How I Met Charles

© 2003 Kurt Leland

When I first began to develop my channeling abilities, back in 1980, I’d been reading the works of the medium Jane Roberts (1929-1984) for several years. She channeled a nonphysical entity named Seth, whose books were quite popular in the seventies and early eighties. These books talked about the nature of the soul and the Afterlife, and about how we each create our own realities through our beliefs about it.

Seth’s teachings had made a lot of sense to me. I was in graduate school studying music at the time, but felt alienated from university life. I also had too much time on my hands. Thus, I conceived a bold plan: Why not try to make contact with my own nonphysical teacher? At that time there were no books or seminars on the subject of channeling. I’d have to make my own way.

I studied the books in which Jane Roberts had written about how she developed her own ability to speak for Seth in trance and made up a time line. She’d started her journey with a Ouija board. So I went out and bought one for myself at a local toy store.

By this time I’d met a piano major named Dennis who shared my interest in spiritual matters. We would get together late in the evening, after both of us were finished with the duties of work, study, and practice, and ply the Ouija board with questions.

In the beginning it didn’t seem as if either of us had much talent for working with the board. In our first session, on October 26, 1980, we spent two and a half hours asking questions and writing down the letters the planchette pointed to--and didn’t get a single intelligible word, not even the. In subsequent sessions the board ignored our questions, but performed odd sweeping motions, passing over one letter at a time, as if there really were a nonphysical being behind its movements and its purpose was to familiarize itself with the layout of the board.

Dennis and I kept asking questions, however--and session by session they got more complicated, despite the board’s apparent inability to do anything but run through the alphabet. Frustrated by the lack of response we were getting, we began to have arguments over terminology. Dennis was familiar with spiritualism, and so would use words like astral, etheric, and ectoplasm. I felt that this vocabulary was old-fashioned and wanted substitute the equivalent terms from Seth’s book. At one point, utterly exasperated with each other, we asked the board what it thought of our argument, and got our first complete word: SILLY.

It wasn’t long before we were able to get short simple, noncommital sentences, supposedly having an entity who identified itself as A.M. as their source. We must have been as exasperating to A.M. as we were to each other. Excited about the possibility of receiving past-life information through the board, we asked a lot of leading questions. The board would patiently answer by pointing to the YES or the NO or simply rowing around in the uncharted areas of the board, perhaps letting us know that our questions weren’t clear or useful.

At some point in the midst of these experiments, Dennis took his hands off the planchette, which continued to move with only my own hands on it. I thought this an interesting enough development to try it out on my own, without Dennis.

I sat on the floor of my cramped dorm room, with the board between my legs. Placing my hands on the planchette, I was struck with how much more sense the semi-circular arches of the alphabet made from this position. When I got proficient at using the board in this manner, the planchette would shoot forward and touch a letter with its point, reminding me of the inner workings of old-fashioned typewriters.

During my first solo session, on November 16, 1980, I received the following odd message from A.M.: YOUR PARTNER IS NOT YET OK. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t have a partner. However, immediately after receiving the message, the telephone rang. Dennis was in the hospital, having taken an overdose of migraine medication. The message that preceded this call was my first indication that A.M. might have been something more than Dennis’s and my overactive imaginations.

I didn’t receive any earth-shaking revelations from A.M. But my contact with him, her, or it was endlessly entertaining. In that first solo session there was a point when A.M. spelled out the word HUMOUR several times. I asked why. The answer was: BECAUSE I’M TOUCHING THE ENGLISH CHANNEL. When I naively asked what other channels A.M could touch, the planchette spelled out with a flourish: ABC, CBS, NBC.

Jane Roberts had made a much stronger contact with the other world much sooner than I did. Within a week of her first session she was already receiving messages on the nature of consciousness. I had wait for two months to pass before I was able to receive anything more than banter from the board. Clearly, I had to let go of the time line I’d sketched out from her books. My own abilities were developing along their own trajectory.

During Christmas break, after reading a book about using the Ouija board, I realized that there was something wrong with my approach. I kept asking questions and getting humorous but usually noncommital answers. There was no depth to the material, no way of telling whether it was truly coming from the other side or was simply a fabrication of my subconscious mind. Much of it was quite frankly nonsense--but, then, so were my past-life-obsessed questions.

I decided on a radical change in my approach. I would ask the board itself if there was anything I could do to improve communication with it. In several sessions held at the turn of the year, A.M. requested that I get some type decals from the store that would include punctuation, and then dictated to me where to place them. Also, I was to attach an old Mercury-head (silver) dime to the pointer end of the planchette to improve reception.

Reception improved so much after this point that I was soon able to hear in my head the messages the board had been laboriously spelling out. I began to write them down without the help of the board, only going back to it when I’d lost the train of thought.

By this time I’d met another new friend--Allan, a graduate student in economics--who was also into things spiritual. We both lived in the same dorm on different floors. He and I would get together in my room. He’d ask the questions, I’d work the board, and he’d write down the answers that A.M. provided.

Allan got impatient with the process on the night of February 8, 1981, a little more than three months after my first Ouija session with Dennis. He told me later that he’d been thinking, “Okay, A.M., let’s cut this bullshit and see if we can get Kurt into a deep trance state.” But before he could say anything, A.M. spelled out that I should set aside the board and see if I could go into trance.

I had no idea what to do. I’d recently learned a yogic breathing technique for meditation, and that seemed like a good place to start. Soon after initiating it I felt my head rolling around on my neck and a numbness develop in my limbs. Hadn’t I seen something like this happen on TV? I found myself wondering.

I began whispering, saying the same syllables over and over again, which gradually turned into humming, then chanting, and finally speaking. A.M expressed joy over being liberated from the board. I wasn’t sure what to make of what was going on. I was still conscious of all that I said and did, even though I no longer felt like the source of the words and actions that seemed to be expressing themselves through me.

For the next several months, I would get together with Allan once or twice a week for these spoken trance sessions, even as I continued the solo sessions with Ouija board and trance-dictation. The pattern of entertaining, but usually noncommital messages continued in the spoken-trance sessions, while the information content of the solo sessions gradually deepened.

In retrospect, I can see the wisdom of the approach that A.M. was taking with me. I needed to become proficient in both writing and speaking while in a trance state. I wasn’t ready yet to deliver information of any depth. The quips and banter made the process of acclimating myself to the trance more enjoyable and kept both Allan and me coming back for more. In the meantime, I continued with my course work, composition lessons, clarinet and piano practice, and job at the library. Every Thursday, when I had no classes, I would treat myself to lunch at a vegetarian coffeehouse in the basement of the Unitarian-Universalist church near the music building. There I met yet another new friend, Brian, someone I’ve remained close to ever since.

Brian was one of the cooks at the restaurant, who only worked there a couple of times a week. Once when I went through the line he took one look at me, sized me up, and asked point blank if I was into astrology--as if he had an intuition about the nature of my psychic explorations. Shortly thereafter I invited him up to my room to see what would happen if I were to go into trance without Allan being present.

The trance was not only successful, but changed both my own and Brian’s life. Brian asked me a question about the symbolism of tarot cards. In trance, I responded with a statement that has since become the cornerstone of the Charles material: “Symbols are a means consciousness uses to monitor its own development.” That was on April 25, 1981. Charles had arrived.

During the first few months of my experiments with spoken trance, a few other voices identifying themselves as different from A.M. had come through. After this first session with Charles, I continued to speak for A.M., and a few other entities who identified themselves by name. Within a year, however, Charles had taken over completely--and has remained with me right up until the present. The other names and voices disappeared.

Brian and I continued to do sessions together, even after he graduated and moved back home to Chicago. When I was finished with my class work, we got an apartment together in Chicago and began holding a weekly Charles class. He and his future wife, Judy, met in that class. When I decided to move to Boston, Brian’s job transferred here. He and Judy moved in together, got married, attended the Boston version of the Charles class for a number of years, and made me a Dutch uncle for their children.

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