Teal Swan's interesting perspective on the nature of Mediumship and Channelling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z833b1J_kyw

Channeling is the act of translating messages from another consciousness. In the spiritual field, this usually means translating messages from beings that exist outside of the 3D reality. A Channel is a person who has the ability to channel these beings. Their words are often taken as the ultimate truth because they are coming from higher dimensions, but most people don’t understand they have their own perspectives and therefore limitations of perspective as well.

A great comment on the video:

CHANNELING can be likened to Artificial Intelligence. The human who is channeling is no longer their personal egoic identity, and the being who is being channeled is not who they are due to the limited perspective/vocabulary of the human channel. This sets up a 3rd party which is "artificial intelligence" it's not the person or the higher dimensional being. Shout out to my boy Bashar for this analogy and you touched on this from an amazing angle Teal much love everyone ??

[Laird]

Valmar, not that I want to be a downer, but I have to ask: what's your response to the strong criticisms that have been made of this person, including that she's an emotionally abusive pretender running a (quasi?) cult?

Valmar, not that I want to be a downer, but I have to ask: what's your response to the strong criticisms that have been made of this person, including that she's an emotionally abusive pretender running a (quasi?) cult?

If she is... I don't know. Can you link some articles about this?

It's weird, because I didn't notice anything... off about her in the video, because what she says rings very true to me ~ maybe that's because it is. But, of course, psychopaths will hide behind the genuine and / or what is portrayed as genuine, to manipulate people. For example, recently, I'd been reading about the worries of some Pagans that Neo-Nazis were hiding behind Germanic / Norse Paganism to push their ideology. Disturbing, to say the least, but not surprising, when thinking about it.

In a few minutes of searching about criticism of Swan, I discovered some interesting articles.

https://gabrielmorris.blogspot.com/2015/...-swan.html

[...] Cameron thinks that Teal is a fraud. And not just a fraud. Cameron actually believes (in her own words) that Teal is a psychopathic maniac with multiple personality disorders, who is lying about almost everything she speaks of. Her spiritual teachings are all based on reading other people's books and scouring the internet. Her entire life's story is false: there was no abusive childhood at the hands of a Satanic Mormon cult. Cameron even thinks that Teal fakes her seizures at convenient times to gain sympathy from people. In Cameron's opinion, everything that Teal does is based on pathologically manipulating people around her and doing whatever she can to increase her fame and stature in the spiritual world.

Apart from a few articles and videos, I can't seem to find much criticism about her, so I'm not sure what to think. :/

[Laird]

Can you link some articles about this?

All of the reading I did on this subject was a year or two back on a laptop which I'm not currently using - if you like I'll start that machine up and have a hunt through its browser's history (I doubt that I bookmarked any of them).

[Laird]

I assumed you'd want me to do that so I did - here are the results of my digging back into my browsing history on this subject.

Her ex-husband - Sarbdeep Swan - wrote a public post regarding her disreputable behaviour both during and after their marriage - if he is to be believed then Teal is far from the "authentic" spiritual guru she markets herself as (and his observations dovetail with Cameron Clark's, so there's good reason to believe him):

The Black Swan [archived]

I am not ‘emotionally unavailable’, as published on her blogs. I had closed off to Black Swan as to have been emotionally vulnerable with her would be suicide. I had committed to a woman I had expected to have been my wife for the rest of my life. I went in knowing she had many problems and issues and had made a conscious decision to be there for her, a rock in the storminess of life, and her life in particular. What I did not expect was a constant undermining of myself, both public and private, and using her ‘community members’ to interfere in our marriage. Trying to charm then manipulate, then abuse and then finally use victimhood to get her way. All this was while I was watching over her so she can deliver on her ‘mission’.

It is a pity that she couldn’t just get on with her life and leave me alone to get off with my life. But, part of the illness is that in order to make herself ‘right’, I and others have to be ‘wrong’. ‘This time I am cured, my ex was just a part of my old damaged pattern and now I’m healthy and sober’. By implying and misleading there is something wrong me with, it absolves her of her own responsibility. Everyone knows things will crash hard this time, it’s so predictable, it’s boring, and I have done the best I can to distance myself from this inevitability.

---

Cameron Clark lived with Teal Swan for a time as part of her (Teal's) intentional community. Here are two pieces she's published about Teal which I've read but too long ago to be familiar any more with the details:

The Truth About Teal Swan

An interview between Cameron and Jessica Schab about Cameron's time with Teal and Teal's true nature.

Teal and Blake are both pathological liars. As far as I am concerned, they are both deluded and dangerous con-artists, and I am relieved to have have gotten away from them when I did.

Teal is certainly emotionally/socially retarded in many ways. Autistic people are also the only ones in their world who have feelings. I think Asperger’s Syndrome is the least likely explanation in Teal’s case though. It leaves too many holes. I feel as though she has studied socially acceptable responses to people’s pain and fakes her way through understanding their emotions by tapping into how she feels and projecting that onto others. She responds mechanistically to most emotional situations, and in my observation there wasn’t any genuine empathy behind any of her actions. I felt like there was always a manipulative angle behind everything she did to make her appear in a certain light. I don't know what your thoughts are on the pathology of someone like Teal who was raised in a good family and turned out the way she has, but if she isn't a psychic vampire, leviathan, or reptilian. I think she suffers from a co-occurrence of Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder and some sort of psychopathy. I think the Dissociative Identity Disorder schtick is something she confabulated, and she was likely misdiagnosed with during treatment with Barbara Snow. I feel like she is using DID, along with her satanic abuse backstory to manipulate, control, and guilt her family, followers, and men in her life into being her narcissistic food supply. DID is just a convenient cover up for her real disorders.

---

An interview arranged and conducted in part by Cameron with Teal's alleged abuser. According to this interview, Teal's claims of abuse don't stack up, and the interviewee has some revealing insights into her psychology:

The Complete Interview of Teal Swan's Alleged Childhood Abuser

Teal Swan has made some remarkable claims about being a victim of satanic, bizarre, sexual and physical, years-long, childhood abuse. In this article, we share the first known interview of Teal’s alleged abuser, “Doc,” concerning the alleged abuse. Included in this article is a handwritten letter Teal allegedly sent Doc in 2004.

JOHN: [...] I wonder: does Teal have reason to be angry at you? Did you have a falling out with her, or something like that?

DOC: Not actually, but one of the problems Teal eventually had with me, was that she couldn't sucker me into all of her games, because I'd call her on the carpet for the nonsense she was doing. The problem with Teal is, the reason she is so convincing, is that she believes her fantasies.

CAMERON: Yeah, that's very apparent.

DOC: And consequently, when she tells these stories, if you're listening to her directly, it seems like she's telling the truth, because to her, it is the truth. But they're totally, completely made up. Where she comes up with the ideas, I don't know, but she's completely disconnected from reality.

CAMERON: I would agree with you there.

DOC: And she's not a good liar, from the standpoint of these stories, because she tells all these stories, and you can't match them up. The timeframes overlapped. You know, it's ridiculous. In her bio, for example, she says she was raised in a cabin in the wilderness. Her folks were summer rangers up at Tony Grove Lake. They stayed up there for two or three months in the summer. They're schoolteachers. She didn't live up there—only just in the summer. And she said she had these modeling jobs, and she never really did. She wanted to, but you can't find any ads with her pictures in it. If she was a model, where's all the proof? She also was in Playboy Magazine.

JOHN: She was in Playboy, or she said she was in Playboy?

DOC: Well, as far as she's concerned, she was.

---

A research piece by "LaVaughn":

Who and What is Teal Scott?

[M]any people have raised the bullshit flag. If you draw from her various bios, including the since deleted ones on modeling sites, you come up with a CV that looks something like this: From age 6 to 19 she was in a torture cult which her parents somehow never knew despite the fact that she was living with them and a brother in a two room cabin. At age 12 she was spotted in a horse supply store by a modeling scout from a New York agency and began traveling the world as a model. That would make her 16 in these photographs. She was also an accomplished equestrian, archer, Telemark skier, fly fisher, and speed skater, some of which is documented. At age 6 she started her apprenticeship with a shaman/accupuncturist which lasted roughly 13 years. One assumes that's not her crazy cult leader but the timelines do kind of, more or less, rather, exactly coincide. Meanwhile she was being mentored in quantum field theory, which she started apparently at birth, because it was "throughout" the first 19 years of her life. She graduated high school at 16. After that she was off to Beijing to study Qigong and energy healing. And she still found time to become a Wiccan High Priestess.

That's an impressive roster. And even more so when you consider that she was taking in this fine metaphysical education while being tortured by an LDS splinter group who thought her innate psychic abilities were of the Devil -- her being female and all -- and that they needed to be tortured out of her.

---

Here's Jessica Schab again - including a vast compendium of links, some (most?) of which are no longer live:

Exposing the Insanity of Teal Swan/Scott Archive [archived]

It's a bit of a rant with plenty of spelling and grammatical errors, and perhaps in parts a little unnecessarily unkind/cruel/mean-spirited, but it should give you plenty to dig into - potentially with the assistance of The Wayback Machine.

---

There's a bunch more that I remember reading but I'm struggling to find it all - the above though should be enough to give you an idea of the sorts of criticisms folks are making.

Anyhow, I share all of this simply to encourage caution about becoming too enthusiastic about this individual as an authentic spiritual teacher. I have no idea how much of it is true.

She sounds like the almost typical New Ager ~ hiding behind spirituality to prop themselves up on a cult of personality.

This is why the New Age cult is so destructive ~ because it uses spiritual truths for material and social status gain.

There was one video I found, criticizing her, that was inundated with pro-Teal Swan shills attacking the video authors in disgusting ways:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve7uHXwxGcc

One of the few sane commenters:

My goodness, I can't believe this comment section. This psychopathic, deeply troubled individual is playing a spiritual teacher and ADVOCATING SUICIDE and her fans still can't fucking snap out of it? I mean it's literally unbelievable.

Her patient killing herself was "totally fine"?

"Totally fine?"

[Laird]

Good point re the suicide stuff, Valmar, though I'm not so sure about your comments on the New Age movement (I see it in more favourable terms, as a positive attempt at synthesis).

Edit: Oh, and I watched and appreciated the video [Edit3: not the video in the OP; the critical video in the post to which I'm responding, in case that's not clear!] - thanks for sharing.

Edit2: I also read the article to which you first linked - I appreciate the author's attempt at free and objective thinking, but I also think, though of course I can't be sure myself, that he's been (or was, at the time of writing) duped.

[Laird]

In a few minutes of searching about criticism of Swan, I discovered some interesting articles.

https://gabrielmorris.blogspot.com/2015/...-swan.html

By the way, Cameron's response to this article is well worth reading:

http://thetruthaboutcameron.blogspot.com...b03176e989

You’ve created a logical house of cards based entirely on Teal’s statements without even seeing what the man she’s accused of all these things has to say. You are welcome to read the interview with Teal's alleged abuser and draw your own conclusions. A number of the other questions you raise, however, I can speak to. I feel much of what you wrote misrepresented and misstated me. For that and other reasons, I feel the need to respond to your blog and let a clear public record stand.

The similarity of Teal's ideas to that of other writers and teachers is astounding and, other than Byron Katie, if she has cited her sources, I've missed it. I think it’s worth noting that she’s been caught repeatedly parroting sources like Wikipedia and Abraham-Hicks nearly word for word and without ever citing a source.

You write:

Note: If Teal is making racist remarks “a lot”, somehow that has completely escaped my notice over the past 2 ½ years of watching her videos, reading her blog posts, interviewing her and meeting her in person.

That it’s escaped your notice, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Many people other than myself have noticed.

[...]

But, for all her claims of leading a “public” and “authentic” life, some of the worst episodes have conveniently disappeared. The infamous “racist rant” on one of the earlier Shadow House episodes is one. It may be gone, but it’s not forgotten.

[...]

In the midst of that rant, she also lectured black people about their need to let go of the vibration of slavery. Or as described in a comment on her blog post about this episode, “Slavery – or more precisely, the insistently reinforced ‘faux’ memory of slavery – was mentioned as being one of the excuses employed to incite and perpetuate defensiveness.”

Teal has stated that she was designed by an Arcturian panel to be pretty and white enough to reach people on every continent.

Before I even came down, um, there was an entire panel of beings, Arcturian beings, sixth-dimensional beings, who even chose the way I would look in this life. Would you like to know why? So, I came down here with the intention of reaching people on every single continent, and to do that, human beings, human beings, they like to pay attention to what’s attractive, right? But based on where you are geographically, certain things are attractive and certain things are unattractive. So a really beautiful woman down in Africa might come up here to the US and be considered pretty ugly. But there are certain type of traits, physical traits, which make a person attractive on every single continent, and so, even before I came here, it’s not like my looks are so gorgeous to one demographic over another demographic. It’s that there will not be a person, on the planet, regardless of what country you go to, that will not perceive some level of attractiveness. Thus they’ll pay attention.

Many people found this explanation both vain and bigoted. African women, which is to say, black women, are seen as “pretty ugly” in the US and much of the world, so she had to be white. Consider the message this sends to women and girls of color or who aren’t model pretty. No matter how great their ideas are, they can’t possibly have a global impact because they aren’t pretty or white enough.

[Laird]

though I'm not so sure about your comments on the New Age movement (I see it in more favourable terms, as a positive attempt at synthesis).

Ah, man, sorry - this could have come across as rude and invalidating. No doubt, there's more truth in what you say than my response allowed for.

She sounds like the almost typical New Ager ~ hiding behind spirituality to prop themselves up on a cult of personality.

This is why the New Age cult is so destructive ~ because it uses spiritual truths for material and social status gain.

I'm sure there are people who can be described thus but I'm not sure they are typical of the New Age movement. I've circulated among New Age groups for decades and, though I'm not by nature a joiner, I have not found the majority to be dishonest or cultish. For the most part, I see people attempting to extract themselves from the traditional dogma-driven perspectives of the religious or the scientistic (note I don't say scientific). Of course, when abandoning one religion there seems to be a temptation to start another or, at least, to regard a new belief system as an alternative religion. That's precisely why I've avoided "joining" the movement. But I have not seen much about New Age thinking that I would regard as being a dangerous cult, although, as you say, there are always greedy individuals who will hijack such a movement for personal gain.

I had never hard of Teal Swan so clearly I am not as in-touch with New Age personalities as I may have been in years gone by. The controversy does remind me of another - perhaps similar - personality: J Z Knight. I remember that when I first came across her web page I had an intense and angry reaction to what I saw as cheap and obvious hucksterism. In the immortal words of the great Van Morrison, she's no guru, no teacher; she's just a greedy individual.