**[ WHY SHAMAN'S SOUP BBS DOESN'T RUN CHANNELED MATERIAL ]** by Michelle Klein-Hass, SysOp, Shaman's Soup BBS--Sylmar, CA Channeling has become a fad in recent years. First Seth, then Ramtha, then a whole deluge of entities from alien starship captains to Egyptians to an entity claiming to be St. John the Revelator. "Channels," known to the Spiritualism faddists of the 1890s and until recently as mediums, speak in the voices of entities that may have lived, or never have had bodies and live as "beings of light." It was estimated at the height of the Seance craze that 75 to 80% of all mediums (and this is a very liberal estimate, the percentage must have been higher) were fakes that knew how to act the part of another being, and who (in those days) knew how to rattle tambourines, chains, and other things to make it seem like the spirits of the departed were there. The famous stage magician Harry Houdini did whole shows which debunked the phoney mediums, much like The Amazing Randi did 10 years ago during the height of Uri Geller's popularity. I'll take an educated guess and say that the figure of 75 to 80 frauds out of a given 100 channelers is a good figure to work with. But what about the 20 to 25% of channels that are authentically contacting discarnates? I believe that these are the most dangerous ones of all. Though I do not discount that maybe one or two of the many thousands of channelers may actually be contacting benevolent beings (in the realm of the Unseen, anything is possible) I believe that most authentic channels are contacting one of three things: 1) Their subconscious, or their superconscious "higher self", in any event contacting a part of themselves which, by calling another name they have disassociated themselves from; 2) "Earthbound" souls of recently dead people who have lost their way "home", or consciously do not wish to be dead. Many crave the sensations of life in a human body, and decide to enter another person's body to recapture the incarnate life; 3) Beings of negative energy which never have had bodies and similarly crave that level of existence. The latter two types of entities are dealt with in a series of text files which are separate on Mysteria BBS under the names NEGENTS.TXT, NEGENTS2.TXT, and NEGENTS3.TXT. They are available on Shaman's Soup as the bulletin "Negative Entities" in the Shaman's Conference, and as a bundled .ARC file with the file you are now reading called CHNLDNGR.ARC. This file is being distributed on other boards as well. If you have received this file in the archive form, the other files are right there. The former type of entity is part of the channel themselves, and their information is meant for the channel only. So where does this lead us? Information from a phony channel or a part of the channel's own mind is useless. And information from an Earthbound or a negative entity is not only untrustworthy, but can be downright dangerous. This is why I have made it the policy of my board to not run anything I know to be channeled material. I might pass up something that may very well come from, shall we say, a "higher" source. But then again, I will spare all of the users of my board a source of usually fraudulent, mostly useless, and sometimes even dangerous information. Thank you for understanding, Michelle Klein-Hass (Chihacou White Puma) Shaman's Soup Central