1) The nature of the material
Material which is composed in a style which is completely foreign to you, which you couldn’t imitate, with references you couldn’t have known, or which you may not even fully agree with, is clearly coming from a source outside of yourself.
2) Psychic experiences
If you have a psychic experience while the material is being given, this is an indication of channelling. If you hear a sound, a voice with an accent, then you could be hearing the words of someone on another realm. An idea which pops into your head intuitively doesn’t have a voice with an accent – it’s coming from within you.
You may have a clairvoyant experience where you actually see the person communicating with you. This could be a definite impression in your mind, or you could actually “see” the person standing there in front of you. It may not necessarily be a person that you see, the great seer Nostradamus, for example, used to see a flame before he made the predictions he wrote in his world-renowned quatrains.
Clairsentience (psychic feeling) is when you pick up the vibe of the communicator – you sense their mood, emotions and what kind of person they are – just as you might sense people’s vibes in everyday life. This is very common among mediums. Positive, dynamic, altruistic people, for example, have a strong presence and an inspiring feel about them.
Other, though much less common, psychic experiences which could happen are: psychic smell – some communicators have a certain smell about them; psychic taste – the vibe of the communicator induces the psychic sensation of taste; and a form of psychic touch, where you can actually feel something psychically almost as though it were physically there.
3) Suspension of conscious thought
When channelling you have to make a conscious effort to suspend your own thought. You don’t exactly block out your own thoughts, but you detach your concentration from them and focus entirely on the material being received. If you start thinking about the content of the message or the phraseology used, you will lose your concentration. This does take effort, but is absolutely essential in word-for-word channelling.
4) Intense concentration
Intense concentration while the material is being received brings a clear awareness of whether you are indeed channelling, or whether it’s your intuition, or imagination. If you concentrate on a thought, voice or image which is the product of your imagination, it will not be sustainable, whereas a genuine message or other kind of psychic experience will tend to grow in intensity the more you concentrate upon it.
Concentration when receiving a channelled message is a very intense, active state, whereas when listening to the intuition, although concentration is necessary, you are in a much more peaceful state, gently aware of a concept evolving in your mind. Concentration is like a flashlight dispelling the shadows of indiscrimination within your mind.
Channelling is, in a way, more hard work than listening to your intuition, because you have to concentrate so hard to stay in line with what you are receiving. Accessing the intuition is more of a gradual, coaxing process. It is a skill which takes a great deal of work to obtain, but once you have it, putting it into practice is, in my experience, less demanding than channelling. Of the two, there is no question that intuition is more valuable: being able to enter a deep contemplative state is a wonderful thing, which, in time, will lead to great inspiration. Intuition is an innate ability in all of us. It is a part of you. It is the voice of the essence of you. Whereas channelling is receiving something from outside of yourself, which most people don’t need to do.
5) Focusing on the words
When most psychics receive a message they get the meaning of what is said, rather than the exact words, which most of the time is fine, but can lead to mistakes. For example, the communicator may say “drive to”, and you get “go to”, which are similar but distinctly different. If you are really concentrating hard, and thereby getting each word individually, you will not know what the message is about until after it’s over: all your mental energy will have been focused on getting the words right, you won’t have had the surplus energy to start thinking about what it means. If you do start thinking about what it means, you will lose concentration and revert to just getting the gist of the material rather than exactly what the communicator is trying to say.
Some communicators have even given me certain words letter by letter, which, though quite difficult, greatly facilitates detachment from meaning, because the letters in themselves have no meaning. So provided you manage to stay with it, just focusing on each letter as it comes, this can be an excellent way of ensuring accuracy, since any isolated mistake is usually easily detectable. It is particularly useful when an alternative word or phrase just isn’t good enough – for example if I needed to get the word “pretty”, and a synonym like “beautiful” wasn’t acceptable, I might well be given it as P-R-E-T-T-Y.
If you manage to keep your concentration – whether it be on words or letters or a combination – you may get a whole story, or complex line of argument, which is entirely unlike anything you’ve ever thought. You may also get foreign words or phrases, which is very difficult indeed. In fact getting verifiable words and names which you have never heard of before is a rare skill because they are not even within your subconscious mind to draw upon. As you will see later, I have channelled poems in this way, some of which rhyme, and when it comes to rhyme, you have to get the word absolutely right – you can’t make do with a similar word as you might be able to with prose.
This is completely different from writing an inspired text of your own. However inspired it is, an inspired text is still your work, and you will still have had to think it all through, whatever your state of consciousness at the time.
6) Writing too fast to think
If the material is coming from yourself – be it your intuition or your imagination – you have to think about it. If you are channelling something word-for-word, you often won’t have time to think about it. Sometimes I find myself writing a message so fast that my hand hurts.
This is entirely different from automatic writing. In the kind of clairaudient channelling I’m talking about, although it’s very fast and intense, you are the person writing. Whereas with automatic writing, the discarnate uses the medium’s hand and controls it. Usually this is achieved by the medium’s entering into a negative trance, thereby putting themselves totally at the mercy of the entity and unable to stop until they have finished. I do not recommend this.
7) Synchronicity
Sometimes the pattern and timing of events is just too extraordinary to be easily dismissed as coincidence. In terms of channelling this is when you get some kind of sign after receiving a message that the material has indeed come from another source.
In 2005, for example, I received a message from a French songwriter who had died tragically at a young age. He’d been very popular in his day and was best known for having written the tune of a classic pop song recorded by an artist who was a household name.
Directly after getting the message I went for lunch with some friends, who I had shared the experience with, to a restaurant I often go to. As I walked in, another song was being played in the restaurant by this same artist – but not the song with the tune by this songwriter. I had never heard this CD being played in the restaurant before. We listened to song after song by this artist throughout lunch – but, very disappointingly, the song in question wasn’t played.
It was so tantalisingly close to being a perfect example of synchronicity that after lunch I decided to phone the restaurant and ask them what CD they had been playing and whether or not it had this song on it. I was told that the entire album in fact had the same name as the song. Synchronicity won the day.
It should be stressed that this kind of thing is helpful to the medium, and perhaps to the medium’s immediate circle or to someone in some way connected to the medium’s work, rather than the world at large. It gives the medium confidence that the communicator really is who they thought it was. But it doesn’t prove anything on its own, and you have to be careful not to read too much into little things which might not be of any significance at all. Sometimes though the synchronicity is just too specific to ignore.
8) Logical analysis
This is a key point, and it simply boils down to: was the message worth getting? Has the communicator said anything worth saying?
With the best channelled material, every time you look at it you will see something you hadn’t noticed before – the more you analyse the text, the more allusions and depth of meaning you will find. It should also make perfect sense, though with some more advanced material it may take you a while to fully understand it all.
9) Intuitive assessment
Intuition is the greatest faculty we have – our internal dial which tells us right from wrong, fact from fiction, good from bad.
If you can channel, your intuition should be good enough to tell you when you are channelling and when you’re not, if not while you are receiving the material, then certainly afterwards. It should also be able to tell you something about the material.
Being a good channeller who has a poor relationship with their intuition is a bit like being a good driver who doesn’t know where he is going: he can drive fast, but not necessarily in the right direction. Receiving messages from the other side is not good in itself, it’s only the quality of the material that makes it good or bad, and a correct understanding of what the material is, where it’s from, and how it should be used. Without a developed intuition the medium is unlikely to know the correct answers to these questions, and could even end up doing more harm than good.
In the early eighties I went through a phase of making the error of neglecting my intuition (and my logical analysis as well in fact), while still continuing to channel. Although my channelling skill didn’t suffer, I ended up making some serious mistakes about the identities of the intelligences I was in touch with, thinking they were much more advanced than they were. Fortunately I had Dr King to put me straight. I felt very awkward about it at the time, but he encouraged me to continue with my psychic development, saying that we all learn from our mistakes, and that the one thing I shouldn’t do was give up.
Having a good intuition is always good – whether you can channel or not. Why? Because intuition – if it really is intuition, as opposed to self-delusion or imagination – is always coming from a good place: from the spiritual part of yourself.
This is by far the most important of these nine points.
