Back in the 60s or 70s there was a book called Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts that claimed to be channeled. Jane Roberts said she was a spirit medium who was allowing a spirit to use her body to speak. It was done in front of people, they took notes, books were written. Her voice and accent changed drastically when she spoke as Seth. The material was pretty odd. It's not like she was selling something, other than the books. The material was sometimes pretty rambling, and not at all what you'd expect from a hoax.

Shortly after the book came out, another group of people began playing with a ouija board in California, and the board started spelling out messages to them like We're here. It kind of reminds you of the satanic writings about "legion". Like there are a legion of demons out there. Only the message was far from demonic. It was completely harmless, nothing scary about it, just a lot of information. If it had been demonic, there should have been a few Manson-like episodes, no?

Think of it this way. If in The Exorcist the only thing the demons did was babble away harmlessly, you wouldn't have a movie, would you. This stuff was about as demonic as being possessed by Urkel.

The people in that group were afraid to give their real names, unlike Jane Roberts. They were afraid of being laughed at by their bosses and co-workers. One of them took the name Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and wrote the book Messages From Michael, and it was so popular that she wrote More Messages From Michael, and soon she was off and running with a movement, as Arlo Guthrie would say.

It didn't stop with that group. Others also spoke to the spirits collectively known as Michael. Other books came out. There is Shepherd Hoodwin, Jose Stevens, Joya Pope, and a handful of other authors all writing Michael books. There are Michael websites on the internet.

I read Shepherd Hoodwin's book Journey Of Your Soul and began an email correspondence with him. I also had him do a "Michael Chart" on me, my wife, and my brother. A "Michael Chart" contains channeled information about the people. Just focusing on my own, there was stuff in there that he had no way of knowing from our emails. It was impressive enough for me to order the other two later, the ones for my wife and brother.

Here's an overview of what they have to say.

We are all "sparks" from God, which they call The Tao in order to avoid religious connotations associated with God. It's not that God created us. God split us off from itself in order to enrich the whole with unique experiences. We will be on a journey that includes many incarnations on earth and many other things too, and then we will return to God.

Our first stop on this journey is the physical plane. That's where we are now. When we die, we move on to the astral plane. Then after a while there, we return to the physical plane in another incarnation. We typically have 100 or 200 incarnations on the physical plane before stopping. Then we spend all our time on the astral plane, which is what you'd think of as heaven. It's where your dead relatives and friends are now.

The physical plane and the astral plane are two of seven planes of existence on our journey. The third one is the causal plane, which is where the Michael spirits now live. They used to be here with us, but they all finished their incarnations and have moved on to the causal plane.

The fourth plane of existence is the famous akashic plane, where the akashic records are kept. Maybe you've heard of them because they have been written about elsewhere. It is heaven's library. We don't live on the akashic plane, just as you don't live in your local library. It is the place where channeled information comes from to do the Michael charts. One of the Michael spirits goes to the akashic plane and looks you up there. There's lots about you there. What type of person you are, what group of spirits you came here with, how far along you are in your current series of incarnations, how many times you've been back and forth from God to the various planes and back again to God.

The 5th, 6th and 7th planes of existence also have names, the mental plane, the buddhaic plane, and I forgot the other one. The messianic. (I cheated, I googled it.)

Of what use is that information to us? Here we are, ants on an anthill, being told what's going on in other worlds. Why do we care anyway? And we have no way of verifying that information. It could be a lot of nonsense. Maybe that's exactly what it is.

One of the main themes of all this is separateness. We begin as part of God, and we are separated off. Here on the physical plane, we are the most separate. We know loneliness, isolation. It's the only plane where we can know those things. All the other planes have us joining with more and more compatriots, until we return to God and are back home where we belong. On the causal plane you have over 1,000 of us acting together as a unit, such as the unit that identifies itself as Michael. We become part of bigger and bigger teams, and we are never isolated.

In evaluating the Michael information, one thing we can look for is consistency between authors. If they are all channeling the same source, more or less, the information should be consistent from one to the other. In some ways it is, and in some ways it isn't. Sometimes they contradict each other, which isn't too impressive. They can have two different charts on a person, giving contradictory information about the person. It happens all the time. Is Barack Obama the type of soul called a Priest? A King? A Warrior? He's been interpreted as all of them, and yet you can only be one, according to the rules. They freely admit that there are tons of errors in the channeled material. That's not too impressive. They give excuses, the standard one being that the channel's material was corrupted by his or her own preconceived notions.

One "bottom line" that they all fall back on is that you have to decide for yourself what seems right to you, and reject what doesn't. How would you like your surgeon to say that. Hey, I think you need to have your spleen removed, and I'll be happy to do it, but if you feel you'd be better off with a heart transplant let me know and I'll do that instead.

Another of their axioms is that we have free will. We do only what we choose to do. So the question arises, did the people who were murdered in the Holocaust, or in Darfur, or in any number of tragedies, choose to be murdered? Come on, who would choose to be treated like that? Do we choose to have all our physical maladies? No - we choose not to, but we get them anyway.

And they dance around that issue by saying that our higher self chose that path. I have a problem with that. A big problem. Who is this fucking higher self who chose to have us in pain? Fuck him.

They say that our higher self wants intensity. It wants to experience every kind of death. It wants to be choked to death, starved to death, bored to death, gored to death, sneezed to death, wheezed to death, cancered to death, heart attacked to death, beaten to death, eaten to death. Yeah, well, I don't.

What is the good of free will if we don't have it ourselves. Some sadistic asshole is sitting back and giggling and saying hey, let's give that prick cancer now. That will be fun to watch and oh so educational for him or her to go through, so lots of good experiences will be added to all that is. Oh come on, I don't want to believe that. It clashes with the other big axiom, that we should only believe what rings true for us. This rings more like that gong in the movie King Kong, summoning the big monkey to pick up the girl.

Are the higher spirits so bored with their lives that they choose to torture us in order to stay awake themselves? I find that to be a miserable way of looking at things.

Another problem I have is that I really don't want to keep coming back here, and yet they say I have to come back another few dozen times in order to complete the cycle. That conflicts with their claim about free will. Hey, I said I don't want to keep doing this. And they answer sure ya do, sure ya do. You don't wanna be a dropout do ya?