Xanadu, Salo, Seth, Hitchcock, St.Germain, Hugh Grant, Woody Allen, etc.

[Ed Augusts]

I did not mean to belittle all 'channeled' books in my last item, just
88% of them. The channeled stuff that made-up most of a whole bookcase
in my last "Mystic Books" storefont failed, with some exceptions such
as the Jane Roberts (channeling) "Seth" books, to seize the public's
mind. One thing for certain, people don't generally buy channeled
stuff put out by someone they know nothing about, "they have to have
BEEN THERE" and seen and heard the channeler "in action". THEN, maybe
they'll be interested. A lot depends on whether the 'entity being
channeled' is any smarter than the person who picks up the book. If
the entity is a dumb-ass, which also reflects on the channeler, then
unless the casual reader is as big, or bigger of an ass, they will
quickly put down the so-called channeled book as worthless. In the
case of the Jane Roberts series, "Seth" was an intriguing "spirit"
with a dense, opaque, yet substantial message. It was never possible
for me to read more than a few pages of a "Seth" book because each
paragraph would give me something hard to think about. After awhile I
stopped wanting to think that hard and put the book away. But at least
there was a message based on what seemed to be an almost tangible,
intellectual -- no, not merely intellectual -- wise, truly wise --
presence... You can't say that for most channeled books, however, no
matter if the entity is St.Germain or Granny Goose.

Some movies are like that, eh? I wonder if various experimental movie-
makers and directors may be channeling an entity! Is that one
possible definition of "inspired" cinema? I don't think I've ever
heard this possibility expressed before. But just as writers and
musicians are inspired -- or depraved -- so, too, are the people who
make movies.. That an evil movie such as "Salo" could have been
inspired by an evil entity that possessed Pier Paolo Pasolini? What
was there about Alfred Hitchcock that made him want to explore terror,
death, crime over and over again? Maybe a weird spirit of some kind
kept Francis Ford Coppola working far too long on a couple of
'duds'.

Are film producers subject to demonic possession, as well, or do they
fall under the sway of stupid entities? Is that how an elderly Gene
Kelly was paired with a spritely Olivia Newton-John in "Xanadu"? But
why am I always thinking about dreck? Take a wonderful movie. The
Wizard of Oz. The Sound of Music. My Fair Lady. More recently,
anything with Jodi Foster or Sigourney Weaver or Hugh Grant, or Julia
Roberts. Or Woody Allen, ha ha! Are these people channels for
spirit? ARE they spirits? Is that it? Or do they just attract happy
spiritual influences in their endeavors and films? I'm thinkin'
they're wise and wonderful spirits, and that's why we like 'em!

Back to books, and bypassing Granny Goose, but speaking of St.
Germain... I have a special bone to pick with Elizabeth Prophet's
Ascended Masters and the idea that she, and others, could get
meaningful messages from the Great Beyond through these 'entities'.
She's the one who got many of her believers to sell their goods and
move into a big underground Montana complex... a bomb shelter,
really.. with her in the late 1980's... just prior to what she
expected would be Armageddon. Instead, the Soviet Union fell apart
and we enjoyed rampant peace and prosperity for a decade, instead. It
was after this occurred that Toye had her vision of 4 entities showing
her maps of future coastlines, which led to the appearance of the
silly book I reviewed in my last message.

I had an incident in the 1980's which shattered any beliefs I naively
had about channeling. This occured in the Northeast regarding a
couple -- whose identity I will not divulge for obvious reasons. I
found out, for a fact, that when they were "channeling spirits" on
stage and in private homes, etc., were REHEARSING their sessions. They
were silly enough to go through a few "questions and answers" with me
looking in on them, just before the stage performance. She sank into
a trance while laying on a big comfy elevated chaise lounge, as her
husband sat beside her, ever ready to assist, query, and be the go-
between with the gathering. Everything went fairly well until someone
in the audience asked an unexpected question which confused the
'medium'. "You mentioned the "Great Lakes Triangle". Would you mind
stating what the exact borders of the Great Lakes Triangle are?" The
poor thing wasn't very geographically-minded, and this 'showed' in the
hesitation, and then errors, of what the "spirit" replied. She didn't
have a clue what the three corners of the triangle were, in fact, she
made it sound like a square, not a triangle. Her partner smiled
broadly and immediately stepped-in to end audience participation and
reverted to a "prepared list of questions". But I and others in the
audience realized what had happened.

But the real downfall of this particular couple and their channeling
efforts came a few months later, at a time when they were hosting a
series of channeling sessions in their home. Couples from their rural
neighborhood drove several miles to visit them once a week. One
night, a young couple drove home after a session of questions and
answers with the "spirits", and found that their home had caught fire
in their absence and burnt to the ground. The fact that the spirits
hadn't warned them of any danger, and that this terrible thing had
happened while the trance channeling session was occuring, broke up
the group. Everyone lost faith in a spirit who wasn't wise enough to
see a disaster on the horizon, plus, if it WAS a spirit -- maybe it
was a harmful spirit! Maybe that nice couple were channeling demons
and didn't even know it! Actually, I think the truth is far simpler
and less mystical than that: They were pretending to channel entities
in order to obtain contributions and fees for "private sessions".

But not all 'channeled' monologues or writings are bogus. Edgar Cayce
really DID diagnose and "cure" people suffering from a variety of
ailments with unusual and unexpected treatments while in a kind of
"trance state". Unless everybody who came by was so gullible that a
"placebo effect" occured. It stands as one of the more practical
achievements done in a trance... Of course, nobody could do the same
thing today, they'd be arrested in a wink for practicing medicine
without a license. What's odd about the Cayce material is that zealot
believers in Virginia Beach pumped-out dozens upon dozens of books and
booklets in which random trance-sayings of Cayce's were applied to
every subject under the Sun. They clearly came very close to founding
a religion upon his trance-messages. Needless to say, their endeavors
sold a lot of books!

Few people know "A Vision" by the Irish mystic and patriot, William
Butler Yeats, a complex Moon-mythology, with particular meanings of
all the phases of the Moon, etc., was not 'by' him at all, it was
mostly channeled by Yeats' wife and he merely wrote down and
transcribed the sessions, and then worked-up a philosophy, of sorts,
around the material. Much of it wasn't even written by Yeats, and yet
it seems to be "his" finest stuff, in some ways. Was his wife using
the guise of a spirit-revelation to communicate what was deep in her
heart to her husband? Did she have the best communication with him
while impersonating a spirit, or while a spirit was working through
her? I haven't seen anything in depth on Yeats' relationship with his
wife so as to be able to gauge better what the 'automatic writing' may
have meant in the context of their lives together.

A Mrs. John H. Curran, of St.Louis, began working with the Ouija Board
in 1912 and for 25 years thereafter, a spirit named Patience Worth
dictated every word of a series of SIX NOVELS and more than 2,000
poems. As Nikki Ligtelyn and I report in our 1997 book "Secrets of
the Ouija Board", one entire novel, Telka, 70,000 words long, was
delivered complete in 35 hours. If you're wondering how this prolific
process could have been done through a Ouija Board,. in truth, the
first manifestations of 'spirit contact' was through the Ouija, and
after that, Mrs. Curran graduated to the use of the same kind of
"automatic writing" used by Yeats' wife, and others, which allowed her
to speed-up the text-transmission tremendously. Here is a brief
excerpt from one of her poems, "The Sounds Unheard by Man"
:
I have heard the moon's beams
sweeping the waters, making a sound
like threads of silver, wept upon.
I have heard the scratch of the
pulsing stars, and the purring sound
of the slow moon as she rolled across
the night. I have heard the shadows
slapping the waters, and the licking
sound of the wave's edge as it sinks
into the sand upon the shore.

Notice this poetry, obsessed with how things sound, almost sounds like
what a spirit might remember back to having been able to hear during
its natural life, something it no longer has access to, and remembers
fondly... or perhaps what this is, is what a disembodied spirit can
hear, now, in a form different from that of a living human being.
Imagine hearing the "scratching of the pulsing stars"... this written
in an era before the "pulsar" phenomena of distant quasi-stellar
energy sources was even dreamt of by astronomers... and the lovely
idea of the slow moon purring as it slowly goes across the sky...
What it does NOT sound like, is the words of a middle-aged person of
no particular education in the Midwest of 1912. Imagine 2,000 poems
like this! It seems to me the Edgar Cayce fanatics in Virginia Beach
ought to adopt Mrs. Curran and her entity, Patience Worth, and
analyze, archive, and manipulate all that material, looking for
"messages" as they've done with Edgar Cayce's less considerable trance-
channeled, controversial diagnostic and healing messages over the past
60 or 70 years. They might find a rich source for further study. You
can only dice-up Cayce's oracular sayings so many times in so many
different ways before it starts sounding foolish!

I wrote what could almost be called a 'channeled' book in February. I
wrote more than 100 pages of .pdf text in 2 days, working night and
day, on the subject of where human beings have been, are, and are
going, as a species. But I don't think of it as 'channeled' material,
I make no claims of hearing spirit voices or channeling "Mafu" or
"Pocahontas' father" or "Khufu" (aka Cheops), Felix the Cat, or
anyone, I simply entered a very prolific phase of writing down various
thoughts, and one thought led to another, and next thing I knew, there
were more than 100 sections. I'm not saying it is inspired, I'm not
even saying it is good. It is what I pulled up from my mind in 48
hours of intense creativity. I've done it before and I will do it
again. Nobody pays attention because I don't say an angel was sitting
on my shoulder at the time, or the Virgin came by after midnight and
started dictating. Wow, what a concept! If I did, I'd get a huge
amount of 'hits'. Nope, it was just me, working from one side to
another of my rudimentary grey matter, as always. There were doves in
the daylight and hoot owls at night, but Felix the Cat didn't jump
onto the monitor and start telling me what to write. I guess because I
write without benefit of supernatural claims, I am neglected by the
fantasy-seeking, miracle-minded public. To find out more, just visit
www.edaugusts.com , which takes you to the BOOKS page, and have a look
at item #2.

Best wishes, -----Ed
(c) 2008 by Ed Augusts