Originally Posted by VinceG  OK, I just looked up some basic facts about Jerry and Esther and Abraham, and a whole bunch of things make sense, now that I realize that Abraham was a channeled entity, rather than an actual person.
So I'm going to lay out some of the basics of channeling. First off, our own words and language is so inferior to the sorts of communication non-physical entities have with each other that it's not even close to speaking another language.
So, when channeling, the channeler uses his/her own brain as a translation tool. What's communicated gets filtered through the concepts and beliefs and thought processes of the channeler. It's a spiritual version of the telephone game. Meaning is inevitably lost, a great deal of it, actually. In fact, probably 90% of the meaning is lost, simply because the channeler cannot understand what is being channeled.
This translation process is subconscious, completely transparent to the channeler. All the channeler experiences is voices. A channeler with a very high degree of spiritual development will experience no so much voices as actual thoughts, which move much faster than speech and can convey a lot more information.
A channeler, looking for interesting things to write, is naturally and subconsciously going to focus on so-called magical information. It's hard to sell books with very basic spiritual knowledge, even though that knowledge is much more important than the magical stuff, which won't work without a lot of application of the basics.
The end result of all this is that the spiritual usefulness of teachings laid out through channeling is only going to be marginally better than if the channeler had simply made up the entire exchange out of whole cloth. New ideas that didn't exist in the channeler's mind before can be described, but those new ideas are subject to the degree of spiritual development of the channeler.
This is why, given the choice between channeling and one's natural spiritual progression using self-inquiry, the savvy spiritualist with choose the latter every time. Channeling is something serious aspirants will play with but eventually discard, as it doesn't even offer much in the way of personal growth. Other beings will talk to you, as long as you want them to, simply because it's better than nothing, but as long as you're focused on this sort of telephone game, trying to operate based on incomplete information that your own mind has filtered out, you might as well be running in circles. |