I Only Work in Inner Space, Part II

I jotted down the following one evening in Grants, NM, when I was staying over in order to go out to see a patient in a remote location the next day. I didn’t add the date, so I don’t know even what year it was, but it has been quite a while since I worked at that office. I’d estimate that I wrote it around 2010, while thinking about that matter of trying to explore inner space without becoming a “space case.” It came out more or less as advice to people who are starting out as intuitive healers in a world that may not even believe their work exists. I think it’s still worth sharing, so here it is, with some minor editing:

Be open to being wrong. Be open to being right.

Some new intuitives, realizing how often they turn out to be correct, might take off on a power trip of some kind. Especially when frightening or distressing material comes through, it should not be stated as an absolute fact that cannot be avoided. Don’t pretend to have all the answers to anything. And don’t impose your point of view or your system of beliefs on anyone as if it were the ultimate. Don’t judge or act self-righteous.

More often, though, the problem is that we constantly second-guess ourselves and fail to trust valid information when it comes to us. I try to maintain a healthy skepticism about ideas that come into my own head, the same as I would with ideas from any other source, constantly checking any way I can. However, the temptation to edit every thought can stop the flow and make it impossible to accomplish anything.

When I do intuitive healing with patients, I prefer to work in collaboration with the person on my table. So often, I see something that seems totally off the wall and vanishingly unlikely to me, but I screw up my courage and tell the patient about it, and it turns out to be dead on. This gives the patient an opportunity to add her own insights, and we find a path through the jungle together, tossing out ideas and testing them until we find the issues that are most fundamental and clear them. Sometimes the patient is sleeping or otherwise not amenable to joining in on this process, and in that case I can still get a lot done, but it’s all the more powerful when we work together.

My point is that I’m not in the business of proving I can divine all the answers; my job is to aid patients in their journey toward healing, not to impress them with my skills. Not that I never feel a need to prove that I can do what I do, especially with the pseudoskeptic types, but it’s crucial to let go of all such concerns if we want to get clear information.

I feel fortunate that I don’t have to identify myself as a professional psychic. If that were the case, I’d always be expected to come up with revelations of some kind, preferably earth-shattering ones. Sometimes neither I nor the patient can find profound meanings in their illnesses and injuries, and many times there’s no need to. We can just do some needles, bodywork, or herbs, and everything’s fine.

One of the things I admire about my mentor Mendy Lou Blackburn, who does identify herself as a professional psychic, is that she doesn’t tell her clients what they want to hear, unless that’s what they need to hear. It’s pretty easy to figure out what a person is hoping you’ll tell them, even without any great psychic ability. A person could probably make a lot of money just feeding comforting, flattering words to clients, but anyone who’s honest knows that would lead to no good. There is a middle way of using firmness to express hard truths without dictating to, insulting, or unnecessarily frightening the client.

I’ve been writing as if you are doing readings for other people, or planning to do so, but perhaps you intend only to gather intuitive impressions for your own development. We need to be all the more careful in reading or channeling for ourselves because we may be quite blind to our own beliefs and preconceived notions— they are so close we can’t see them clearly.

Be open to greatness.

Betsy Morgan Coffman told our beginning channeling class that we might find ourselves in contact with some very high-level being, Jesus for example, and that often people get upset and refuse to trust that this is happening. “But think about it,” she said. “Why wouldn’t Jesus want to talk to you?”

But what of the Wayne Bents of the world [Bent was an abusive cult leader who was jailed and was much in the news when I originally wrote this], the people who are sure that not only is God talking to them, He is telling them to gather followers who will treat them as His representatives on earth? Bent reported being told that he was the Messiah in so many words, if I remember correctly. I use him as an example because there is general agreement that he’s delusional. That is, he’s been less successful than some, and done more obvious harm, or at least been caught at it. But what’s the essential difference between Bent and, say, Joan of Arc? Perhaps “by their fruits” is still the best way that you will know them.

Some years ago I was part of a Noetic Sciences group that held meetings with inspirational speakers and uplifting activities. Once a young guy showed up and introduced himself, quite matter-of-factly, as the latest incarnation of some great line of spiritual teachers or world leaders, I don’t remember what exactly. This pronouncement was delivered in the same tone as if he’d told us he lived in Bernalillo or had just started college. Totally normal for him. When I looked toward him, I saw a black space in the room where he should have been. He scared the hell out of me, and I hoped he’d never come back. Nobody else had a bad feeling about him— I asked them later. I never saw him again, and I don’t know what fruits, if any, he or his message produced. Every so often I run into someone with claims along the same lines, and am not sure what to think. My own tales of my experiences with famous deceased humans and higher beings may strike someone in a similar way, so I can’t judge. I just know that that particular young man left me feeling extremely uneasy.

You probably will never receive a message that says you’re the Messiah or the incarnation of some other august figure. But never doubt that you are as deserving of enlightenment as anyone.

If, instead, a message you get tears you down, it’s probably coming from you and not Them. Source/Spirit/Higher Powers/the Divine might be applying tough love at times, not letting you get away with laziness or self-deception, but won’t belittle you or discourage your sincere efforts. They typically seem to think better of us than we do of ourselves; They see the reality of the infinite beings we truly are.

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Betsy’s Channeling Classes: Conclusion

Mandala by C.J. Rogers

For your further edification and amusement, I offer the rest of my experiences with formal channeling classes, from the notes I took at the time.

On 2/24/08, Betsy-Morgan Coffman held a “booster” class  for those who had already been through C2.  There were some amazingly profound, high-level messages, which I think are worth passing on to you, as well as more clarification about the mechanics of channeling.

Betsy started out with some general advice from herself and Orion, which I will pass on to you:

“The higher frequency wins” if there is interference from bothersome entities.  There are always lots of entities around when we do this work, clamoring to come through, but we don’t have to allow them our attention.

“Intuition is ordering in; channeling is ordering out.”  Intuition is getting information from your own higher self.

“No matter what you say the ego’s going to challenge it.”

“Try your best not to take responsibility” for the other person’s life and actions.  “Give them their power back.”

Cleanse daily, asking your highest guides for help.  Cleanse at the end of a session.

“Truth is empowering, freeing, loving, and doesn’t harm anyone.”  There is impersonal truth, like what we might get at a public session, and there is personal truth, specific to the individual.

“The third eye is for psychic hits, the crown for channeled information.”  You can use both and alternate between them.

You can ask for a guide either by his or her name or by nature, that is, you can ask for an angel, or a healing guide, or a guide that can help with a specific issue.
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The format was similar to the previous classes.  For the first exercise, we were told to ask for three guides, as before.  I found a greenish energy on my left; I heard the name “Taltec.”  He said, “You are kind.”  Above my head was a white light, I thought associated with the word “Mycene.”  I did not receive a message from her.  This process again seemed far too rushed for me, and I was barely getting in touch with the third entity when we finished.  I did feel my hands activated and glowing, though, and great energy at my crown chakra.  I would have liked to have more opportunity to feel out these energies or entities and to see if I should have more contact with them.  They did not return later, as far as I could tell.

“Marcus,” a guide associated with a excellent healer I know, Susan Herrington, was fun and lighthearted, and kept telling us to lighten up.  I could feel him clearly, sitting at my left with Susan, and found him particularly enjoyable.  A most pleasant energy.  He spoke, jokingly, of “leace”—love and peace at the same time.

When we next went around the circle, we were supposed to have an entity speak.  The day before, I had told Fryderyk that the class was coming up, and that I hoped he would attend with me, and he did return.  I felt some of the previous energies/beings around me, but Fryderyk had also been there the entire time, coming in strongly in his most usual spot at my right side.  I was a little torn, not knowing which one to listen to.  I wanted very much to hear from him, but then, I might be missing a chance to make the acquaintance of someone who could become important to me.  It became more difficult because I was second to the last in line, and I had to hold my connection to him for quite a while as the others took their turns.  At first, I felt a great deal of activity around my vocal mechanism, buzzing and vibrating, and energy and near-words rising in my throat.  I could hardly keep from bursting out with whatever he wanted to say—ideas were coming already— and I needed to squelch him until it was time.  But by the time it was our turn, the energy had dropped considerably, and I felt that we might have missed his chance to come through.  I had also become increasingly nervous; my heart was pounding fast and I couldn’t calm it down.  I realized that I wasn’t comfortable bringing out this intimate association in such a public place, despite the fact that there were people I knew fairly well and trusted in the room.  I was afraid of letting him speak and also afraid of blocking him.  I was pretty much tied in knots.  Then it was my turn and I had to find a way through all that.

Betsy acknowledged that I was already strongly connected and did not need help from her to get in touch.  I told her that Fryderyk was present.  I took a deep breath and opened my mouth.  Nothing.  Then more nothing.  Finally my voice started up, and while I didn’t feel that the message was solely his at first, the voice sounded solid and confident.  “Performance anxiety is not unusual,” we said, and I was told that others could feel my anxiety.  That veteran of many years of mediumship of all sorts was able to work around my nerves, though, and more words came out of my mouth.  “It is interesting to come to you in this context; it is not the way I am used to working….  She is nervous, she is blocking, but it doesn’t matter, I can still get through to you.  She does not want you to know me as she does.  She is possessive….  I am interested in what you are doing with this work.  I am proud of you.  You are doing well.”  He said something else reminding us that we are greater than we think we are, but I couldn’t remember the exact words long enough to write them down.

No one else knew the significance of his calling me possessive; they could not have known how I had sometimes taken him to task for that very fault, and how I had insisted that it was not a fault of mine.  This could have been heard as an inside joke, but I didn’t detect the slightest edge of humor.  Nor did he seem upset or frustrated.  I was simply being told a truth.  I was so surprised to find that I really didn’t want to share him with the group.  “I asked for that,” I thought, and I took the lesson to heart.

After saying his piece, Fryderyk left the room.  I remembered that during the C1 class he had hung around, but had not seemed to want to speak.  I remembered, too, that when he did speak to me in the evening after the class was over, his message was too personal for a group session.  I almost regretted asking him to come in today, since it seemed I had done little more than to cause both of us an inconvenience.  I was glad I had been able to hear a few words from him, excited and elated, but I felt that perhaps I had been inappropriate somehow.  I wasn’t quite sure what to think.  I wondered if he had done this simply as a favor to me, or if it had served his own purposes in any way.  I thanked him profusely, anyway.

We began to receive some formidable material.  Manuel reported, with a quizzical and perhaps confused look on his face, that he was channeling “the light that surrounds Metatron.”  This sounded quite odd to me, especially since at that time I had never heard of the Archangel Metatron, and the name seemed like something out of a Japanese superhero cartoon.  But the entity added, “We use names for your convenience, not ours.  You can call me Bob if you like.”

Liz admitted that she was extremely uneasy with the whole experience of being in the class, and apologized for bringing up a lot of questions about the basic mechanisms of channeling.  We encouraged her to ask and not to feel bad about her misgivings.  She asked, among other things, how it could be that we are all one energy, but it manifests as different beings.  She wanted to know if we were really just channeling God at all times.  “Bob” explained, “Thought takes energy and forms it.”  He said it is like air being everywhere in the world; it is situated over different countries, but it cannot be separated.  He referred to string theory and how a string vibrating one way is one thing, and vibrating another way, it is something different.  “You are the essence of God having a human experience,” he added.  “You are born with this toolbox and you spend your whole life just trying to open the box.”

I asked him about a friend’s channeling of a set of fictional characters, and whether it matters that they are fictional.  His immediate answer was simply, “No.”  A concept came to me, and I said, “I just got that fiction is a convenient framework for us to create what we need to manifest.”  “Bob” added, “But remember that you are the author, the editor, and the director.”

Orion broke in with, “We personify energy, so that the part of us that is a personality can relate to it.”

Marie (not “my” Marie) said, “There are so many different guides because we are all so different.”

Liz asked about how we create our reality through our thoughts.  Karen replied, “Intense emotion with your thought creates your reality.”  Betsy concurred, and her ideas included, “Taking emotion away from the thought disempowers it.”

Betsy said that she had told Orion years ago, “All I want is more God.”  He had replied, “If you connected right to God, you’d burn up!  I’m as high as you can go without burning up.”  (I’m not so sure about that; humans do often seem to make direct connections to the Divine– don’t they?)

We told Liz that we appreciated her questions, which brought the whole discussion up to a higher level.  She seemed to feel a bit better, but she declined to try any channeling herself, saying that she had realized it was something she just didn’t want to do.

I asked another Susan (there were three, and I had met this one in previous classes) why we all have that fundamental belief that we are not good enough and not deserving, because she had expressed something earlier about our need to get beyond that.  She was unable to give a purpose for it, but talked about how it happens, how when we come to Earth we remember who we really are, but we get brainwashed within a few years and forget.  It came to me that we believe we are inferior because deep down we remember that we used to be something greater.

When it was my turn to answer questions, I was not nervous the way I had been earlier with Fryderyk.  I knew that if I was unable to connect with a guide, I would still most likely be able to bring in answers on my own.  I felt myself connecting very strongly upward, lifting, and there was an entity in the position where I expect to find Michael, but I couldn’t be quite sure it was him, and he did not connect with me in such a way as to speak through me.  I felt more that I was connected directly to Source and speaking as my higher self, and that was what I reported when asked.

The information I gave met with approval; Betsy said in a couple of cases that she saw the same thing, and one of the students I read for said, “Well, you’re the third person to tell me that.”  I felt confident and strong.  My style of speech and my consciousness remained my own, however, and that seemed all right, as I was speaking meaningfully and effectively.

Susan H. was last, after me.  I asked Marcus why sometimes we can’t channel, thinking particularly of another friend who’d been having this problem lately.  He said, “From our point of view, it’s like you go away.  Since you are being human, sometimes you need to go and do human things.  You can’t always be in channeling energy.  But we are always glad when you come back.”

Marcus was then asked why we come here to be human.  Part of his answer was to say that it’s like going to an amusement park— we want to ride the Ferris wheel, the roller coaster, all the different rides, and have all the different experiences.  Karen asked if Source learns through us with those experiences.  Marcus, and it seemed Susan along with him, replied that Source already knows.  So why do we need to have those experiences at all?  “If I wanted to climb a mountain, I’d know it would be cold, but I’d still want to go.  If I was going to watch a sad movie, I’d know it would make me cry, but I’d still want to watch it.”

There was so much more, far more than I was able to write down.  We rocked!

 

On March 18, 2009, I participated in another of Betsy’s booster classes.  This one was conducted as a conference call; it was an experiment to find out if holding a class over the phone would be workable.  For me, it worked quite well.  It seemed to me that I could perceive more without the distraction of seeing and hearing the other students in the same room with me.  Some very experienced channelers, Hania Stromberg and Jennifer Vaitkus, were on the call.

While setting up and calling upon help and protection, Betsy mentioned an entity I hadn’t heard of before, “Lady Maitreya.”  “Who the heck is that?” I thought.*  Then Betsy did her usual thing of asking us to contact three guides, to our left, to our right, and above us in the center.  Very little time was allotted to each one, and as in the past, I felt rushed, but it seemed like I made three definite contacts.

The one on the left looked like a cartoon of an angelic figure in white, with yellow hair, a white halo, and a suggestion of wings, either small wings or perhaps some sort of ornamental shoulder pads or flanges sticking up from her dress.  I wasn’t sure.  I was a little annoyed with myself for coming up with such a hackneyed picture of an angel, but I felt like there was some actual communication coming from this being.  When I asked for a name, I heard “Maitreya.”  That again!  What did it mean?  This didn’t look anything like the Future Buddha, certainly.

The guide on the right flew into my field of vision and hovered in front of me.  At first I thought it was a great russet-red bird, but it quickly crystallized into an image of a pterosaur with a long, skinny neck and a pouch below its beak rather like a pelican’s.  Once the image formed, it just sat there.  There was no communication of any kind, or rather I had no time to ask for any, because Betsy had already gone on to the last guide.  I still have no clue what a red pterosaur was doing in my head.

As at previous classes, the third guide was the hardest to get a fix on, and I was barely getting started when I ran out of time.  We had been told that the third guide was likely to be the highest, and this seemed to be the case.  I thought he felt much like my previous experiences of Jesus.  Lots of white light and a vague sense of a human male shape, nothing more just then.

We were all asked to give greetings and brief messages from our guides.  As we went around the circle, I did my best to focus in on them and get a sense of what they might want to say.  It was the first guide, the angel woman, who wanted to speak, so I concentrated on her.  “Maitreya” didn’t sound quite right.  I thought that she was related to Maitreya or an aspect of him/her, in a way I couldn’t pin down.  I finally settled on “a representative of Maitreya.”  I still didn’t think that was exactly right.

At any rate, when my turn came, I felt ready.  I introduced the being as a representative of Maitreya and an image of purified womanhood, whatever all that meant, and proceeded to speak.  My experience was that ideas were put into my head, but words were not put in my mouth; I had to come up with the verbalization myself.  The lady said that she had come to speak of purity.  We all often feel unworthy, she said, but she wanted us to know that we are everything that we need to be, that we are pure light and so forth, and should not let anyone tell us otherwise.  The speech was clearly a response to my having recently been accused of being taken over by a harmful spiritual source and was sucking energy from everyone around me [as I mentioned in previous posts].  Whether this message was coming from a source entirely outside me or simply from my own mind, I found it heartening.

As the various students and their guides spoke, at times I strongly perceived the colors or energetic “flavors” of different entities.  One who was particularly vivid was introduced as Edgar, and later identified as Edgar Cayce.  I saw black, in a wide and far-reaching vista that stretched ahead of me, a line of deep black running across the horizon.  I don’t mean black in any negative sense; this was simply the tone that presented itself to my brain.  Edgar seemed most congenial.  Another strong entity was called Mary; when asked, she could not say that she was any one specific Mary, but told us simply that she was “Mary who loves.”  I saw her as tones of royal blue and indigo.  Yet another entity claimed to be Kuan Yin.  I didn’t perceive much of anything with that one.

Jesus spoke through Hania, as usual.  There was no message of great import, but his presence was palpable, and felt as wonderful and soothing as ever.

In some cases, either I was simply unable to perceive anything, or nothing much was happening for that student.  Sometimes I fancy that I can tell whether or not “real” channeling is going on, but that may be hubris on my part.  One way or another, some of the students appeared to struggle mightily, and the messages were unimpressive.  It’s not easy, even with practice and help from the teacher, to do these things on command and with so little time to prepare.  With some others, I could strongly feel and/or quasi-see the entities.  The skeptics and pseudoskeptics among you might like to say that I was seeing thought-forms generated by the students themselves.  That’s a possibility.

Finally, we took time for a few questions.  One student asked about some depigmented, flaky patches on her arms, which someone had told her related to a past life.  The student who was asked the question came up blank, but I was bursting with answers, and I asked if it would be all right to say something.  Betsy told us that she had been about to open the question to the group anyway, and to go ahead and speak.  It looked to me like the woman had been burned in that past life and that the flaking represented trying to get rid of the damage, trying to get rid of something she didn’t need or want anymore.

Another student had been said to have the “Flower of Life” in her aura or something like that.  I didn’t understand this reference, but it appeared to be a familiar concept to Betsy and her circle.  This woman asked plaintively why she couldn’t manifest this and why she didn’t feel connected with it.  No answers were forthcoming, and so I jumped in again, telling her that I could feel her fear—which I really could, so very strongly— and asking her to let go of that and be all that she really is.

My memory isn’t totally clear on any of this, which so often happens with working in an altered state.  At the time, I spoke with conviction, but then I spent the rest of the evening and the next day second-guessing myself and wondering if I had gotten any of what I told the other students right.  “Right.”  Does that mean anything at this point?

 

*Since writing this, I’ve looked through Betsy’s first book, I’m Beside Myself, again, and found Maitreya described as an “angel, archangel, and star being” who has been an important guide for her over many years.  I’ll ask Betsy for clarification.

My Second Channeling Class

I thought I’d already posted what I’d written about the second channeling class I took from Betsy-Morgan Coffman, but no, I’d let it slip by.  Sorry.  Here it is, just as I wrote it soon after the class in 2007.  Among other things, this account contains a great example of a spirit contact that seemed questionable and better not to continue.  For context, see my post “A Beginning Channeling Class.”  https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/a-beginning-channeling-class/

On September 29, 2007, I jumped back into the fray and took Betsy Coffman’s second channeling class, now affectionately referred to as “C2.”  For the most part, I still wasn’t really channeling when I worked on my own, and I didn’t feel very ready to go on to the C2 class.  I decided to try it and go with whatever happened.

We began by telling what we had gotten out of the first class and what we hoped to obtain from this one.  While some of the students were going like gangbusters and even doing formal readings for people, others expressed misgivings similar to mine.  They said that they still couldn’t clearly see or hear anything, and that while they were very much aware of entities being in contact with them, they often couldn’t be sure who those beings were.  I heard these things before it was my turn to speak, and so I already felt better by the time I was asked to describe my own situation.

I told the group that after the C1 class I had essentially gotten more of what I already had, especially increased empathic ability.  I said that had found myself working more as a psychic and medical intuitive than a channeler, meaning that I was receiving useful information and relaying it to patients, but I wasn’t getting that information from entities other than myself.  I had been in touch with various beings, but I generally couldn’t get verbal messages, and I often couldn’t tell one being from another.  I was hoping to develop more as a medium, I said, with clearer and more definite communication.

“I think you’ll be getting that, and a lot more,” Betsy replied.  She looked at me and announced that there was someone trying to contact me right then.  He was a doctor, she said, then added that he was in fact a surgeon.  I had just started feeling something going on at the back of my neck, a little toward the right, with a sense of a small area of a golden tan color, and I told Betsy that I was indeed aware of someone being there.

Betsy called upon her guide Orion, Jesus Christ, and Archangel Michael, as she always does.  The energy in the room got thicker, and I felt activity around my head, as at the first class.  The first exercise we did was also similar to what happened in the CI class: we were supposed to ask for three guides to show themselves to us and give us their names and a message.

I had just expressed a desire for more better mediumship with more verbal communication, but my experience of this exercise could hardly have been more opposite to my request.  The guides which revealed themselves weren’t even persons in any sense.  The first impression I received was of an evergreen tree, not a realistic image but more like a green paper cutout.  There was a deep green all over my inner field of vision.  I asked for a message, and it seemed to be, “Keep growing.”

Next, I saw an image of a stairwell on the outside of a stone building.  My view zoomed in on the stone, and I felt surrounded by a sandstone-like color and texture.  The stone seemed to permeate my body, and I felt strengthened.  “Solidity,” I thought.

I was expecting water to show up next, but instead I vaguely saw a yellow light, and thought it was the sun.  Rather than more light, I was surrounded by warmth, with no strong visual images.  The principle expressing itself seemed to be heat, not light.  I was perfectly happy with that, because I had been freezing the whole time in Betsy’s living room despite being wrapped in one of the blankets she had thoughtfully provided.  I stayed warmer for an hour or so after that.

Again, as at the C1 class, I felt awfully rushed during this exercise.  I was just barely bringing things into focus with each entity when Betsy moved on to the next, and when she had us finish up, I was still trying to figure out what was going on with the Heat being.  Yet, when we went around the circle and described our experiences, it turned out that some other students had received massive quantities of material in that short time.  I was the only one who complained of feeling rushed.

I couldn’t begin to understand why I might be hearing from elements of nature.  They didn’t seem to be nature spirits like, for example, the personified spirits of plants that appear in Carlos Castaneda’s work.  The only purpose I could imagine was that they were intended to shore up my physical structure.  If there was any purpose at all.  Did Orion send them to me?  Did I bring them in on my own?

We had another go-round before lunch, in which we were supposed to ask for our “highest, best, and easiest advanced channeling guide” and give a message.  As the other students did their work, I found myself a bit overwhelmed, receiving four different “stations.”  One was Orion, who I perceive as mostly white light with hints of iridescent, coruscating colors.  This was coming in near the top of my head, toward the front, and from the direction of the chair Betsy was sitting in.  Slightly lower and to the right, another energy was streaming into my head.  I thought this one was Michael, not because he was telling me so, but because the tone felt like what I had perceived earlier when Betsy called Michael to be with us.  A little lower on the side of my head was something that I was pretty sure was Fryderyk.  And still at the back of my neck was that patch of tan-colored light that I thought must be the doctor that Betsy had mentioned.

The tan color deepened to brown and spread around me.  To my astonishment, the area of color developed, like a photo, into a vision of a man with chocolate-brown skin.  He superimposed himself over the left side of my face and upper chest and my left arm, and I perceived him as if from the inside and the outside at the same time.  I could actually see him, with technicolor clarity, something that had never, ever happened to me before.  He looked to be in his mid-thirties, with very round cheeks and prominent eyes, a little like Louis Armstrong.  I heard the name “Bertram.”

Bertram, or whoever he was, was doing his darndest to get through to me.  He was practically jumping up and down and shouting, and he was putting a great deal of pressure on me.  I didn’t like it one bit, and I held on to Orion for dear life, asking over and over, “Is this OK?  Is this going to be a problem?  Should I be working with this guy?”  I couldn’t get a clear answer.  I didn’t have the sense that Bertram was evil or malicious, but he was coming on awfully strong, and considering my previous negative experiences, I wanted to be cautious.  I didn’t want to overreact or freak out, though, and I held a center of calm as best I could.

In the background I could hear Bertram telling me that he had not been able to complete his work on Earth and that he wanted so much to come out into the world and do more.  That probably wasn’t the best thing to say to me; it only increased my resistance and caused me to react like, “Not on my time, buddy!”  He seemed sincere and enthusiastic, though, and I wondered if my misgivings might be unfair to him.  He was positively bursting with a desire to speak.  I still kept my hold on Orion and on myself, refusing to let Bertram get the better of me, feeling like I was holding down the lid on a box of squirming animals that were all trying to escape.  I had to wait for my turn to channel before I could let anyone speak anyway.

I was curious to see what Betsy and Orion would have to say about the party going on around me, whether they would notice the multiple entities.  When my turn came, Betsy gazed at me and said, “There are three cords of light coming into you.”  That was true, assuming that Orion didn’t count himself.  I introduced the three other entities as apparently-Michael, a deceased friend of mine, and the doctor Betsy had seen earlier.  I described Bertram’s appearance and manner and gave his name, but said that although he wanted to speak directly, I was not going to let him do it, because I did not feel entirely comfortable with him.  I told Betsy that I was asking Orion for support.  I gave Bertram’s message about not being finished with his work and hoping to do more, but in my own words and without leaving my own persona.

I wasn’t really given any specific personal guidance about dealing with this, and neither Betsy nor Orion expressed an opinion about whether Bertram was on the up-and-up.  There was a discussion, though, about how it often happens that whole crowds of entities surround the channel, all clamoring to speak at once.  The advice was to ask Orion or another guide to act as a gatekeeper and let only one in at a time.

(This reminded me of something that Rosemary Brown had described in one of her books.  She mentioned that both Liszt and Chopin seemed to perform this gatekeeping function for her, organizing the work of the other composers so that she wouldn’t be overwhelmed.  At one point, she heard Chopin snap at someone in Polish, and she wrote down what she heard phonetically so she could ask someone what it meant.  It turned out to be, “You go away!”  I wonder who the intruder was.  Mrs. Brown also noted other instances in which Chopin acted protectively toward her, and this doesn’t surprise me in the least.)

So I was given exactly what I asked for, clear verbal and visual communication and a definite experience of mediumship, and I rejected it.  Figures.  But I felt that I was doing what I needed to do to keep myself safe.

Fryderyk either declined to push himself through all the noise, or he was overwhelmed by the other voices; at any rate, he faded out.  I did feel connected to him to some degree for most of the day, though.

At long last, much later than planned, we had lunch, which seemed to go awfully fast, since we all had plenty to talk about.  After lunch, there was one more exercise, for which two hours were allotted.  This, too, was just like the format of the first class; we were to ask each other questions and produce channeled answers.  I wasn’t worried about this part, because I knew that I was likely to come up with some sort of useful and interesting answers whether they were channeled or not.

While the other students were doing their stuff, I tuned into, or was made to tune into, the entity that appeared to be Michael, and I received clear words, so when I had the chance I wanted to tell everyone what he had said.  “I had Michael on the line a minute ago,” I announced.  “This is what he said: ‘Your questions are so small.  Enlarge yourselves!  Remember what you truly are!  You are not small creatures who live in buildings and worry about money.’”  I thought Michael’s comments were a little unfair, especially since after all we were only asking the questions for practice purposes, and I said so.  (One of the students had asked a question about a business she was planning and had received information about the building she would be using and the income her business would generate.)  “He sounds kind of combative today,” I added.  It occurs to me that whenever I have been able to bring through any clear voices, they have sounded forceful, maybe annoyed, maybe almost belligerent.  I expect that this says more about me than about them.  Michael’s pronouncements were not so different from those of Marie in the C1 class, although the “feel” of the two entities was totally different and one could not be confused with the other.

But then I had to be on the spot.  I did the dropping-into-the-heart thing and asked Michael to be present for us.  I could feel him strongly.  “We’re ready,” I said.

The first question came from a woman who was the head of a business.  She had an unusual appearance, which she had alluded to by saying that she looked and felt like a “hybrid” and didn’t fit in with her family, and I had been trying to figure out her exact ethnic background.  She said that she had been told she was to do something important in her home country, and she wondered whether she would be going there to live, staying in the US, or going back and forth.  She thought that perhaps she was meant to go into politics.  This brought forth a cornucopia of images, which, again, I felt like I was getting on my own, not being shown by any entity but her.  It looked like she was going to be a bridge between the two countries in some way.  I wasn’t sure exactly what sort of work she was going to do, but I felt that she was a kind of cultural ambassador or head of a social organization rather than a politician.  I could see her surrounded by crowds of people, who were delighted that she was there.  The people were holding banners with writing on them, which I couldn’t read, not because of a language problem but because the picture was too vague.  There were flowers all around, as if the event was some kind of celebration.  I also could feel distinctly that in this vision, her family was overjoyed to see her.  As things were in our mundane present, they missed her terribly; I felt this as a cord pulling on her, which she was resisting.  By my standards, this was a spectacular amount of vivid material.  I was pretty clear about it all, but I expressed myself diffidently and as if everything was a question, like, “Um, it’s in Asia?”

According to her feedback, I did pretty well.  She was from the Philippines, and hadn’t been there in 20 years.  She said that her family was always begging her to come and visit, but that she hadn’t wanted to do it.  It was a big family and she didn’t know a lot of the members.

The next questioner was a woman in her twenties who was wondering about her health.  She had recently developed a chronic fatigue type of situation, and wanted to know whether it was only because of the energetic changes related to channeling work and psychic development, or whether something was physically wrong.  This ought to have been right up my alley, but I didn’t get all that much information.  I did think that there was something physical going on that should be checked out, but I didn’t think it was serious.  I could see her reproductive system glowing with light, bringing itself to my attention, so I concentrated on that.  It occurred to me to ask, “Have you been pregnant?”  She hadn’t.  “Do you want to be pregnant?”  Heavens, no!  I kept scanning and found an energetic hole in her middle, around the solar plexus, so I asked about digestion and assimilation.  Other people jumped in with comments, and we all seemed to be seeing something similar.  Michael wasn’t telling me anything helpful about the problem, but he was pouring a great deal of energy into that deficient area.  I could see and feel it swooping across the room toward the young woman, and it looked like the hole was filling in and she was being strengthened considerably.  I wasn’t putting forth any effort myself.  I just described what I saw.

I was less impressed with myself after this second reading, but there was still some positive feedback.  The young woman had been having considerable difficulties with hormonal issues, and so far no form of medicine had helped.  And while she wasn’t thinking of getting pregnant anytime soon, Betsy had already seen a baby in her future.

I don’t want you to think I was intentionally shutting off impressions from Michael or anyone else and trying to go it alone.  I was staying open, or at least I thought I was.  Every time I made a statement, I checked with my “uplink” for clarification.  It’s very possible that I was receiving more input than I realized.

Betsy asked if Michael had a message for me.  “She worries too much,” I heard myself say, in an offhand, curt tone.  “Relax.  I’ll take care of it.”

I hate to ask personal questions in this kind of context.  I suppose I feel that I should be going after the answers myself.  But since I had to ask something when it was time, I came up with a health question.  (I’ve always got those.)  I said that although I had been getting stronger and stronger with the energetic inputs I’d been getting from Michael and other sources, in the past few weeks I had been sick a lot and still didn’t feel like I was quite right.  I asked whether I might have picked up something from a patient or been energetically damaged somehow in the course of my work.  The person doing the reading had trouble getting anything, and other people tried to help.  Everyone, including a Reconnective Healing practitioner who was in the class, felt that something was actually wrong, but nobody could put their finger on it.  Betsy told me that I could ask again later, but I was feeling so completely filled with good Qi by the entities around me that it didn’t seem like an urgent question anymore.

I needed two questions, and I had another that was bothering me a bit.  I told the channeler of the moment that there was someone who had been a close friend of mine, that we had become estranged, and that I was thinking of contacting her.  I wanted to know whether that would be a good thing or whether it would only cause my friend unnecessary pain and distress.  I was told that making contact would be fine and that “love would blossom” between us again.  I guess if I try it we’ll see.

The woman who did this reading for me hadn’t formally practiced her channeling skills for a year, but she described being in daily contact with a number of angels and saints, Michael in particular.  She had a particular difficulty, more than most of us, with having to sort through myriad entities and pull in a clear “radio station.”  She worked very slowly, taking an agonizingly long time to listen before making any statement.  I wasn’t really bothered by the wait, especially since I felt that I needed a lot of time for this work myself, but Betsy tried to find ways to help her be more efficient.  She reminded us that we are “on a three-way phone call,” and that we can request that the person ask the question some other way, find a clearer question, or add details, in addition to checking back with the guide spirit.  Restating the questions differently seemed to help some in this case, but this student never did get much of a flow going.  She felt frustrated, but she was undaunted, and she resolved to practice more.

Another student got stuck in visions of beautiful colors, which seemed significant but never yielded any answers.  Betsy stepped in and helped her get out of the psychedelic loop and move forward, and then she was able to come up with relevant and helpful impressions.

We put a lot of time and attention into this exercise, and every student’s session was interesting and enlightening.  Every one was unique, too.  A number of us were (apparently) dealing with the same entities, with Michael being popular as usual.  I noticed that the tone of “my” Michael was different from the Michael brought through by other people, and that their versions were different from each other.  I wonder, of course, whether we are all really in contact with the same entity, and whether we are accurately hearing from whoever that may be.  Perhaps it’s not strange at all that our own personalities color the interactions and the messages.  I do know that when I’ve spoken with other fans of Michael, they have described someone very much like the being I perceive.

There is always, always the question of whether we are getting anything real and true when we look for information this way.  Betsy made a comment that I took to  heart: “When it’s fear-based, it’s you.”  This must be meaningful in the context of the confused interactions I’ve sometimes had with Fryderyk, when I’ve thought I’ve heard something negative from him at the same time as I was feeling love and warmth.

I had been worried about falling asleep during the class, as I had during the second day of C1.  I’d gotten up extra early to attend the beginning of our Oriental Medicine Association annual meeting, then rushed over to Betsy’s, and I’m usually wiped on Saturdays anyway.  I got through the day just fine, though, and in fact I felt more and more energized as the class went on.  Queen Marie never showed up, but I saw myself in my queen-archetype guise, not as a beginning student, but as royalty from another country, as a master in my own right.  This has happened before, and I don’t understand it yet, but I like it.  I confess that, despite my fairly low level of skill, I am beginning to see myself as a power, an entity much like Michael and the other angels, saints, and avatars.  Maybe that’s just hubris, or maybe that’s the whole point.  That’s exactly what we are.

During the C1 class and in the days soon after, most of the entities I contacted insisted that I didn’t need them and that they wouldn’t be speaking through me on other occasions.  I remember being especially disappointed at hearing that from Kuan Yin, and sincerely protesting that I did too need her, unable to understand why I was being abandoned.  I think I understand now.  Channeling is not my primary function, and is not going to be.  I can receive information on my own more easily than I can through another being.  That doesn’t mean I can’t have friends in high places, though, and I still intend to pursue better communication with them.

Betsy mentioned that the rose I had brought her at the C1 class stayed in bloom and fresh for two weeks.

I slept through a lot of Saturday evening, after the class, and I’ve needed more sleep than usual since.  Nothing too strange about that.  I wanted to be alone on Sunday and kept away from any disembodied guests.

At one point I dreamed that I was taking a piano lesson with a new teacher that I was apprehensive about, and I concluded that he was OK and I should go ahead and work with him.  The teacher was a white guy with light brown hair (who does that sound like?), but I took the dream as being about Bertram.  I decided to give him a chance.  I called up Orion and asked him to put us in touch.  I did get a contact with the new guy, and I very frankly described my attitude about associating with him.  I told him that I had some seriously difficult patients who were not making good progress in their healing, and that I could certainly use his help, but that I needed to stay in charge of my body and I didn’t want to be pushed around.

My first opportunity to let Bertram get in touch with a patient was on 10/1/07.  I had no idea how to go about this, or what he might have in mind, even though I had done a good deal of healing work in the past with Fryderyk and other invisible helpers.  I held my hands over the patients’ bodies and told him he could come through and do whatever he thought best.  He was definitely there, but the contact was much fainter than at the class, and not a lot seemed to happen.  Maybe it was a decent first try.  If it’s true that he is a surgeon, I may not be at all the right partner for him.  As usual, I await further developments.

Not long after that, I concluded that I should not try to work with Bertram, although he didn’t do anything noticeably inappropriate.  I still didn’t feel comfortable, and it did not seem like a fruitful avenue to pursue.  I simply told him good-bye, and that was the end of that.

A Beginning Channeling Class

In February 2007, I took Betsy Coffman’s beginning channeling class, or “C1.”  This was 10 months before I started working with Mendy Lou Blackburn regularly.  While I had done a little bit of channeling at the piano with my composer friend years before, I had never done any verbal channeling, and most of this method was completely new to me.  I’m posting it in hopes that it will be of use to some people I know who have recently started into this kind of endeavor.  For a bit of background about Betsy and her work, you can check the interview with her I posted on this blog some months ago.  It would also be useful to read my post “Orion’s Net,” which concerned an experience I had with the main entity Betsy channels.

Here’s what I wrote about the C1 class at the time it happened:

2/17-18/07

It was a little difficult for me to come to terms with what I read about Betsy’s source, Orion, on her website.  Orion was supposed to be an entity from a “universe beyond and behind the Pleiades.”  Give me a break!  I don’t react well to gobbledygook like that.  However, I had a good feeling about Orion from meeting him in one of Betsy’s Monday night public sessions.  And I had a good feeling generally about taking the class.  I decided to jump in.

The main point of the class was for Orion and his associates to make adjustments in our systems that would increase our telecommunications capabilities, so to speak.  This was immediately palpable.  Almost the moment we sat down, the entities began working on us.  We were told that they would work mainly on our crown and throat chakras, and we did feel a lot going on around our heads.  Betsy told us that headaches were a common reaction, and that she still gets a headache before giving a class or a presentation.  The headache, she said, was a reaction to the pressure of the energy building up, and the best way to deal with it was to start talking or writing, to let the message out.  She described other possible bodily reactions that would let us know the work was being done.  We sure didn’t have any trouble believing that something was going on; all of us had very strong, even overwhelming sensations of powerful energies in the room.  I felt lightheaded, spinny, and oddly nonverbal, almost unable to speak.

As is typical with classes of all kinds, at the beginning we were asked to introduce ourselves and tell why we had come to this particular experience.  I had a whole speech prepared about my reasons for being there, but I felt quite unable to give it, so I explained that I wasn’t able to say much of anything and that I was going to leave my introduction for another time.

Betsy gave us the story of how she came to be there, as well.  I was amused to find that she wasn’t too crazy about the Pleiades business, either.  She said that for the entire first year that she channeled, most of the messages had to do with her former life somewhere in the Pleiades.  Her reaction was rather like mine—“Again with the Pleiades!”  And she felt that the information wasn’t of any practical value.  Finally she told the entities, “You know, I’m really not interested in this.  Couldn’t you tell me something more useful?”  At that point, apparently, she began to receive information that she could apply to her own present life and the lives of her clients.

Betsy talked a lot about what channeling felt like and how we could be sure we were really doing it.  She said it was normal to feel that we must be making it all up, since it was easy and natural, not a struggle at all.  She recommended starting with prayer, and then beginning to say something, just about anything, to give the entities a “runway” to take off from.

Our first tries

I was a little surprised to find that we would be individually put on the spot.  We went around the room, with each student in turn making an attempt to channel.  All of us managed to do some form of channeling, or at least to have some sort of communication with some sort of energy, on the first try.  Betsy said that we were an exceptional class.  “Oh, you say that to all your classes,” someone teased, but Betsy insisted that we had accomplished something unusual.

My experience on that go-round was extremely puzzling, and I still don’t understand it.  When it was my turn, I felt a definite contact with an energy that was not familiar to me, but did not seem problematic in any way.  I could feel it near the top of my head.  I asked how I could make a stronger connection, and the energy suddenly flowed down through my body into my pelvis, where it seemed to pool and settle in.  I was having a lot of trouble with joints in that area, and I thought the entity might be wanting to help with that.  I felt my hands starting to move, and I reported that I was getting physical movements, not words.

Because I hadn’t introduced myself and described my background, Betsy didn’t know that this was a common experience for me.  She was not pleased, and said I wasn’t ready for that and should not let this being take over my body.  She coached me through tossing it out, and had us all say, “Begone!” and “Go to the light!”  I was a bit shocked, because I hadn’t perceived anything negative.  The entity felt comfortable to me.

When the thing was gone and Betsy felt we were all well protected and on an even keel again, she explained that the being had been an aspect of me, someone I had been in a past life.  She saw it as an imperious, ruthless queen, someone who had done great harm.  I hadn’t perceived any personality whatsoever, and frankly, I felt a little doubtful about her perceptions.  However, some of the students saw something along these lines as well.

This encounter made me feel more vulnerable and wimpy than ever.  However, Betsy’s take on what had happened was quite the opposite.  She said that I was having problems like this specifically because I was such a powerful channel.  This was certainly not something I would have expected to hear.  She went on to explain that because I was powerful, I was being noticed; I stood out energetically and attracted attention, including unwanted attention.

I told her that I had been attacked by an extremely negative entity in the past, and had had some other experiences that made me very nervous about contacting new and unknown beings.  I wanted to be open enough to get the job done, I said, but I didn’t want to be open to just anything.  How could I protect myself?  Betsy, who tends to speak rather biblically, told me to “put on the armament of the Kingdom of Heaven.”  “The breastplate and everything,” she added.  I didn’t have a clue what the armament of the Kingdom of Heaven ought to look like, but this sounded like a great idea.  I quickly built myself a medieval suit of armor, covering everything down to my toes and fingertips.  I felt wonderfully safe in there, but could still perceive everything I needed to perceive—the armor didn’t block anything I didn’t want to block.  At the same time, Betsy called on the Archangel Michael to guard us, and I had an image of Michael in his own armor, holding his sword up straight in front of his body, standing between us and anything that might wish to cause harm.   These images were a great comfort. (While Michael is apparently an extremely popular entity with whom people report contacts quite often, I didn’t perceive him as actually being with us; I just had a mental picture of him.  He might well have been there, though, without my being aware of him.)

Later, I had occasion to tell a little bit about the demon attack I had survived in 1999.  [See my post “A Case of Possession.]  Betsy said that my brushes with the dark side made me more powerful than I would have been otherwise, because I could recognize and deal with those forces.  She said I was about 80 percent light and 20 percent dark.  I’m not quite sure what to make of that.

In the early afternoon, we were given an exercise in which we were supposed to visualize three entities, one to our left, one in the center, and one on our right.  We were to ask each one for its name, its relationship to us, a message, and a gift.  While this exercise was a little bit mechanical, it seemed helpful and confidence-building to have a definite framework to start with.

I had often complained that channeled entities have such pretentious names, like Orion or Emmanuel or Ramtha.  Well, the first entity I contacted, the one on my left, said that his name was Larry!  Spirit’s really playing with me, I thought.  Larry started off with a big, warm hug.  When I asked what he was to me, I heard the word “father,” but he bore no resemblance to my father at all, in any form, and I don’t know what that was about.  His message was, “Don’t sell yourself short.”  For a gift, he showed me an old-fashioned telephone, the kind we used to rent from Ma Bell.  It was that standard beige, an early touch-tone model, and it sat on a small table with a white tablecloth, appearing to be lit by a spotlight, floating in front of me.  What a perfect gift—as if to say, “Call anytime.”  As I was taking leave of Larry, I embraced him again, and could see/feel a scruffy, stubbly sort of salt-and-pepper beard.  Larry seemed to be the kind of guy who could be found sitting around in his undershirt, drinking a beer, watching the game.  If Orion is from the Pleiades, Larry must be from Cleveland.  I wanted unpretentious, and I got it.

The next entity, in the center, was a complete contrast, and in her case I had that feeling Betsy had warned us about, the feeling of “I must be making this up.”  It was Kuan Yin that appeared to me, and having sincerely wished to contact her in the last few days, I was delighted to see her.  She held a long mala of large, deep green beads, and that was what she gave to me.  I decided that they must be jade, though truly they were too dark of a green.  I just thought jade would be properly symbolic.  Kuan Yin’s message seemed at cross purposes with Larry’s; she said, “Be humble and listen.”  She gave her name as Kuan Yin of the Spring, which conveniently happens to be the form of the goddess depicted by the porcelain statue in my office.  That part felt the most possibly made up.

The third entity caused me a lot of confusion.  Because I was looking to the right, and Fryderyk had been hanging around his usual spot there, I thought at first that the being was Fryderyk himself.  It only took half a minute or so to be sure that it wasn’t, but by that time Betsy and Orion were well ahead of me in the exercise, and I couldn’t catch up.  I never really managed to pin down just what I was in contact with.  It seemed far more abstract and nonhuman than the previous two beings.  I felt a strong sense of expansion in my head and body.  “I Am That Which Expands,” was the thought that appeared.  As I struggled to pick up something clearer, I saw an image of an intense sunset, as if it were a sunset in the dark somehow, with a deep orange slash of cloud just above the horizon, against a background of nearly all charcoal grey.  At that point, Betsy took us on to a discussion of what had just happened to each of us, which was too soon for me.  For a while I kept trying to let the experience run to its completion, but I was inevitably pulled back into the class, and I never reached any definite conclusions about this entity.

Since Fryderyk was around much of the day, I wondered if Betsy would notice him.  At one point, when he was only in a tenuous and delicate contact with me, I said to her, “Look over here. What do you see?”  Betsy gazed at the space near my shoulder, where I was perceiving a little spot of gold light, and exclaimed, “Oh! It’s like a leprechaun!”  Then, more seriously, she said, “It’s someone who loves you.”  Leprechaun, that’s a new one.  He was compared to angels, woodland sprites, and similar ethereal beings during his life, but never leprechauns!  (I might have compared the image more to Tinkerbell, as in the movie, myself.)

Marie

We had another try late in the afternoon.  As we went around the circle, I felt my contact with Orion, the three beings I described above, and everyone else I had encountered in the room slipping inexorably away.  I couldn’t seem to do anything about it.  When Orion got to the person next to me, I felt that there was absolutely no hope of any channeling or anything else of use coming through me.  I felt completely disconnected from the phone lines.  But Orion started to tell me that there was someone trying to come through.  I think he said specifically that it was some part of me, but I couldn’t hear or process very well at the time, so I’m not sure.

Until the last moment I thought nothing would happen.  Imagine my surprise when I opened my mouth and meaningful words came out!  The words made sense and they were delivered with force and conviction.  It was my inner Queen, but no energy was coming into me from the outside, and I had no sense of being invaded.  I knew that she was nothing more nor less than an aspect of myself, and I was not afraid.  Rather, I felt filled to the brim with strength and power.

“I know,” she began. “I am the one who knows.”

Betsy asked, “Should we address you as the knower?”

“No.”

“Would you give us a name?”

Nothing bubbled up in my head, but without warning I found myself saying, “Marie.”  I heard the French pronunciation, or at least I think I did, but as I was having enough trouble speaking English, that was not what actually came out of my mouth.

“Will you be speaking through Elene again?”

“No.”  This sounded definite.  Hmm, why not?

“Just this once?”

A nod.

“Do you have a word to give us?”

“Confidence.”  This came out with utter ease, and I was astonished to find the speech continuing.  “Do not be swayed.  Have confidence.  When others speak, listen to yourself.  Be sure.  Do not be swayed.  You know.  You know.”

Betsy asked if there was anything more.

I smiled.  “Elene is quite surprised.  But I’m not.”  There I felt more like I was editing.

Then Marie indicated that her presentation was over.  However, as the next student began, I could still hear and see more words on the same theme.  I felt like I could have continued to speak for a good half hour.  I also noticed that I could have written the words down just as easily as speaking them (and I wish I had).  That made me feel better still—that I could potentially do this work without the assistance of another person to take notes, and without having to remember everything later.  And most of all I was greatly relieved to find myself truly, inarguably channeling something, absolutely not making it up.

I thought that Marie must have been the queen personality that Betsy had described earlier.  However, although Marie appeared to be a person who expected to be heard and obeyed, I didn’t see her as “ruthless.”  She seemed to be interested in helping the members of the group to find their own power, not to take power for herself.  I still don’t feel that she was the being that had slipped into my body that morning.  Betsy could have been right, though.  One way or another, I experienced the heady feeling of knowing myself to be a multidimensional, complex, damned impressive being, capable of tremendous strength and clarity.  (Just like everybody else….)

The last student channeled her deceased father, with whom she had had a difficult relationship.  For much of the weekend, this student found herself surrounded by family and friends who had passed on, and Betsy felt that she was likely to turn into an able medium.  The conversation with her father was perhaps the most useful and significant event of the entire class.

Some themes kept repeating as we moved from entity to entity: roses, the name “I Am” or “Je Suis,” queens and their attributes.  The entities or guides were a varied lot.  A couple of people said that they were channeling Orion himself, strangely enough.  Or maybe that’s not strange at all.

Betsy mentioned that often people get uncomfortable when someone appears to receive a message from a source they think is too big or important, particularly when the source is Jesus.  Then we really think we must be making it up.  Surely Jesus isn’t speaking to us—he must be awfully busy, after all, and we are so insignificant.  “But think about it,” Betsy said, with great seriousness.  “Shouldn’t Jesus be our best friend?  Of course he loves us and wants to talk to us!”

I’m never quite sure what to think about Jesus or what to expect of him, but at one point when Betsy just spoke his name in passing, on the subject of asking for protection, I felt a new and truly immense energy enter the room, just for a moment.

The second day

That evening, I was quite energized, and I was up till 3:00 writing.  I didn’t get a headache, but I did have severe itching over much of my body, which went on for hours, and I had an overall discomfort that felt a lot like jet lag.  I slept poorly, waking often, then waking earlier than necessary the next morning.  I was fairly wiped out when I got to the class.  The group was about evenly divided between those who had gone to bed early and slept longer than usual and those whose experiences were more like mine.  A number reported headaches or other annoyances.  We spent a substantial amount of time debriefing and speculating.

This time I made sure to give a little bit of the introduction I had skipped the day before.  I confessed that my fondest wish was to truly converse with a particular being with whom I had an intense and long-term relationship.  He wasn’t a leprechaun, I explained; he had been a pianist and composer in his Earth life, during which I, as far as I knew, had been close to him.  I gave his name, only his first name, which Betsy naturally had a little trouble with.  I said that the name was Polish, but nobody flashed on his identity, which was fine with me.  Everyone seemed to receive all this as perfectly ordinary.  As we worked through the day, Betsy did her best to facilitate the communication I so desired, but there was no success.  Fryderyk hung around but also distinctly hung back.  I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t trying harder to come through; I felt sure that he was capable of it, and that if I couldn’t speak for him, surely Betsy could.

Again, I felt largely nonverbal through the morning.  This time, I also felt unable to stay awake.  I could hardly hold my head up, and reclined into the couch with my eyes closed.  When my first turn to channel came around, I realized that I was essentially asleep.  I could hear everything that was going on, but I wasn’t really in the room with everyone.  Maybe I’ll do an Edgar Cayce, I thought; as far as I knew, it might work even better if I were asleep.  Nothing much happened, though.  I could feel a whole cloud of entities hovering in front of me, but I couldn’t make any clear contact with anything or anyone.  Betsy tried to perk me up, saying that I was in too deep and needed to sit up and come to attention, but I was just too tired to do anything about it.  Mine was the only apparent failure of the whole weekend.  I still learned something important from it.

When we made our next and last attempt of the day, Betsy made me go first so that I wouldn’t fall back to sleep while the others worked.  She coached me in great detail to keep me from falling into an overly deep trance.  It wasn’t such a concern by that time—I had gotten over the weariness of the morning.  It was a good thing that I was more with it at that point, because the exercise consisted of answering questions posed by other students.  What a responsibility for us fledgling prophets!

“Drop into your heart”

To get me properly off and running, Betsy coached me carefully and in detail.  Her basic description of getting into the channeling state is that you “drop into your heart.”  This felt very literal to me, and was easy and natural to do throughout most of the class.  Betsy watched closely as I “dropped” this way, and whatever I noticed about what I was doing, she saw at the same time.  At some moments, I felt that I was starting to think too much, and Betsy immediately said, “You’re getting into your head again.  Drop into your heart.”  At one point, I went too far down, and she immediately told me to come back up.  The feeling was like getting an elevator to the proper level and exactly lined up with the edge of the floor.  When I had it right, it was obvious.  Betsy pointed out that it wasn’t necessary to go very deep in order to channel.  I suppose I had thought that more dissociation or slower brainwaves or something would be required.

The experience this time was rather undramatic.  I did feel an entity close in front of my face, hovering.  It did not seem to be anyone I knew or had contacted before.  It may well have been facilitating the communication somehow, but I must say that I did not feel it was speaking through me.  This time around, the sensation was that I was perceiving more through my typical, everyday methods, seeing energy patterns in the subjects’ bodies and picking up emotions.  I seemed to come up with useful answers to at least some extent, but I didn’t feel that I was doing anything more than what I often do in the context of giving treatments.  Perhaps it was a bit clearer than usual.  Whatever was happening, it was accepted by the group as channeling.

For example, the first student who questioned me asked about a relationship problem.  I could vividly see a knot in her heart, and I told her simply and directly, “You have a constriction in your heart.  You need to let go of it.”  I spoke without thinking first, and I was perhaps less diplomatic than I would have been in my normal state, but it just felt like me talking.  She wanted to know if this relationship was able to progress and whether she should pursue it.  In the back of my mind I was thinking that she should ask herself, not me!  I told her that I didn’t know what was going to happen, but that if she kept herself all closed up and terrified the way she was, she would be sure to prevent the relationship from working out.  I didn’t like being forced to come up with an answer to such a grave question; my impression was that this woman was relying a great deal on outside guidance, maybe more than was healthy, and that she might give too much weight to my answers.  This worried me even though I am used to being an authority figure in my regular job, and I have to advise people on important matters all the time.  I guess in my capacity as a doctor I am only human and my guidance isn’t seen as supernaturally potent, as might happen with channeling.  [This has changed to a degree– these days patients often ask me specifically to do psychic work for them.]

I seemed to be operating on at least two different levels as I continued answering questions.  I responded directly to what I perceived, without consciously judging the messages, at least not too much.  At the same time, I was entirely conscious, and in the background I was thinking in an ordinary way about what I was saying.  However, I wasn’t planning what to say before saying it.  It was an interesting state.

When it was my turn to ask a question, I took the opportunity to ask about one of my health problems.  The student who was channeling said that there was an issue about forgiveness, and that she heard the word “mother.”  Betsy was receiving a message too, and jumped in on this.  Her impression was that it was a past life issue, while the student was speaking of my present life.  Another reason not to give too much weight to specific answers, I would say; impressions may be essentially true but slightly off.  (Which should be obvious to even the casual observer.)  Betsy also said that I had a tooth that was contributing to my problem, which was what my chiropractor found a couple of days later.  I haven’t been able to make much out of the forgiveness issue as yet, but I am keeping it in mind.

All flavors of channeling

I think that, among all the various attempts by all the students, we experienced practically all the possible flavors of channeling within that one weekend.  We contacted everything from dead humans to apparent deities to our own higher, or at least different, selves.  My own experiences ranged from working almost as my usual self to being almost completely bypassed by another personality.  Perhaps the most important thing I learned was that channeling, in a broad sense, is something we do quite commonly, even when we don’t think of it that way.  Writing a poem when I don’t know where the words are coming from is not so different from having Queen Marie speak through my voice.  Doing spontaneous choreography or trance dancing is not so different from having another entity move my limbs.  Directly perceiving the condition of a patient’s body is a lot like being told.  Even when we get information ourselves, unmediated by any outside entity, we don’t necessarily know where it’s coming from.  A great deal of the time, we’re doing what Jon Klimo calls “open channeling,” where the source is unknown but we’re getting something beyond the capabilities of the quotidian self.

But who or what were the entities with whom we spent the weekend?  For the most part, I have no clue.  I do feel confident, however, that they were far more than just our own selves, even our far larger selves.  There was an incontrovertible sense of “otherness,” and more importantly, I felt distinct energies that were definitely not part of my own field.

Betsy has a relatively simple and practical answer to this overarching question, one which is espoused by many in the channeling world.  It’s all Spirit, she would say. Right now this is Spirit being Orion, this is Spirit being Betsy, this is Spirit being Larry, or Saint Michael, or Susan’s father.  It doesn’t really matter how we divide things up and make distinctions, it’s all One.  That explanation goes a long way for me.

Aftermath

A few hours after the end of the second day of class, I repaired to my room, determined to talk with Fryderyk somehow.  I could still feel a pretty strong connection to him, and I hoped there was a chance.  I sat down with a notebook and a pencil.  And at last, at incredibly long last, we talked.

I didn’t want to be overheard, but I did want to use definite words, so I tried whispering softly, almost silently, to him.  When words seemed to rise out of the darkness in my head, I whispered them back to myself.  It felt like a real conversation, even though I was speaking both parts.  It wasn’t exactly that I heard him, more that I was just hearing my own voice, but saying things that were not my own thoughts.  Limited though it was, it felt like a miracle after all these years of struggling to communicate.

It started with a rush of romantic drivel on both sides— “I’ve waited so long for this,” that sort of thing.  It was predictable, but wonderful and exciting and miraculous.  I wanted to make the most of this rare opportunity, though.  When we had settled down a bit, I asked about Rose, about whom I was intensely curious.  [Rose Creet, Leslie Flint’s friend, with whom Fryderyk has/had long-term connections.]  “You must have spent a number of lives with her.”

“Only a few.”  After a moment’s pause, “But you, I have contended with you many times.”  Contended?  I didn’t think I would have come up with that word.  “I have contended with you, and I have been content with you.”  I liked that.

But I would like to meet Rose, I insisted.  Would that be possible?  He was oddly coy and evasive.  She was too far away, she couldn’t come here.  “But I could go there,” I suggested.  No on that, too.  Everything I asked about was met with resistance of some sort.

I switched to another touchy subject, the piano.  “Have you given up on me as a student?”

“Yes.”  Not unexpected, but not what I wanted to hear!  I tried to ask why, and couldn’t get anything clear.  I started to argue with him, telling him that despite my severe inadequacies, I had a good musical mind and I was worthy of his attention.  To my horror, I found myself dissolving into tears and begging pathetically.  I was far too emotional to understand any reply, except that there did seem to be something along the lines of, “Well, you might try practicing more.”  However, I felt a huge, unrelenting love and tenderness from him the whole time.

Finally, I turned to matters of healing.  I tried to explain that I felt that he and I had some problems in common, and that it seemed to me that somehow if I could heal him I could heal myself, and vice-versa.  I wasn’t exactly sure how to explore this idea, but I wanted to see how he reacted to it.  He said, “I am beyond the need for healing.”

Yeah, right, I thought.  Even at that moment I could clearly sense a deep pain in the center of his being.

During this part of our interaction, the intensity of love and longing increased to almost an unbearable level.  He moved around my right side, wrapping himself around me.  There was just a moment of him sinking into my body, and then he faded away.

It turned out to be impractical to write while all this was going on, but I was able to remember and jot down the highlights afterward.  It made perfect sense to me that he had not spoken to me during the class in this way.  Our conversation was not at all for public consumption, and would have been inappropriate and embarrassing in that context.  He had been not shy but wise.

The sense of power, strength and solidity I had gained from Marie stayed with me for a few days.  I also felt physically more solid and stable, and my problem joints held together better—perhaps a gift from that mysterious first entity.  Of course, as is wont to happen, all those benefits faded after a while.

Added 2/20/07

Last night I found myself in touch with Fryc again, but I was extremely sleepy and couldn’t work up a good communication with him.  I hope it was only the fatigue and nothing more that prevented it.  This morning, though, I had a nice chat with Kuan Yin.  She kept calling me “daughter,” which kind of bugged me for some reason.  She was big and warm and enveloping, and I saw a lot of pale yellow.  I asked whether she would be available to speak to me at other times, and she said no.  Surprised, I asked why not.  Her reply was, “Daughter, you don’t need me.”  I protested that I did too need her, but you know, all the messages of the past few days seem to be pointing in the same direction, that I need to rely on myself and my own intuition.  Which, interestingly enough, was my own point of view in the first place.  Go figure.  At any rate, I asked Kuan Yin if I could at least visit sometimes, and that seemed to be OK.

An Appointment with Jesus

The following article was originally published in The Searchlight in December 2007.  I referred to this experience in a post last Easter, and here I am again, still trying to process it.  I didn’t understand what had happened to me then, and I don’t understand it much better now.  Digesting more books about the early development of Christianity has convinced me further that things were not the way they taught us in Catholic school and that Jesus cannot be quite what they told us he was.  That has made my experience all the more confusing, I’m afraid.

Oddly enough, reading the Bhagavad Gita and getting its different perspective on the relationship of God to humanity has shed a little bit of light on these matters.  Krishna speaks to Arjuna in so much the same terms Jesus often uses with those who believe they are channeling him.

Yesterday evening, Easter Sunday, I spent a couple of hours with a video of Vassula Ryden, who receives messages from a source identified as Jesus through verbal communication and writes them down.  I’ve looked askance at Vassula’s messages because they have Jesus advocating specific sectarian practices such as reading the Bible and praying the rosary, even while saying that he wants to unite all the religions.  This seems odd to me, and it seems to contradict much of what has been said by Hania’s Jesus source, as well as a great deal of the spiritual literature in general.  And it just feels wrong to me!  But what do I know?  Perhaps for some people this is exactly the best message, the message that is most needed.  Or not.

A materialist/humanist friend of mine wrote, in apparent exasperation, “I don’t know how intelligent people like you and Hania can believe you are having experiences like this!”  Well, I told her, we are having the experiences.  It’s only the meaning of the experiences, the interpretation, that’s in question.  If someone is having a certain experience, Hania, Vassula, or whoever, I can’t say that she is not, and if a person receives certain messages, well, then, those are the messages she receives.   We have to go from there.  Simply saying it didn’t really happen is not going to get us anywhere.  And I think it’s of the greatest importance that we go much further in understanding these matters.

Faith and trust are still major challenges for me, but if I have faith in anything, just a bit, it’s direct experience.  I have been unable to get much in the way of direct experience to clarify or augment what I’ve said here.  I’ve probably blocked it somehow, though that was not my intention.  I’m still trying.

When I channel Jesus Christ, regardless whether my channeling is clear or poor, I am filled with unspeakable peace, light and wonderful fullness.  It is a spiritual practice for me, and that’s why I do it, the bottom line.

– Hania Stromberg

On Tuesday, September 11, 2007, at 7:00 pm Mountain Time, I had an appointment with Jesus.  Really.

I had been in touch with him before, or at least I thought so; that wasn’t a new concept.  I had experienced him mostly as a great golden light beaming down from above me.  Recently I had heard that my friend Hania Stromberg was channeling him and was welcoming people to have sessions with him by phone.

Readers of The Searchlight may remember Hania’s name in connection with her work on Induced After-Death Communication.  In the past few months, she has been studying with Betsy Morgan Coffman, who teaches channeling here in Albuquerque.  Hania has had a strong relationship with Jesus for many years, and when she opens herself to channel, it is Jesus who speaks; she says that other beings have offered to communicate through her, but she wants only Jesus Christ.  Since this has been going on, there has been a noticeable transformation in Hania.  She continues to suffer with severe health problems, but her color has gone from grey to pink, and she has taken on a distinct glow.  Seeing this change, it’s easy to believe that something wonderful is happening.

I signed up for a time, and promptly had something of a spiritual crisis.  Although Betsy has said that it isn’t unusual for people to receive messages from Jesus, I found the idea of calling up and asking him questions rather disconcerting and theologically uncomfortable.  I wondered if we were dealing with the “real” Jesus.  Hania had told me that when people asked the Big Questions, “Why do we have wars?” and that sort of thing, not a lot came through, but personal questions, on relationships or jobs or whatever, generally received clear answers.  I’m still having trouble conceiving of Jesus as a cosmic Dear Abby, and for a while I was seriously discombobulated by all of this.  At the time of the session, I was quite unnerved by the prospect of consulting Jesus by phone.

But while I have questions about what exactly is taking place, I do not for a moment think that Hania is faking or deluding herself.  That’s because within a few moments of beginning the phone call, as soon as she had said a prayer invoking Jesus’ presence, there was indeed a presence in the room with me, directly in front of where I was sitting on my ordinary sofa in my ordinary living room.  I had no doubt of this whatsoever.  I could even vaguely see him for a few moments, a faint vision of arms with stereotypical wide white sleeves.  I assume he was just as much in Hania’s house with her at the same time.  This presence was powerful, but soft and gentle.  The light was not too bright for my eyes, so to speak.  If it was not truly Jesus, the pretender was awfully convincing.

So I was hearing a soft female voice in my left ear, and at the same time I was perceiving this masculine figure nearby in my house.  It was kind of like having subtitles, or perhaps simultaneous translation like at the UN.  On my own, I wasn’t getting any of this audio portion, or any other manner of verbal transmission, so when I report that “he said” something, I mean that I heard Hania’s voice saying it.  I was getting mostly emotional and kinesthetic impressions, with moments of faint visual images.

As soon as we got started, I was invited to ask questions.  What I most longed to ask was who he is, what he is, and what he is doing, that is, what his nature and purpose may be.  I was nervous to ask these things directly, so I kept my mouth shut about them.  I thought that he might well read them inside me anyway.

What I did ask was my next most burning question: why I am not healing.  I asked if there were anything I should be doing, or anything I should stop doing, in order for healing to take place.  I told him that I believed he could heal me, and the funny thing is that I truly meant that.  Faith has always been the most difficult thing in the world for me, and yet I found that I honestly believed that Jesus could do anything necessary to make my body OK.  I believed that he had healed others (patients sometimes tell me this and mean it literally), and that he had great power to heal people, despite the fact that Hania herself had not experienced the slightest improvement in her physical problems.  I mean I believed.  I felt no doubt whatsoever.  That was a new and unique experience in itself.

He held my right hand in both of his as I spoke to him.  I asked about my stomach, which has been going through a flareup of chronic gastritis.  I also asked about my constantly unstable joints, which cause nerve impingement and chronic pain.  These felt like terribly insignificant questions to ask of such an august presence.

I am going to tell you the replies I received, not because I think you are interested in my digestive system, but because they illustrate the specificity, relevance, and practicality of the advice.  With regard to my stomach, he told me that there was a great deal of overactivity and agitation in that area.  As he pointed it out, I could feel it clearly; part of it was simply my nervousness at having this contact with him, but mostly it had already been there.  He said that it was agitation in my mind and heart that was affecting my stomach, not anything wrong with the stomach itself.  He embraced me, and I felt as if my head was resting against his shoulder.  Through all this there were tears running freely down my cheeks.  He said that I should take the peace that he can provide into my mind and body, and that if my stomach started to feel bad, I should visualize resting against him in that same way, leaning on him and letting him support me.

Hania had mentioned that sometimes Jesus communicates directly through her, though not by taking over her vocal chords, and sometimes instead she herself reports what she is receiving from him.  During the discussion of my joint and chronic pain problems, she described seeing me in a curled-up, crouched position, hugging my knees.  The interpretation of the picture seemed to come directly from the spiritual source, though.  He said that the problems came from pain in my heart, which I had held locked up in my body and had not “accepted” or “allowed to go into the earth.”  I wasn’t quite sure how to work with what I was told.

I tend to feel that if I am given healings or some other sort of spiritual goodies, I need to somehow pay for what I’ve been given.  I didn’t say anything about that out loud, but Jesus told me that I didn’t need to do anything, be anything, or try to deserve anything— I was loved and cared for just for myself, no matter what.  I have run into religious people who are extremely concerned that they are not pleasing God, and I wish they could hear this.

It was clear that this being could read my thoughts, feelings, and energetic patterns, and so it was not surprising that he perceived my ambiguity about him.  “I can feel you going back and forth as you are reaching out to me,” he said near the end of the session.  “Don’t give up.”

The whole experience lasted a little over half an hour.  The last thing Jesus said was that although the call was about to end, he would still be with me. Hania asked if I wanted to give any feedback, but I was too overwhelmed to speak right then.

Afterward, I had a huge emotional release, wailing and sobbing.  I was grateful that no one else was in the house.  Even the presence was gone.

I was not immediately and completely healed, but I did feel considerably better in my stomach the next day.  Unfortunately, the day after that was much worse again.  However, I did feel healed where it really counted.

Recently I read that Mother Theresa, in her youth, had visions of Christ, and then later in her life she lost touch with that direct perception of him.  She could not understand why she was no longer able to see him, and felt that perhaps God did not even exist.  Somehow she was able to continue with her demanding work despite feeling a lack of spiritual support.  I find this all difficult to understand.  First, Jesus seems to make himself so readily available that I can’t imagine what could have been blocking the contact for this very devout woman.  To stop having visions is perhaps not so strange, but to stop having any sense of his existence?  And then, how is it that I, who have nothing like a traditional Christian faith, have been given this gift, while others, true believers, who long for a connection with Christ and put great effort forth to find it cannot seem to get in touch with him?

I imagine that a mainline Christian like Mother Theresa would believe that Jesus was real, but that the divinities of other religions were just myths or fairy tales.  Yet, I’ve encountered other deities.  This is one of my sources of confusion—how there can be so many high-level divine beings floating about, all of them appearing “real,” and yet many of them representing belief systems that are incompatible with each other?  What should I make of a universe in which I find not only archangels and the Christ himself, but Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion, as well?

The best I can do to interpret this extraordinary experience is to say that the universe is full of beings that care about us and want to help us.  I felt greatly loved by this wonderful person, and I loved him completely in return.  I did receive something of an answer to my questions about what he is and what he is doing, though not a verbal one.  Perhaps he put this directly into my mind, or perhaps it was only inspired by the experience of his presence.  My vision was that we humans cannot really relate to God in the largest sense, that we need to have a piece of God with a human face in order to communicate.  Jesus fulfills that role, and perhaps that is the point of our other divine beings as well.

Was there a historical Jesus, who walked the earth as a human male a couple of thousand years ago?  There is plenty of controversy over this point.  I think that most likely there was such a person, a great teacher and healer who carried tremendous light and affected many lives.  (We should probably be referring to this person by his original name, Yeshua.)  Then people with their own agendas ladled layers of mythology on top of his story.  I doubt that most of what passes for Christianity these days has a lot to do with the reality of what Jesus said and did; I agree with the proverb that says that Christianity would be a great idea if anyone ever actually tried it.  I am not able to believe most of what they taught us in Catholic school when I was six, or when I was sixteen—not that Christianity is the only way, and not that the Bible infallibly tells what really happened in a given time and place.  Certainly not that we are damned forever if we don’t do exactly as we are told or if we have been raised with a different belief system.

It does seem that most of the material that purports to come from Jesus emphasizes love and compassion, and deemphasizes churches, books, and dogma.  In one session with Hania, he was heard to say that he has only one church, and that is the human heart.  He added that reading holy books is only of value if it helps a person to find him in their heart.

What if Jesus was “only” a human being, albeit a very special one?  (I say “only” because even the most limited of human beings are far larger than we realize.)  Hearing from him is still not such a big surprise.  We know that humans who have died still live in some way, somewhere, and that they can communicate with those still on the Earth.  If Jesus ever lived as a human being, then he still lives, and even if he were no more than an ordinary person, he could potentially speak to us in the present.  But what if he never lived here with us, and the story we have been given is only legend and metaphor?  Sometimes I wonder if we ourselves create our deities, if our concentration on them and love for them brings them into existence out of nothing.  Then, I think, this is a moot point, because ALL of us are essentially invented out of nothing.  Where do our own personalities and individual identities come from, anyway?  It’s really the same question.  It’s all one thing, all mind, all God, showing myriad faces everywhere, contemplating itself and its works.

Hania told me later that she has been given some answers to these questions about the nature of Jesus.  The material has been either “in a uniquely childlike simplicity,” as she describes it, or more than her brain can handle:  “What I am able to take and project are rather hackneyed fragments of something so much more brilliant, but beyond the scope of my ability, as a channel, to receive.”  Perhaps this is also why only simple and limited answers come through on the larger questions about human existence, while everyday questions elicit clear replies.

Hania also wants readers to know that although when she channels “Jesus replaces her personality with himself,” and she experiences his peace and compassion, the rest of the time she still struggles with her own life issues, “although perhaps gradually less so.”  That is, she is still the same person she was before, and she makes no claims to be anything other than ordinary.

I spoke with Jesus again the next day, on my own.  It was simple.  I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I remember the love.  That’s all I can say for now.

Interview with Betsy Morgan Coffman, Part II

Originally posted November 30, 2009 at Gaia.com

One of the most interesting parts of this conversation, to me, was the matter of Betsy’s falling down the stairs in her house while putting out food for her cat, which left her with a fractured hip.  Betsy was certain that this was not caused by her own clumsiness, and after experiencing the atmosphere around that stairway, I was more than ready to believe her.

E:  Now, sometimes people will find themselves in contact with beings that seem just great.  They get healings from them, they have all kinds of wonderful things happen, and yet it turns out that those beings are not what they purported to be.  They’re caught in a lie at some point.  I just wonder if you have any comment.

B:  A little, for whatever it’s worth.  The people that I have met and associated with, we are all so concerned about being authentic and coming from our integrity that we almost go overboard to make sure that what we’re saying is the truth.  We take immense responsibility for communicating from love accurately, with compassion and non-judgment.

Now, I have seen other people do that.  My interpretation is that their ego is a little bit bigger than their ability, and so they’re enjoying swimming in this ego, like putting on a shoe that’s too big, but the shoe is so beautiful they don’t want to take it off.  And they get compliments on it, and then they identify with the shoe, thinking they are the gift, and they don’t want to give up that identity, rather than recognizing that nothing in the world makes us better, we are already perfect.  Nothing in the world makes us smaller, we’re already whole.  So I just try to steer clear of people like that or readers like that, and give people a heads up to try to go to someone who you’ve gotten a good recommendation for, or to trust your own senses.  If you start to feel, “This doesn’t feel good,” then it’s not good, and you should leave.

Be really careful what you ask for.  When my son, Gannon, was six years old, or seven—he also is gifted and very interested in star beings—he has more gifts than he’s interested in having, actually, so he hasn’t developed them.  They’ve been too frightening.  Like, when he’s asleep at night, blankets get pulled off, or he’ll hear the ocean and the sound of universes rumbling and exploding in his head, and he’s gone into objects and seen what they’re like from the inside and out.  Anyway, when he was six or seven he wanted to have an off-planet being, a little boy off-planet being, as a buddy.  So we prayed, we got down on our knees together, and we invited in an off-planet being that would be around seven years old and that would like to have an earth being for a friend.  And he went to bed that night in his room; he had a bunk bed and he slept on the top.  And I went to bed in my room.  It was a small apartment.  My daughter, who was a year younger, five or six, slept with me.  In the middle of the night I woke up with a start, like mothers often do, knowing I had to get into my son’s room immediately, and I walked through the apartment in the dark.  I went to his room and I stood there with my hand on the light switch, looking around.  I didn’t want to turn on the light and scare him, but I could feel I needed to be there.  And something felt disconcerting and alive, and I thought, “I need to stay here.”  And I didn’t want to wake him up, so again, I didn’t turn on the light, I just lay down on the bottom bunk as quietly as I could.  And I stayed awake for ten or fifteen minutes and went to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up again, and my son was shaking me, and he said, “Mom, thank you so much for coming in my room.  I was scared to death.  I was praying you’d flip that light switch on.  I could see your hand on the light switch.”  He said, “They came, they came!  A daddy and a young boy, and they wanted me to go with them, and they wanted to take me, and I was scared to go, and I was scared to stay, and I didn’t know what I was going to do, and at that moment you appeared at the doorway.  And they stopped, and they stared at you and you stared at them, and then when you wouldn’t leave they went out the window.  I don’t want that to happen to me again, Mom.”

And we found a hair that looked like it might have come off the body on the floor, and he pictured what they looked like.  And we got down on our knees, and we prayed to them and told them never to come back again, he wasn’t ready.  And so we released them, cleansed them, and they never came back.

Amazing, huh?

E:  Awfully, awfully amazing.  I don’t even begin to know what to make of that.  It raises so many questions.  I definitely understand the “be careful what you wish for” part, and “be careful what you open yourself to.”

B:  It seems like the clearer you are, the more light you have, the more you can bring in.  So Gannon has immense light.  He is the most Christed being I’ve ever met, and I’m honored that he came through me.  I can’t claim anything to that, because kids choose their own parents, but I feel that I’m fairly light.  He and I got down together and asked for something, not knowing who we are, or the power that could happen.

E:  He got exactly what he asked for, but it wasn’t what he really wanted.

My daughter had an invisible dog for a while.  She didn’t ask for it, but we’d be out walking, and she’d say, “I keep feeling like there’s a dog following me.”  There was nothing adverse about it; it was just like there was an invisible dog walking with us.  I would bend down and try to find where it was, and I could feel something there, not anything very strong, but I could definitely believe that there was a dog.  She didn’t see it; she just had a real strong sense of a dog being there, and she could describe it.

B:  Amazing.

E:  But she doesn’t do anything like that otherwise.  Maybe at some point she will.

I guess in a lot of ways the question is answered, but I wanted to ask you about the demon attack that I experienced.

B:  My experience is that there is such a thing.  I don’t like even… but for us, I’ll talk about it.  Yes, I know what you mean, it’s horrible, it’s hard to get rid of them.  I don’t do house clearings, but a girlfriend of mine, a gal I taught—some of her gifts she was born with, her name is Melissa—she likes to do house cleanings and she likes mediumship and she likes to investigate the paranormal, very much like what they do on TV, like investigating deaths and murders and stuff that I would never, ever have any interest in doing because there is a lot of negative energy.  But thank goodness there are some psychics that are not afraid of it and find it quite delightful.

E:  I wasn’t trying to do a cleansing, but this was a patient of mine who had this thing stuck to her—that was her main complaint, that was what she was actually trying to be treated for.

B:  I don’t even work with that!

E:  But people who were considerably more advanced had tried to help her.  I mean, I was just treating her for the strokes that she had had while this was going on, I was just treating the physical stuff.

B:  Which may have been caused from the entity.

E:  That’s what she thought.  Anyway, some very high-level people….

B:  Between you and me, I think I got pushed off the steps.  That’s how I broke my hip.  There’s something I need to cleanse in this house, and it hangs out right there [pointing to the upper part of the stairway].

E:  I’m interested that you mentioned that, because I was real uncomfortable when I walked in, and I thought I must be crazy because I know what goes on here, and I thought, it can’t feel like this!

B:  At what point did you begin to feel uncomfortable?

E:  I just walked in and sat down in here, and—

B:  Right here, mm hmm.  It’s right there [pointing again toward the stairs].

E:  Well, I kept kind of looking up in there!  Yeah, I think you’ve got something, and that’s weird because [laughing, to the entity] how dare you be in here, the Archangel Michael is protecting this place!

B:  I know, but what he says is, “I was here first.”  I’m somewhat protected, but of course I got pushed!  Now, Orion was telling me, “Put the cat food—you know, when that happened—put the food on the paper plate, and slide it through the banister.  But I didn’t listen.  I went up and I put the plate down, and then I got to the fourth step, and… it wasn’t me.  I didn’t miss that step.  I don’t know what happened.  I can remember going down, thinking, “What the heck is happening?  How did this happen?”  It was almost like I was taken out of my body, and it was the strangest experience I’ve ever had.

So, I’ve had the house feng shui-ed right there, and that up there, where the ceiling comes together, means “to fall.”  And I also just know, because when I go to bed at night, I keep all the lights on, because I can feel the energy.  And this morning when I woke up, I thought, “Oh, he fiddled with me last night.”  Not sexually, just with my mind.  I woke up and was still tired, and couldn’t sleep really well.

I kept telling my friend Bill, “There’s something in this house,” and he kept saying, “No, no, no.”  I said, “I know there is, I know there is.”  So finally today I called him, and I said, “I’ve had it.”  I said, “I know.  It’s either I’m possessed, or this house is possessed.”  I said, “I’m really feeling crazy, I can feel the emotional swings in me.  I’m a good and happy person, but I could feel the swings, like craziness.  Craziness!  And I thought, “This is not me.”  And so I called him, and I left him a message; he was doing dentistry.  He called me back and he said that he did swing the pendulum, and he said, “You’re right.  There are entities, and now this is one way to handle it.”

So he called Terry Cast [spelling?], whom I adore.  She does radionics, and so she’s broadcasting electricity to me right now.  And they can’t take electricity; they have to leave your energy field.  And so what we’re going to do is do a house cleansing, but I’m going to get a whole bunch of people.  This is making him very mad right now, that I’m even talking about it.  I can see him getting mad.  I’ve told him, “Let’s peacefully coexist,” but last night he fiddled with my sleep, and that is not peacefully coexisting.  I’m saying, “You can be here, just  don’t bother me and I won’t bother you.”

When I first walked in here, I thought, “This is everything I’ve ever wanted.  Why am I not excited?”  I had no excitement about it.  I did it purely from another level of, “This is everything I’ve ever wanted.  I should take the house.”

E:  Well, if this could happen to you, it could happen to anybody.

B:  Thank you for saying that.  It was quite a compliment.  Yep, it could.  Because I wasn’t willing to think.  I didn’t ask myself really deeply, “Why am I not more emotionally connected?”  And at a superficial level I thought, “Well, you’ve been knowing for a long time you were going to move, and so this must be what’s next.”

E:  I guess it’s another learning experience, but still, it’s a pretty tough one!

B:  I know!

E:  Well, it makes me feel a little more confident, because really, when I walked in, I thought, “I don’t like it here!”  And I thought, “I must be incorrect, because Betsy would only pick a place with good energy.”

B:  Oh, you know, it’s strange, isn’t it?  I need to get this area right here all feng shui-ed.  It needs to have something different.  But there’s some energy that lives here in this house.

E:  I guess I just did something that was a little violent, that maybe I shouldn’t have done.  I just put a bubble around me.  I went like [gesturing].  I thought, “It’s not coming home with me.”  I really pushed at it.

B:  That’s not violent.  And it really likes it here; it won’t go home with you.

E:  Wow.  Okay.  I guess I only have one really major question left.

One more “danger” question.  I don’t really think this is dangerous, but I’ve been told that it was, and I wonder what your experience is.  Now, what has always been natural for me, and I’m trying to learn to get information in other ways, but what’s always been natural with me is to get emotional, like, tone-colors, and to get kinesthetic information, you know, for things to come through me physically.

B:  I’m not sure I understand.

E:  I mean for my body to be moved.  Physically moved, or at least to experience physical sensations or tendencies.  That I would get the experience in my body rather than verbally or visually.  I still can hardly get anything verbally.  I am getting more visually these days.

B:  That’s good, that’s still good.

E:  You know, it seems like people just operate on these different channels, so to speak.  Because my main contact is a musician, in fact, one of the greatest pianists of all time, I have gotten some channeling at the piano in past years.  This was one of the greatest experiences of my entire life.  I want more of it.  A healer I was working with at the time was absolutely convinced that this was doing great harm to me, and that it needed to stop.  I’m meaning this as more of a general question, but here I am going into the personal story.  I really didn’t believe it, but I told him that she was saying that this was doing harm to me, and that he needed to either find another way to do it, or not do it.  And he must have believed that, because he’s never done it again.

B:  So you had one of your spirit guides on the other side, and he was a pianist.  And he was coming through you.  And then somebody told you it was bad for you.  And so what happened?

E:  And so he stopped, and he’s never done it again.

B:  And you miss him.

E:  I’m with him many times, but I miss that experience.  I don’t even care if it’s  harmful!

B:  Why is it harmful?

E:  She was saying that because of the particular way he was interfacing with my body, that it was actually doing harm to me.

B:  I don’t see this doing any harm at all.  I think you should have it.  I think that maybe the only thing you might have felt and wondered what do to with is I see that he loves you so much he has a kind of ownership of you.  In one lifetime you were completely committed to each other, and you might feel that.  As long as you recognize that he feels that way, you don’t have to… you can say, “You know I love you that way too, but we’re not in the same dimension right now.  But while we’re sharing what we can, I’m all yours.”

E:  Definitely.  I just really liked the piano lessons.  Actually, I got some technical problems solved.

B:  And you can invite him back.

E:  Oh, I have, over and over and over.  And I mean, we have often a very, extremely intimate relationship.  I don’t see him all the time, and this is something I’ve also been told was strange, that people just call on their spirit guides any time, and I don’t find that to be true.  He just doesn’t always seem to be hanging around the Earth plane.  He has other things to do.  He’s not at my beck and call, but sometimes he’s around for days at a time, and sometimes he’s around when I’m not really available, and he can even be pushy about it.  But then, I’m pushy with him too.  It’s like, if I want him, I want him, and I kind of grab at him.

And various people are saying, well, he’s stuck, he shouldn’t be here.  But he’s been part of a number of large projects, rather in the way of what you’re doing.

B:  He’s not stuck.  He comes and goes.  I’m seeing that sometimes he retreats, almost like somebody who is a genius and very, very gifted needs to almost go into a black hole.  Did he have depression or did he just have to get away from people?

E:  He was extremely ill.

B:   Okay, so I’m seeing him go away for periods of time.  But there are three, if not including the black hole place, a fourth place where he goes when he’s not with you.  Then he’s designing and creating somewhere, and there’s times when he retreats.  He goes to a star, and he comes to you.

E:  As far as I know, he’s working with other people.  There are a couple of major mediums that he’s been involved with.

B:  Great.

E:  I didn’t know that when I first met him.

B:  That’s probably that creative space that he goes to, still being very creative.

E:  But it seems like there’s a lot going on with him, and because I can’t generally get verbal information, there’s only so much I know about it.  I know more about it because of what other mediums, who are very well-known, have done with him.

B:  What was your question?  I forgot.

E:  My question was whether channeling by means of physical movement was dangerous, or what you might have to say about it.

B:  Physical movement meaning playing the piano?

E:  Or anything else.

B:  No! Not at all.  There’s healers….

E:  He does that too.

B:  A smile could be channeled.  They influence us energetically, transport us, and so they do impress our thoughts as well as our feelings, and they impress our bodies.  You know, Ramtha is a full-body channel.  It doesn’t hurt her; maybe it tires her for the energy to come in and walk her around.

E:  You did make mention of full-body channeling in the class, but then we didn’t really get into that.

B:  That was the first way, that was how I first channeled.  Hatshepsut came in, the female pharaoh, and I was being moved around, and she had a really bold, loud voice.  It didn’t hurt me at all.  I enjoyed having the experience.  It doesn’t hurt you, not unless you feel the guide, the channel, or the energy that comes through, would harm you.  Like whack at yourself or something!

E:  No, he’s done quite a bit of healing for me.  He can’t seem to get me out of most of the physical problems….

B:  You know, the channels that hurt are the bad energies, the entities that fiddle with us psychologically, screw up our minds.

E:  Yeah, I can imagine that happening.  That demon character had an aspect of that, like it made you think certain things about yourself.

B:  Yes, that’s the bad energy.

E:  And it didn’t want you to express yourself.  It would go for the throat.  It seemed to want to choke off your speech.

B:  Some cause people to get depressed, and some give them hypertension, and some stroke.  You know, there is a demonic world.  My sister, who saw the Archangel Michael, is a Christian, and she says, “Put on the full armament of God, the breastplate, the sword, the shield, and the helmet, and ask for a legion of angels.”

E:  When you said that in the class, also, you said, “Put on the armament of the Kingdom of Heaven,” and I instantly visualized this medieval suit of armor, with the visor and the gauntlets.

B:  Yeah, me too, I see that too.

E:  That was really helpful.  Out of all the things I’ve tried to do for protection, that very simple thing seemed the most helpful.

B:  Well, it’s in the Bible.

E:  Medieval suits of armor hadn’t been invented yet at that time!  It just happened to come out that way.  When I thought of armament, that just happened to be the way it came out.

B:  Yeah, I could have said it that way.

E:  You’ve given me a great deal here, and I’m very grateful.

B:  Wow, thank you.

I’m just going to say thank you Lord, thank you Jesus Christ, thank you Michael, thank you Orion, thank you Hatshepsut, thank you Frederick, thank you to all the angels and archangels and master teacher guides that are with us.  Thank you.  With the name of love we accept this for our highest good.  We accept that this house is more cleansed because we did this work today in the name of love.  And so it is.  Amen.

We agreed that the unpleasant energy in the room felt a lot lighter; in fact, the room felt pretty decent by that time.

Orion’s Net

Originally posted November 22, 2009 at Gaia.com

I mentioned last time that I was somewhat acquainted with Betsy Morgan Coffman’s guide, Orion. Here’s part of what I was talking about:

At a session last March, Mendy and I were talking about large entities that appear to be composed of multiple beings, such as the “Michael” of Messages from Michael.  Orion’s name came up, and I commented that I still didn’t have much understanding of what Orion “really” is.  As I said that, I felt a sudden resonance, and I thought that if I took a look I would get some worthwhile insight.

So I held the intention of looking at Orion, and I began to have quite a vivid vision.  First, against an image of space with stars, there was a huge burst of white light coming through what looked like a wormhole in a science-fiction movie.  I could see a round tunnel behind it, and on the other side, an equally huge, bright mass of light.  This seemed to describe where Orion was coming from.

Then I felt myself flying or being pulled through the hole, and found myself on the other side, in the other universe.  I had only had the intention of looking at all this, but suddenly it was like actually being there, though I was still quite aware of the usual room around me.  I could feel tingling, like little sparks, and warmth all over my body.  As I more or less adjusted to my surroundings, I began to see the sparks as small, twinkling points of light all around me.  Somehow the points of light seemed excited and happy, as if they were glad I was there.  It felt like the entire space was filled with love and joy—and fun, a sense of lightness, as if I had walked into some wonderful celebration.  Mendy was observing all this, and she could see the same little lights and feel the sensation of love.  There was absolutely no seriousness or gravity about any of this.

I asked the sparkles, which seemed to be conscious beings, what they wanted to tell me.  I never received much in the way of imagery, and there were no words, but I felt pressure on my third eye.  I got to wondering just what sort of beings the sparkles were, and it occurred to me to ask how they would perceive themselves from the perspective of their own lives in their own universe.  In response, I was shown an image of myself, which I took as meaning that their nature was similar to my own.  Mendy’s impression was that they were indeed similar to us, but further along in their evolution.  I don’t know.  I can only say that they were an awful lot of fun and I liked them a lot.

And then I was back in the room and in my normal consciousness.

This was an unusual experience for me, though a couple of other times I’ve received information in the form of a journey like this, which pulled me along on its own terms and with its own apparent agenda until it had told me whatever I was supposed to be told.  It was also quite different from my previous impressions of Orion, except for the mass of white light.  I’m feeling inspired, but puzzled.

The sparkles were somewhat like swarms of tiny lights I had perceived before, which Mendy had identified as fairies, but they seemed far more powerful, and they seemed to exist in a matrix or continuum that was filled in every direction with conscious points of light.  Mendy has experienced visions of the universe that were very much like that, with all of us, all beings, represented as points of light filling space everywhere.  Perhaps I simply wandered into Mendy’s field of perceptions, so to speak.  I found myself thinking of Indra’s Net, the Buddhist concept of an infinite network of jewels, each reflecting all the others.

I mentioned this experience to a few other people and got some interesting responses.  My friend Patrice, a talented channeler in her own right, wrote, “Oh, i e-mailed your story to my friend Daywah and she had the same experience about 3 weeks ago.”  And Hania [see earlier posts] had this to say:  “I recall that some years ago when I used to meditate several hours a day, I had these intelligent living sparkles (like little fire sparks but I felt their intelligence) always in my room.  Later on, when I meditated very infrequently but held on to my path, they still lingered around my new bedroom.  In both situations, when I had guests, they, too, could see these living sparkles.  I have always felt their good will and great aliveness, although I never knew what/who they were.  Now I see them very very seldom.  Were they beings from another universe?  I don’t know.”

Interview with Betsy Morgan Coffman, Part I

Originally posted November 21, 2009 at Gaia.com

Ages ago, it seems now, May 29, 2007, I interviewed Betsy Morgan Coffman, who is a master channeler and has found a way to teach this art to others.  Betsy is a very popular teacher, and I’ve taken some of her workshops myself.  After observing her in action for a while, I was curious about her subjective experience of her work.

Betsy’s main guide, with whom I am slightly acquainted, is an entity who calls himself Orion.  That is, the personality that comes through appears as masculine, but it would be inaccurate to think of Orion as male, or even to think of him as a single entity, as you will see below.  Nearly two years after this interview, during one of my study sessions with Mendy Lou Blackburn, I received a dramatic vision of myriad points of life, spread across space, each of them a conscious being– rather as if I had discovered a universe of Tinkerbells!  At the time, I didn’t remember that Betsy had described Orion as “so many points of consciousness, of light.”  Mendy saw the lights too, and since then I’ve spoken with another person who’s seen the same thing.  My vision was tremendous fun, and the beings seemed wonderfully loving and positive, but as with so many beings I’ve perceived, I can’t pretend to understand what the points of light “really” were, or what’s really going on with “star beings.”  I can say, however, that the Orion personality has a fine sense of humor, and that’s always a strong recommendation as far as I’m concerned.

What follows is the first part of the interview.

Elene:  It seems like most of your students are relatively old, in their 40s at least, usually 50s or 60s.  Have you kept track of their ages?  Do you think that, generally, people have to be at a certain level of maturity before they can start developing their spiritual gifts?

Betsy:  I find that when people are emotionally and spiritually ready, then they will call me.  They have a kind of authentic curiosity that invites them to know more, to go further into self-discovery, and this is a wonderful opportunity to discover the self at very deep levels.  The self as spirit, as love.  What I have noticed is that people who have a certain level of spiritual awareness are attracted to this work no matter what their age.  Yes, they need to be at a certain level of maturity, at all levels, emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally, or else they won’t be able to integrate the information as it moves into them.  Some people will have levels of fear, which is simply resistance to accepting truth.  Truth is very frightening to the ego, and when the ego is the predominant factor in the personality, the person simply will not be attracted to this.

E:  Is Orion singular or plural?  I notice that you seem to speak of him both ways.

B:  Yeah, I know, I do that, I recognize it, and I think, “Gee, that could be confusing.”  It’s a difficult question because it cannot be answered in English words.  Orion predominantly is a huge, singular energy field to us, yet as I investigate it by looking at him, the term you might call psychically or energetically, what I see is that there are so many points of consciousness, of light, that pool into him, that to us at our limited linear level, we would not be able to equate ourselves to him as a singular energy, he’s so huge.

Mostly I see him as singular, unless I investigate further.

E:  Did Orion have anything to say about why he wants to do this work?

B:  He wants to help our world become enlightened.  And so it would lead me to say, then, to him, “Well, what does that mean to you, Orion?”  And he says, “To live in love.”  Right now we’re living in percentages of love and fear.  We have misperceptions about who we are, and those misperceptions color our responses to the world, and cause a lot of anger and misunderstanding and even wars, and when we are enlightened or living from love we’ll have a peaceful planet.

E:  I remember that you had asked “why me?” and you were told, “Because you were willing.”

B:  Yes, because I was willing.  I see, as I’m looking at it now, I can see that I also had association with him at some level of awareness.  We were comrades, friends, confidants, companions, and this is an ongoing reunion for us.  It’s kind of a celebration of the unity and the ongoing nature of life.  Life wants to take form; life wants to express itself.  Life wants to contribute, and this is an example of life doing that at a very large level.  He kind of births himself into individuals as they ask it.  So I asked him, “What do you mean ‘birth yourself?’” and he said, “It’s an idea whose time has come.”  And this idea is that it’s possible for love and peace to actually coexist harmoniously on this planet, or for people to coexist with love and peace in harmony on this planet.

E:  How did you get started?

B:  I’ve always been interested in the paranormal.  I’ve always wanted to be someone who was actively expressing some skill, praying for it, hoping for it, reading about it.  And then, out of the blue—I was 42—out of the blue, doing Reiki, a voice started talking to me in my head, telling me that now we were to begin our real work, and that I was to bring Orion through my voice in an art form called channeling.  And of course I had heard of channeling, but I had never done it.  So I was quite surprised, and I said, “What are you talking about?”  I said, “Who are you and what are you doing in my head?” And he introduced himself and said, “My name is Orion.”  And I said, “Orin?”  He said, “No, Orion.”  I said, “Like the stars?”  He said, “Yes, like the stars.”  I said, “What are you doing in my head?  Don’t you need permission?”  He goes, “Oh, I have permission!  I got it a long time ago at your planning table.  Now it’s time, like an alarm clock going off.  It’s time for us to begin our work.”

And I said, “But I don’t know how to channel.”  And I think this part is the key:  He said, “You don’t have to do anything but show up, and I’ll do the rest.”  And that is exactly how he teaches the classes.  When people are willing, and show up, he does the rest.  That’s the completion of his invitation, or his promise.  That’s the gift he brings to the world, to lift a person’s frequency, and that is the beginning of enlightenment.  Now, enlightenment may take place over years, or an instant.  It’s an individual experience, and it really depends on that person’s particular soul path.  But this is like salt and pepper in a person’s life; it enhances the quality of one’s life, and can assist in that opening process being quicker and very often much more gentle, even though the physical body may experience signs of duress, such as headaches.

E:  There are other types of work I’ve been exposed to that didn’t seem to have quite the level of arduousness that comes along with this, and I was wondering if there are ways to make it less difficult.

B:  If you want to not go so fast, you can ask them to slow down.  However, Orion’s energy… and I have been maybe too humble as I unknowingly, unwittingly associated this work with myself, with the personality called Betsy.  So I downplayed its effectiveness because—it even makes me cry—I don’t want to be IT, I don’t want people to associate me with IT, with their enlightenment.  But in the past few days, actually, and this energy is perfectly timed, I have seen the power, and I’ve seen it grow, and it’s been huge.  Before my last class I was so dizzy I nearly passed out.  And people were getting nauseated in their stomachs.  The energy is increasing, it’s not slowing down!  And Orion will keep encouraging us to please do the ascension every day so that our physical bodies can get used to this energy.  People will get on my website and they’ll read it, and then they’ll get a rush, and start getting the swirling and the lifting and the stomachaches and the headaches because Orion is here now, and it’s time for human beings to really start recognizing that we’re in the 11^th hour, and there are beings of light in the stars who will help us when we ask for help.  It’s almost like a rescue mission.  It’s time to help the planet Earth, for we are on self-destruct.

So it’s coming, and the Course in Miracles says, “The correction of the planet cannot happen at the level of the problem.”  It has to happen at the level of an invisible spiritual force.  So, those of us who are aware enough and disciplined enough and willing enough to give part of our day to ascension, meditation, prayer, channeling, actually bring in a kind of light that stabilizes the franticness of our planet.  Our planet is in chaos, and there’s great fear.  If we will go into our center and find the calm and the peace that passes all understanding, we tether the chaotic nature of man, and help to bring a spiritual balance back to earth.  We are joined by forces of good from the stars who are here to help us save our planet, and at the same time we’re saving ourselves.  We’re saving ourselves from errors in thinking and from identification with the physical world as source, or cause, or valuable.  We begin to realize that everything that is really valuable is intrinsic and invisible to the eye, like in The Little Prince, or The Velveteen Rabbit, some of those wonderful children’s books that say that what is of real value, you don’t see it at all.  And that is what happens in the channeling classes; it’s an experience of what’s really valuable, and that’s the opening heart.

But even though taking a channeling class can open your higher chakras, so that you can see, hear, feel and know into the higher realms, you develop your psychic ability to have a perception of reality from higher dimensions or higher vibratory levels, that is not, to me, nor to Orion, the most beautiful part of channeling.  What we’re talking about is opening the crown chakra and connecting with the kingdom of heaven, and experiencing spiritual unity with higher awareness and then with every single human being on the planet, and birthing compassion.

E:  What is really meant by “star beings”?

B:  According to my experience, and my experience is really limited to my conversations with Orion— I try not to overindulge in books because, as you’ve probably noticed, everybody has an opinion, everybody has an experience, and there are so many different answers out there.  So Orion simply says that most of the planet is star-seeded, that most of us have come from stars.  We’ve come from lots of different stars, lots, and so there are different breeds, you might say, or brands of us.  We carry, then, different vibrations, different skills, different interests, and different influences for our planet.  But we all come with purpose in assisting this planet and helping it to be—they’re giving me this right now—a tropical forest of love, green, lush, loving.  And there’s about twenty percent that are not star-seeded, and they are causing a whole lot of problems.  They’re very power-hungry.  There are lizard people, as they say, on this planet, and these people, or these energies who appear as people, will either leave because it’ll get too bright, too much light, or they will just die.  I’m asking what that means, and they’re showing me that these beings may just go back into the nothingness and they may not appear again.

I find that a curiosity.  Sometimes the answers are beyond my grasp, every now and then, and I ask why, and they say, “Because you are not at a level of acceptance of what we have to tell you yet, and because your vocabulary doesn’t have words to ascribe to a reality that we understand, and that you don’t even have a cognition of or can imagine.”  So we get as much as we can get, and the information first hits us as light.  And that’s one reason we increase our frequency; as we increase our frequency we are more capable of accepting more of a bigger reality construct.

Right now we live in a matrix of fear, you might say; the world consciousness of our planet, the mass consciousness has so much fear, and the world needs a huge cleansing.  It requires souls who have an incredible amount of willingness and resilience.  It is tiring to get beaten up in the world and then to say, “I still have faith in something good and better than this,” and to pick yourself up and smile and insist that the intrinsic nature of man is good rather than evil, and keep on keeping on with love.  And so we have bonded together from the level of our hearts even though no words are spoken, and different human beings, who were originally from different planets, have stepped forward to lead their own.  Oprah leads a certain venue of people,  Princess Diana led some, Mother Theresa led some, so did Papaji and Martin Luther King.  So when someone such as that makes their self known, and then they go out, it wakes people up.  It’s not a bad death; it’s not an accidental death.  It shocks someone into waking up when something like that happens, and causes us to want to be all that we can be.

E:  Now, are we saying that star beings are living on physical planets as physical beings?

B:  Yes, at higher dimensions.  Some are at this dimension, but the ones that are coming to aid us are at a higher frequency.

E:  Is Orion, singular or as a group, in any way tied to a physical existence?

B:  No.  He’s light, a huge light.  And he does come through the middle star of the belt of Orion.  My beginning began with the Pleiades, and as I asked why, they said that that’s one of my main places that I am from, and I had to reconnect with that frequency, up my frequency, and clear out before I could then engage at a higher level with Orion.

E:  I think that leads kind of naturally to the question, “What are angels?”

B:  Well, angels are, of course, absolutely wonderful!  They are created by God, they are messengers of love, and they almost touch us physically.  When we talk about spirit guides, they come from all over, all these different dimensions.  Angels are just a little bit higher than us.  They are sent to us by God, or consciousness itself, to comfort us, protect us, help us to heal, to encourage us.  So every single human being has guardian angels, at least one. Everyone has at least one, and some have more.  I see that the more a human being is doing to contribute or serve on the planet in the name of love, the more angels they seem to gather.

Some people are connected to archangels, and archangels are at a frequency higher.  It’s like, here we are, and angels are above us, and then the archangels.  Now, in the Bible, weren’t there seven or nine levels of angels?  Different people have different ideas.  So there’s the cherubim and the seraphim and then there’s archangels and angels.  But Archangel Michael, who is probably the most well-known angel, is in the Bible.  His name is mentioned four times in the Bible.  He is called the Prince of Angels, and he is a wonderful defender and protector and warrior.  So when you call upon Archangel Michael, you have this huge wonderful angel, who has not incarnated as a human being ever.  And I see him—I’ve seen him on occasion—he’s seven to nine feet tall, and he’s blue, and he’s huge.  My experience is that if he shows up where I am, I’m thinking that he must be able to show up where other people are too.  I’ve seen him when I was working with psychic surgeons in Brazil.

And my sister saw him—he saved her life when she was about to step in a pool of water.  He saved her from electrocution.  She was stepping into a laundry room, and didn’t know water was on the floor and that there was a loose wire.  And all of a sudden he appeared and he raised his arms, and then his robe draped, and across it in red letters it said “electrocution.”  And she stopped and called the fire department.  She said, “You won’t believe what just happened,” and they said, “Look, lady, we’ll believe anything.  We don’t know what you saw, but if you had set one foot in this room you’d be dead.  Your husband would have come home to find you floating in a pool of water.”

E:  An incredibly specific vision!

B:  Mm-hmm.  Jesus said that it’s time, he’s coming back, he’s going to show us miracles.  The world needs to see miracles.  The earth is at a crossroads, and miracles need to be seen in the physical in order to inspire people to take up a spiritual sword and move forward to take back ownership of our planet.

E:  This seems like a good time to talk about protection, since Michael is such a master at that.

B:  Each archangel has a different purpose, but of course they’re all here for love.  They’re all messengers, some more geared for healing.

One huge energy that some people see as an archangel, but I see it as much, much bigger than that, is Metatron.  Metatron is huge.  He governs part of the heavens, as far as I see it.  So even though Michael is the Prince of the Angels, Metatron is either side by side with him like brothers, or bigger.  I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Metatron.

E:  I have, but I don’t know anything about him.

B:  He comes in occasionally as a huge energy, more robust, stern.

E:  More robust??

B:  More demanding, more serious.  Where Michael comes in with this gentle—but serious— love, very gentle and compassionate, Metatron is almost a warrior, with energy like you would imagine around Thor, you know, the god of war.

I describe a lot of things with energy; it’s like the work I do is energy Braille, and even now as you and I are talking in casual conversation, in order to get the truth, I notice I access my higher self, which automatically accesses my guides and Orion.  They all just click-click-click-click in, and I get dizzy.  I don’t know if you’ll get dizzy, but it seems like it’s almost contagious.  One of us goes up, and we all go up.

E:  I’m feeling that now, but I have to stay here in order to do this interview, so I can’t go along.

B:  Yes!  Sometimes I have to tell myself, “Betsy, get in your body, get back in your body.”