(M.J.E. Spirit / Glossary / C - G)

Spirit Dialogues

Explorations of Spirit
by Michael Edwards

Front page: Foreword - Site Map
Introduction
Glossary
A - B
C - G (this page)
H - L
M - Z
First dialogue -->

Glossary

(Still under construction - some entries are still partly or entirely unwritten)

Go quickly to alphabetic sections with the following links (letters in bold, larger type are on a different page from this; smaller letters are further down on this page):

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Links to all entries in the Glossary follow now, with the entries for the four pages grouped separately. Entries for pages other than the present one are in bold type, and entries for this page are in normal (large) type.
Notes on the perspective from which I wrote the Glossary can be found on the front page for the Glossary.

A - B

akashic - angel - The Apostle Paul - archangel - Archangel Michael - Ascended Masters - Ascension - Ashtar, Ashtar Command - astral plane - Atlantis - aura - Bivalia

C - G

channelling - Christ - clairaudient - clairsentient - clairvoyant - deva - dimensions (3rd, 4th, 5th, etc.) - El Morya - fairy - God - Ground Ascension

H - L

Higher Self / higher self - Hilarion - Hilarion, Lady - I AM / I AM Presence - Jehovah's Witnesses - Jesus - karma - Koot Hoomi - Kuthumi - Lady Hilarion - light / the Light - light-body

M - Z

Masters - Maya - mental body - merkabah - Michael, Archangel - nature spirit - New Age - Paul - Paul the Apostle - reincarnation - St. Paul - Sananda - soul - starseed - St. Germain - Theosophy

C channelling
While in the dialogues I sometimes refer to the dialogues as channellings, and formerly did so in actual discussion of the dialogues with various interested friends, I am increasingly feeling that I would like to distance the dialogues a little from the concept of channelling as often referred to by New-Age people. That is why I have not labelled this web site as a "channelling" web site. (Actually, I did originally when first designing the web site, but then changed that label, for reasons I will explain here.) In some of the dialogues themselves, I quite often do refer to channelling my Higher Self, and refer to the dialogues as channellings. Even though I do not now want to tie the concept of having dialogues with my Higher Self too closely to the idea of channelling, with all the limitations and baggage that carries with it, I do not now feel I can expunge all those references without having to adjust the context in other ways to fit in with whatever wording I substituted, so those references remain.
Channelling is where a person (once commonly known as a medium, now more trendily known as a channel or channeller - or channeler in the U.S., where the practice is very common), sits quietly and opens his or her mind to beings who exist in the spirit realm, and receives their thoughts. (Some people, especially Christians critical of the practice of channelling, say that the channel is completely controlled by the spirit entity, and is in great danger of being possessed by evil spirits, or even demonic forces.)
I don't have anything as such against channelling, although some channelled messages I've read or heard seem sufficiently content-free or sufficiently lacking in spirituality for me to doubt their authenticity; but, more importantly, what I have done is different from channelling in many ways.
For a start, channelling usually seems to involve a spirit entity totally outside of oneself, typically one of the Masters (very highly evolved beings believed in by certain people in the New Age, in Theosophy, and so on); however, the entity I am possibly in touch with is none other than my Higher Self, who in a real sense is not another being, but simply the true spiritual essence of myself. You could even regard it simply as a dialogue with myself, or at least between two aspects or points of view within myself, and this seems rather removed from the idea of tapping information hitherto completely unknown from outside sources.
This leads to another difference. Although my higher self does perhaps have a different point of view from my ordinary self, and I never had any difficulty in distinguishing these two points of view in writing the dialogues, and was never in danger of confusing the two roles, there is all the same a sense in which it is still all me. My higher self doesn't really tell me anything I don't already know myself at some deep level, as he himself says a couple of times in the dialogues. This is in contrast to receiving channelled messages from the Masters, for instance, where presumably you don't know what they are going to say until they say it.
For these reasons I feel less inclined now to identify the information from my higher self as channelling.
There might also be a more practical reason for not so identifying it, and that is that channelling (whether deservedly or not) is very disreputable amongst many people, especially those of more conservative or orthodox points of view. There is a chance that some such people might find interest in the dialogues, but if they are too prominently identified as channelling, they might be put off even before they can give it a fair reading.
Channelling is also associated in many instances with the giving of prophecies, which I do not myself do in the dialogues. Often the entities who channel are regarded as highly evolved Masters or angels with great spiritual knowledge, and I suppose it is natural therefore to suppose they may have information which ordinary humans don't have; and that might include knowledge of what is going to happen in the future. This leads to the idea of channelled messages prophesying future events, rather disconcertingly often disasters of one sort or another. (I have never quite understood the fascination New-Age people and some Christians and mystics have for the possibility of world-wide cataclysms, often seen as a cleansing agent for the planet before a new Golden Age of peace, prosperity, and wisdom is ushered in. I somehow feel people who believe in these impending disasters are too accepting of them, even almost revelling in them in more extreme cases, and my own feeling is that I don't know what disasters may be in the future, but that I would hope humanity could enter a new era of peace and enlightenment with as little damage as possible along the way.)
Well, if you consider various channelled prophecies of near-future disasters, they sometimes give a date, or at least a time-frame of some sort; and in some cases the appointed time is already well and truly up - and nothing has happened. I have to say that channelled messages have an absolutely lousy record for accuracy of prediction of future events, and I take little notice of messages I hear or read about future events. Even if I think a message has that essence of unconditional love that indicates that it really may be coming from a great Master, if it contains firm prophecies about specific events, I nevertheless regard those as unlikely to happen. Whether the Masters can make mistakes about such things or not, I don't know; it is equally possible that the channeller's own mind is getting in the way and spoiling the purity of the message (perhaps quite unintentionally and unbeknownst to the channeller - I by no means accuse all of them of dishonesty). But, for whatever reason, I have to accept that no channelled message can be assumed to be pure and infallible, even if I really do feel it is likely to contain the essence of a great Master. And channelling is well known to be inherently flawed in that it can never be entirely free of impurity or extraneous thoughts or ideas.
I don't rule out the possibility of channelling being a possible means of receiving information from beyond this world, but I think it has its limitations, and can only be valid if those are observed. And I am increasingly persuaded that the receiving of reliable information about future events is not one of the purposes which channelling serves well. That's not to say that channelling may not serve valid purposes: for instance, it may provide a means of learning new ideas which can broaden one's spiritual outlook (without definitively telling you whether such ideas are The Truth or not), or it may provide you with inspiration or motivations of various sorts. It may validly provide individuals with information that applies to them in their current situation, with the emphasis being on that relativity of the information to that individual's situation at that particular time: in other words, the information may not be valid to anyone else, or maybe even not to the same individual at a different time of their life from when the information is received.
If one can speak of my dialogues as being channelled from my higher self (and I'm not really fussed one way or the other whether they are so regarded, since that's only playing games with words), I believe it is these more subjective uses of channelling I just described which my dialogues focus on; and I believe as you read the dialogues you should be able to see this. There is a wealth of ideas to consider here, new ways of looking at things, perhaps even tentative and somewhat uncertain answers, and new questions; but there is very little in the way of firm truth or doctrine or revelation.
The information I have received from my higher self is in a sense information I am already familiar with in one way or another; yet in another way it has turned out to give me a series of ideas or concepts I may not have otherwise thought of, and in a subtle way I believe this has influenced my spiritual growth and outlook, probably mostly for the better.
This information may not be relevant or even helpful to anyone at all other than myself, and I make no promises whatever about what you may get from reading the dialogues. If they come your way, however, and you choose to read them, I hope you enjoy them, and hope that they may occasionally give you inspiration or insight. I ask you to consider anything you read open-mindedly, and not to dismiss it without thought if it happens to disagree with beliefs you already hold strongly.
Above all, don't treat anything I say as dogma or unquestioned truth. Think about it, question it, and really consider whether you think it's true. Does it feel right in some deep sense that maybe you can't fully explain in words? Do you have the feeling that, if anything spiritual is true, that the truth must be something along these lines, because it just makes sense, or because nothing else seems to make as much sense? Does what is written here ring true because it matches experiences you've had yourself, or provides a plausible way of interpreting their possible meaning or significance?
The best way of reading what I have written is to do so with questions of this sort in the back of your mind - and of course to treat each topic or subject or issue discussed separately, so that you might find yourself saying, "Yes, yes" to some parts - "that really does make sense, it resonates with me", while at other times you may respond, "No, that doesn't feel right to me - I can't accept that at this time". What I've written is not a single, monolithic, indivisible block that is so interdependent in its various parts that you have to either accept it all as true or reject it all as false, like some scriptures or religions are considered by their adherents - even though I do find myself that it hangs together in something like the same way (although I think less rigorously than is often claimed for religions or scriptures). Whatever I have come up with is not a new religion (although it may be different from any established tradition you may know of), and is not absolute truth; it is just my own view of truth, filtered through my own perceptions and biases. I don't believe any spiritual concepts can be any more than this, but they often claim to be absolute and infallible.
My dialogues are perhaps best regarded as not being channelling, which is why I have stopped referring to them by that label. And indeed, anyone who reads them who has already heard or read channelled messages from Masters or angels or other high beings will find that there is not a great deal of resemblance between the two either in content or in general tone and outlook, although I think at the least there is less disagreement between my dialogues and these sources than there is with most other sources of spiritual information that I know of (which of course is far from all that exists).

Christ
[... description to appear later.]

clairaudient
The concept of psychic senses, which operate on higher levels of existence than the physical, but in an approximately parallel fashion, is discussed under clairvoyant. "Clairaudient" and "clairaudience" simply refer to the hearing equivalent of clairvoyance.

clairsentient
The concept of psychic senses, which operate on higher levels of existence than the physical, but in an approximately parallel fashion, is discussed under clairvoyant. "Clairsentient" and "clairsentience" simply refer to the touching or feeling equivalent of clairvoyance.

clairvoyant
If we accept the premise, common in the New Age, Theosophy, and similar systems of spirituality, that the universe exists on various levels of existence, of which the physical is merely the lowest (as explained under astral plane), clairvoyance is the ability to see beings or objects on higher planes of existence than the physical, such as the astral, mental, and so on. "Clairvoyant" is the adjective for this, and a clairvoyant is also a person who has this ability. The term means literally "clear-seeing", and it is not a bad description of what clairvoyance is.
Actual physical sight is not involved, according to most sources, and thus it should be possible for a totally blind person to be clairvoyant. It is presumed that, as part of the psychic ability we all supposedly possess latently, we have psychic equivalents of our normal physical senses which, when developed, allow us to perceive things on higher levels of existence. So clairvoyance is the ability to use psychic sight to see into the astral plane or even higher, depending on the clairvoyant's level of development.
Clairvoyance is not simply the ability to read the future, as many people suppose. Whether reading the future is possible or not, even in principle, depends on the position one takes about whether we have true free-will, or whether all events are predestined in some way. Opinions differ on this, and it is not necessary to delve into this here; but, regardless of the position taken on this, very few people knowledgeable about the subject would describe clairvoyance as the ability to read future events. It is, as previously explained, the ability to see things on higher planes than the physical; but, given that the various planes influence each other, the ability to see non-physical planes may give one information that enables one to see likely future events on the physical plane that are completely invisible to anyone who does not have clairvoyant sight.
Clairvoyance is the most commonly known and spoken-of psychic sense, presumably because humans are visually-oriented, and sight is our most important and prominent sense. But if you accept the reality of clairvoyance, there is no reason at all why psychic equivalents should not exist of the other senses too, so that clairaudience ("clear hearing") is the ability to hear psychically into higher planes of existence, and clairsentience ("clear feeling") is the ability to feel psychically.
Presumably the senses of smell and taste also have these higher equivalents, although I have never heard or read of any references to them, and do not know explicit terms for them.

D deva
[... description to appear later.]

dimensions (3rd, 4th, 5th, etc.)
[... description to appear later.]

E El Morya
[... description to appear later.]

F fairy
[... description to appear later.]

G God
In attempting to write this entry, I feel as if I'm trying to embark on writing an entire history of the universe and a complete account of the meaning of life within a few paragraphs - something which is clearly near-impossible to do. Without a doubt, the term "God" is the most difficult term of all those in this glossary to describe, and yet at the same time the most important. Rather than try to work out the ultimate best method of going about this, I'm going to try the opposite approach and just follow my nose, and say whatever seems to come to mind on the subject. Clearly, at least an approximate understanding of what I mean by certain key words such as "God" and "Spirit" is important for you to understand the dialogues properly and avoid misinterpreting them.
One approach I might be tempted to follow would be just to say to you, "Go and read the dialogues", which effectively spend hundreds of pages talking around the meaning of "God", and sometimes focusing directly on it. In fact, I do recommend this course of action. This will give you my own view of God - and I assume you are interested in that, or else you wouldn't be wasting your time reading this web site at all.
But let me try to say a few words about God here. By this name, I do not mean the Christian God, the Jewish God, the Islamic God, the Hindu God(s) - or indeed any set, doctrinal concept of God at all. In many ways, I think God is what you think he/she/it is; I think the question, by its very nature (at least in this limited world), is highly subjective - perhaps the most subjective question it is possible to consider.
It's much easier to say what God is not than to say what he is (and for convenience I'll usually use the masculine pronoun rather than the clumsy "he/she/it"). And one of these negative characteristics of God is that I believe he cannot be defined - whatever you say about him, someone might find (or conceive of) aspects of him that don't agree with your description; no statement about him is ever going to fully describe all aspects of him, and there will always be aspects of him that go against your description.
Well, except perhaps for statements such as "God is love" (or "God is loving"). To be sure, I would accept that this far from described God fully, in that there might be attributes of him that this does not cover; but I would find it difficult to see attributes of God which showed this statement to be false in any way - that is, I would find it difficult to see hate in God. If I am right here, then that at least is a statement about God that is unqualifiedly true.
But someone else may disagree, and I can't show them to be wrong. Indeed, many fundamentalist Christians will eagerly tell you that there is plenty that God hates, including many types of behaviour (not all them self-evidently offensive or harmful), and even, in extreme cases, certain whole classes of human being - such as homosexuals, for instance.
However, this is a view of God I do not personally accept in the slightest. If you have anything like this view of God, not only will you consider my dialogues, and the entire contents of this web site, as false, but you will see them as shocking, corrupt, and heretical, and straight from the Devil himself. You will find this entire web site blatantly blasphemous, and thoroughly offensive and obnoxious, perhaps to be compared to paedophile web sites. You have the right to this view, and I am not going to attempt to refute it, except insofar as the dialogues themselves from time to time discuss such views.
I see God as the essence of that inner longing I think we all have, although we may not be aware of it if we have let the worries, or even routine, of everyday life swamp it. But surely, if only we can be open to it, we can all experience a sudden wild, inner longing of such poignancy, for no apparent reason, or perhaps prompted by some little event, or some touch of beauty somewhere, of such a nature that we don't know what we're longing for, but we feel sure we would instantly recognize it if we actually came across it. This is one view of God that is proposed by writer C. S. Lewis, and I agree with him on this, although in many respects I strongly disagree with his Anglican theology. (Well, he didn't regard this experience as defining God, as being what he is - and neither do I; but he regarded this as the merest glimpse of the full reality of God, who is too wonderful for us to fully comprehend beyond that sort of level - and so do I.)
But since the dialogues explore such ideas in much greater detail, I don't see much point in going further into it here. But perhaps it's important to realize that I view God as someone/something to be experienced within, not merely accepted from outside authorities or scriptures as a doctrine that can't be questioned (although of course I recognize the right of anyone to accept such a view of God if they see fit to). And because one's view of God (according to my own view of God) comes from experience, it can change from time to time as your experiences and view of life change. Thus I directly challenge the idea beloved of many Christians that God is eternally the same, and never changes in any way. Indeed, an integral part of my view of God is that he may well be evolving and growing, just as we are, and that God and humanity (and maybe other life on Earth or elsewhere in the universe) help each other grow in a symbiotic way.
I think that's about the best summary of God I can give here without writing dozens or hundreds of pages, which the dialogues already do anyway.

Ground Ascension
A particular method of Ascension proposed by various teachers, including Lady Hilarion.
To explain what Ground Ascension is, and why it is called this, it is first necessary to consider a different and earlier conception of Ascension that prevailed.
Ascension has usually been seen as a spiritual process whereby the planet Earth, and many individuals living on Earth, would experience a leap in awareness from the current 3rd dimension to either the 4th or 5th dimensions (various groups differed on what dimension Ascension would be to). However, this concept often seems to have been integrated with (or sometimes perhaps confused with) a physical ascension, in which people would be bodily lifted up to Ashtar's ships, where the necessary changes to one's body would take place. Eric Klein's The Crystal Stair was a classic exposition of this view of Ascension.
This view of Ascension appeared to be widely believed in the circles of people I associated with at the time I first encountered the idea (1993), and it was believed that this process would begin happening within a few years. However, a little later, certain groups of people began rejecting this idea, finding it unconvincing. One channelled account I read stated that the Masters had abandoned Ship Ascension, as it was sometimes called, because it had proved dangerous to several individuals previously.
One movement that I learned of, apparently led informally by Lady Hilarion, began to undertake a process they called Ground Ascension - called this because it took place entirely on Earth (on the ground, so to speak), without anyone being lifted up to Ashtar's ships. The process was very tightly scheduled, lasted 21 days, and during the entire period, you had to very precisely follow extremely strict dietary rules which amounted almost to a 21-day fast. No liquids at all were to be taken during the first seven days (!), because during this time the Masters, led by Serapis Bey, were apparently placing etheric implants (see astral plane for a brief explanation of "etheric") in your body, which would give vital assistance in your Ascension, and taking liquids could somehow endanger your life. During the remaining 14 days, you were allowed to eat a very limited range of foods, which (bizarrely) included ice-cream, and various other soft foods. This process intersects with practices of certain controversial Breatharian groups, who advocate a similar process. And indeed, many people who undertook the Ground Ascension process believed that after finishing, they would never have to eat again, although I am not aware of any who haven't resumed eating once more.
The theory behind Ground Ascension was formidably complex and labyrinthine, and there was a lot of talk about the "Little Spirit" leaving the body temporarily for several days, and the body was nothing but an empty shell during this time, and it would be extremely dangerous to break the rules in any way during this time, and would endanger your Ascension for a very long time to come. (I don't remember now where the "Big Spirit" (or one's ordinary Spirit) was during all this. The various parts of oneself seemed to be playing quite a complicated game of Musical Chairs during all this process.) I never understood this whole outlook, and didn't like it either, because the entire process appeared to be largely fear-based ("you must follow this rule and that, because if you don't, dire things will happen to you"); and if there is anything that makes me wary of a spiritual practice or outlook, it is for it to be motivated by fear.
A number of people I know personally went through this 21-day process, and some apparently came out the other end largely unharmed, apart from looking very gaunt and having lost a lot of weight. But another was taken to hospital a few days into the process, having collapsed, and she sensibly abandoned the whole idea after coming out of hospital. People who abandoned the process because of such setbacks were sometimes regarded by others who had completed the process (ironically, and, to my mind, rather insensitively) as having given in to a "negative mental attitude". (Apropos of this, Breatharians have actually been known to die of thirst or starvation because of similar processes they were undertaking. The Ascension people I knew were not in any explicit way associated (to my knowledge) with Breatharian groups; but the resemblance is rather too close for my comfort.)
I never did the Ground Ascension process, and didn't even believe in it; but I was associating with people who had done it, or who planned to, round about 1994, and I heard and read so much about it that maybe I couldn't help wondering if just possibly it could be valid, and maybe the only way of ascending. After all, certain messages purportedly channelled from Masters, including Sananda, had said that Ground Ascension was the only viable method now for ascending, and Ship Ascension was completely out.
Well, I lost touch with the whole Ascension business a little after this, and I never followed any process at all. And I have subsequently found out on the Internet that plenty of people apparently still believe in Ship Ascension, and expect it to happen some time. I am sceptical now of any prescribed method of Ascension, and stick to my idea that there are many ways of growing spiritually, and no-one has a monopoly on truth or enlightenment. I try to remain open-minded about Ascension, but can't help feeling sceptical at times. In any case, the concept of Ascension is not central to my spiritual outlook, which is not dependent on it being true, and, looking back now, I see that my interest in Ascension (I wouldn't call it belief in Ascension, even at the height of my interest) as little more than a craze that swept the New-Age community a decade or so ago (as of January, 2001), and in which I rather uncharacteristically got caught up.
This influence can be seen in the dialogues on this web site, especially the earlier ones, which at times seem to talk about Ascension as if it were a fact, and they should be read bearing this context in mind.

Front page: Foreword - Site Map
Introduction
Glossary
A - B
C - G (this page)
H - L
M - Z
First dialogue -->

This page created on Wednesday, 25 July, 2001, as part of a reorganization of the formerly one-page Glossary.