Lets start with a definition of Channeling. Channeling is the ability of a person who is psychically sensitive to experience contact with non-ordinary consciousness, e.g. angels, teaching spirits, ascended masters, otherworldy beings, etc. The channel facilitates communication by relaying messages from these beings via spoken or written word. Often communication happens by telepathy, where the channel mentally "hears," "sees," and/or feels messages from the being, then, directly or with the help of a spirit guide, passes the information on. The channel allows his/her ego to step aside for the message to be delivered, but has awareness of the thoughts coming through and may even influence the message with his/her own bias. Castillo (1995) states that: "Trance phenomena result from the behavior of intense focusing of attention, which is the key psychological mechanism of trance induction. Adaptive responses, including institutionalized forms of trance, are 'tuned' into neural networks in the brain." 1
In Stephenie’s case her “channel” was opened by a powerful, vivid dream she had in which the vampire, who she later names Edward, reveals himself to her and gives her a download of his character, nature and desires. Lets let Stephenie describe this experience in her own words.
I woke up (on that June 2nd. 2003) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the [Twilight] book…I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so intrigued by the nameless couple's story that I hated the idea of forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description. Also, the vampire was just so darned good-looking, that I didn't want to lose the mental image… My vampire I was in love with from day one… From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some. I mostly wrote at night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than five minutes without being interrupted. I started from the scene in the meadow and wrote through to the end. Then I went back to the beginning and wrote until the pieces matched up. I drove the "golden spike" that connected them in late August, three months later…All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply wouldn't shut up. (my emphasis) I'd stay up as late as I could stand trying to get all the stuff in my mind typed out, and then crawl, exhausted, into bed (my baby still wasn't sleeping through the night, yet) only to have another conversation start in my head. I hated to lose anything by forgetting, so I'd get up and head back down to the computer. Eventually, I got a pen and notebook for beside my bed to jot notes down so I could get some freakin' sleep. It was always an exciting challenge in the morning to try to decipher the stuff I'd scrawled across the page in the dark. During the day, I couldn't stay away from the computer, either. When I was stuck at swim lessons, out in 115 degrees of Phoenix sunshine, I would plot and scheme and come home with so much new stuff that I couldn't type fast enough. When I'd finished the body of the novel, I started writing epilogues...lots of epilogues. This eventually clued me in to the fact that I wasn't ready to let go of my characters, and I started working on the sequel. 2
Perhaps it was Stephenie’s characters that weren’t ready to let go of her! Stephenie’s process for writing Twilight is actually quite common for materials that are written by psychically gifted people, or Channels, who are not writing their material solely from their own consciousness or imagination. The characterizations, conversations and plot lines created by Stephenie are more or less dictated to her by the characters themselves, specifically Edward. Stephenie herself admits this in an interview with School Library Journal, “I really got the whole character of Edward just entirely laid out for me. He was there.” So who laid him out for her? Stephenie had to name him, give him a home and a fill in the assorted details surrounding his life, but the heart of Edward, his innate nature, desires, beliefs about himself, his reality was literally spoken, downloaded, channeled to her, presumably by Edward himself. She also admits that she didn’t research the book much, other than to find a suitable setting. “I created my own unique world” 3 …but was it really her world alone?
The International phenomenon of Twilight has begun to influence the consciousness of our planet. In August 2008 Newsweek ran an interview with Stephenie asking her some routine questions about the effect the Twilight Series is having on people. On the Newsweek message boards in response to this interview a very telling comment was left, giving us an inkling into just how powerful this material is for more than just the young adult audience.
From the Newsweek Message Board
Posted By: proct001 @ 01/26/2009 10:31:46 PM
Stephanie. As a 37 year old mother of three, I can't even begin to tell you how much your books have affected me. I finished the 4 of them in less than a week and then read your posting from Midnight Sun. Since finishing them, I have this deep void, like I am missing a part of me, my family that these books brought into my life. I was even tearful a few times after I finished them! Anyway, your writing is just wonderful and has touched me in so many ways. You are SO talented and develop the characters and plots so intensely. I can't wait to read them again but I do TRULY hope you will finish Midnight Sun; it is wonderful and entertaining and really adds to the Twilight version. Thanks for giving all of us fans such a wonderful outlet from reality!
Stephenie herself admits, “I suppose the psychological challenge was accepting that Edward and Bella weren't real people. (I still don't entirely believe that).” 4 So where does that leave the millions of Twilight fans who have been initiated into this world of magic, immortality and otherworldly consciousness? For like this 37-year-old mother of three, I too was altered, activated and awakened by Twilight. Reading these stories was like remembering. Remembering a world, a relationship, a time, that never happened in my physical reality and yet was so familiar, so true, that it felt like Stephenie was writing about intimate details of my personal life and relationships. Like I already knew Edward Cullen and his vampire family, and Twilight was just helping me to remember the details more clearly. Is this just escapism in its most obsessive form or is there something else to it? Is there perhaps truth behind the fantasy, a truth whose time has come to be seen and known? I believe Edward Cullen is the key that has opened Pandora’s box of memory.
If Edward were a real being, perhaps not in physical form, but as real as any other non-ordinary being like an angel, or a ghost, or a fairy what might his message be, his reason for making contact? Stephenie’s own beliefs may give us a clue.
Was it difficult to portray vampires sympathetically?
They ended up being vampires in the way they are because I have strong opinions on free will. No matter what position you're in, you always have a choice. So I had these characters who were in a position where traditionally they would have been the bad guys, but, instead, they chose to be something different—a theme that has always been important to me. 5
Lets face it, Vampires, although a source of much mystique and role-playing fantasy, still lurk in the realms of darkness, shadow and fear. Our collective consciousness as a planet still lives in fear of these beings, innate fear as Edward describes it in Twilight, because humans feel these beings are not “safe.” Yet, the message of the Twilight Series is not a horror story, not a story of fear and possession. The power of Twilight is that it is a story of love, pure love, and redemption. It is through learning how to love that Edward begins to grow and evolve, reclaiming the human parts of himself. It is only when Edward learns to master his darker nature, his desire to destroy and consume, that he learns how to master himself to the point of transforming his very consciousness. By the end of the series Edward is not so much vampiric in nature, as he is more akin to a guardian angel. He has redeemed himself through his choice, his decision to learn how to love.
Edwards story invites us to search for our own redemption. Face our own monster within and master it, acknowledge that it is there, inescapable, and yet not insurmountable. And like Edward, when we learn to tame the monster within we open to greater and greater potential, to our divine or angelic nature.
So what does this have to do with Edward being real? Why does it matter if he is an angel, a vampire, a non-ordinary being or just a figment of Stephenie Meyer’s imagination? Lets look, again, at the story of Twilight. Bella goes online to research Vampires. She visits a site called Vampires A – Z (an actual website, by the way). 6 She learns that there are accounts of Vampires all over the world, from ancient beings to modern rock stars. Much of what she reads seems silly or macabre. None of it jives with what she has experienced of Edward. Yes, he’s a bit odd, but she also sees him better than he sees himself. She sees his angelic qualities, his light, his goodness, whereas he is blinded by his darkness, his monster. Bella’s light and love, her presence in his life, activates innate knowledge in Edward, alchemically shifting him, activating his DNA, unleashing hidden potential inside of him to transform and transcend his Vampire nature. He has already begun this process on his own by becoming a “vegetarian,” and showing reverence for human life. She helps him complete this process through the power of love. Because of her ability to see his true angelic essence, and because of their divinely ordained love, he is set free from the monster, he is redeemed. And Bella is given immortality and a family of soul kin that know her, see her, truly, intimately. She is no longer average, wandering, an outsider, she is finally home.
To understand why this redemption is so important, so necessary, lets take a trip back in time to some of our creation myths. The stories of how our world came into being. We’re probably all familiar with the Genesis account, you know the garden, Adam, Eve, the apple. But did you know that Eve was Adam’s second wife? In the ancient Hebrew text the Zohar, we are told that Adam’s first wife was named Lillith. She was created as Adam’s equal. Unlike Eve, who was created from a part of Adam, Lillith was created as a separate being altogether. Scholars don’t exactly see eye to eye on the who, what, when, where and why of the story, but what is commonly accepted is that for one reason or another Adam and Lillith split up, some say because she wouldn’t submit her will to his, and she went her own way. It is at this point that things gets interesting. Although there is no definitive story on Lillith, we know do a few things about what happened next to her. First, according to the Zohar, we learn that Lillith became the wife of the angel Samael, whose name means medicine or poison of God. Second, we learn that Lillith is attributed to having given birth to all sorts of odd hybrid creatures, often referred to as “monsters” or the Nephilium. Finally, according to mythological tradition, we find that Lillith became the first (or mother) of the Vampires. How much of a stretch is it then to conclude that Vampires are actually a kind of angel? In fact, there are stories of more than just the mating of Lillith and Samael. In the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the book of Jubilees there are references to the intermingling and marriage of the Sons of God (angels) and the Daughters of man (women) who produced hybrid offspring. And these angels even have a name. They are thought to be the Grigori, watcher angels, sent to protect and guard the earth and its inhabitants. And they fell in love with human women and married them.
Remember the story in Twilight where Jacob tells Bella about how his ancestors survived the great flood by tying their canoes to the tops of the trees? Well, stories like this are not unique, and the impetus behind the story is pretty much the same. The earth was overrun with too many creatures, human and non-human, that were making a mess of things. So God, or Mother Nature, or Great Spirit, decided to cause a cataclysm and clean up a bit. However, many beings survived the great flood, or floods, by building boats or going underground, or simply surviving. Many beings, not just humans. In fact, some scriptural historians hypothesize that for Noah and his family to single-handedly repopulate the earth would have been an impossibility, therefore other beings, people, species must have survived the flood as well. And if you follow the thread in Twilight about Vampires and swimming, you realize that a flood would only drown things that required air for survival. Not Vampires.
Lets get back to Lillith. If we follow the stories that made Lillith into a demon, it is her hatred of the children of Adam and Eve that riles her bloodlust. She is angry at Adam and God for being rejected, and therefore seeks to destroy his offspring by drinking their blood and teaching her children to do the same. This is at least one explanation for where the Vampire and its predatory nature originated. But what if Lillith wasn’t a demon? What if she was simply a woman who went looking for a man who could match her power, her passion, and found an angel instead? Then what does that make Vampires? Children of an angel and a woman, offspring with angel-like power and human-like free will.
So where does the blood-lust come from? Why the need to consume and devour? When one begins to study the legends of Vampires one thing becomes startlingly clear, not all Vampires are blood drinkers. Actually, Vampire lore details feeding on everything from flesh, to sex to psychic energy. In fact one Bulgarian Vampire, the Ubour, feeds on regular food and only turns to blood drinking when nothing else is available. In another case, the Upir from the Ukraine, eats fish. So what is the common thread that connects Vampirism, if it isn’t necessarily the practice of drinking blood? Perhaps it is their bloodline. Perhaps it is the fact that they are the offspring of Lillith and Samael. Perhaps it is their capacity to be both angelic and human.
So at what point then did these half human, half angel beings become creatures of the night, monsters, evil? Well, lets face it, whether its angels, superheros, aliens, or psychics, no being with extra-sensory skills has ever really had it easy fitting in with the human race. Humans tend to burn, imprison or torture anything that challenges the accepted norm, doesn’t fit into the rules created for themselves and society. So is it that hard to imagine that these vampires, these hybrid beings withdrew to the shadows, to the night, to protect themselves from us? And in doing so began to believe about themselves all the scary stories we told about them? In our rejection of what we don’t understand we have relegated these beings to the shadow, the darkness of our collective consciousness as a planet…a planet that they are still very much a part of. To the point that they themselves have almost completely forgotten who they really and truly are, children of God, children of the angels. Perhaps it is time to shift the accepted norm and welcome them back.
And what if there were some of these beings, those like Edward, that are seeking to reclaim their rightful place on earth? What if they remembered who they are, slowly at first, but now gaining momentum as they are embraced, loved, welcomed to the table. We can co-exist, we can share our planet. Earth is their home as much as it is ours. Humans are not the only species on this planet, but we are at present the most dangerous species. We have managed to figure out how to destroy not only ourselves but every other thing on this planet as well, and that includes all non-ordinary, otherworldly beings. The Other-kin have awoken to realize they can no longer sit idly by and ignore the foibles of the human race. They must act, and act quickly to circumvent the direction humans have been headed towards, one of planetary destruction. For we destroy their world as well as ours.
Enter Edward and his story. The awakening of millions who through his presence have connected to their own passion, longing, desire for soul-kin. Aren’t we all Bella? On the surface we’re ordinary, but underneath we have untapped potential for greatness. Falling in love with Edward Cullen is falling in love with your angelic potential. What if we all have an Edward, a protector, a guardian, an angel, who loves us more than his own life, passionately? And what if that being were just waiting for the green light, permission to connect, make himself or herself known? And what if that’s exactly what Edward is trying to communicate. Let go of your fear. Let go of your doubt. Trust. Love. Believe.
Can we embrace our vampire friends, love them back into the fullness of their angelic-human majesty? Can we embrace ourselves, all our shadowed, veiled aspects, the places that sometimes we’re afraid or ashamed to look at? What if everything you ever heard about vampires was wrong? What if you were a vampire-angel and you didn’t even know it? What if you had extra-senses, psychic abilities that were only waiting for you to remember who you are, so they could awaken you to your true self? What if Edward Cullen wanted you?
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Footnotes:
- Wickipedia article on Trance Mediumship
- The Story Behind Twilight from Stepeheniemeyer.com
- Cynsations Interview with Stephenie Meyer March 27, 2006, www.cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com
- ibid.
- Stephenie Meyer Interview from Love At First Bite School Library Journal, 10/1/2005
- The Vampire Research and Survey Center http://www.angelfire.com/biz4/vampyreresearch/home.html
