For the past couple of years I have been reading considerably about what Dion Fortune and Gareth Knight (and other ritual magicians of their kind) call "contacts" - or sometimes "Masters". The experience is of individual communication, or sharing of consciousness, with a spiritual being.
The phenomenon seems various in its details, and may occur in a full trance (i.e. when the human becomes unconscious, and speaks or writes without awareness of what is being communicated). Or it may happen in more alert trance states, with awareness of what is going-on. This is apparently broadly the same as "channelling" (i.e. what is channelled, is "a contact").
And contacts seem to underlie, and blend-with by degrees, much commoner and more normal phenomena such as an intense fascination, empathy, communion with some not-present personage; who might be alive or dead, real-life or fictional.
Contact may be sensory (in the form of spoken words or conversation (clairaudience), of visual (clairvoyance - perhaps of visions, symbols, written words); or non-sensory - as what I call "direct knowing".
What seems to be the essential common factor is experienced person-to-person (or person-to-being) contact.
Having read quite widely on this subject, it has become clear that (contrary to common claims, and despite that contacts are often sought purposively as a path to knowledge and guidance) such contacts are not necessarily, indeed only seldom, the basis for accurate or valid information.
This is obvious from the apparent wrongness of much specific (and indeed abstract and generalized) information of this kind; but it must be true from the wide range of contradictory information cited between different (but apparently honest and competent) people; and the same person at different times.
So I have concluded that contacts ought Not to be regarded as a pathway to factual or conceptual knowledge or true guidance.
On the other hand; I have concluded that experience of contacts are not only of potentially primary personal significance; but are probably necessary to the development of true knowledge.
In other words, unless we experience a phenomenon that could be characterized as a contact, we shall never really understand anything.
I concluded this from examining my own work in science and literature, as well as theology, philosophy, and mystical religious experience. Even from when I was an atheist - from more than a decade before I was a theist, or a Christian; I never really understood the meanings of things until I had had this kind of contact experience.
For instance, if I was working on theoretical science; it was all just a matter of "comparing models" - an activity that had no end, and brought no sense of validity - until I had reached an empathic contact with those scientists (living or dead) whose work I was critiquing or using; and the same applied when I had developed a theory that I regarded as valid.
Truth needed to be "checked" by a very inner process, much as I later called heart-thinking; and until a proposition had passed this "test" I was never confident of it.
True knowing needs to be known in the heart, and no amount of head-knowing (logic and "facts") can replace this requirement.
Something closely analogous seems to be at work when I am trying to understand a writer. Unless and until I can attain an inward sense of contact and communion with that person; then I never really feel I know what they are saying.
For instance; it took me about a decade before I "got" Owen Barfield, and felt that I really understood what he was thinking and asserting - and this understanding came as a consequence of getting onto his wavelength by a kind of sympathetic resonance, by thinking "with" him as I read his words or contemplated his writings.
Much the same applied with William Arkle; I had to immerse into his writings for some years before, quite suddenly, I "contacted" his spirit and had the basis for understanding.
But with other authors - such as ST Coleridge - I have never attained this sense of contact, therefore I have never (so far) been confident of understanding him: it is all second-hand, hearsay, "models" of what he was doing.
It is certainly Not the case that contact leads to correct understanding. Contact with Barfield and Arkle was just the basis for understanding them. I needed to study, read, re-read, and think hard.
So having experienced "contact" should Not be used as a "proof" that one's understanding is correct.
But without that contact, there never would have been genuine understanding.
Furthermore, once one has attained contact, and followed it with serious study; one can recognize when others have not attained contact; and are merely parroting and playing-with second-hand summaries and models.
Contact therefore seems to be necessary but not sufficient to knowing.
Contact is also perhaps one of the commonest and most readily available modes of direct spiritual experience: a kind-of evidence of the reality of the spirit world.
And this is just how things would be expected, in an animated, living reality - in this created universe ultimately composed of Beings in relationships.
In sum; I conclude that he ways that contacts are usually regarded, seem to be mistaken. It is usually an error to seek contacts as a source of factual information.
However, contacts - properly regarded - can be an experience of the living world of spirits, an active participation a world of conscious Beings: recognition of a relational world, in which we are never alone.
And a way of inhabiting a world where we can truly understand purposes and meanings - at least to the extent of our individual cognitive capacities, biases, defects and particular perspectives.
All this depends on our regarding it as metaphysically possible - that is, our fundamental assumptions need to allow for such potential: we need to realize that this fits how reality is structured and operates.
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