Channelling

Channelling or channeling is the act of allowing a spiritual entity to take control of your body and speak through you, or at least that's what New Agers, spiritualists and similar types would have you believe. In reality it is usually just bad acting, sometimes combined with a bit of cold reading to impress the rubes. Channeled characters often take the form of either a mark's departed loved one or a long-dead alleged guru.

Putting the psycho in
Parapsychology
Men who stare at goats
By the powers of tinfoil
v - t - e

Temporary possession

As in séances, this communication with the "spirits" is not considered to constitute a full "possession" as it is not seen as the complete, non-consensual takeover of a living being by a spirit or demon, something usually considered detrimental to the "victim" and requiring exorcism. Channelling is much easier to fake claimed by believers to offer opportunities for more positive and mutually respectful interaction between the living medium and the spirit. The most commonly-reported physical manifestations of channelling are an unusual vocal pattern or uncharacteristic physical behaviors by the medium.

Lack of Evidence

Channeling people from the distant past is rather easier than a conventional séance, in which the medium supposedly passes on messages from the recently deceased to an audience who knew the dead people in question. This requires a certain amount of skill in cold reading, or at least a certain amount of diligence in preparatory work to perform hot reading.

By contrast, channelers are free to make stuff up as they go along; there is no statement a channeler can make about (for example) the domestic life of Cleopatra which will positively be known by her audience to be false.

It would take considerable hot reading to convince a historian, an archeologist, and an expert in ancient languages that you were channeling Cleopatra; indeed, it would take actual scholarship, and anyone capable of it might give up their life of deception for a chair at one of the nicer universities. Interestingly, Cleopatra (or whoever is being channeled) always chooses to speak English (or any language the channeler speaks) when being channeled, instead of Koiné Greek, Demotic Egyptian or any other of the nine languages she reportedly spoke. Similarly, those channeling Joan of Arc rarely seem to speak medieval French.

So far as we are aware, no channeler has ever done the research necessary to give even a moderately accurate impersonation of a historical figure. This might be because they recognize the extreme difficulty of the task, and find sufficient pickings among the gullible; or they may have convinced themselves that they really are channeling dead people.

Shirley MacLaine

Actress Shirley MacLaine and the ABC television network gave this modern version of ghosts-speaking-through-a-medium a modicum of credibility. In 1987 ABC broadcast a mini-series based on MacLaine's book Out on a Limb, which depicts MacLaine conversing with spirits through channeler Kevin Ryerson. One of the spirits who speaks through Ryerson is a contemporary of Jesus called "John". "John" doesn't speak Aramaic — the language of Jesus — but a kind of Elizabethan English. "John" tells MacLaine that she is co-creator of the world with God. MacLaine, a consummate egotist, becomes ecstatic to find out that she is right about a belief she'd expressed earlier, viz., that she is God.[1]

One of MacLaine's favorite channelers, J. Z. Knight, claims to channel a 35,000-year-old Cro-Magnon warrior called Ramtha. This preposterous notion has made her famous and wealthy. Some of her patrons pay as much as $1,000 to attend her seminars where she dispenses such wisdom as "[we must] open our minds to new frontiers of potential".

Channelers
gollark: Maybe they could but we haven't viewbombed them enough yet.
gollark: Theoretically?
gollark: It *could* die before 5 hours, couldn't it?
gollark: Really, one thing will fix it, and that's TJ09 removing/modifying sickness.
gollark: I doubt ignoring it actually helps anyone at all.

See also

References
  1. Isness Is Her Business by Martin Gardner New York Review of Books (April 9, 1987)
  2. Stone, Joshua D. (1995). Hidden Mysteries: ETs, Ancient Mystery Schools and Ascension. Easy-To-Read Encyclopedia of the Spiritual Path Series. 4. Flagstaff, Arizona: Light Technology Publishing. p. 122. ISBN 9780929385570. Retrieved 2016-12-21. "Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, was a channel for Archangel Gabriel."
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