I channel because it's what I do. It's become so much a part of me, like eating and breathing, I imagine I would be bewildered if the ability suddenly left me. (Bear with me, folks, I'm thinking out loud to myself to you) It's an extension of being creative. I write. I draw pictures. I do music. I make things out of wood. I channel.

I suppose this post wiil deal with at least a couple of the questions that I get asked. The questions are usually short and to the point. The answers are not always so simple. Let me give it a whirl!

Question 1: Is it possible you're schizophrenic? You hear voices, you've said. Schizophrenics hear voices.

Answer: I've been to therapy. Not for voices, but for suicidal depression, rage and being narcissistic (read: pathologically self-centered). The neighbor's dog has not told me to kill anyone, Jesus has not assured me that I can handle live powerlines, no-one or nothing is telling me how awful I am and that I must cut or burn myself, or kill myself. Or other people. Those with the type of schizophrenia who hear voices usually hear the kinds of things I've listed. If you wanna know what life is like for a schizophrenic, let me recommend two books; since I no longer have them I can only give the titles, but one is by a former schizophrenic - Operators and Things - and the other is by the therapist who saw a young woman through her experience, it is either The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl or The Biography of a Schizophrenic Girl. With the second book, I can give you the author: Margarite Schechehaye. Either way, that ain't me. When I told my therapist about Sara, he more or less said, "Nu, I hear a lot of that these days. So, bubby, what were you saying about your mutha?" Before I leave this question, let me ask one back atcha: How do you perceive your own thoughts? I perceive the voices of Sara, Seima, Llam, Joan of Arc in the same way that I perceive my own thoughts. But they are not my thoughts.

Question 2: Okay, so let's say you're not schizophrenic. Is it possible you are in a dissociative state? By that I mean, one part of your brain doesn't know that there is another part that is claiming to be Sara, or Seima, or Joan of Arc?

Answer: Yes, it's possible. But not likely. It is possible that a part of my mind of which I am completely unaware is playing a baroque form of hide-and-seek on me, constructing an elaborate and convincing charade to get the "aware" part of me convinced that I am in touch with Sara and company. Human minds will do that; many people lie to themselves their whole lives, convinced that they are good people, while those about them know that they are really total bastards. With me personally, you must acknowledge that in many ways I can see lots of trees but not the forest, that is, I have only my subjective experience about which to talk. Except.

Item: Fifteen people (at last count) have seen Sara. The most dramatic of these was at a poetry reading in Bloomfield New Jersey in 2002. About a dozen people, none of whom were aware of my life with her, came up to me after I had read and wanted to know, "Who was that little blond woman on stage with you?" I was startled, but not at a loss: "Oh, that's Sara, she's my wife." To the couple of people who pressed me with, "Where is she now?," I merely answered, "Oh, she's floating around here somewhere. Our lives are so busy I rarely see her." Tongue in cheek.

Item: My personal angel Seima has appeared in the dreams of six different people that I know. One person was totally unaware of her presence in my life and yet he got the name almost right: "...and I think she said her name was Saymir." I shrugged and asked, "Big woman? Over seven feet tall?" (Seima, by human standards, is about 7'5") "Yeah!How'd you know?" To which I replied with a straight face, "Oh, all guys dream about a woman like that sooner or later!" Which is true; 99% of them never recall the dream, though. Pity!

Item: Back at the beginning of all of this, I thought I would go to the one group of people who had the repuation of having a handle on channeling, so one terribly hot day in June of 1990 I went to a meeting of the local Spiritualist Church. I was given five minutes with one of the ministers, a man who utilized the rocking table technique for yes-no answers. But he was aware of "a red-haired man of powerful build, twinkling eyes and an infectious smile, about five foot five. High forehead. Looks like he's ready to burst out laughing." I had told him I wanted to ask a question of someone named Will; the question was, should I publish his writings? The answer, which I already knew, was "Yes." The minister looked puzzled and said to me, "Will seems to be possessed of great charm and immense mental clarity. Who is he, anyway?" Smiling, I told him, "The poet, William Blake. I came here just to make sure I'm not going crazy." With a warm and understanding smile, the minister began reciting, "Tyger, tyger, burning bright..." which Will had been singing while I sat with the minister.

Question 3: "I'm a writer. I've read some of your material very carefully. I've read your essays and other non-channeled material, and you have a very distinctive 'voice' on paper. Some of your channeled material bears no relation to your writing style. But some of it does. Care to comment?

Answer: I'm the first one to notice the same thing. There are times when I relax so completely that I just sit in the chair and watch kinda dumbfounded as the words speed acroos the screen. At such times, my thoughts, my writing techniques, my life experience are neatly out of the way of whoever is in the control booth. Then there are days when I am acutely aware that whatever the person is composing is being filtered through my brain and my use of English. Three notable exceptions are Irlene Davis, who writes with a southern drawl; Catty Cutty of Edinburgh who writes with a Scots burrrrr; and Joan of Arc, whose syntax is French and said syntax shows up quite often in her English. By the way, someone once presented Mr. Blake with a genuinely good question. Blake had claimed he had been in touch with the spirit of Voltaire. The questioner asked, "Mister Blake, Voltaire wrote and spoke in French, and you know English only; how is it that you comprehend him?" Blake had obviously given just that question a good deal of thought, and without hesitating replied, "It is as if Voltaire sat at a pianoforte and struck a key in French, whereas I hear it in English." That may be too cute for some people, but it happens to be the truth. As it is, I have some short sentences in French, Aztec and ancient Chinese that I really must check out someday; the "language barrier," as we call it here at Outlands, sometimes opens a tad and some few words leak through. Joan of Arc has produced a number of these.

Question 4 : I've been given to understand that you at one point owned over 7000 books, had read most of them, and remember huge portions of each, sometimes down to individual page numbers as to where something can be found. Is it possible that you're being creative with historical facts about historical figures, but facts of which you are only subliminally aware? To be blunt, isn't it possible you are doing masterful fiction-writing, based upon your prodigious memory?

Answer : That too is possible. In the mid-1970's I began writing a series of dialogs or plays set in fourth-century AD Corinth, in Greece. This little hobby of mine occupied me on and off for about five years. They featured the same five or six people, one of whom was a wine-seller. Throughout this whole period, the only things that I at all knew about Corinth in that era was it was a seaport, it had a huge markeplace called an agora, and at one end of the agora was a place for the local Roman magistrate to sit and hear legal matters; this place was called the bema, and it was a kind of little throne set up slightly so that the magistrate could look down at the petitioners and the petitioners had to look up at him. Logic and the bare political facts of the era said there had to be a small barracks for a few soldiers to act as the local constabulary near the marketplace. In my dialogs I had put the two wine-sellers diagonally opposite each other in the middle of the market. Again, in my imagination, I had placed the magistrate's quarters and the barrack slightly off the market proper on a gently downhill road that lead to the next town over, Cenchrae. In 1981 I stumbled across the records of the archaelogical team who'd excavated quite a bit of Corinth, and I found it unnerving in the extreme to find out that there were indeed two wineshops diagonally opposed to each other in the middle of the market, and the barracks were where I had placed them. This was long before I'd even heard of channeling.

Question 5 : What one chaneling episode sticks out in your mind as the most prominent? I imagine after 20-plus years there are a number of them, but tell me a good one.

Answer : You're right! There are a lot! Meeting Sara is one; meeting Seima is another, and Hurrain's story is a book unto itself. But I think this one could be quickly told, and again it was before I had ever heard the word, "channeling." In 1981 I began rehearsing music with a woman who was on a spiritual path similar to mine in many ways. We hit it off extraordinarily well, and worked together flawlessly for a few months. One night I went to sleep and dreamed that I was with her backstage at Albert Hall. Onstage we could plainly see the late John Lennon with an acoustic guitar and he was playing his song Imagine. For a moment he looked towards us, smiled, and I seemed to sense him saying, "It's up to folks like you now." I awoke in a sweat and began to cry; John's death disturbed and hurt very bad. The next night was rehearsal night, and my partner and I sat chewing the fat for a few moments. I wanted to say something about the dream when she picked up her guitar and began to play Imagine. She stopped, her eyes full of tears, and looked at me, shaking her head, no, no, no, it can't be, to which I said aloud, "You were there with me at Albert Hall. You heard him, it's up to us." She had; it is.