Two channelled sources did more than any others to establish the practice as a recognisable feature of late twentieth-century American spirituality. Jane Roberts, a novelist and poet, began in 1963 to produce material she attributed to an entity called Seth, delivered initially through a Ouija board and later spoken directly in trance and transcribed by her husband, and the resulting Seth books, published from 1970 onward, set out an extensive philosophy of a multidimensional self and the idea that individuals create their own reality through belief, a phrase that entered New Age vocabulary directly from this source and is still commonly used without reference to it.
J.Z. Knight, a Washington state cable-television executive, began channelling an entity she calls Ramtha in 1977, describing him as a thirty-five-thousand-year-old warrior spirit, and built around the material a large following, a retreat centre and, from 1998, her own accredited institution, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, making her channelling arguably the most commercially and institutionally developed example of the practice in the United States. Both cases display the same pattern the practice generates repeatedly: a body of philosophical or cosmological material, often extensive and internally consistent enough to sustain years of published output, presented by the channel as originating from a source other than their own conscious authorship, while critics and some psychologists studying the phenomenon describe the same material as an unusually productive form of automatic composition, a disagreement about mechanism that neither the volume nor the coherence of what is produced settles on its own.