Channel Hopping

Right off, let me say I've got nothing against the dead. There are a few I really like. In fact, some of my best friends are dead. But that doesn't mean I want to hang out with them on weekends and kick around old times.

Oh, I don't mean to sound like a bigot. I just think the dead should know their place--and not come scooting back from the Other Side just 'cause this year they're "in" and everybody wants one at a party.

Bad enough you don't know where they've been. Even worse, with the sudden slew of trance channels on hand to help them spout off, today's dead tend to be real know-it-alls. Less likely to dish out greetings from Gramps than with tips on how to shake your inner turmoil, or news that you used to be known as Festive Olga in the year nine, when half the Eskimos in Greenland were wont to toss old seal chunks into your igloo for hours of fun and blubber--the kind of info you'd just as soon stayed packed away with Jimmy Hoffa.

But enough about me. The only reason I mention the whole business is that I'm meeting Mafu. Mafu, you may as well know, is also a deadie. Dead but psychic, like the rest of them. He's lived 17 times--that's just counting his incarnations on earth--as everything from Egyptian Pharaoh to Pompeian leper. But lately, eschewing a bod of his own, he appears exclusively in the full-figured form of 28-year-old Penny Torres, bright and bubbly ex-wife of an L.A. police officer.

Penny channels "the Fun Guy," as she calls him. This means that for the past year, she's been gracious enough to vacate her body when the frequently deceased wants to sidle in and start dispensing the special brand of beyond-the-grave wit and wisdom that's made him spiritual darling to legions of devotees.

All true. The field's crowded, but Mafu has already emerged as one of the hottest entities on the channel circuit since Ramtha, the famed 35,000-year-old warrior who got nailed asking believers to shell out big bucks for Arabian ponies. Said fillies, coincidentally, were raised on the Yelm, Washington, ranch of J.Z. Knight, the gifted blonde who leaves her incarnate being to channel Ramtha when he's feeling chatty. Word in the New Age world is that Dick Chamberlain and Mike Farrell, among numerous others, swear by the big R, while Linda Evans has switched camps. Now she's Mafu's girl.

Or am I going too fast?

Channeling, for the four or five of you who think I'm discussing Iranscam funding techniques, is the cosmic rage that has half of Hollywood spending more time yakking with spirits from Atlantis with names like after-shaves than with their own agents.

Basically, channels are enlightened citizens who, through chance or training, know how to turn themselves into human telephones. They do this by entering a trance and stepping out of their bodies to let the spirits in. This enables the rest of us to pay money and gather round, not just to hear the Other Worlders speak through them but to bask in the wondrous energy their formless entities just seem to emit, like benevolent swamp gas, while they tell us what's what.

If it's still confusing, imagine the channel as Mister Ed and the believers as a batch of happy Wilburs--who happen to pay anywhere from $10 to $1500 for the privilege of kicking around cosmic secrets with invisible visitors. Los Angeles alone is home to 1000 channels, with countless full-timers and followers sprouting up coast to coast.

Weird as the whole process may sound, weirder still is the sheer normalcy of the good souls involved. People into channeling--a trend, no matter how you slice it--tend to be relentless examples of Regular Guy- and Galhood. Which makes sense when you realize that most Americans got their first glimpse at this extreme-o phenom on that most unextreme of venues--TV!

Channeling may be the first grand-scale spiritual movement to have been promulgated primarily on the tube. Christianity at least existed before Oral Roberts started tossing crutches to the ushers in the first row. But for most contempo devotees, channeling didn't show up in their brains till those cultural trail blazers Merv Griffin and Shirley MacLaine put it there.

Merv was first, back in the summer of '86, when he played host to Lazaris, a nonphysical entity channeled by Jach Pursel. As luck would have it (if you call sitting home watching The Merv Griffin Show luck), I caught that media milestone. Actor Michael York and his wife, Pat, the Jim and Tammy Bakker of New Age theology, were on hand to help introduce the masses to their man. And Merv made the point right up front that "many of our top stars are now consulting not Jach but the entity."

With that kind of build-up, you're expecting Sun Myung Moon. Even more incredible, on comes this Teddy-bear R.V.salesman-of-the-month type. And this is Jach. Channel to the stars!

Considering its impact, it's worth reliving the thrill of that cognitive landmark. After the obligatory couch chat, Pursel says he's ready to make room for Daddy. First he gulps in air, squinches his eyes shut, wrinkles his nose and bares his teeth like a Disney chipmunk.

The contorto stuff is part of the excitement of channel watching. See, it's not easy letting some strange spirit sublet your body. You'll find channels who snuffle, channels who snort, channels who groan and twitch. But Jach's one of your tamer pros. Upscale. The furthest he goes is that nose wrinkle.

At last, Jach is banished to the metaphysical greenroom; Lazaris pipes up with his trademark opener: "All right!" Pronounced "Oo-right," in an accent best described as Charlie Chan in a kilt.

The entity's message turns out to be your basic success-'n'-positive-thinking shtick: cosmic Norman Vincent Peale. "You do create your own reality!" And my own fave: "After you leave this plane, your body gets younger and thinner and more athletic." Perfect!

"We have earthly things to do, called commercials," blurts a respectful Merv at one point.

"We know of such things," quips Lazaris, wrinkling up again. I mean, he's never been incarnated. The guy dwells in some timeless ether. But, by God, he knows about commercial breaks. Now, here's a spirit for our era!

The medium, in ways Marshall McLuhan never guessed, is clearly the message. Awash in our media Zeitgeist, we can use some divine intervention. But, this being late-Eighties America, we need it repackaged--postmodernized--preferably in telegenic bytes by blow-dried shamans such as Jach and his compadre Kevin Ryerson, the channel catapulted to stardom by MacLaine's blockbuster Out on a Limb.

Limb, without question, has done for channeling what Saturday Night Fever did for disco. The miniseries weaves the tale of Shirl's stormy affair with a married British pol and her plunge into the paranormal. The scene that opened a grateful nation's eyes, however, was her Malibu tête-à -tête with Ryerson.

Kev is one of the nation's premiere mediums (Joyce DeWitt sometimes tours with him). He's tall. He's dark. He wears a fedora tugged low over one eye. And it's amazing, the stuff Ryerson reveals. For one thing, he informs Shirley that she and her beloved had been married on Atlantis. His nibs was a diplomat then, too. Unfortunately, even on Atlantis, he was too caught up in his career to really adore Shirley the way she required.

It all makes sense! That's the thing about reincarnation: the way past lives make the twisted and inexplicable present logical as sitcoms. Each life's just another episode. There are, as channels one and all insist, no accidents.

Their session over, Shirley'd love to find out more about this right-brain, faith-in-the-unseen situation, but Kev's got a date. "I need to be picking up my lady" is how he puts it.

Alone again, the codivine Miss M. reports that she was "vibrating with this strange, almost magnetic energy down [her] arms." Thankfully, no paper clips fly across the room and scar her elbows. What's most exciting is that this revelation--the irrational is as real as meat loaf--has transformed her on the spot. And her transformation sparks scads of split-level, job--family--and--Allstate Insurance types to see the clear light right along with her. Like Shirl, a soul, after that first taste, just needs to get out there and sample the magic firsthand.

•

There exist, on the New Age chain of being, three modes of attaining atoneness with the channel of your choice. You've got your retreats, your evening get-togethers and your personalized sessions (or, as industry insiders like to call them, your "privates"). Retreats, often week-long affairs in some suitable idyllic setting, tend to be the most demanding, spiritually and financially.

So when I get a call that I can meet Mafu's own Penny T., who had already canceled a couple of meetings, at midnight that very night at some place called the Institute of Mentalphysics in Yucca Valley, I drop everything and flee my modest movieland hovel for the three-hour drive. The point of her (continued on page 174) Channel Hopping (continued from page 136) appearance, apparently, is to greet arrivees at the opening of her monstro $625-a-head six-day human-sexuality retreat. What a thrill!

Torres, of course, doesn't show. Which leaves me, drenched in rent-a-car sweat and dazed with anticipation, more or less at loose ends here in the desert moonlight. But that's OK. There are no accidents. (I've decided to try out this world view while doing this piece, just as a nutty break from my meat-and-potatoes "Life is hell.") What's meant to happen is that I'll hang out at the Mentalphysics sign-in office, meet a couple of hard-core Mafu fans and snag some valuable testimony. Which is what does happen! It's almost spooky.

"Mafu gets right in your face. It's intense," chuckles one friendly attendee, a real perfect-teeth-and-triathlon guy--it turns out he's appeared in commercials and soaps (Capitol and As the World Turns). Like lots of those here at the institute, Michael Doven seems to have attended just about all of Mafu's recent events, trailing the zesty entity from retreats and intensives as far afield as Colorado, Seattle and Peru.

"He'll say," Doven continues, "'Would you lay with an overweight woman?' No matter what you answer, he knows the truth. And when it comes out, all the overweight women in the room are mad."

Good God!

"There's no point lying"--big daytime-drama grin--"Mafu knows. I mean, he knows what shirt you were wearing last Tuesday. He knows what you did two nights ago!"

Nobody ever said inner growth was easy. But even now, that first flush of panic is as vivid as heat rash. What spooks me is that I can't remember what I did two nights ago!

I dimly recall a plastic lint remover and the sensation that Ted Koppel was watching me from my TV. Now I'm faced with the threat that some ex-Pharaoh will root out worse truths.

Of course, the average person will say to himself, "None of this can be real." And yet--here's the crux, the quaking nub, the unspeakable, hell-freighted hypothesis any sane neurotic has to lug like a ball and chain to channel land: What if--what if it's all real?

Next morning, about 50 pairs of shoes are lined up, like good little soldiers, outside the Mentalphysics meditation center. At first, dulled by sleep deprivation and all-round angst, your correspondent thinks maybe the impossible has happened: The whole group's gone nonphysical, except for their Reeboks. Turns out, though, the socks-only retreatees are already inside, awaiting Mafu's rescheduled arrival. He's due in at ten.

Inside, giant ferns flank a sort of Naugahyde throne on the flowered platform. A pair of purple pyramids sway languidly, dangling on gold wire from the sanctuary ceiling. The assembled seekers might have been scooped up and teleported from a Donahue audience. A wholesome bunch.

Promptly at ten--here's Penny! And she's Elayne Boosler's little sister. Or could be. Torres comes on like a lipstick-and-eye-linered, Letterman-ready comedienne. She's got enough blonde hair to stuff a whoopee cushion, and a killer delivery.

"My niece, I found out last time, is, like, a major virgin." Big laugh.

She works the room, peppering regulars. "You might not want to sit next to your mother during this one," she kids an Opieesque 17-year-old lad wedged between his folks. "Have you had sex?" she asks the squirming youngster. "No, don't tell me! We'll get Mafu to get it out of you."

Before this morning's big draw emerges, there's a Mafu-pronouncement update. One bit of news is the intergalactic AIDS quarantine. Seems our off-planetary neighbors, skittish as preschooler parents with an HIV-pos. child in their day-care center, have gotten together to keep earthlings from spreading our killer virus. This explains, among other things, the Challenger disaster. It wasn't those frosty booster seals after all. It was the Astral Command, cracking down on interstellar immigrants. (If Morton Thiokol attorneys can get that in a deposition, it'll save the company zillions in settlements.)

At last, Penny settles on her Naugahyde, sits back and prepares to transmogrify. Mild rocking gives way to twitches. Then come shudders, a wrenching, tortured groan and--mirabile dictu!--it's not Penny anymore. It's Mafu, who bursts to life like Ed McMahon doing Yoda. "It is, indeed, a glorious thing to be here in your time!"

Other channels stay put on their thrones, squinch-eyed and sedentary. But Mafu follows, quite literally, in Ramtha's footsteps. He pops up and manipulates his hostess' haunches around the room in a flat-footed, ALFlike waddle to greet his regulars.

The spirit wastes little time before wading into heavy water. "A state of marriage can be a limitation. What if you desire to lay with someone else?"

Mafu pauses, nostril to nostril with a pretty middle-aged lady, who manages to smile sweetly at the assault: "You're familiar with this, aren't you?"

"Do you want me to answer right now?"

"No, why don't we wait for another lifetime?"

Ouch! In another seat, a nervous, pregnant young woman weeps over whether or not to abort. Across the room, the sheepish dad, in the company of another young woman, is told, in effect, that he's at the counter asking for another life if he doesn't shape up. (If we're really good, see, we won't have to come back; we can ditch this mortal coil and groove out as pure energy, like guess who?) The tone's pesky but affectionate: Joe Pyne come back to life as a cross-dressing Kreskin, hosting The Newlywed Game.

Mafu punctuates his most scathing queries with a hearty it's-all-a-joke chuckle. But still, when he shuffles his way near my row, clomping ever closer, I leave so much sweat on my seat back, I'm afraid it'll peel off when I leap up and run screaming out into the desert, to die among cacti, too plagued by Ted Koppel shame to get even: Mafu's term for attaining perfect no-beans-left-to-spillness.

Mafu pauses, swings my way, but--maybe he can read minds; maybe he's merciful--shuffles on by toward a handsome, familiar-looking fellow in the first row. I'm so relieved that I can't even remember how many Valiums I've gobbled.

Back in the marital tug of wars, Mafu stops short by this swarthy looker, who, it turns out, is Andrew Rubin, star of Police Academy and the late, lamented Joe Bash show, among other things.

"Hector, how do you like laying with my woman?" Mafu wonders. The drift's a little unclear at first--until it turns out Hector is how Mafu pronounces actor, and Andrew is Penny's fiancé. (At the same time, trickily enough, she's Mafu's "woman," which makes it that much more high-impact when M. asks A. what he'll do if he feels desire for another woman when he's married to P.)

In all honesty, I'd probably implode if the gal of my dreams turned into a chuckling dead man and began to grill me on true-love dos and don'ts. But Andrew, to his credit, is as cool as a cuke. Maybe this happens all the time around their house. And why not? The half-hour-comedy potential's endless. I Married Mafu!--about a guy who never knows when the little lady will twitch out and re-emerge, her perky self possessed by a crusty-but-lovable ascended master. "Hector!"

"Don't judge yourself; you're all God" is Mafu's message. It's like the opposite of est. First you find out all the reasons you're an asshole. Then you find out there's no such thing as an asshole, anyway! So go ahead and love your funky self.

Hats off to those brave channel fans who can handle the program! Personally, I'm back on highway 62 before I crack and confess to spanking a WAC.

•

Happily, on just about any night here in the psychic hub of the universe, there's enough channel action to make Edgar Cayce want to reincarnate and lease a Hyundai. L.A.'s so hopping, benevolent entity--wise, that serious seekers are less likely to go trekking through Nepal than through the San Fernando Valley. The only way to keep track--unless you're already psychic--is to snap up a copy of the movement's New Awareness bible, The Conscious Connection. Tellingly enough, its founder, Susan Levin, used to run the singles connection, Mix and Match. "Until," explains Levin, now a pillar of the L.A. spiritual community, "I got tired of the desperation."

Exactly! Here in the Tainted Semen Era, smart singles are looking to get intimate with non physical beings. It's safer than all that guy-'n'-gal stuff. Thus far, nobody's even caught athlete's foot from a formless spirit guide, let alone the killer sex plague.

That's what's so great. Even the briefest riff through Levin's high-colonic and "color energy" promos reveals a smorgasbord of other-world get-togethers. You've got Pele, Hawaiian volcano goddess. You've got Bell-Bell from Atlantis. You've got Merlin and St. Germain. You've got Raydia from pass the Pleiades. Li Sung, Dr. Peebles, Master Ho, Zoroaster, Zamar and Moe Howard. I've caught them all. Or almost. (I made up Moe, but only because I have this feeling that when I start channeling, that's who's going to take over.)

For weeks, I attended a channel an evening, not to mention those "privates." Grim but true. One more jolt of psychic energy and my offspring will be born with a third eye.

Take Darryl Anka's Bashar, from the planet Essassani. Darryl, a special-effects ace by training, distributes his own videos and holds S.R.O. Thursday-night channelings at the Encino Women's Club. The day after we caught him, he was off to break still new frontiers--to channel in Japan. They may have invented ancestor worship, but it takes good ol' American know-how to show them how to get in touch with their dead-and-goners.

For once, they can't cop the technology and sell it back to us, either. There isn't any. Unless you count crystals. Every trend generates its own peculiar paraphernalia. And the same chest-haired hepsters who once dangled coke spoons around their necks are now likely to be dangling amethysts instead. Not 'cause they're trying to be hip--no!--but 'cause they want to magnify their energy field.

Young Darryl, a compact, goateed Canadian in this incarnation, does not seem to require mineral assistance. He's empowered enough in unadorned jeans and a snug muscle T. Before Darryl can relax up front and beam in Bashar, his roadies have to set up the vid-cam, check the P.A., make sure tapes and transcripts of channels past are on display by the door where seekers drop their $12 admission on the way in. Which gives Valley spiritualists time to browse among the twinkly display.

The biggest table belongs to Dr. Shawn Shelton, a 40ish, blonde lovely in tight stone-washed jeans and enough lip gloss to lubricate a submarine. "The magic of crystals can create a more beautiful and powerful you," according to the doctor's testimony. Better still, her mile-long array offers stones for specific psychoemotional hankers. Such as aventurine--"the money-and-business crystal." Or Apache-tear obsidian--"perfect for immediately transforming worry, fear and anxiety."

By the time Bashar's manager, big Steve Muro, starts his warm-up spiel, dozens of true believers are already clutching their crystals. A few rest them on their heads. Others simply roll the wonder nuggets back and forth between their fingers, like Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. "Uri Geller was on Good Morning America," says Muro, "Shirley MacLaine has her own miniseries, Whitley Strieber"--author of. the extraterrestrial best seller Communion--"was on Johnny Carson. The New Age is approaching!"

Yeah! The Communion deal means a lot to Basharites. See, their entity's not a past-lifer, he's an alien. From the planet Essassani. Apparently, several years ago, Darryl spotted a craft (insiders never call them spaceships) over greater Los Angeles. That sighting triggered the memory of his real mission as an earthling: to get the rest of us ready for the shift to Fourth Density, last stop on the physical plane before entering Pure Lightville. All of which, just so you have time to pack the Polaroid, should start happening 26 years from now. For the record, Bashar's breed are already Fourth Density, going on Fifth. Essassanites "average five feet of your height, with gray skin coloration with wide upturned eyes.... Males have no hair. Women have white fluff." I've seen similar creatures grubbing for Burger King buns in Times Square subway bins, but draw your own conclusions.

By way of transition, the alien of the hour breaks into a heavy catarrh, a loud hack and swallow on his way from being Darryl to being Bashar. It's not really appetizing. But maybe, on Essassani, postnasal drip is a sign of welcome--like vomiting in Australia.

"All right, I'll say, and how are you all this evening of your time as you create time to exist?"

That's how Essassanites speak English. Bashar pronounces world "wurrl-ed" and doles out tureens of ethereal data before breaking for no-nonsense Q. and A. with the eager Valley metaphysicians lined up along the women's-club wall. This is serious biz. Beyond your standard "Is something in my past life holding up my cable deal?" queries, Bashar tackles some arcane inquiries. One little bald fellow, when told that killer whales are the "samurais and sorcerers of the sea," asks if dolphins have "multiple-point consciousness." "Yes," Bashar replies, "and so do you." Who'd ever have guessed?

At half time, actor Allen Garfield, who starred as the tempetuous new police chief in Beverly Hills Cop II, abandons Dr. Shawn's crystal emporium long enough to explain what's brought him back to Bashar three weeks in a row. "From a purely entertainment value, it's fabulous," gushes Garfield, looking svelte and elegant. "The guy sounds like a Valley version of Yul Brynner in The King and I. But he says some great things. Every time I come, I drive home thinking, I just spent three hours with some fucking entity from some fucking spaceship who looks like he works in the post office. And what he's saying fuses with things going on in my own life." Here the actor's actor pauses, his face aglow with ethereal glee.

"Besides, I love seeing Shawn. A lot of gorgeous chicks come to these things."

•

Dr. Peebles, the departed Scotsman channeled by affable Thomas Jacobson, is actually the same entity channeled by the Reverend William Rainan, Tom's psychic instructor. That happens a lot. "John," for example, speaks through Kevin Ryerson and Gerry Bowman. But it's OK. That's one of the sweet things about the movement. Channels, by and large, hold the same attitude about spirits as Eskimos do about their wives: They don't mind sharing.

Tom shows up in a crew-neck patterned sweater, wool pants and wafer-soled Italian shoes--the weekend C.E.O. look. Right off, he helps a roomful of well-groomed white people groove out on a guided meditation, employing the same Hobbity visuals aging hippies started painting on the sides of vans in the mid-Seventies. The unicorn-and-white-light feel favored by Gilbert Williams, the premiere New Age artist, represented by Jach Pursel at his thriving Illuminarium galleries. (Jach, the one channel who eschews the Eskimo share-the-spirit approach, opens every video with a caveat emptor: Anybody else claiming to speak as Lazaris is a fake. It's that simple. Jach's also the only channel flush enough to open up a très-glam art gallery at Number One Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. There are, it becomes more and more obvious, no accidents.)

"You're loony," the dead cutup tells an earnest gent who insists he's being contacted by a spirit named Philip. "Only teasing," adds Peebles. "I'm only using some of the earth humor I've heard directed toward me."

The heart of the affair, as is once more the case, are the questions. Your dancers, your scribes, your aspiring Jerry Bruckheimers--all crave the kind of insider info that, weirdly enough, they're confident a man who lived centuries before step deals were even invented can somehow dish out.

"I've been working on a script," announces a chunky but sweet first-time writer in the back. "I've just left my job. I'm about to finish, and I feel a lot of fear."

"Well," ad-libs the enlightened sage, "all you have to do is make the spirit the star of the script."

What a kook! And the wacky patter's enhanced by the fact that Tom himself bears an uncanny resemblance to lounge legend Shecky Greene.

After the yoks, Dr. P. proceeds to more nuts-and-bolts material. "Names and titles are important," he points out in that roguish burr, eyes shut, hands webbed upon his sloping belly. "If you don't feel a little nasty, you're not going far enough. You have wonderful humor, but be a little more black. Without apology."

When Miss Screenwriter finally mentions the name of her opus--Chances Are--Peebles makes no bones about his reaction. "Change the title, for goodness' sake! The public will respond!"

This is priceless advice. Considering my own agent, whose general response to just about anything is "See if Taco Bell is hiring," you can't help but love the guffawing master's M.O.

•

Now, though, it's time to talk privates.

For five years, twice a week, I've been shelling out $50 a pop to hit the couch at my analyst's, Dr. Housebomb. Just trying to get a handle on things. And now, for a comparable fee ($50 to $300--but you don't meet as often), I've had the privilege of sampling the kind of consultation only a quality trance channel can provide. And let me tell you, as therapists, your channels supply bushels more Big Insights per depression-fighting dollar. Not to mention the bonus entertainment value.

"People don't have time for traditional therapy anymore" is how Margo Chandley, Ph.D., explains it. "A channel session is like an accelerated psychoanalysis. It's quicker. This is what we need."

And not just because we're a bunch of go-go moderns, either. The whole universe is accelerating. Time's speeding up. According to Dr. Chandley (she snagged her doctorate studying 13 top-drawer practitioners), the last days of our millennium are a time when the planet itself is revving up for a leap in consciousness. That's why all these enlightened beings are popping up in the first place.

Dr. Margo's theory is that Mayans were gifted at levitation on account of their pineal glands, which were jumbo compared with Homo moderno's, which are as withered in disuse as a Tyrannosaurus' arms. How do you think the Mayans built those hefty pyramids? Surely not by hand. No, sir, the denizens of Olde Mexico had plainly mastered telekinesis.

It's the same with Atlantis. And I ought to know--I was there. Lazaris told me personally.

I'm serious. Jach was gracious enough to grant yours truly a one-on-one with the Big Guy at the L.A.X. Hilton. To his credit, J.P. still charges a modest $53 per private, easily the low end of the nonincarnate consultation scale. Mafu, by contrast, charges two C notes. And most middle-of-the-road energies bill at least $100.

Pursel and I share a Diet Pepsi; then Laz arrives and tells me I had a key lifetime back on Atlantis, round about 11,300 B.C. The scene: Dad was a wealthy banker, and I wrote god-awful epic ballads. I was, near as I can make out, a sort of grade-D Rod McKuen. My poetry was so bad I was disowned. I became an outcast and died broke. Until--scant consolation--decades after I checked out, my work was rediscovered and used as propaganda by the reigning fascist administration. The regime that revered me eventually destroyed the entire civilization. Which may, I suppose, mean that the batch of light verse I'm currently preparing will be critically lambasted, then end up quoted extensively in Sly Stallone's 2004 Presidential Inauguration speech. When, thankfully, I'll already be dead.

Unlike your ho-hum, poky analysts--such as Housebomb--Lazaris will occasionally toss out a hot stock-market tip. It's nice. The spirit (considered by many the most avant entity in the cosmos) tailors each tip to his client's particular psychic make-up. Says the loving and rotund Lazaris with a smile, "We would tell you, because of your temperament, hold on to blue chips."

The ancient-scribe motif is also picked up by Gerry Bowman. He channels "John" on the Out of the Ordinary Show, America's first radio call-in formless-energy program.

If Jach Pursel is the Pat Boone of trancedom, Gerry Bowman's the flat-out Elvis. He holds privates in a converted garage behind his funky, ramshackle house in Altadena.

It's kind of a blue-collar feel. Bowman is wire-thin, with ropy veins down his arms, a droopy mustache and a tattoo of an eagle clutching a U.S.A. banner gracing his right wrist. Before deciding "to take the spook on the road," our man was a Boston mechanic, a Vietnam vet and a window-and-door contractor.

Among non-Yup aficionados (your BMW clones tend to go in for Laz), Bowman's considered the purest energy helping us out right now. Word is, when John shows up, there's not much of Gerry left to pollute the spirit's vibe. Meaning, when this cowboy leaves his body, he leaves his body. In fact, Gerry confided that he can channel John's energy only eight or nine times a week. (Compared to the dozens of sessions your standard professions take on.) More than that, he confesses, and he starts doing "the Thorazine shuffle." There are, needless to say, easier ways to make a living.

Intense strain does not begin to capture the throes Bowman goes through to let in John. First off, he stubs out a pre-out-of-body cigarette. Then, for a moment, he stays inhumanly still, staring at an Egyptian print on the wall--the eye of Horus. Inanimate as stone, he suddenly pitches forward, flushing scarlet, and begins to shiver, the veins in his throat pulsing like a hanged man's. At last, jerked back upright, he closes his eyes. By now, the twitching has gripped him all over. Organic electroshock, inches from my own incredulous self. If there's such a thing as a contact heart attack, I'm a likely candidate.

I've said it before, but under the circumstances, it's worth repeating: After a minute or two, anything seems normal. And sure enough, in no time, I'm used to this vibrating saint in a Ban-Lon shirt, knee-deep in another twisted-scribbler saga. This time, I'm a malcontent scribe with prophetic powers. In ancient Egypt. Even then, I seem to have, um, "problems with relationships with the opposite sex."

But that's OK. Three hundred fifty light-years from now, John says I'll come back as a "gaseous state on the planet Elgon" and finally find happiness as a fume.

Of course, your conventional, West 57th--type wisdom might dismiss channeling as a "self-love, Yuppie religion." But that's way off. Channel infatuation isn't about selfishness or status. It's about raw, steaming, bodily-fluid-friendly sexual pleasure. The kind nobody has anymore.

My most memorable privates--with Sherman Oaks' hugely popular Natalie Wood look-alike Taryn Krivé and North Hollywood's sultry-but-spiritual Shawn Randall, whose channel classes have inspired some top entities in the biz--left me with a warm glow. They were, you might say, models of The New Intimacy. The kind where all you do is feel and never touch.

In the old days, you could have sex and not connect. As the Eighties climax, all that's left is connecting. Which is what Taryn and I did, separated only by a floral-print TV tray in her private channel room. To begin, Taryn rubs a chunk of purple crystal along the length of her torso. The former legal secretary starts at the crown of her brunette shag. She eases the charged-up mineral between her Bambi eyes, between her breasts, due south to her flat and seductive tummy. She opens chakras one through seven and slides the electromagnetic silica back up to her pretty skull.

Actual touching at this point would be as inappropriate as martinis. What I the client do is wait for the spirits to arrive, so we can abandon the pesky physical realm altogether and get down to business.

For $100, it's just us, all alone in this cozy salon. "You and I knew each other in Lemuria," Hopi spirit Barking Tree reveals through Krivé. "I was married. We had a relationship that was very close."

Well, gosh. Is it getting warm in here? I hardly know this creature, and she's telling me what a really deep female I was way back when. I mean, you could sleep with somebody dozens of times and she'd never dream you were once a Lemurian bachelorette. But get down with a channel and without so much as a smooch, you're totally exposed.

"You had a lifetime in Alaska, and you were what is called Eskimo. In that lifetime, I was not in physical form, but I was one of your spirit guides."

Oooh, yeah! Ladies and gentlemen, the unconditional love floating over me at this moment is more than I can adequately convey. Just being here with Barking Tree, now letting me know that in my Eskimo mode, I "had a limp and a tendency to hide"--just sharing such intimacy with this caring and adorable woman generates that life-affirming, warm glow deep down inside of me.

Somehow, in retrospect, it all seems weirdly inevitable. Here at the dawn of the New Age, sex has been bounced by hands-off, soul-to-soul communion. Any day now, we'll be formless, anyway. Today's channel hoppers are simply boning up for the big transition.

Despite this new-found enlightenment, my excitement at meeting Shawn Randall, legendary channel instructress and vessel for ascended entity Torah, is shamelessly crude. In her preholiness mode, Randall wrote screenplays. And it just so happens she co-penned one of my all-time favorite cinema gems: Pia Zadora's The Lonely Lady. The prospect of communing with the woman who put words in Pia's lips is just too thrilling. I can't imagine more total fulfillment.

Once Lady's author enters her trance and admits Torah, she gives me the low-down on my life as an alienated crystal wizard back on Atlantis. That existence, I embraced psychic powers at 45 and died a bemused seer decades later. Past life--wise, it's not too shabby. Compared with some of the karmic pit stops I've slimed through, this one sounds like a jaunt at Club Med. But even this info is not what makes our session so special.

Beyond all the channeled specifics, what really sends me are the dynamics of the affair. Shawn greets me at the door of her beige condo with her blouse open down to her navel. Our eyes lock and a wave of desire suffuses my loftier urges. We instantly give in to retro, animal drives that are bigger than both of us. And then----

I'm lying, of course. I don't even know if Pia's scribe knew she was baring more than her soul. It's just that even an inadvertent breast exposure sets a tone. Especially if there are no accidents.

By the time our session gets under way, my fantasy's already fading. The accomplished, beautiful channel sits at her end of the couch, transformed into Torah. The squirmy seeker sits at the other end, all keyed up for some cosmic oneness.

What, really, is left to say? Moments pass in heavenly communion. Torah tells me she and I both lived in Lemuria, that long-defunct continent in the Pacific, and lets me know she fought in the Crusades. I have no idea what it means. All I know is, after a passel of revealing details, it's white light a-go-go. Torah explains everything.

"Sensuality," she reveals, "is in reality very spiritual. At the point of orgasm, you are closer with your higher self than at any other time. Total surrender to lovingness, total surrender to sensation that overcomes all other ills and problems of the day. This, in a sense, is you opening to the energy."

By now, my advisor has buttoned up. But still, the mood lingers on. What she's saying is at once erotic, outrageous and completely logical. Channeling, as you've doubtless already guessed, is the ultimate safe sex. Not just safe but cosmic...empowering...divine....

Go ahead and laugh. Now that flesh and blood are off limits, spirit's the next frontier. Ten years from now, you won't even take your own body on your honeymoon. You'll just unpack, clutch your crystal and slip into a trance.

It's perfect! Tune in, turn on, talk true love with the saucy godhead.

Illustration by John O'Leary

"Mafu bursts to life like Ed McMahon doing Yoda. 'It is, indeed, a glorious thing to be here in your time!'"