JANUARY 2009
I, THE CHANNEL
by Hans TenDam
We all use intuition. And we take it seriously. If not, we couldn’t be regression therapists. Many of our clients have intuitive experiences, many of our colleagues have intuitive experiences. Regression is an intuitive experience.
When people discover intuition, they discover things like automatic writing, giving or receiving readings or doing body scans, consulting oracles.
Anybody with any experience in this field knows that intuitive information is valid, whatever scientists may say. Intuitive information may be surprisingly right and to the point, often wonderfully succinct. Intuitive information is valid, but it is not reliable.
It’s not
a surefire way to knowledge and wisdom. We may err with our intuition, like we may err with our intellect. No errors of reasoning, but errors in perception and even more errors in interpretation.
* The first error may be noise. This is especially true when we want to use intuition, but we are not properly in the mood, not in the proper trance state, so to speak. Not calm enough, not open-minded enough. The best state to receive intuitive stuff is usually when we don’t seek it.
* The second cause of error is that we do not know which part of us is channeling the information. The most common reason for error is to channel fears or hopes instead of perceptions. Every part of ourselves, like inner children or past lifetimes, has its own agenda.
* Possibly the biggest chance for intuitive error is when unintegrated parts, interfering parts, parts of us that contain unresolved issues, start babbling. They may repeat their own pet stories, their own pet fears, their own pet opinions.
* Even worse are external sources that seem to come from the inside, or from above. Internalized voices or the voices of presences that are not necessarily what they purport to be.
The common trap is that people who discover the wonders of intuition, start receiving messages from higher beings. The oldest book about channeled sessions is from 1659, describing the sittings of John Dee and Edward Kelley with high and very high angels.
The fashion to channel “Masters” started with Helena Blavatsky, who abused it in ridiculous ways. When some colleague was not willing to clean up the mess that she had made in her rooms, she would produce a written message that would suddenly come down from the wall in which one of the masters exhorted her pupil to work off his karma by cleaning up Blavatsky’s domestic mess. This fashion (I mean channeling Masters, not to clean up other people’s mess) has really caught on.
Many, many people are today channeling these Masters. Spiritist groups even have channeled the portraits of these masters. They all look like they have swallowed an overdose of psychedelic sugar. They are so sweet, that you would not buy a secondhand car of one of them. What is more, they all look like they really understand you and really see you for what you really are. It’s the kind of look you want your partner to have on your wedding day.
Spiritual figures and religious figures, angels and archangels are joined today by extraterrestrial sources, claiming to come from Sirius, Arcturus, the Pleiades and what not. The content of those messages doesn’t make me very happy in general. Many stern warnings and much sugar again.
I’m not particularly impressed by most published intuitive stuff. I even dread there are many impostors at the other side of the channel. (Many Brits will agree.)
The only thing we can do to counteract that is register, register and again register our impressions, and evaluate them afterwards. Preferably before publishing them.
One of our colleagues published a book in 1988 about progressions, in which a full chapter was dedicated to how to world would be and how the United States would be in particular in 1998. I remember how I felt when I read this: that he would be sorry 10 years later that he had published it. Of course, no one of these prophecies came true.
Even a seer like Edgar Cayce, who in a very intuitive way gave many solutions to medical problems, and was one of the more effective mediums we have had, could produce gibberish, as is witnessed with a book full of empty and meaningless answers and advice. Apparently, often he didn’t tune in to the right source and his subconscious just produced high-minded babble. When he began to answer general questions about reincarnation and about the history of the world, his information is very doubtful, to say the least. He fell in the same trap as many of us are still falling:identifying very interesting and very important past lives of himself and people around him. Also his prophecies misfired. Like parts of United States would sink into the sea before the end of the 20th century, and parts of Atlantis would rise. Apocalypse forever. I have lived
through many forecasts of the end of the world as we know it: in 1953 (the calendar of the Great Pyramid ending), in 1963 (one of the many dawns of the Age of Aquarius), in 1984 (the Second Coming of Christ who would be also the Maitreya-Buddha), 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 in which nothing particular happened, and now we have 2012 (the Maya-calendar ending). Well, the Mayas ended long before their calendar and one day you run out of stone.
Great apocalypses, with prophecies of doom and salvation, are typical of channeled information. Very impressive things are going to happen in your life or in the world in general. Usually, a big crisis will be upon us and after that a tremendous change for the better.
Non-believers in the prophecy will fare very badly (scientists, politicians, bankers, journalists, industrialists – in general the establishment) while the believers who have been ridiculed will get their just awards. Small apocalypses are foreseen on the level of individual’s lives. Some happiness or initiation is just around the corner, and present unhappiness and misery and pain are just to prepare you for that. Other favorite messages are about which people around you are your true soul mates and which people are karmic baddies that are trying to hurt you and putting you down.
Whatever the many sensible uses of intuition, we should use it sparingly in our work. We are there to help people to find and clean their own intuitive sources; we are not there to help people by using our own intuition. Outside healing and reading do not go well together with professional therapy, because the roles of the client in both approaches do conflict. “Listen to me: think for yourself!” We should only do that for people who are absolutely unable to do it for themselves: autistic people, people in coma, small infants, the mentally retarded.
This issue relates to the use – or not – of spirit guides. I think the best that has been said about this was by Roger Woolger, when he stated that he didn’t work with guides, but that guides worked with him. The spiritual should inspire us, be in the background, not in the foreground. We are the guides. That’s what people pay us for.
For those of you who doubt my message, all this has been channeled by a Very High Spirit who really knows what best for us, and for unfathomable reasons elected me as his mouthpiece. I can’t prove that, but you can’t disprove that. In the end you have to use your common sense.
EARTh members will think differently about these issues. My opinion is not necessarily shared by others. But I think we are there to emancipate our clients, not to make them into the receptacles of religious ideas or religious feelings (not even when about emancipation). If you want to do that, you should be in the conversion business, not in the therapy business.
Do whatever you want to do, but please don’t announce your psychic and spiritual services together with announcing your regression therapy work – and your EARTh-membership. It’s bad PR. Worse, it’s unprofessional.
Hans TenDam
