Taking Divine Dictation...
Or, how can you tell if it’s really God on the line?
by D. Patrick Miller
From the voluminous legacy of Edgar Cayce to the Pathwork, A Course in Miracles, and the best-selling Conversations with God, the age-old phenomenon of people hearing and forwarding special messages from disembodied spirits — including the Supreme Being — just won’t go away.
According to psychologist Arthur Hastings, author of a study of channeling entitled With the Tongues of Men and Angels, at least fifteen percent of the general population sooner or later “hears” an inner voice offering information or guidance. “Regardless of the validity of the claims of supernatural agency, the fact remains that mentally healthy individuals experience these phenomena,” he writes. “Moreover, a large number of these messages contain meaningful information and exhibit knowledge and talents of which the channeler is completely unaware.”
The whole notion of channeling is inherently controversial: either you find it credible or you don’t. The lack of empirical validation for the phenomenon is neatly counterbalanced by an impressive anecdotal record throughout history. Writing in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, psychiatrist Mitchell Liester of Colorado Springs reports that people who have reported inner voices include Socrates, Joan of Arc, George Washington Carver, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Gen. George S. Patton, among many others (see “Channeling Through History,” below). While the realm of channeling clearly has a more diverse population than credulous New Agers, it also has few if any tests or standards by which to measure the validity of messages received from disembodied sources.
For instance, how can one distinguish between mystic messages from a transcendent realm and the deep musings of one’s own subconscious? What’s the qualitative difference between otherworldly insight and hallucinatory delusion? If you begin to hear a mysterious inner voice, are there any questions or challenges you can use to call out its source? And if you are about to listen to — or pay for — the counsel of an alleged channeler, are there any guidelines to keep in mind besides “let the buyer beware”?
The investigation of such inquiries turns up no hard and fast rules — or at least none without ready exceptions. But it does appear that the best interpretation of extra-worldly messages follows the direction of spiritual growth itself — toward self-confrontation and humility, and away from self-importance.
Helen Schucman, the Reluctant Scribe
In 1965 a 56-year-old Columbia University psychology professor named Helen Schucman experienced great anxiety when she heard a “soundless Voice” in her head announcing, “This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.” For a check on her sanity she turned to her boss William N. Thetford, then director of the Psychology Department of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Thetford, who had been listening avidly to Schucman’s reports of mystical dreams and visions in the months before the voice issued its simple directive, calmly replied, “Why don’t you take down the notes? We’ll look them over and see if they make any sense, and throw them out otherwise. No one has to know.”Thus began seven years of difficult extracurricular labor for Schucman as she scribed the material that became A Course in Miracles (ACIM), now a million-plus best-seller and a popular reference in transpersonal therapy. Written in Christian terminology with many passages of striking literary quality — large portions of the prose adhere to the Shakespearean meter of iambic pentameter — the Course proposes a largely Eastern metaphysics laced with contemporary psychological references to such concepts as “ego” and “projection.”
Bill Thetford, who typed up the shorthand notes recorded by Schucman, came to refer to the Course as the “Christian Vedanta” and it has often been cited as a modern summary of the so-called “perennial philosophy” common to all religious traditions. ACIM students appear to be remarkably diverse, including agnostics, scientists, and psychotherapists as well as veterans of traditional religious paths. Two well-known popularizers of the teaching are spiritual lecturer Marianne Williamson and psychiatrist Jerry Jampolsky, both authors of best-selling books based on Course ideas.
As a channeling phenomenon, the inside story of Course scribe Helen Schucman and her inner voice is particularly significant. While virtually every prominent channel has claimed to be surprised by the initiation of his or her exotic talent, Schucman appears to be unique in her unwillingness to become a spokesperson for the voluminous message she recorded. She participated in only one speaking tour about the Course, and generally refused to provide interviews or other publicity before her death in 1981.
Part of Schucman’s reluctance to be publicly identified with the Course no doubt had to do with the professional identities that she and Thetford had to protect throughout the secret transcription of the Course, which took place during their last years at Columbia. As Bill Thetford related to me about a year before his death in 1988, “Professors at Columbia didn’t do this kind of thing, particularly in the Department of Psychiatry. Can you imagine? — hearing voices, taking down material of this kind...”
But the religiously ambivalent Schucman (who described herself as a hard-headed scientist while surreptitiously attending Catholic masses) was also unnerved by what she called the “certainty, wisdom, gentleness, clarity and patience that characterized the Voice” — not to mention the fact that the voice clearly identified itself as the historical Jesus Christ. In her own writing about the Course, Schucman could never bring herself to affirm the source’s claimed identity, preferring to call it only “the Voice” — or the “Top Sergeant,” as she once referred to it in personal correspondence.
Schucman may have further resisted identifying with the material she channeled because she was unwilling to apply its central lessons of forgiveness and ego-surrender. As she told a friend near the end of her life, “I know the Course is true, but I don’t believe it.” Bill Thetford often remarked on Schucman’s pronounced tendency toward dissociation, enabling her to receive the Course material without interference from her own ego — “very much as if she were tuning into an FM channel,” Thetford recalled — and then revert to an everyday personality noted for its insecurity and tendency toward sharp criticism.
Thus Schucman might be said to have inadvertently provided a model of propriety for those who would be channels, exhibiting a near-total detachment from the message she gave to the world. While everyone who knew her agrees that she could have benefited from applying Course principles to her own life, Schucman’s detachment nonetheless kept ACIM uncontaminated by any promotional agenda of its channel.. . .
Higher Wisdom or Hallucination?
If you happen to hear an inner voice, how can you determine whether it’s worth listening to? After all, the notorious “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz heard voices that told him to kill people. And many diagnosed schizophrenics hear seemingly disembodied voices that offer them anything but higher wisdom.“There’s quite a difference between the contents of pathological hallucinations and transcendent voices,” explains Dr. Liester. “Delusory voices tend to be very demanding, critical, or judgmental whereas transcendent voices are uplifting, supportive, and encouraging.” Liester adds that the states of mind in which the two kinds of voices are heard are also quite different. The sustained reception of a transcendent voice tends to occur in “an altered state of consciousness that is profoundly transpersonal. The channeler’s sense of identity changes from that of an individual to someone connected with something beyond themselves. There’s an altered perception of space and time that differs from hallucinations, in which people lose track of time or are disoriented within time. Hearing transpersonal voices, people transcend time; that is, they still know it’s there but they aren’t trapped within it.”
Finally, delusory voices will tend to have a divisive or negative message, issuing warnings or portents of doom instead of instruction or insight. “Transcendent voices have a unitive nature,” comments Liester. “They come from a perspective that sees both sides of paradoxes and integrates them into a larger whole. From the perspective of the divine there is no doom and gloom; a divine voice will guide us past the dualities of life and lift us into a transcendent outlook.”...
