A Medium or a Channel?
DEAR JEANETTE: What is the difference between a medium and a channel? H.A., Forest Park, MI.
DEAR H.A.: Mediums have long been known as persons who can make contact with the spirit world and bring messages to those who are not able to make such contacts for themselves. Various methods and accessories may be used to help accomplish this. Also various levels of the spirit world may be contacted.
A medium, today, is regarded as anyone who can contact the spirit world for messages or signs from that world. A channel is a medium who is making contact with a rather high level spirit or spirits for specific purposes of transmitting teachings or other truths.
The same person may serve, and frequently does, as both a medium and a channel, since the ability to contact the spirit world can be used and developed in more than one direction.
To understand this more fully, you need to know something of the development of the discarnates who are in the spirit world. A person who has recently ‘died’ will continue to have the same personality, characteristics, and talents that he or she had before becoming a discarnate.
As the spirit learns to function without the body, it will learn that time and space no longer have the same meaning that they had in the physical world. Therefore the spirit can see and learn things differently from the way it was necessary to see or learn while on earth.
There are many discarnates who take the opportunity to communicate with earth beings whenever they find the opening. They will be, sometimes, troublemakers or at least mischievous in their dealings with those of us on this side. They are frequently the ones who ‘speak’ through such means as Ouija boards and automatic writing.
Those who are troublemakers, or actually evil in their intent, can cause a great deal of trouble for anyone who deals with them. Possession of the incarnate by the discarnate could actually result from such contact.
The person who is acting as a channel is contacting the spirit world at a level where the beings have spent that necessary time and effort to become much more knowledgeable than they were when they first entered the astral or spirit world. The messages from such spirits will usually be teachings of truth and beauty or truly helpful information for the one receiving it.