I’ve been intrigued for years by the phenomenon known as channeling. I first became aware of this activity back in the 1970s with the publication of The Seth Material by Jane Roberts. The next popular channeler to hit the scene was J.Z. Knight, channeling the entity named Ramtha. Then came Lee Carroll’s Kryon. Soon there was Sheldon Nidle and the Galactic Federation of Light, Barbara Marciniac with the Pleiadians and Phyllis Schlemmer’s Council of Nine. Many more have followed in their wake, perhaps numbering in the hundreds just in America alone, although most of them are not as well known.
I’ve attended four channeling sessions, by four different channelers, out of curiosity. What intrigued me about all of them, and about all channelers in general, is that it’s virtually impossible to know if they’re really channeling or if they’re faking it. Any rational person would tend to think even those who are not consciously faking it are in any case probably victims of some sort of dissociative personality disorder, or some kind of temporary psychological break from reality during which time they experience audio hallucinations. So I decided to see if any serious research had been done on this phenomenon by qualified behavioral scientists. To my surprise I found there has been some work done in this area of research.
I won’t bother to go into the details of that research now. Much of it has been summarized here:
http://bit.ly/9Bw5TB
The bottom line is that a number of explanations have been proposed from the results of the research. All of the explanations, of course, are based on the psychological and psychiatric data accumulated over the past hundred years or so. On the other hand, some of the research is based on more current science such as quantum mechanics. For example, the work of renowned theoretical physicist, David Bohm, is mentioned in the material on the page linked above. His idea of the “implicate and explicate” order, or realms of reality, was never really intended to explain the phenomenon of channeling.
Nevertheless, it does provide a basis for such an explanation that gets beyond the more conventional explanations derived from psychology and psychiatry. In fact, Bohm's idea (based in quantum physics) of how reality is structured (and there are several others in the field of quantum mechanics who tend to agree with his hypotheses) eventually boils down to something very similar to the explanations of channeling that are provided by the channeled entities themselves. In simplified terms, it often goes something like this:
There is but One Source and we (along with the channeled entities themselves) are all part of that One Source. Therefore, there is always a natural channel of communication available between us, them (the channeled entities) and the One Source. But it occurred to me that there just might be yet another explanation for the channeling phenomenon. Let’s call it the Simulated Reality Hypothesis or SRH.
Sometime back in the 1980s my son told me that the video game arcade, where he liked to hang out, was going to be the first in the country to acquire a holographic video game. Instead of the characters in the game being displayed on a computer screen they would be displayed, in 3-Dimensional form, on a flat surface that you could view from every angle, 360 degrees around the platform.
Unfortunately, that turned out to be an unsubstantiated rumor and never came to pass. But it did spark a vision in my mind:
I suddenly envisioned the earth as a platform (metaphorically speaking) and that we humans are merely holographic projections moving around on that platform. Not only are we moving around but (and this was a little disturbing) perhaps we are being controlled to some degree by “someone” or some “thing”, in some other dimension. In other words, this invisible entity (or group of entities) is playing an incredibly sophisticated, high-tech, holographic computer game and we are the characters in a simulated reality.
By some “coincidence”, just a week or so after having this intuitive flash, I was introduced to a book called The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav. To my amazement, Zukav was talking about very similar ideas derived from the science of quantum physics. Then, just a couple weeks later, I was in a book store and just happened to stumble onto a book called The Holographic Universe by science writer, Michael Talbot. This book is basically an overview of some of the ideas of some of the world’s leading thinkers and researchers in the field of quantum physics. Among them is the aforementioned physicist, David Bohm. As I read through this book I became more and more convinced that this idea that we are living in a simulated reality just might be the truth of the matter.
Since then, of course, we’ve all been introduced to that idea through three incredible movies: The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and Dark City. Maybe there’s more to the fundamental idea behind these movies than most people are willing to consider. More to the point, maybe this idea also provides an explanation for the phenomenon we call “channeling”.
Dr. Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at Oxford, has written a fascinating paper entitled “Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?”. It’s available online:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
In the introduction Bostrom writes:
Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears. That is the basic idea. The rest of this paper will spell it out more carefully.
The paper is well written and Bostrom does a terrific job of presenting a convincing case for the idea that we are, indeed, living in a simulated reality generated by an extremely powerful computer system. So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume he’s right.
If that’s the case, then perhaps the messages that channelers are receiving are being transmitted from the program that is running the simulation and/or from the entities (advanced humans or otherwise) that are controlling the program. Perhaps these transmissions are simply scripted material devised as part of an experiment, a research project designed to see what effect the “messages” will have on the channeler (the primary subject who is directly receiving the messages) as well as on the rest of the people who, in turn, receive the message from the channeler.
Or worse yet, what if it’s nothing that “scientific”? What if it’s just some random entity (or group of entities) in some other dimension, sitting around playing a computer game for no purpose other than their personal amusement?
On the one hand, it seems like a bizarre idea. On the other hand, if you think about it, you might agree with me that it’s no more bizarre than the notion that the channelers are receiving their messages from Light Beings, Angels, Aliens, Spirit Guides, Galactic Federations, the Council of Nine and an assortment of Ascended Masters.
What do you think?
*********************
The Thirteenth Floor, movie trailer:
">object>
Dark City, Part 1 of 10:
">object>
I give up. What do I do when I become a lion?
ReplyDelete