Walk-ins

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Walk-ins

In 1979 popular New Age author Ruth Montgomery identified an unknown phenomenon that had occurred to a variety of unrelated individuals. They reported that the soul originally inhabiting their body had vacated it so that another could "walk in" and take over. Montgomery wrote about walk-ins in her book, Strangers Among Us (1979), suggesting that at times people with otherwise perfectly healthy bodies no longer wished to live. If they were allowed to leave, the people would turn over their physically sound bodies to some advanced (though as yet unperfected) soul. In a subsequent book, Threshold to Tomorrow (1983), Montgomery related some 17 case histories of walk-ins, including New Age leaders Dick Sutphen and Carol Parrish-Harra.

The background of a person claiming to be a walk-in often contains a traumatic, even life-threatening, event through which the person passed to a new, transformed life. Some individuals suffered a medical crisis, often to the point of clinical death and revival. Others reached the conclusion that they simply no longer wanted to live. Because the new personality emerging after the crisis retains the memory of the previous personality, some observers have suggested more mundane explanations of the walk-in experience, including a dramatic re-integration of a previously fragmented personality. The experience of walk-ins has also been compared to near-death experiences, which have led to similar life transformations, though without the feeling of being a different person.

Montgomery claims she received the concept of walk-ins from her "guides," a group of evolved entities from whom Montgomery had channeled material for many years. According to her guides, many of the world's leading figures have been walk-ins, including Moses, Joseph, and Jesus of Nazareth. More recent leaders include Muhammad, Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, Joseph Smith Jr., Mary Baker Eddy, and many of the founders of the American nation, notably George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abigail Adams.

None of the outstanding people from history identified by Montgomery as walk-ins left any hint of having experienced anything similar to the experiences of contemporary walk-ins. Montgomery believed the public nature of the contemporary phenomenon is related to the approaching New Age, which she believed would be initiated by a polar shift in the year 1999. In the past, walk-ins have not identified themselves as such, but in the light of the events of 1999, they need to know of each other so they can locate each other as the leaders who will build the new golden age.

Among the more interesting of the contemporary walk-ins is the couple who heads the Extraterrestrial Earth Mission. Over the last decade they have claimed to be inhabited by a series of extraterrestrial metaphysical teachers. In 1986, John, a metaphysical teacher in Seattle, Washington, abandoned his body to a personality known as "Avinash." Later that year he met another walk-in, then named "Arthea." During the next eight years Avinash would also depart and be succeeded by persons known as "Aktivar," "Alarius," "Savizar," and "ZaviRah." At the same time Arthea was followed by "Akria," "Polaria," "Silarra," and "Ziva'rah." There is every expectation that further walk-in teachers will appear in the future.