Explaining channeling
So is channeling real? What's going on?
There seems to be no real evidence that the information is truly coming from unseen spirits or some omniscient cosmic consciousness instead of the channeler. Virtually all channeled information is subjective, mystical and completely unverifiable, often including themes of universal love, messages from God, cosmic unity, and so on.
Channeled information from different sources is often contradictory; a dozen different spirits, presumably dwelling in the same afterworld, give a dozen different accounts. If the spirits are truly imparting important cosmic wisdom and universal truths, you would expect different channelers in different places and times to say the same things. Instead, studies have shown that channeled information changes with the times and tends to reflect the ideas popular in the culture at the time.
Because there is no way to verify information and descriptions of different planes of existence, the nature of the soul, and so on, there's no way to know what, if any, of the channeled information is accurate, but clearly much of it cannot be correct.
What would help verify channeling as a real phenomenon would be to have accurate, concrete, and verifiable information revealed that only the spirit would know. For example, a person who truly channeled Einstein should be able to continue making important physics discoveries long after his death; or a father who died unexpectedly and left his affairs in disarray should be able to tell his wife and family, through a channeler, where important documents are located to help settle his estate.
If people could communicate with spirits of the dead, it would be a tremendous boon to law enforcement, who could simply ask a medium to contact the dead and provide them with details to find their bodies or solve their murders. Channelers have unfortunately never been able to contact the spirits of Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, Natalee Holloway, Holly Bobo, or countless other missing persons to find their remains and/or bring the killers to justice.
The psychology of channeling
Instead, channelers are only able to provide unimportant, unverifiable and ambiguous information about the great beyond. The real explanation for channeling lies in psychology, not psychic powers.
As psychologist James Alcock of York University notes in "The Encyclopedia of The Paranormal," "the supposed phenomenon is actually very old, for it is simply automatism — automatic behavior over which an individual denies any personal control ... Today we recognize that automatism is a form of dissociation, an altered state of consciousness, in which an individual is capable of speaking or acting without awareness of deliberately doing so."
In other words, when a person mediates and clears his or her mind, random thoughts, images, and symbols may spontaneously arise. In this harmless dissociative state, though it may seem that this information is coming from another consciousness outside the body, in fact it is generated by the mind itself. It's the same process by which artists and musicians may suddenly be inspired by a great thought, or how we dream of things we'd never have imagined or thought of.''
