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What could be a more perfect topic to begin our Book Review section during the month of Halloween, than discussion of the various books on channeling? Channeling is not only a popular sport at present, but if examined closely an intriguing one. It's not at all clear, for example, what the purpose of channeling is; this lack of clarity actually gives it a "spookiness" that's almost independent of the fact that disembodied or otherworldly intelligences, personalities and even (shudder)" entities" are central items of the channeling ee phenomenon. Consider, for example, the most common means of establishing the "inner plane" or channel connection: meditation. This is the method most recommended both by channelers and the given channelled source. Meditation is of course, as we should all know by now, a means of stilling the mind so that our ordinary thinking faculties are temporarily vetoed; this provisional silence of the otherwise constant "interior monologue" is the means whereby the meditator is supposed to bypass the conditioning screen of (culturally programmed) concept, in so doing becoming ideally receptive to holistic dimensions otherwise recessed into the unconscious beyond the focus of ordinary "notice". However, as the very object of channeling, out of those ostensibly more holistic zones of being comes charging...more verbiage! Out of the meditator's mouth issues another voice. In Los Angeles alone, in fact, the phenomenon is so prevalent that it seems every other face has "someone else's" voice coming out of it (although this is apparently such a commonplace of filmland that "channeling" seems more a logical extension than an abrupt break). And a great deal of the content of such channeled information from coveted "higher sources", is taken up by odd black—key vibrations inflected into the upper registries of haunted nasality extolling the virtues of...meditation! This of course can only mean one of one thing, ultimately, amounting to a largely unnoticed metaphysical tautology; you're being encouraged to meditate in order to still the chronic cover of the verbal mind, thus putting you in the properly receptive condition to pass a sonorously-rolling Voice not your own around the glottis in elicitation of a Speech which inevitably extols the virtue of meditation, ,as means of extracting a verbal instruction that tells you... Now that's spooky! It's almost another version of the oddly reverberative "self-reference" paradox (you know, the peculiar conceptual log—jam which occurs when a categorical negative is expressed in first—person, .e. “all statements are false, including tk this one". Richard Hofstader would have a field day deciphering the a ee oe ee | ee ee Be To be fair, the exhortation to "meditate" that emanates from channeled sources, like t.v.'s exhortation to watch t.v., ostensibly points to a content beyond the significance of its own form—in—itself; i.e. just as television bids for your attention presumably because of the information it carries, so channeling claims your attention by way of the meditative mechanism apparently because of its unique power to bring a stream of extraordinary news. People consult the channeler, after all, not only or even particularly for the edification of the standard message to meditate, but largely because it's expected the source can produce a verbal description of conditions and events beyond the ordinary ken of three—dimensional faculties. We consult the channeler because, basically, we are concerned, in a very ordinary conceptual way. Like every personality anxiously poised on the psychological tightwire spanning the temporalized chasm of existence, we grope in ambiguity over the Questionmark of chronic incompletion supplied by the tenses in which we conjugate the terms of ego—identity; it would always be oh-so helpful if we could see the future in advance, T-Bird_Vs_The_Flying_saucers.htm by Marshall Telemachus Moebius code which the general program of "channeling" carries!)