Who or What Is Charles?

© 2003 Kurt Leland

When I first began to develop my channeling abilities, I assumed, based on the Seth books, that knowledgeable nonphysical entities existed and that it was possible to contact them in an altered state of consciousness such as the one Jane Roberts used to reach Seth. She called that altered state a trance. I did the best I could to achieve a similar altered state, and the result was an apparently reliable, often extremely wise source of information that I assumed was no different from Seth.

Since Seth had a name, I assumed that my own nonphysical teacher would also have one. I was never told, however, that “his” name was Charles. Instead, I was told: “Here is a sound that you can use to contact a clear source of information.” The sound began with “Ch” and ended with “s,” sounding vaguely Chinese in the middle. Because I wanted a name for my teacher so badly, I chose “Charles,” since that was the only name that seemed to resemble the sound I was given. And Charles it has been ever since.

Before going on, I should say that there are other differences, besides the name, between my experience in trance and that of Jane Roberts. It took me about six months from my first Ouija board attempt to open up to a reliable source of nonphysical guidance. Jane Roberts first accessed Seth by Ouija board only a week after her first attempt, and was speaking in trance for Seth a mere two weeks later.

Once Jane’s trance state had become deep enough to fully accommodate Seth’s presence, the expressions on her face changed dramatically, as well as her gestures. Her eyes are often open, and she can even move around the room. In trance, Jane’s voice deepened and took on a masculine cast. Furthermore, Seth spoke through her with an odd accent, not easily traceable to foreign speakers of English from any one country.

My face doesn’t change when I’m in trance, nor does the quality of my voice. I don’t speak in an accent. People who know me well as Kurt are often able to hear a difference in speech rhythm when Charles is coming through me. I say “Uh” “well” and “you know” like most of us do when speaking. Such words or phrases are virtually absent from Charles’s speech, which rolls on as if he were a highly experienced, often entertaining lecturer. His humor, also, seems to be somewhat different from mine. For lack of a better term, I think of it as cosmic irony.

I speak with my eyes closed at all times. While Charles may sometimes gesture, I don’t move around the room, as Jane did in her early sessions.

Because I wanted so much to emulate Jane Roberts in the beginning of my channeling experiments, I thought that a lot of the difference between her way of working and mine were faults. Jane’s trance, in particular, was so deep that she rarely remembered anything she had said and had to be reminded of it by being shown a transcript done by her husband, Robert Butts. My trance, however, allows me to hear everything I say as a kind of passive witness. Anything that may be relevant to my own growth sticks in my memory.

Over the years I’ve changed my opinion about this detail of my trance experience. Rather than see it as a sign that my trance state isn’t as deep as Jane Roberts’s was, I’m grateful for the accelerated growth that has become possible as a result of my being able to remember what I’ve said. In the case of most clients in private sessions, however, the material that I deliver evaporates from memory within an hour or so of coming out of trance, much like a dream.

One other detail pertaining to my experience of Charles remains to be mentioned. I call him “he” for convenience, because the name I use for him is masculine. Charles, however, refers to himself at all times as “we.” His explanation for this is that he wants to acknowledge the fact that I too am present in the trance state with him--and he’ll sometimes call upon me for help when he can’t find the specific word he wants.

People have often asked me, over the more than twenty years since Charles first appeared in my life, whether he’s a person who once lived in the world and is now either between lifetimes or has somehow graduated from having to incarnate on Earth. I’ve had to say that I don’t know. I had a great uncle who died before I was born who was named Charles, but from what I know about his life (he committed suicide), I doubt that he would have been as reliable a source of spiritual knowledge as my Charles has become.

Charles has further complicated the matter of who or what he is by giving a different answer every time someone asks him the question. In some cases, these answers are related to each other in that each is an attempt to describe nonphysical communication be means of metaphors or analogies with something else. For example, one of the explanations of Charles that I’ve felt the most comfortable with is that the name simply acts as a log-on password to a computer-like information network that exists in nonphysical reality.

In other cases, Charles’s answers to the question of who or what he is have seemed inconsistent with one another. In considering these answers, I’ve had to accept the possibility that the phenomenon of trance channeling may be more complex than the model I’d been working with: a medium goes into trance and his or her nonphysical teacher comes through to offer spiritual guidance and wisdom. Sometimes I’ve suspected that while I call the source of the guidance that comes through me Charles, a variety of nonphysical entities that I’m not sophisticated or sensitive enough to distinguish from one another may come through at different times.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that Charles himself was trying to put across a message to me about the source of such communications. No matter how they might be explained, we’ll never know what’s really going on. Charles could be entirely a product of my own brain or mind--a version of the soul, as described in previous chapters, that represents the highest possible levels of organization within the brain.

Explaining Charles in reductionistic terms, however, does little in my mind to reduce the value of his teaching. It’s still a miracle to me that I can go into trance for an hour and a half and talk and answer questions on virtually any subject with a degree of wisdom and fluency that I rarely achieve when not in trance.

I’ve done thousands of private sessions for clients over the years, as well as more than three hundred classes. I’ve even done nearly six hundred sessions for myself, going into trance at the word-processor keyboard. Such personal sessions are one of the benefits of the lighter, semi-conscious trance state that I’ve cultivated, in which I’m conscious enough to be able to hear and remember the information that comes through me, but without my own personality becoming so involved as to distort it.

Such sessions have been of enormous use to me. My clients also find their own private sessions quite helpful, Some fo them have been seeing me regularly for a decade or more. As for the Charles classes, the Boston branch, so to speak, has been meeting more or less continuously, once a month, since shortly after my arrival here in 1984. As of the present writing, it consists of about two dozen regular members and a number of people who show up less frequently, as well as the occasional one-time drop-in. Some of the regulars have been around since the very beginning.

I mention these facts because the ultimate value of the Charles material can’t be decided purely on the basis of its improbable source. I say “improbable” because many people may find the idea of speaking for a nonphysical teacher in trance incredible.

To my mind, the words of Jesus about how to distinguish between the false prophets and the true apply equally well to trance channelers: “You will know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16) The fruits of the Charles material in myself and others seem to be: an increase in happiness, well-being, self-awareness, and many of the satisfactions (Maslow’s B-values) that I identified in chapter 1 as the products of self-actualization. Even though I can’t say for sure where this information comes from, I’ve come to feel that its benefits speak for themselves.

One of the most remarkable things about the Charles material, perhaps, is its comprehensiveness as a system of spiritual practices intended to promote self-actualization, and its sheer volume. Transcriptions of the Charles classes and my own sessions require some thirty megabytes of storage space on my computer. My 270-page book Otherwhere took up about one megabyte of space on the disk I sent to my publisher when it was finished. Thus I could conceivably publish the equivalent of thirty books of about that size based on the Charles material I’ve collected from 1980 to the present.

I’ll be making some of this material public for the first time here on this website.

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