Sara Schurr
Hi, I'm Sara Schurr. I channeled for Aranya and The Pixies from 1986 to 1998.
I began channeling Aranya quite by accident. For a number of years I had been listening to a voice speak to me during my meditation. I called this 'getting guidance' and over time decided that this voice was my higher self. Over the years I had graduated from simply listening to the voice to taking down what I heard as dictation while typing on my computer. One morning the voice got stuck and kept repeating the same thing over and over again. I don't remember now what it was that it repeated but I do remember that it occurred to me that maybe the voice would get unstuck if I said the words out loud. So I tried it and sure enough the words began to flow.
The voice, which eventually identified itself as Aranya, told me to put my attention across the room and to pretend to sit on the file cabinet and listen to him. Thus began my training as a channel. After a few days of this he asked me to make a decision as to whether I actually wanted to learn to be a channel. I wrestled with this for a day or so. I knew that if I said yes, I would be giving up all hope of ever being 'normal.' But aside from that I couldn't come up with any good reason not to do it. And so I said yes since I hadn't succeeded in being normal yet and I wasn't giving up that much to do it. He then trained me to relax and open up to him and simply listen. He called it 'getting out of the way.' And I saw that as my only real job in the process--to work as hard as I could at not thinking and not interfering with the process and staying out of the way.
He introduced me to each entity separately. We started with Harmony who was a real kick and drove me nuts making funny noises and trying out every thing that my voice could possibly do. Once I'd gotten used to her and she'd gotten used to the process he introduced Melody and then Symphony. By then, I was practicing each night channeling for my husband, Walter Cooke. He'd ask questions of the entities and they'd have a great conversation together. Harmony asked him to come up with musical names for the three of them and that's where the names Harmony, Melody and Symphony came from.
Harmony started playing her creation game early on. She took Walter through the process--he created the Ponderosa Pine. And then she told him that I was part of the committee that created the 'freeway daisy' otherwise known as the ox-eye daisy. So next time you see daisies growing along the road or out in a field in the spring, think of me.
I went about 4 or 5 months channeling the four of them with my biggest concern being that maybe Aranya would leave when I got good at the process and leave me with the 3 angels. I am very very fond of him and really didn't like that idea at all. That turned out not to be an issue. Instead, he introduced me to Hon Sone Lee who was a rather big challenge since he actually had a body that he sort of wrapped around mine in the channeling process. He's much shorter than I am and we had some interesting adjusting to do. He used to joke that his nose hit me right in between my shoulder blades on my back.
I had been channeling with my eyes closed these first few months and somewhere in the late spring (this all began in February) I saw Harmony in the mirror and she was so clearly different than me and so mesmerizing to me that I never needed to channel with my eyes closed again. Once I was comfortable with channeling with my eyes open I let the entities get up and walk around while I channeled and Harmony got her wish of getting to dance with Walter.
Symbala and Ramana were added as the year went by and at the end of 12 months there were 7 of them and I felt as if I was at my max in terms of entities. Each has a very different energy and way of expressing themselves and it was a stretch for me to let go and be open to each one and trust that it would all be okay each time. I admit I spent a lot of my energy making sure each one stayed in their 'defined' box so that I and my audiences could tell them all apart. Silly me!
We began holding monthly public sessions in our home in August 1986 and that went on for 10 years. I began doing private consultations in the spring of 1987 and those continued until I retired in 1998. From 1987 through 1998 I offered topic based workshops including our fun series, Pixie University where we even had a degree program. How many people do you know who have a BMSU (Bachelor's of Makes Stuff Up). During that time I also published Aranya's little book,
A Journey to the Center, and was a regular contributor to Spirit Speaks Magazine until it ceased publication.
It was a wonderful wild ride. When it began I got very clear that while it was nice that other folks got something out of what I did, that the real purpose of the process was for my own growth. I was going to do it as long as I was getting something out of it and when I stopped getting enough out of it I'd stop.
In actuality, being a channel was a perfect reflection and test of the issues coming out of my first judgment. In my first life time I had taken it upon myself to try to save everyone from their suffering by offering ways to let go of judgment and become enlightened. No matter what I did, I wasn't successful and people just kept coming back asking for more. In the end, I judged myself for being unwilling to give everything I had emotionally and spiritually to my students and I judged them for not getting it. So here I was again, offering an enlightenment school through my channeling where neither I nor my students were getting it! The good news is that I had the entities to show me what I was doing, and to help me through the very painful process of meeting my first judgment head on by quitting when channeling was taking more out of me than I was getting from it. Quitting was one of the most difficult and liberating things I have ever done. And I have never really been sorry that I quit.
During the year after I quit channeling I had a number of spiritual openings that would last for a day or so and then dissolve back into normal every day life. After a year of this I realized where I was in Melody's cozying out of judgment process. I was still deeply trapped in the belief that suffering was real and that we all needed to do something about it. It became clear to me that what I needed was some way to realize that suffering wasn't real. Within a week of that realization I came upon The Work of Byron Katie. This was exactly what I was looking for. And it seemed to me to be the missing piece in all the things that the entities had talked about. Over and over again they had told us we needed to simply let go of judgment. But they never told us how. Katie's 4 questions were clearly a way to do it.
I've spent the last 9 years doing The Work and I highly recommend it. Have I become enlightened? No, but you know I no longer care if I ever become enlightened and I see that as a HUGE step. Do I still judge? Yes, of course, and yet I no longer fight against it but instead have a tool with which to make peace with and undo my judgments and set myself free from the traps they create.
One of the more amazing things that has come out of doing The Work is the change in my view of what my channeling really was. I had the opportunity to do The Work with Byron Katie and I chose to do it on my feelings of not being appreciated for all I did in channeling --my first judgment working over time again. We went through the process and at one point, Katie looked at me deep in the eyes and said, "Sweetheart, these are entities, is it true? Can you absolutely know it's true? Where does the voice come from?"
With great soul searching and even greater difficulty and lots of tears I had to admit that I had no way of proving that they were entities and that in fact the voice came from me, the words came from me. And that the turn around "These aren't entities" was as true or truer than "These are entities". This was really upsetting to me. I struggled with it for over a year. I was afraid that if I actually accepted that Aranya wasn't an entity and that it was all me, that it meant I'd been making it all up all those years; that I was admitting to being a fraud. In time I realized that wasn't the point. Nothing is real, just as the entities have always said. Aranya had always said that he was not separate from me. He knew that but I didn't. I heard him say it a thousand times. And yet it never went in and stuck.
So here's where I am with it now. Thoughts arise. Some thoughts have a familiar feel to them and I call those 'my thoughts'. They belong to Sara and all her sub personalities. Some thoughts don't have a familiar feel. Some I label as Aranya. Some as Harmony. Some as Melody, etc. The thoughts that I say belong to the entities tend to be much bigger and more expansive and wiser than the thoughts that are familiar to me and that I own as mine. But in truth those thoughts all come from the same place, what I call the mind of God.
I have come to realize--though I don't always believe it--that Sara as an absolute, really doesn't exist. I can find no proof of it. There is no one in there in my head that I can find when I go looking for her. There are thoughts. I have learned from Byron Katie to inquire regarding the truth of those thoughts. And just as the entities said, I have found there is no truth with a capital T. That Sara exists is not a Truth. She appears to exist. I live as if she does. But she is no more real than the entities. We're all equally illusionary and I've been making them all up all along.
I guess I'm actually starting to get the core curriculum of Pixie University. Maybe I'm finally ready to own my MMSU--Master of Makes Stuff Up. I've made up Sara and I've made up the entities and I've made up the concept of I. And while that may sound fairly outrageous it makes sense to me.
So what do retired channels do? I live my life. I move where spirit moves me. Walter and I go on adventures. I tended the garden at Winterhaven, our home until we sold it. For a while I facilitated the Work. For reasons beyond me, I've learned to be a webmaster. To find out more about me feel free to explore my website.
For those of you who are curious, the photos of the entities on this website were all taken one afternoon in 1988 by my dear friend, Joan Reddish. We were doing a photo shoot to get a photo of me for the dust cover of Aranya's book and she asked me to channel for her so she could shoot pictures of each of the entities. What fun to have an excuse to share those photos with you now.