Channeling, Spirit Guides And Totem Animals

From the perspective of a forensic psychologist, I've always been interested in mediumistic channeling because it's one of those things that science cannot definitively explain. Undertaking  such a study would have to include psycho-logical, para psychological and metaphysical studies of consciousness, co-consciousness and unconscious processes, disassociation and other altered states such as disembodied consciousness and entities, and state specific consciousness in order to sort the non-pathological from pathological. As you can see, that's a pretty tall order. All of these things must be examined to establish whether or not the person claiming to be a psychic medium is authentically and genuinely receiving information from a source outside of themselves, or projecting from an internal state which is  possibly  psychosis. In other words, the source must be verified and the message authenticated. Which, in my opinion, is damned near impossible to do unless the person in question is so obviously out of touch with reality that their mental state and cognitive behavior supports such a conclusion. Despite Hollywood's best efforts, it is very, very difficult to prove in the real world of legality that someone is a raving lunatic because psychoses can be easily hidden or masked.

Psychic abilities are and always have been a 'hot button' subject to psychoanalysts; we are pretty evenly divided on the subject . We are by training philosophical pragmatists advocating an approach that evaluates theories in terms of the success of their practical application and our opinions are heavily influenced by the school of thought which we embrace. Professional opinion of the individual practitioner  is based on theses experiences. Notice I said opinion. Nothing is writ in stone, no matter what your philosophy. Such is the flexible nature of science, particularly of the mind.

This why I cannot  discount channeling out of hand as mental illness and prefer to think of it as a type of  spiritual phenomena. There is a type of disassociation during the experience which is not pathological psychosis.The symptomology simply doesn't fit the clinical diagnosis of disfunction.
[ See the DSM-IV definition of mental disorders and compare to the DSM-V version.] It's my opinion (for whatever that's worth) that the disassociation experienced by a medium during channeling is a state of co-consciousness where the individuals ego is set aside in order for the entity to communicate. Some theorists such as Ken Wilbur believe this is actually a state of higher consciousness, and I can't argue that as either a psychologist or theologian. (There is a rather long but enlightening paper published by Paul M. Helfrich that supports the work of Ken Wilbur and others found here: //www.paulhelfrich.com/library/Helfrich_P_Assessing_Channeling.pdf ).


Spiritualists have embraced a similar belief throughout the history of their movement, calling it spirit communication ("revelation from spirit guides"). The phenomena of spirit communication became particularly popular during the late Victorian period as a past time, and during the early 20th century as families turned to mediums to contact their loved ones  who died serving in the military during WWI. It's popularity faded for a few decades, only to see a resurgence during the 1960's and to become a staple of the current New Age Movement. Channels such as JZ Knight (Ramtha) and Ester Hicks (Abraham, who is described as a conglomeration of several entities) have many followers and are still in demand, as is  Jane Roberts' entity Seth.  Long before, however, the ancients consulted oracles ( e.g., the Pythia of Delphi) and instances of channeling are evidenced in the Bible such as Saul seeking the help of a psychic to contact the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 28:6–20). As the saying goes, "everything old is new again".

Many Pagans and magickal people have a relationship with spirit guides and totem animals from which they seek wisdom and guidance. My own experience with seeking out a spirit guide/totem animal began from an interest in the shamanic work of the late Dr. Michael Harner, and currently, his student Sandra Ingerman, who is a licensed family therapist and mental health counselor board certified as an expert in traumatic stress. ( Her books Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self,  and Medicine for the Earth are classics which I highly recommend to add to your  library!)


I believe that channeling is a gift and an art, and not all of us are chosen. Channeling a manifested entity is not "hearing the still small voice in your head"; rather it is tapping into a state of disassociation from the personal vessel (medium) in order to give voice to a disincarnate being. After the message is delivered, the vessel disengages from the being who is in spirit and returns to their own reality.  The majority of mediums who do this type of work can engage their entity at will with preparation, usually involving a ritual of some sort. Not all channeled entities are spirit guides, some exist to simply impart information. An example of this type of spirit is Erik, the son of Elisa Medhus, MD, who speaks at will through numerous mediums, usually responding from questions asked by his mother during sessions that are subject specific. ( Stumbled on the Channeling Erik site on You Tube, and he seems to have quite an ardent following. You can find his back story and other information at the website dedicated to his work. I will reserve my opinion other than to say sessions with him are interesting from several standpoints and depending on which medium is featured at the time.. Some seem to be better than others at connecting with him).

Although I have psychic abilities- as we all do- I am not a medium per se. As a High Priestess, I have  participated in the ritual known as Calling Down the Moon and have temporarily been filled by the spiritual presence of Goddess for the duration of the ceremony. Other than that I do not channel anyone or anything. I believe I have  been blessed with gifts, but channeling is not one of them.

I don't have a spirit guide either.  I sit on the proverbial fence when it comes to believing that spirit guides originate from within or outside of ourselves. There is a theory that spirit guides are ancestors or our beloved dead or another  form of entity ( think guardian angel) that somehow connects with humans. And yet there is another which explains them as a higher form of consciousness such as the Universal Mind. Further still, there is they theory that the originate from within our own consciousness on a different level of experience. [Check out this article from Live Science to learn more: https://www.livescience.com/38561-channeling.html]

In closing, I will tell you that I do have animal totems. I have gleaned  a great deal from the characteristics of the ones who have presented themselves to me over time. Their wisdom, I believe comes from the relationship of those characteristics applied to situations in my life. Through them I know more about myself. And in the end, that's what we're all looking for, isn't it?



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[Another fine source you may enjoy is reading the book Information from Paranormal Sources

by Jon Klimo, which also has more information on Ken Wilbur and others and a section about the purported contact of the Challenger astronauts with NASA scientist Sally Ride .]

Jung-A Mystic For Our Time

This post originally appeared in the Pagan Blog Project 2014, Week J

The teachings of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung ( pronounced "young") are one of my passions. So much so that when I finally decided to pick a psychological discipline with which to align myself while I was working on my counseling degree, I chose Jungian Psychology.

My first exposure to Jungian thought was through a self-help group sponsored by the Center+Point Foundation. We met as a coterie weekly to apply Jung's theory of self-integration and growth potential to areas of our lives. It was the 70's,what can I say? All my friends were going to est, and I certainly couldn't afford to spend that much money on developing my psyche at the time. ( Later I did got to both est I and II, but to be honest, Center+Point was the better investment, in my opinion. It's certainly the one that's benefited me the most in the long run. It's been over 35 years now, and all I can remember taking away from est was that they controlled when you got to go to the bathroom, the bastards.)

C.G.Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, a friend and contemporary of Sigmund Freud. They shared a lively friendship, mostly through correspondence. That ended after many years when Freud asked Jung to give him his opinion on a particular dream he'd had. I take it the explanation Jung came up with was less than flattering to Freud's rather largely inflated opinion of himself; to make matters worse, it was later discovered that Freud withheld details of the dream that he thought would usurp his authority in the psychiatric community. Jung had deduced correctly what those details were and he and Freud parted company acrimoniously- but not before Freud publicly accused Jung of casting "death wishes" upon him during another encounter where he fainted ( Which I suspect was due more to Freud's own hysteria than to any malefica  from Jung.) [ Freud A-Z,pg 103 by Susan Heller,2005 ;published by John Wiley&Sons,Inc.] The suggestion so affected  Jung  that he plunged into a depression during which he had vividly lucid dreams about death. During this period, Jung became intensely interested in all things death-related, so much so that it influenced the writing of his Seven Sermons to the Dead (using the pseudonym of Basilides). He described the dead as "...the voices of the Unanswered, Unresolved,and the Unredeemed."[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sermons_to_the_Dead ]

But wait a minute...weren't these two supposedly learned men of science? They were indeed, but I wonder if Freud's knowledge of Jung's numerous encounters with the mystical that began in his childhood (he'd experienced psychokinesis,precognition and clairvoyance at a very early age), hadn't lodged its self in a dusty corner of his mind, only to prey on the psychiatrist's own fear of the occult.
Both Jung's mother Emile and grandmother Augusta were known psychic mediums. It would follow that Carl would have a natural curiosity and a better understanding of this subject than most of his contemporaries, wouldn't it? As it turns out, it not only was, but when Jung learned that his 16 year old cousin was also a medium, he enlisted her assistance in helping with paranormal experiments that became the framework for his doctoral thesis," On the Psychology and Pathology if So-called Occult Phenomena", published in 1902. Four years later he published one of his most significant works,The Psychology of Dementia Preacox [https://archive.org/details/psychologyofdeme00junguoft]After that, he received several impressive honorary degrees in succession from universities in his home country and Harvard,Oxford and Clark University in Massachusetts. He'd also been appointed as the President of the International Congress of Psycho-Analysis (1910), but resigned from that and an esteemed professorship at the University of Zurich. Desiring to distance himself from the mainstream, he began an almost obsessive preoccupation with mythology and dream work. [ The Portable Jung,edited by Joseph Campbell, published by Penguin Books,1976]

He began to work on the development of his general theories on psychological types and archetypes in earnest. Out of this period came his definitions of introvert and extrovert and the four basic functions of thinking, feeling,sensation and intuition; the collective unconscious, and anima (feminine) and animus (masculine) principles.

Jung's theories were powered by insight into the workings of his own psyche. He closely examined his dreams and applied his own unique understanding of spirituality to interpretation of religious symbols. He was a student of both Eastern (Taoism,Hinduism) and Western religions (Christianity and Gnosticism), and his spiritual leaning were best described as eclectic. He believed in occult phenomena and the paranormal because he'd experienced it first hand. As the line of demarcation between his dreams and visions began to blur, he penned the enormously popular and autobiographical Memories,Dreams and Reflections,which he continued to work on until his death on June 6,1961.

In 1944, Jung had had an out-of-body experience (OBE) after a heart attack where he saw himself high above the Earth, where he saw a temple made of stone. He felt called to go inside this temple to learn the meaning of life. But before he could do so, he was called back by an apparition of his attending physician, who'd taken the form of the Heal of the Temple of Asclepius (the Greek god of healing) who commanded him to return to Earth because he work was not done. Jung's near-death experience was confirmed by a nurse who witnessed him being surrounded in a white light.

After the death of his wife in the 1950's, he retired to Bollingen, Switzerland and began to build what amounted to being a castle on the property he owned. Into the stone walls he had mystical and alchemical symbols carved. During the building of this castle he updated many of his published works on the mandala, synchronicity and the I Ching. These re-workings became his opus, Aion [.http://www.amazon.com/Aion-Researches-Phenomenology-Collected-Works/dp/069101826X]

Jung was an ardent believer in reincarnation; much of his feeling on the subject came from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He was quoted saying that his existence was based on " ...a passionate drive for understanding in order to piece together mythic conceptions from the slender hints of the unknowable."
[Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience,Rosemary Ellen Guiley, 1994] Like many of us today, he feared for the future of humankind and stated emphatically that our saving grace would be our becoming mindfully more conscious as a species.

Just prior to his death, Carl Jung had a dream in which he became whole ( a reoccurring subject in his writings about personal integration). I believe this meant that his individuation had become complete and he had reached the pinnacle of human growth. In this dream, he was himself symbolized as a tree whose roots were interlaced with gold-the metal associated with completeness in alchemy. On the night he died, a particularly violent storm arose on Lake Geneva in which lightning struck his favorite tree. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Stranger things have happened in this world.

Carl Gustav Jung left a legacy of thought that is applicable to all forms of occult and academic traditions; little wonder so many Pagans gravitate to this great mystic of our time.