The Great Visions of Ellen G. White

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Spiritualism Today

The craze in spiritualism in the 1990s is the New Age phenomenon known as channeling. In it the human medium gives over his or her body and vocal mechanism to a spirit, to proclaim messages from some long-departed “person.” GVEGW 57.2

J. Z. Knight, 40, a housewife from Yelm, Washington, allowed “Ramtha”—alleged to be a 35,000-year-old man—to speak through her to 400 persons over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1986, at the Doubletree Plaza Hotel outside Seattle. Each person attending the seminar paid $400 for the privilege! 50 GVEGW 57.3

Whereas the audiences for these modern soothsayers until recently were about 90 percent housewives, now they are approximately 60 percent business and professional people. GVEGW 57.4

In January 1987 the American Broadcasting Company devoted five hours of prime-time television to actress Shirley MacLaine’s “personal trek through a psychic world.” She had already sold 4 million copies of one of her two “mystic experience” books; after that exposure on television both books hit the best-selling charts again. GVEGW 57.5

A University of Chicago poll in 1986 demonstrated that 67 percent of the public claims to have had at least one psychic experience. 51 GVEGW 57.6