Channeling does not exist in a vacuum. Although these latter
chapters may seem to have gotten farther and farther away from the
heart of what channeling is all about, nevertheless they represent
the things that I have found to be concomitant with a responsible
approach to the stewardship of channeled materials.
Publishing is not for every channel or for every group. Although
your attitude as a channel, for transmission of data, is focused
passivity, your attitude as one preparing channeling for any kind of
publishing needs to be that of a hard-nosed researcher. Choose only
what you consider to be the channel’s best work. Note that I did not
say choose your best work. It is not a good idea for a channel to
edit his own material.
An objective eye is very helpful, regardless
of your point of view as a channel. Some channels do think a lot of
themselves. Others think too little of their material and tend to
value others’ work with less discrimination than their own. Seldom
is anyone unbiased about his own work. Whichever way you may be
biased, it is well to eliminate the bias by selecting someone who
can be relied upon to give good, objective opinions.
When you consider the enormous amount of channeled material, even if
you consider only published material and eliminate manuscripts, you
are gazing at a repository of millions of words. The attitude of a
scientist is appropriate when it comes to publishing because you
want to contribute to the field, not merely add look-alikes to
already extant material. Wait until you feel that you have
accumulated a group of channeled materials of which you can really
feel proud.
The range of scale on which you can preserve and publish material is
close to infinite. The smallest level is the manuscript, whether it
be a holographic copy, which is common to those who employ automatic
handwriting or typewriting or tapes. These are unedited and
represent an archival record of the channeling work that you have
done.
Whether or not you plan to publish at the time that you are
conducting a session, do record sessions. If you decide not to use a
particular session you have perhaps wasted a tape, but I don’t think
so. It has been my experience that one often goes back to scan one’s
older resources when one is working on a project and finds little
treasure troves that are most useful. Remember that channeling is
some of the hardest work that you will ever do in terms of
concentration and emotional and mental care, and it is well not to
waste it by failing to employ what the 20th century has in so much
abundance— record-keeping devices.
Whether or not you have any publishing ambition at present, then,
make plans to begin your own archives. You will need the usual
office equipment, most of which is rather specialized and used in
libraries. If you do not have a library supply house near you, I
recommend that you obtain Gaylord Bros., Inc., mail order catalogue.
(Gaylord Bros., Inc., Box 4901, Syracuse, NY. 13221) As a former
librarian I can recommend that concern as an excellent and
reasonably priced supplier of the various cards, containers, files
and so forth that you might need to hold your materials and keep
them cool and dry or otherwise preserved.
The next level of care in preservation is creating a transcript
archive. Transcripts are much more edit-able than holographs or
tapes. You will want to create a standard format for your
transcripts if you decide to convert the information on tapes or
written by hand to a more easily readable and editable typewritten
medium.
I recommend that you include the date each tape is made, the
names of contacts on the tape, the names of channels used and the
names of any questioners whose questions may have prompted answers
by the contact through the channel. You may think when you are
having a session that you will remember what went on in it, but over
a period of years things run together in memory and it becomes
impossible to retrieve the knowledge of who, when and where by
looking at the tape.
Clean your faithful typewriter—that costs very little—at regular
intervals, and keep a good black ribbon in it, for if you do edit
your material at a later date, you will want to be able to see the
copy.
Also recommended are the use of double-spaced lines and wide margins
so that you can write above, below or beside copy during the editing
process. It is not always easy to remember just how you are going to
cut and paste selections of channeling, and room for notes is often
most welcome. It has never been my practice to do more editing in
channeled material than is needed to unsplit an infinitive or
eliminate channeling errors in transmission, which are usually
pointed out quite promptly by the contacts within the channeled
message.
Sometimes a word is lost and one simply has to guess at the
proper word, which I think is quite acceptable if there is enough of
a context to go on. The one thing I am not for is changing a
channeling or adding to it in any way that has substantive meaning,
since the nature of channeled material is that authorship does not
reside with the channel. It is not polite to rewrite discarnate
entities’ inspiring sermonettes! This is so no matter how great the
temptation because of the difference in some personally held tenet.
How devastating would it be to you or your group to lose the
channeled material that you have produced in the past? If the answer
to that is, “Very,” you need to set up a safe file, separate from
the archive’s files, either in a safety deposit box in your bank or
at the home of a friend who lives in a distant neighborhood or city.
I prefer the latter course since this gives me the opportunity to
share the channeling with someone interested in it anyway, as well
as to have an archive copy which would survive even a totally
devastating fire at my own house.
There are peculiarities to channeling which make setting up a
recording system a little challenging. If you or your group’s
channels have loud, piercing or resonant voices there are no
problems that cannot be easily overcome. However, not only do many
channels have quiet voices; the nature of channeling is such that it
causes many channels to lower what little voice they have in order
to flow with the energy which is being transmitted, which is
peaceful and serene in many cases.
The reason that this can cause
problems, by and large, is that most tape recorders are equipped
with automatic recording levels programmed into the internals of the
machine. There is no way the operator can manually adjust recording
volume level. This means that when the machine hears a silent room
with one soft voice speaking somewhere in the distance, it turns the
level up accordingly to pick up the small voice.
This causes a great
deal of tape hiss. I am told by the wonderful volunteer (by name,
and thank you endlessly, honorable Judy Dunn) who transcribes our
Sunday night meditations that the white noise is deafening under
those circumstances.
There are solutions. The first is to purchase inexpensive equipment,
and we do not exclude the low-priced Radio Shack product which is
geared to use with the tie-pin microphone. This type of microphone
is excellent and when pinned to a channel’s clothing will pick up
even a whisper with no problems. Cheap tape recorders do fall apart,
and more expensive tape machines do not have the proper-sized jacks
for the tie-pin microphones, so the tie-pin mike does not seem to
last well, at least not for us.
On balance, however, we have had
almost as good luck using cheaper equipment as “expensive”! Of
course, had we an inordinate amount of funds we would be able to buy
really expensive, professional recording equipment, both recorders
and microphones, which is an entirely different breed of cat from
tape recorders on the general consumer market, which are geared far
better to play than to record, and could promise one an ideal
recording situation.
The amount of money that would need to be
expended would be beyond most small groups’ means. If you have the
means, talk to your favorite recording studio engineer or
professional sound dealer to find out how best to supply your needs.
The other solution is to get a “better” machine and a very good
microphone and hand-hold the microphone when necessary, so that it
is always close to a soft-voiced channel or questioner. This
involves seating the people in the group carefully. If anyone
reading this knows the perfect setup for the inexpensive recording
of channeling I invite you to write me and let me know.
The third level, in terms of ambition, of channeling projects is the
edited selection of messages on tape or on paper. The likely vehicle
for such is the research report or bulletin, put together either
like a short newsletter periodically or, if you feel that you have a
body of material that is worth publishing as a book, a very
inexpensively produced book with a small number of copies ordered.
If you decide upon the research report format, you will need to get
a masthead composed and a printer.
The information on the masthead
needs to include the name of your organization, an indication of its
tax exempt status and a short declaration of what your group is.
Your address should always be included, and if you are in the
process of moving or think that you might move within the next few
years, you would be well advised to print an address that you are
fairly certain will be stable for as many years as possible.
Some
people use post office boxes and keep them from year to year whether
or not they remain in the same place as the post office box. Others
use Mom, a friend or a relative. You would be surprised what
longevity paper has. You never know when you are going to get a
letter from a person who has seen some of your work published years
ago and who now wants to read more.
Your choice of a typewriter is personal. Some people are very
conscious of the way things look and really are bothered if they do
not have a good-looking copy. Others simply don’t see the niceties
of ink on paper, and concentrate completely on the material itself.
If the material is good, they have few complaints about the format,
whether or not it deserves it. Most people are not of this latter
kind, and if you wish to avoid criticism in the future, you might
straighten up your typewriter now! Electronic typewriters give you
many special effects that mechanical-action typewriters simply could
not unless one had an office-type IBM.
Proportional spacing is a
good device for achieving a more “printed” look if you are doing
camera-ready copy at the typewriter. Some machines, especially
computer-assisted ones, allow you to justify the right margin and
use proportional spacing, which is as good as having copy typeset,
if the computer does a good job.
Another format for this level of “just a few copies” of channeling,
the modestly printed book, requires that you choose a cover and a
title page. Be sure that on the title page you have all the needed
information about yourself and your group and on the back of the
title page, all the needed addresses, publication data and so forth.
Take a look in a mass market book, especially on the reverse side
(verso) of the title page, to familiarize yourself with the kind of
information that gets put there.
Be sure, whether you are choosing
the research report or the book as your vehicle, to place the
copyright declaration clearly on the title page or on its verso. The
declaration should read ©, the copyrighting person or corporation,
and the year of publication, all on one line. This protects you even
before you have gotten your actual copyright from the Library of
Congress. (To copyright your book write: Registrar of Copyright,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20559 and ask for Form TX.)
If
you are generating periodical reports you should know that you need
to copyright each and every report if you wish to have that
information available to nationwide retrieval systems. Books, of
course, must also be copyrighted separately. It is a relatively
simple task, except for the blanks having to do with authorship.
We
have copyrighted our channeled material in the name of the contact,
not the name of the channel, and the Library of Congress has had
precedents for this and allowed it, although the channeling then is
classified by the archaic term, “spirit writings,” which may not
appeal to some channels. There is a faintly surrealistic tone to
submitting a copyright to one’s government which explains that a
book has been written by a discarnate and unborn entity which does
not live in the United States, which has done the work “for hire”!
The cheapest binding for a modest book publication—by which I mean,
say, under 200 books printed—is the spiral binding. If you use 8½"
by 11" paper and type the copy yourself, a spiral-bound volume can
be had at a very reasonable price. One note about pricing is that if
you wish to tell people how much it costs you to print the book you
must figure in mailing expenses and office supplies like envelopes
and shipping tape.
The small book or research report can also be put on tape, a medium
which many people prefer to the printed word. If you decide to
publish in tape form you must put a (p) notice (copyright for
recorded material, or “poppyright”) on each cassette in order to
copyright the material. You would also need to ask for Form SR from
the Library of Congress.
As with books, that statement on the
cassette indicates intention to copyright which makes plagiarism
illegal whether or not the Library of Congress has actually received
or processed the tape. The same kind of care should go into
producing a tape as producing a book. You would not want mistakes
and dirty copy in a book, nor do you want garbled language or a
noisy tape if you produce in that medium. There are times, however,
when if you want to make something available to the public, you must
take what you can get.
When our research associate, Don Elkins, died
in 1984, Jim McCarty and I found that neither one of us had been
careful enough about recording and placing in an archive Don’s
dozens of brilliant and fascinating lectures, given over a
thirty-year period. We found that we had only enough material to
make one composite tape, 90 percent of which was recorded on a very
poor machine with dirty heads in the most unprofessional manner. Our
tape machine was probably stuck under my chair.
Moreover, a radio
station occupied an upper floor of a high rise near the building we
were in, and strains of music bled through, drifting on and off the
tape with annoying regularity. Professionals could not remove the
tape noise or the music, but we felt that it was important to make
just one of our Research Director’s amazing story-telling sessions
available to those who might request it, so we published what we
had.
Would that I had had this book back when I began this work. You
may want to submit your channeled material for magazine publication.
It is a small market, but I can recommend the well-produced METAPSYCHOLOGY: THE JOURNAL OF DISCARNATE INTELLIGENCE, (P.O. Box
3295, Charlottesville, VA 22903) as the standard for the field.
The fourth level of publishing scope is the research report or book
in quantities over two hundred. I use the figure of two hundred
because if you have over 200 pieces of mail to send out at any one
time you can save a great deal of money, eventually, by using bulk
mailing privileges. When you are sending out a yearly report which
has been pre-subscribed, it’s very helpful to have the bulk mailing
ability.
Of course, if you have barely two hundred people on your
mailing list it will not pay you to get the permit because it costs
a substantial amount of money just to obtain the permit number, and
it would be difficult to make up the difference between the savings
and the cost involved with the mailing permit.
At this larger scale the instructions given for the more modest
efforts become more important—the copyright, the production of a
complete masthead and the inclusion of a fairly permanent address.
The more books or reports that you publish each time, the more
inexpensive each volume is. However, don’t be fooled into ordering
more copies of the book than you will need simply to get the lower
price per volume.
Speaking of money, the binding of a book is a rather large part of
the expense of producing it. Although the spiral binding is the
least expensive, a staple binding (saddle stitching) is also fairly
inexpensive. In that binding method the book is printed on double
sheets folded over to make a book with staples at the fold.
Perfect
binding is more pleasing to the eye and handier for putting one’s
title on the spine—since the pages are glued together to make a
spine—and is correspondingly more expensive. Perfect bindings these
days are almost always glued, the cost of stitching being enormously
expensive. However, today’s glues are excellent, for the most part,
so do not feel that you are cutting corners too much if you want to
publish a really good-quality book and decide on a glued perfect
binding.
At this level you are still doing it yourself. I urge you to stay
away from vanity publishers and I say this as a librarian with quite
a bit of experience in the matter. They promise you a great deal,
all of which is basically true, but almost all of which comes to
nothing for 98 percent of their customers. Instead, look for small
presses who publish in your field.
Often a small press which is
publishing a periodical will have quite a bit of time between
printing issues and will be glad to have your business. By all
means, comparison-shop and put the printer to work who offers you
both a reasonable price on the job and a feeling of mutual sympathy
over the phone or in person. Printing a book involves a lot of
discussion and if you choose a printer who is not easy to talk to,
you are not doing yourself any favors. Often the most sympathetic
person also offers a good price per job, which helps cut costs.
Private printers usually charge half of the cost of printing when
they receive a manuscript and half when they deliver the volumes to
you. Thus the cost is well-known ahead of time and there are no
surprises, unless something occurs right at the moment the process
of printing is taking place and you both decide together to make
some changes. If you have a printer who makes changes without
telling you, use your discretion, but certainly consider going to
another printer.
The computer has brought to the home publisher a new ease in
typesetting. Formerly the printer had to do that for you. Now, if
you have a personal computer which is compatible with your printer’s
printing computer you can format your book or research report at
home on the computer and transmit it to the printer over a telephone
modem.
The cost to us, at this writing, of typesetting from our
publisher, Palmer Publications, Box 296, Amherst, WI 54406, is about
ten dollars per page, and if you are printing a book you are talking
about a four-figure amount which can be saved by using your
computer. Rejoice, if you have one and know how to use it! And
certainly if you are considering printing a book which will run 200
pages or more, you might consider getting a computer instead of
jobbing out the typesetting, and doing the typesetting yourself.
After typesetting those two hundred pages, and thereby making up the
two thousand dollars which you have laid out for the computer, you
have the typesetting done and a computer left over which can do the
same thing for you another time, plus, need I say, a whole lot more.
You will think, after proof-reading your book in galley form, or on
the computer, that you have been careful, thorough and complete in
your proofing. However, copyreading is an art and not a science. The
human eye can scarcely ever be trained to see everything which comes
before it. Proofread extensively and redundantly, and after you have
finished the process, proofread once more. You will almost always
find more errors each time you go through a manuscript.
I mentioned the efficacy of recording the date of every session when
you do transcripts. It’s also well to preserve these dates in any
publication which you may decide to make. It is the only way to
retrieve, for a questioning reader, the context of a particular
channeling, part of which you may have used in your publication.
Mailing can easily be done from the home, since in most parts of the
country there is either a post office very near or a mail carrier
who picks up mail at your mailbox. Be sure and get stout envelopes
because there is something about a package the size of a book which
must distress those who slog through sleet and rain to carry our
mail.
Until we figured out that we had a problem using bulk rates
and services we lost several books entirely. Now we have learned to
use clear packing tape and very tough envelopes. Other things that
you will need for mailing will be a weight scale, a rate schedule, a
zip code book and, if you decide to use bulk mailing privileges, all
the rubber bands, stickers and other paraphernalia that the postal
service provides free to the permit holder.
Many groups wish to advertise their publications, and a good many of
them spend money that they don’t need to in order to do so. Spend
carefully if you wish to buy advertising. Aim the advertisement at
the metaphysical audience to which it will appeal. Use a soft sell,
refraining from boasting or sensationalism unless there is a touch
of larceny in your soul. Mail-order selling is a science which is
very big on hyperbole, and that’s fine in a free-market society, but
when you are dealing with metaphysics there is an innate morality
which I, personally, wish would prevail more often.
If you are going to advertise once in a periodical, advertise at
least three times. Studies have shown that advertising is most
effective done this way.
Lots of people who have not published previously are probably
puzzled by this point in the chapter because I have not mentioned
selling your work to a mass-market publisher as an option. I will do
so now, but only to discourage you. For every piece of channeled
material that gets published by a mass-market publisher there are
thousands of manuscripts that are destined to gather rejection slips
as easily and inevitably as city snow gathers soot.
This is due to
the highly speculative venture that any publisher engages upon when
he publishes channeled material. If it hits, it hits very well; it
if does not hit, it represents an expense to the publisher and most
publishers have been stung by channelings which their editors
respected and appreciated but which the mass market did not.
One of our books, THE RA MATERIAL, (Originally THE LAW OF ONE in its
first private printing) has been published by a mass-market
publisher.
They did a very good job with it, but it took two years,
almost, to get it through the typesetting, proofing and editing
process, and even though we do not have to publish it ourselves it
is more expensive for us to offer to our readers than any of our
other books because the mass-market publisher cannot sell it to us
at its cost of printing it and make a profit. We pay the same price
that wholesalers do.
We have not been lucky enough to have a
publisher which wishes to get behind us with promotional tours of
lectures or extensive advertising, so we have realized no benefit
from mass-market publishing. Consequently, I don’t recommend it for
your first venture, unless you really don’t care about publishing
unless someone else can do it for you. In any case I wish you good
luck and Godspeed with your work and your materials.
This Handbook couldn’t be more timely—or more useful.
Channeling is an age-old art, but only recently has it exploded into
such widespread popularity that many thousands of individuals are
learning how to access wisdom, information, and reassurance from a
variety of nonphysical sources.
How do you make contact with higher entities who have your best
interests in mind? And, having done so, how to you retain your
sanity and common sense, and develop your humor and humility? If
ever there was a manual of channeler’s do’s and don’ts, either it
mildewed away in the mists of time or was incinerated by organized
religionists.
Now Carla L. Rueckert—whom we have to thank for channeling The Ra
Material and The Law of One—provides a dandy 20th century
replacement. This is a wise, loving, useful book, and must reading
for anyone involved in the process of personal spiritual expansion.
Tam Mossman
Editor of Metapsychology,
The Journal of Discarnate
Intelligence