a definition
so what is channeling?
Across time, most human societies have seen the physical world as just one level of reality, and thought it possible for communication to happen between the different levels. At its simplest, this is called channeling and the people who do it are called channels.
Channeling expresses in different ways at different times in different societies. It's been experienced and reported by shamans, saints and sinners, by the cream of society and by its curdled dredges. It's been experienced in dreams and waking visions. It's been heard as voices and seen as art.
It may be provoked by trauma and/or extreme physical practices such as fasting and sleep deprivation. It is often an experience mediated by psychoactive substances. Alcohol. Magic mushrooms. Ibogaine. Cannabis. These practices and substances are used to open what Aldous Huxley called the doors of perception.
Given this range, it's hard to find a single definition for channeling, and the moment you define it, others will take issue with your definition.
It's a bit like the blind wise men touching the elephant and each perceiving a different creature — a snake? a tree? a supersized bat? — based on the part of the elephant they touch. I've always felt the point of that story is not that we each perceive our own reality (which we do), but that we each see just a sliver of reality and draw our conclusions from that.
In my own experience, I would define channeling as. . .
the pushing forward into conscious awareness of deeper — normally-unconscious — levels that transcend personal identity
In my case, mediated by cannabis, those deeper levels express as songs and other writings, as deep emotional connections, and self-awareness.
And in my understanding, those deeper levels are pushed forward by energies that are intrinsic to the structure and functioning of the universe we inhabit.
universal energies
rooted in
a sentient universe
Scientifically, we know there was nothing but energy in the first nano-nano-nano mork-seconds of the universe, and we know the physical universe coalesced out of these energies. In other words, scientifically we can say that the source of the universe was and is energy.
In my understanding, that source, those energies are sentient and all of the physical and nonphysical manifestations of the universe are imbued with and derive from that sentience. The universe is a structure made of sentient energies that start at the level of the source, and that project into lower and lower levels, into lower and lower vibrations that ultimately bridge into the physical existence that we inhabit.
Thus we are not just physical beings. We remain rooted to the universe, to the source, through the energies that connect and animate us.
Different people, different channels, experience that rootedness in many different ways.
Just for one instance, many experience it as a celestial presence which some interpret as a religious event, others as a spiritual experience.
Just for another instance, some encounter their rootedness as a separate and distinct 'personality,' often with a name, personal history and idosyncracies.
Still others find their rootedness in their creative muse, the 'voice' that comes from dark, goes nowhere, but leaves creation in its wake.
so who/what is karo?
so who/what is karo?
For me, that creative muse is how it first started, in my teens, with poetry and fiction spilling out of that mysterious inner source.
I loved the experience and treasured the results, so much that (in a long story partly told in the karoworx section) I pretty much choked that muse to death. Poetry and fiction both stopped coming.
However, by then, I was writing professionally and the muse would provide occasional inspiration for my paid work, so we remained on speaking terms.
Although that writing muse always felt remote from my conscious self, I always felt it as deeply connected to me, a part of my inner fabric. I've never felt the same connection with the energies that push the songs forward.
Rather, throughout, the karo energies have remained more than remote — they are impersonal, implacable and imperturbable. They do not express to me as anything I'd consider a human personality. However, their grasp of the human condition, and the understanding of the human heart and mind shown in their lyrics is almost superhuman.
In a sense it is. Humans are towards one end of the universe's cascading energy structure, while the source is at the start of the cascade. In between are myriad levels that — the closer we get to the source — are less and less me, more and more we.
My understanding is that the karo energies come out of those deeper realms where me has ceased to have much meaning, but the we of human experience is still active.
However, because the songs channel through me, they are shaped and coloured by me, by my personality, foibles and penchants, which are at the same time enhanced by the karo energies.
So the sardonic humour and irreverance in some songs is me. But not me. Made sharper. Even less reverent. The romantic who shines through many songs is me. But not me. Not embarrassed to show it, to express it. The angry envionmentalist is me. But not me. With the courage I never had in my professional writing to call out the economic sociopaths disrupting the climate for short term gain.
I could go on but I think that leads to a final point. "karo" is not a person, rather . . .
"karo" is a label for the amalgam of those impersonal song energies shining into and through the deeper levels and ego of the channel
So gordon is not karo. karo is not gordon. karo shines through gordon.
a meditation experience
I came to this view of the universe and the karo energies through a meditation path I encountered in Australia while I was preparing to produce a documentary on psychic phenomena. The documentary never happened. The meditation changed my life and my being.
The path itself was called Practical Meditation at the time, but it was less a 'meditation' practice — with expectations that its practitioners spend years learning to still the mind, in order to transcend the ego and mind traps of everyday life — than a guided exposure to the transformative power of those universal energies.
The meditation path itself happened though a series of universal-energy-based visualizations. These visualizations were initiated and overseen by a supervising channel, and the student would then visualize the scene on a recurring basis.
The outward purpose of the path was self-awareness. The visualized scenes triggered seismic internal change as the energies behind them blasted away the ego and its patterns, forcing the student (usually, like me, kicking and screaming the entire way) to consciously acknowledge and examine aspects of self normally avoided.
Blunt force was the tool because the ego does not like to let go. It does not like to change. Having gained the power of self-identity, the ego does not like to shift back to its true role, as merely an intermediary tool for the navigation of everyday life.
Still, although it wasn't a meditation per se, we all just called it 'the meditation', and most of the people who went through it found it one of the most powerful experiences of their lives.
The meditation itself was channeled by universal energies into the awareness of a skinny Australian named Les and his partner Marcia, who had themselves been initiated into the meditation sequence by its first channel, Raymond. My experience at working with the energies came both from being a student of it under Les and Marcia, and then a third generation supervisor of it in Edmonton with my first wife Leanne.
Throughout it was clear that the supervisor's role was to channel the energies of the meditation, and to provide explanation, interpretation, context and assurance to the student. But the lessons of self-awareness which the energies triggered had to be absorbed and understood and integrated by the student.
a universal self-awareness
The self-awareness taught by the meditation was not unique unto itself, and not some deep knowledge only the initiated could appreciate. The self awareness principles the meditation taught — and still teaches every single day, because self-awareness is a process not a state — were / are universal. Their core wisdom can be found in many traditions and esoteric philosophies.
If there was a difference between those other traditions and the meditation I experienced personally and supervised in others, it was the speed of the profound changes triggered by the energies behind the meditation.
For a non-traditional take on these universal energies, their functioning and their view of self-awareness, download and check out The Teachings of the Minstrel, an excerpt from the (itself channeled) comic spiritual-adventure novel, tHe PoEt & i.
emotions
energies, emotions and the songs
While not the same, the energies behind the meditation and the energies pushing the songs forward are closely related. So they feel very similar.
Both come with a range of physical symptoms, from being bombed (feeling lethargic and mentally woolly from intense energy bombardment), to nausea, and hyperactive energy centres, especially the forehead.
Beyond the physical symptoms, the songs came / come with their own varieties of energy, and these have changed somewhat across the three song channeling phases.
In the first phase, the energies pushing the songs forward were powerful, assertive and heavy. They forced the songs into my awareness with overwhelming force. A channeling session was a series of waves of intense engulfing energies that triggered the next section of lyrics or chords into conscious awareness. These intense flashes would then be followed by a quieter period as I assimilated the new parts of the song.
During the first phase, I would often feel a pulsating pressure across my forehead and a crankiness in the late afternoon / early evening, as though i was building up to explode. Later I would find myself channeling a new song or a major new part of a song that I was working on. I came to recognize this feeling and would warn others around me to just ignore my mental state because something new was being pushed forward.
I seldom knew what was coming. At times the energies pushed the lyrics forward first; other times they pushed my hands into finding chords on my guitar, which would then build up into longer sequences that became songs.
The song Bluebirds was of the latter type. I found this chord (A minor 7) I really liked the sound of, so I started noodling around and found a chord progression that included it. It was only after the chord sequence had solidified that lyrics began to come. But I was two verses into the song before I had the emotional realization it was about my then wife Leanne. And it was only later again that I understood, again emotionally, that it was my farewell song to her, that it was about the nature of our relationship as two 'blue birds sailing the winds of eternity', bound together by destiny but not bound to succeed in this lifetime.
Like Blue Birds, most of the songs had powerful emotional connections for me. Along with the waves of energy, I would feel these overwhelming emotional releases as I 'locked into' the meaning of a song. The bursting waves of energy / emotion would then repeat as each new part of the song, each new set of lines came forward. But which came first? the flush of energy or the flash of emotion was a chicken and egg question. I couldn't and still can't separate the energies from the emotions they released.
(See on singing for more on the interplay between the songs and my emotions.)
The 2.0 energies were never quite as intense as the 1.0, though every song had its own intensities and emotional lock-ins. But the 2.0 energies were just as or even more insistent. Gentler but more precise. They knew and demanded exactly how each song was to sound, how the existing 1.0 lyrics were to work with the structure of the instrumental tracks they were being married to.
Not that I understood it consciously at the time. I still don't, well not fully anyways. I would simply 'feel' my way through each new 2.0 song, singing it over and over, dozens then dozens of times as the song energies clarified the lyrics, their phrasing and the delivery of each line.
But it was always through a glass darkly.
a working theory
the inner experience — a working theory
And that is largely how I still bring songs forward. While the third and fourth phase song energies have become familiar, more like an old friend than the overwhelming force they started as, they remain mysterious. Still remote. Still impersonal, imperturbable, implacable.
Yet, after all these years, having sung these songs thousands of times, I have come to a 'working theory' of my internal experience when I am channeling the songs. You may want to consider it more metaphor than factual description, more rabbit hole journey than destination. More mumbo jumbo than gobbledeegook.
Let's start with the first rabbit hole, shall we Alice? Keep up if you can.
the mind-body problem
Self-aware consciousness is a defining fact of human life and its essential mystery. What? who? is the observer aware that it is observing? Is that observer the cause of consciousness? Or just an artefact of it? Does that observer transcend death? Or does it return to dust along with the body?
You might say questions like these have 'bedevilled' religion since it became religion, philosophy since it became philosophy, and science since it became science. In its essential distillation, the consciousness conumdrum — the mind-body problem — asks if there is a non-physical aspect to our being and, if there is, how does that non-physical aspect arise? And how does that non-physical aspect interact with our physical beings?
How does a non-physical aspect decide to lift it's hand?
And then do it?
Yes, I am avoiding naming that non-physical aspect. Judeo-Christian religions call it soul. Bhuddism calls it atman. Rene Descartes thought of it as a humunculum (a sort of little leprechaun) lounging in the pineal gland. Arthur Koestler called it the ghost in the machine. Reductionist science — a powerful analytical tool in the right circumstances — calls it mind and sees it as an 'emergent property' of a complex bio-electrical-chemical structure, the brain. But that name, that label is no more revealing than "soul" or "ghost in the machine".
These are all just labels for the everyday but ineffable experience of being an observer aware that it is observing.
When I channel, there are multiple levels of awareness operating.
There is an awareness — label it "i" — watching the interplay between the energies of the music and the "singer" — meaning my entire vocal 'mechanism', which includes the physical (vocal cords, lungs, etc) and the non-physical mental processes and understandings that allow me to sing.
That "i" awareness floats off and up to the (metaphorical) side, disembodied, similar to the way lucid dreamers often describe experiencing their point of view.
The singer awareness drops into a sort of inner trance, opening itself to the flow of the song energies, letting the energies take over the singing as much as possible. The energies infuse the singer. This is when the lyrics come, this is when the singing lessons come. This is when the full karo emerges.
As that happens, the singer has an awareness of the process, 'knows' when it got a lyric or a phrasing right, knows when it blew it. But it's the "i" awareness that notes the new lyrics that have appeared, or the vocal phrasing that has come into focus, or that the singing delivery is not quite right, that it still has to be refined.
It's the singer that is taught but it's the "i" awareness summarizes and absorbs the lesson.
Cool eh? But that still doesn't explain the central mystery. What's happening, what's going on 'under the hood' when the singer is infused, when the lyrics are coming from dark and the singing lessons are pushing forward?
I have a theory for that too, Alice, but we'll have to explore a few more rabbit holes to get there. Tell you what, we'll have a nice cuppa tea after.
a little background
We know the brain is an immense network of interweaving networks of interconnecting neurons. But the networks and neurons don't actually touch each other.
Instead there are gaps called synapses between neurons, and any brain activity requires 'communication' across that gap. Depending on the neuron network in question, that communication happens by a molecule of a neurotransmitter substance moving from one side of the synapse to the other.
Serotonin is one of the most important neurotransmitters, dopamine another. Too much or too little of these substances in the brain can have devastating effects, from depression and anxiety to degenerative diseases like Parkinson's.
Substances like psilocybin are psychoactive because their molecules are structurally similar enough to a molecule of serotonin that they can 'act' as a messanger in the synapses of the serotogenic system. Tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis, acts in a similar manner with the human endocannabinoid system.
But those substances actually aren't very good 'actors' so they garble the message. In sometimes fun, sometimes instructive, sometimes terrifying ways.
A little further now, watch your step on that lilypad!
Now, let's hypothesize that in addition to those physical neuron networks, there is another interweaving, interconnecting neuron network, but this one is non-physical. What does that mean? It means that we are not able to perceive or measure it on its own. But we can deduce its existence by its effects, the same way physicists deduce the existence of dark matter and dark energy by their effects on the clumping and movement of large galactic structures.
As Leonard Cohen might say — if he were alive, but he's not, so he couldn't more than mightn't — that non-physical network is where the light gets in. That's where the energies that connect us to the wider universe enter and act on our physical beings. That's where the self-aware observer arises.
And for me, that's where the songs enter my awareness.
And now we are getting close, but . . . one more rabbit hole
a little quantum wierdness
To the average person, the world appears solid. Reliable. Predictable. We can touch this desk, hit these computer keys. Hug our significant other. But to the quantum physicist, that's all a kind of illusion. Underneath is a seething mass of quantum fields, probabilities, possibilities and the kind of just plain wierdness that allows cats to be simultaneously dead and alive, and that led Einstein to complain "god does not play dice with the universe!"
At the heart of that wierdness are three quantum phenomena — wave-particle duality, uncertainty and the wave function. These phenomena all depend on there being an "observer".
For example. wave-particle duality is experimentally established beyond any doubt. Energy such as light, and even matter such as electrons, can be observed to act as though they are waves or act as though they are particles. The difference is in the experimental setup. In the observer's intention. Look to observe a wave and you will. Look to find a particle and that's what you will find.
But what is the form of the unobserved photon? The unseen electron? That's uncertain. Unknowable even. Either/or? Both? Neither? About all we can say is that there's a probability the photon is a wave, a probability the photon is a particle. So the wave function is the sum of those probabilities (which is pretty easy math for a binary phenomena).
The math gets way more complicated if you're attempting to measure say the position or the momentum of an electron circling its nucleus. You cannot know both. Measuring one makes the other uncertain. If you measure the electron's momentum, its position is a wave function that sums the many probabilities for where you might find that electron in it's orbit. Some positions are more likely, some far less likely.
For instance, the electron turning up in the middle of the your left nostril is a possible but very low probability outcome in the quantum world.
Gesundheit.
Physicists describe this as a 'cloud' of probabilities, and they say that the wave function behind that cloud 'collapses' into a single state, say a single position, when the electron is 'observed' or measured.
But what causes the collapse? It is self-aware consciousness itself. It is the observer's awareness that it is observing that makes an observation that can collapse the wave function to a single state. Without awareness there is no observation. Without observation there is no collapse. Without collapse . . .
The great physicist, astronomer and mathematician Sir James Jeans summed it this way:
‘The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.'
We have arrived Alice. Back at the synapse. The bottom of this particular rabbit hole.
Where the physical and the non-physical communicate. Where the great thought of the universe collapses into you and me.
Self-aware consciousness — the observer aware that it is observing — is an effect, an emergent property of that non-physical neuron network operating into and through the synapses of the physical neuron networks. We are wave functions collapsed into individual identities by the observation of the universe.
And that, my unseen friend, is the channeling experience.
Or some mumble jumble like that.
See gordon's song blog for further ruminations on this and other topics. Most recent on this topic:
The various recordings on this website are not for download or release. They are just demos, low resolution versions of the songs gordon has channeled into this existence. Interested parties can contact gordon @ this website.
