorder, have questions ready to ask the “guide,” put on special music, surround your-self with the image of a bubble of white light, imagine energy and light flowing through your throat, feel the presence of your guide growing stronger, and so on. In the midst of this, instruction number 8 is, “If your mind is saying, ‘I wonder if it is just me’ or asking ‘Have I really connected with a guide?’ let that thought go, and for now believe that you have indeed connected with a high-level guide, even if you cannot sense or prove the reality of it” (85).

In Kathryn Ridall’s (1988) manual,
Channeling: How to Reach Out to Your Spirit Guides,
we learn that “as people begin to channel, they almost inevitably feel as if they are making it up. . . . When my students complain that they’re just making it up, I tell them, ‘Good. Continue to make it up.’ Allow your imagination to roam freely. . . . Don’t allow your rational mind to rule at that time. Push its thoughts aside; soon enough it will be back in control” (113-114). In fact, in a four-step instruction on how to channel, Ridall’s fourth step is, “Pretend that you are your guide. Speak to yourself aloud as if you were sitting a few feet away. Begin to offer yourself guidance on the topic you want to address. . . . Refer to yourself in the second person. For instance, ‘You feel nervous about our current interaction. You are afraid you are making it up’” (109). All this sounds like a kind of ventriloquism school.

It makes sense that, at least in the case of conscious channeling, practitioners are developing rather detailed and careful plans for how to imagine themselves as another person. This serves as the first step, creating an imagined virtual agent that the individual can then proceed to mistake for real. The actions of the channel’s body are not informative about authorship, of course, because either self or the virtual agent could be causing them. Rather, it is the perceived source of the person’s thoughts that determines the allocation of action authorship. The body’s actions, although play-acted, may reveal surprising levels of perceptual detail about the virtual agent (“I didn’t know I could do that accent”) and may have unexpected emotional impact (“These jokes are actually funny”). This could promote the inference that the virtual agent is real.

With the development of the virtual agent comes a transition in the locus of the
control experience,
as the agent’s thoughts begin to predict the body’s action better than the self’s thoughts do. Successful channeling seems to follow from the continued observation that the body’s acts are previewed by thoughts that are being (actively) attributed to the virtual agent. The acts seem uncontrollable by self, not necessarily because the self is even trying to control them but because the virtual agent’s thoughts seem to have this control. Thoughts coming to mind in the virtual agent’s accent, for example, may preview the body’s actions again and again. The misattribution of actions to the virtual agent continually deflates the sense of the self’s conscious will for the body’s actions. When the person is “in” the agent, the body’s actions seem controllable by that agent, and the person’s normal self seems less in control because thoughts attributed to self are simply not occurring as often.

The theory that imagination becomes real is a potential way to understand many conscious channelers. Consider one of the best known early channelers, Jane Roberts, who consciously channeled the entity Seth and wrote several widely read books. She had been an author of fiction and had been planning to write a do-it-yourself book on ESP. She reported starting off with her husband at a Ouija board and having sessions in which they became convinced they were getting messages from Seth. Then she recounts that two sessions “were much the same, except for one bewildering element: I began to anticipate the board’s replies. . . I heard the words in my head at a faster and faster rate, and not only sentences but whole paragraphs before they were spelled out” (Roberts 1970, 18). Soon she dropped the board, and with it her husband’s help, and began to speak as Seth (in a somewhat lower-pitched voice than her usual one). Seth’s new-age pronouncements were very popular, and this early example was one of the starting points of the current channeling fad.
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9.
It is interesting that since then Seth has been speaking through other channels; Frances Morse of Connecticut began channeling Seth in 1975 and reports that counseling clients of hers who are familiar with Jane Roberts’s Seth have generally been satisfied with her version of Seth as well (Brown 1997, 157).

Jane Roberts clearly had strong motivation to channel—she was hoping to write a book—and she had a strong ability to imagine, as evidenced by her past work as a fiction author. Perhaps in her case, a deep desire to believe that her virtual agent was real helped to fuel her performance and her commitment to the reality of Seth.