“OP, there IS no strong evidence to lead one to conclude that psychic phenomena exist.”
Does channeling necessarily have to be labeled as “psychic phenomena”? If its just letting the subconscious have full access to the body, akin to what happens in the pendulum experiment I mentioned previously, then channeling could be placed into a different category. Or at least discussed somewhat.
Gone the “Seth” route and was incredibly unimpressed.
The reason why a current medium is required is because we need to examine said medium for accuracy in predictions and information given.
If all channeling is is “letting the subconscious have full access to the body”, then how is it a psychic phenomenon? We can reach into the subconscious and pull out lots of weird stuff. None of it violates the known laws of physics or requires psychic powers to explain it.
If you are going to persist in calling it “channeling”, then we are going to have to insist on having to call it “psychic phenomena”. When you refer to it as a psychological problem, we can talk about it as a psychological problem.
That’s not evidence. That’s wishful thinking. I didn’t come to that conclusion. In fact, I came to the exact opposite conclusion - she’s knowingly faking it for money and fame. So we’re back to square one. By what criteria did you reason that she’s not capable of faking that? It seems pretty easy to me.
How True Believers scrutinize mediums and other assorted psychics in today’s society: Take one telescope, smear both ends with petroleum jelly, look through the wrong end and declare “How can you not see that fuzzy brightness and not believe?”
For the millionth time the material transmitted is not the issue here. I myself think a lot of it, possibly all, is bogus. Its whether or not the channeling is real is the issue.
Have you watched the videos also? If so then fair enough. We all see what we want to see, this as much as it applies to me applies to you also.
Years of practice backed up by tons of notes that she never deviated from. Would you like direct evidence that “Seth” spouted pseudoscientific bullshit? This is from my copy of Roberts 1970 The Seth Material, in which her ghostest with the mostest says
Did you know what I had to go through to find this bit of claptrap?
I just let the book fall open.
**If you ignore the material transmitted you have NOTHING. **It’s the only reason channeling exist; it’s the definition of channeling. Do you understand that? It could just as easily be hypnotic mushrooms transmitting info directly into your ears, but there’s no way to examine that without looking at the information. If the information isn’t the issue, why do you care if the channelers are bogus? What could it possibly matter?
Just looked up Mrs. Roberts in this (serious, scholarly) dictionary.
Apparently she left behind a whole lot of private journals, all “now at Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library, ms. group nr. 1090.” Very few of them, it seems, have been studied by serious, unbiased scholars or biographers, so really we know very little of her private thinking.
The last bit of her entry is worth quoting in full, I think:
Title of said dictionary being “Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism”, which boasts of being selected “Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2006” but completely neglects to mention what agency made this selection. By the way, there is no woo this “dictionary” doesn’t praise to the heavens-don’t look to it for any serious criticism.
Wait…WHY can’t mediums be proven to be genuine? As I said before, IF any of these people were real, it would be TRIVIALLY SIMPLE to prove it. Depending on what, exactly, the channeler claims is happening, any scientist could come up with a dozen tests off the top of their head that would allow them to prove conclusively that they were for real. Science is a method of investigation. It could very very easily be applied to these cases, IF the medium is willing to be tested.
If you mean to attack the scholarly work of people like Antoine Faivre, Olav Hammer, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and other contributors to the dictionary, you’re going to have to do better than that. Bring arguments. Give examples. Exert yourself.
To make it easy for you: Bring us just a single example, from any of the dictionary’s many, many entries, making the claim that any given bit of woo is a genuinely divine revelation, i.e. the real deal, handed down from a heavenly source. I’ll wait.
Twenty seconds on Google would have revealed this very information.
Wouter Hanegraaff, professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents at the University of Amsterdam, a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and former president of the Dutch Society for the Study of Religion, as well as of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.
If you have any serious criticism to level against the man’s arguments, or his overall reputation as a scholar, by all means fire away.
