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A Serious Look at New Age SpiritualityAn anthropologist examines
how channeling has filtered down to middle of the road AmericaBY
CHRISTOPHER SHEA
W A S H I N G T O NF R H I S L TEST ROOK,Michael FBrown sp ent
more than one eveningkicking back on a sofa.and takingnotes while
the people around him jab-bered in the tongues of extraterrestrials
o r3,000-year-old Nubian priests.Dr. Brown, an anthropologist at
Wil-liams College, has been studying chan-nelers, a subculture
within the New Agemovem ent that even most New Agers con-sider
fringe. Channelers believe they canuse themselves as conduits for
communi-cations from other epochs, o ther planets,or other
dimensions.Most academics despise the New Age.Th ey find the loose
conglomeration of spir-itual views that goes by the nam e to be
self-indulgent, anti-rational, and terribly mid-dlebrow.S o you
might sympathize if the conven-tionally tweedy Dr. Brown,
Princetonclass of '72, confessed to feeling uncom-fortable among
chann elers in full yawp,Yet, he says, I liked the people Iworked
with, with few exceptions. Ithought they were smart and funny.
Some-times their imaginations were a little, oh,unconstrained for
my taste. But I likedtheir willingness to consider almost ev
ery--thing. I found it refreshing.People outside the New Age loop
mayknow channeling from the Doonesburyparody: A ditzy female
character is occa-sionally taken over by Hunk-Ra, an as-sertive
21,000-year-old warrior. The par-
ody is based on J 2 Knight, a former sub-urban hou sewife who
became a channelingcelebrity-and a millionaire-after a reve-lation
that som eone named Ramtha wastrying to speak through her.SOLID
BOURGEOIS STANDING
Dr. Brown's new book, The Chat~nelingZone American pirituality
in an AnxiousAge (Harvard University Press), looks atJ. Z. Knight
and at channelers more ex-treme . But it also looks at the way
channel-ing has filtered down from a few charis-matic figures into
self-help groups fullof mall-going, middle-class
Americans.Sometimes it doesn't differ much frommeditation. Chan
nelers may still be on thefringe, Dr. Brown argues, but their
solid
bourgeois standin g magnifies their culturalinfluence.I tried to
use channeling as a gatewayto under stand some broader ideas. hesay
s. :'I wanted to do ustice to the under-standing .of. the kind of
sensibility that isreflected in channeling, but also hiw-how that
sensibility is reflected and re-frac ted in th e world as
middle-class peopleexperience it.A lot of the language of
channeling isthe sam e language you hear on pas showsabo ut
'self-actualization,' or from motiva-tional s pea ker s hired by
businesses.A SOJOURN I N SANTA FE
Dr. Brown got his first real taste of theNe w Age eight years
ago, during a sojournat a San ta Fe, N.M., think tank. He
wasfinishing a book on an alliance between aPeruvian rebel m
ovement of 1965and localIndian tribes that viewed the rebels as
di-vine. A,neighbor sometimes kept him upnights by beating on a
tribal drum duringimpromptu healing sessions. Curious,he started
hangingout at self-improvementworkshops and asking questions.Now he
finds evidence of the New Age'sreach even when he visits his
parents inNap les, Fla. It's a very Republican com-munity. he say
s, but I'll be at a partyand som e guy in white shoes will come u
pand sa y, 'My wife and I went to see a chan-neler. It was kind of
fun.' In America,where 70 per cent of adults say they be-lieve in
angels and 3 per cent accept thepossibility of reincarnation,
channelingcomfortably co-exists with Bill Bennett-style moral
conservativism.In a typical fieldwork expedition for thebook, Dr.
Brown spent several hours inupstate New York with a group that
chan-nels Kana. Kana lives on a future di-mensional plane, parallel
to ours but aheadof us by many thousands of years, ac-cording t o a
brochure printed by the chan-nelers. Th e main channeler, Paul
(Dr.Brown granted most people in his bookanonymity), spoke in a
robotic voice forabout an hour and a half, sharing suchglimpses of
Kana's world as , We a re ofone thought and mind. We share all
feel-ings and deeds. He called on his listenersto balance runaway
technology with eco-
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ERI PW E N OH L FOR THE HRONI LEMichael F . Brown of Williatns
Colleg e:A lot of the language of chnnneling isthe sam e language
you hear on P S s l ~o ~c>sabout 'self-actualization.
logical sensitivity-a goa l he said Kan a'srace has already
accomplished.As Dr. Brow n describes it, the eveningsounds less
like a religious event than acocktail party with an eccentric guest
ofhonor. An engineer challenges Kana ontechnological details of his
world. Kana
Sometimes chanrielers'imaginations were a little, oh,
unconstrained for my taste. But Iliked their willingness
toconsider almost everything.found it refreshing.crac ks bad jokes.
(So-meone as ks him ifpeople on his planet hav e antennae o n
theirfaces. No, he replies. We hav e ca-ble. )But afterward, one
woman marvels:
These encounters teach us that ou r pow-ers are far greater than
we know. I 'mamazed by the human mind and by how farwe can e xpand
ourselves.Other channelers have a style that ismuch closer to
lecturing. You wouldn'tknow , unless they told yo u, that their
pro-noun cement s about freeing the mind fromthe shackles of
Western reason were sup-posedly coming from ano ther planet.Dr.
Brown sees a coheren t philosophy inall of the approaches: Human
beings arethe equivalent of gods, able to tap in to thedeepest
powers in the universe. We canshape reality with our thoughts.
Rationaljudgm ent of almost any kind is a bad thing.Channeling has
roots in spiritual tradi-tions stretching from Brazil to
Scandina-via, he argues, but it also reflects somequintessentially
American concerns. Ittaps into the long-standing American im-pulse
t o d o away with religious middlemenand h ave a direct experience
of the sacred.(One group h e met with claims to.channe1Jesus.) It
finds support in the all-Americanbelief in the limitless potential
of everyperson.DE L ING W IT H FR G ME NT T IO N
Chann elingal so reflects some very mod-ern , o r postmodern,
worries. Cultural crit-ics are always talking about how peoplefaced
with the information overload of thelate 20th century-and who fill
su ch vari edroles a s mother, businesswoman, consum -er, an d
Internet surfer-have the se ns ethat thei r identity is
fragmenting. Chann el-ing may be a way of dealing with,
evencelebrating . this feeling.Chann elers, furthermore, sometimes
as-sume roles that society has denied them.Some studies have found
that twice asmany women as men channel, and thatthey often channel
hyper-masculine fig-ures. They may be indulging in genderplay, akin
to people who take on a newidentity on the Internet.On e historical
antecedent of channelingis thc spiritualism m ovement, which s wep
tAmerica in the 1840s and lasted throughthe 1870s. In 1843; Sha ke
r med ium s inNew York welcomed the spirits of Crom-well and Cae
sar. to a religious gathe ring.Contit~rred tr Pnge A 18
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A 1 8 T H E C H R O N I C LE O F H I G H E R E D U C A T IO N M
A R C H 2 8 , 1997
TH E FACULTY RESEARCH
Cot~tinued rom Page A 6Th e mo st prominent theologians of the
daydebated whe ther it was possible to summonfamily members from
beyond the grave.One chang e since then, Dr. B rown notes, isa
growing ambivalence about the family:No on e wants to channel Mom
anym ore.LITTLE NTEREST FROM SCHOLARS
Despite its influence, the New Agedoesn't attract man y
researchers. Mostpeople I kn ow w ho ar e thinking of studyingthe
New Age decide not to, say s RobertWuthnow, a professor of
sociology atPrinceton University w ho writes frequentlyab ou t
religion. It really isn't a co he ren tmo vem ent-ev en the term
doesn't ade-quately describe it. That's why I thinkBrown's work is
important. It takes up on easpect of current spirituality and gives
us agood understanding of it.Some scholars shun investigating
theNew Age out of fear that their colleagueswill think they have
gone native. The ta-boo quality tends to rub off on th e academ
-ics involved, sa ys David J. Hess , authorof Science in the N e w
ge (University ofWisconsin Press, 1993 ,which looked a t thedebates
between New Agers and debunk-ers.Dr. Brown, like a good
anthropologist,suspend ed judgment during his research ,although he
is temperamentally a skeptic.Many of the groups he sat in on were
sosmall he couldn't avoid participating, whichled to some awkward
moments. In on eS an-
ta Fe workshop, h e was asked to pick up acrysta l that a wom an
had ad ded t o a pile ofpersonal effects, and to tap into the
per-sonal energy it exuded. To my sur-prise, he writes, I saw an
incendiarylandscape of southwestern mesas thatevo ked a s en se of
regret followed by a feel-ing of reconciliation. Th e wom an said
hehad channeled on e of her dreams.A KIN OF FREE ASSOCIATION
1 gav e it my best, he say s now, with ashrug. I think a lot of
it was a kind of freeassociation, an d that's fine, that's okay.
It'slike friends sitting around a room late atnight, saying ,
'Let's talk abo ut the firstthing that pop s into ou r heads.' You
aremoving away from rational though t, experi-menting with i
differen t way of being in theworld. It 's actu ally kind of fun ,
if you aren'tworried abo ut whe re it's headed.In som e ca ses ,
it's headed toward radicalrelativism, disengagement with the
world,and self-important apo calyp tic babble,he says.He knows,
however, that New Agersdon't have a mo nopoly on those failings.
Inthe workshops he attended, he heard some-thing unsettlingly
familiar in the constantassertions that there is no truth beyond
in-dividual viewpoints-that the worst sin is tochallenge someone's
emotional recountingof their own personal experience.: In my dark
er moments, he says, 1think the New Age speaks much the
samelanguage a s the humanities today.
