When spirits begin to speak with man, he must beware lest he believe them in anything; for they say almost anything; things are fabricated by them, and they lie; for if they were permitted to relate what heaven is, and how things are in the heavens, they would tell so many lies, and indeed with solemn affirmation, that man would be astonished…They are extremely fond of fabricating: and whenever any subject of discourse is proposed, they think that they know it, and give their opinions one after another, one in one way, and another in another, altogether as if they knew; and if man then listens and believes, they press on, and deceive, and seduce in diverse ways. – Emanuel Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, 1622
When it comes to encounters with “hungry ghosts,” no story is more disturbing and tragic than that of Canadian journalist and best-selling author Joe Fisher. Fisher committed suicide at age 53 on May 9, 2001, throwing himself off a limestone cliff at Elora Gorge, Canada. His body was discovered by a group of teens. One newspaper suggested he may have been murdered. Shortly before his death, Fisher’s final book,The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, an investigation into channeling and spirit guides – described by its publisher as “his gripping journey into a realm of darkness and deception” – was republished by Paraview Press. What gives this story a strange twist is that, in one of his last communications with editor Patrick Huyghe, Fisher stated that the spirits he had allegedly angered as a result of writing the book were still causing him trouble.Fisher’s works include the metaphysical classics Life Between Life, Predictions and The Case for Reincarnation, the last of which includes a preface by the 14th Dalai Lama. In an article on the topic of “spirit possession,” Colin Wilson, who acknowledges Fisher as a friend, mentions that he “had been cheerful and normal, and no one, including myself, could believe that he had killed himself.” He mentions, moreover, that Fisher believed in life after death and subscribed to the theory of reincarnation. “What baffled me was that he must have been convinced that suicide would only leave him with another set of problems.”
Wilson has a point, because in The Case for Reincarnation, Fisher had written: “Those who learn that they have killed themselves in past lives are quickly brought to the realization that suicide, far from being an answer to life’s problems, is [instead] the violent breaking of the lifeline. If the [suicide] could only realize the resulting intensification of difficulty which must enter the life to come, [suicide] would never be [attempted].”
That Fisher’s death was caused by a group of malevolent discarnate entities – who perhaps influenced his mind – might sound far-fetched and sensational. It is, however, a possibility that cannot be ignored as anyone who’s read Hungry Ghosts would probably agree. Unable to accept that an optimistic, spiritually-minded man like Fisher would want to take his own life, Wilson writes: “I find myself speculating whether his suicide had anything to do with a weird experience he had in the 1980s.”
That “weird experience” began in 1984, when Fisher met an Australian-Canadian medium named Aviva Nuemann, who suffered from chronic leukemia. Aviva had contacted Fisher, suggesting he attend a channeling session at her house because, she said, she did not feel entirely comfortable being a “mouthpiece” for discarnate entities and was hoping that he, an expert on metaphysics, might be able to shed some light on the matter. When they first met, Aviva, a laboratory technologist, stressed the point that she had “never believed in the so-called psychic world. I think astrology is absolute crap, and I’ve got no time for anything that’s supposed to be paranormal…” She then told him the remarkable story of how she became a channeler for “the guides.”
It all started, she said, when she agreed to allow her friend, Roger Belancourt, to try and heal her under hypnosis. His aim was to administer positive medical suggestions to her subconscious mind, such as “Your bone-marrow will start immediately to manufacture the extra red blood cells needed by your body.” These hypnotic sessions took an experimental turn when Roger began probing Aviva’s mind for past-life memories. In an emotionless voice in the third-person, Aviva described having been a peasant woman named Svetlana who lived through the Russian revolution, as well as a Punjabi infant who died of malnutrition before his first birthday. Other “past life memories” were described as well.
Probing deeper still, Roger managed to contact another part of Aviva’s mind, even more knowledgeable than her subconscious. It referred to itself as the “alter-consciousness.” Roger discovered that every organ of Aviva’s body, and every aspect of her personality, appeared to possess its own alter-consciousness, each with its own voice. He used the “voices” to monitor Aviva’s health. By communicating with the blood’s alter-consciousness, for instance, Roger was able to tell whether Aviva’s red blood cell count had increased or decreased. This higher aspect of Aviva’s mind – what one might term her “superconsciousness” – proved to be very knowledgeable about spiritual matters. The aim of reincarnation is “forward development,” it said, which is “understanding of oneself.”
When brought back to full consciousness, Aviva had no memory of what had transpired while in trance. It was as though she had been deeply asleep. “Coming back isn’t much fun,” she told Fisher. “It’s as if I’m being dragged very swiftly up a mineshaft…it’s like hearing an alarm go off when I’m dead to the world.” Seeing as her alter-consciousness seemed to know just about everything, Roger decided to ask it if “spirit guides” actually existed for he had long suspected that he was watched over by a deceased Tibetan Lama named Jai-Lin. Roger found to his delight that he could communicate with Jai-Lin via Aviva’s alter-consciousness, which in Fisher’s words “acted as intermediary, relaying messages from the next world.” His “guide” told Roger that he “must always think positive thoughts,” and that “you have much to learn in self-discipline.”
Annoyed by the fact that Roger was unable to control his negative emotions, Jai-Lin told Roger that he must move on to meet fresh challenges elsewhere. Jai-Lin was eventually replaced by another “guide,” an affectionate entity named Hanni, who claimed to have been Roger’s mother in a previous life in the Netherlands. Every incarnate individual was administered a spirit guide, Roger was told. But this did not necessarily mean that one had the same guide throughout the whole course of one’s life – or, for that matter, several life times. Sometimes a guide would leave their “charge” – the incarnate person whom they were required to “watch over” – and another guide would fill their place.
Having mastered the ability to manipulate Aviva’s vocal cords – a process that was said to take some time – Hanni was able to speak through the entranced Aviva. Fisher describes Hanni’s voice as “soft and tenderly” and totally dissimilar to Aviva’s. While channeling her own guide – a Yorkshire farmer named Russel who claimed to have last lived on Earth during the 19th century – the voice that issued from Aviva’s mouth was also unlike her own, so much so that it left Fisher stunned. “Gone was the high-pitched jocularity with the pronounced Australian lilt. Her enunciation was now unequivocally masculine; the English accent was unmistakable.”
Speaking to Russel, Fisher was not only surprised by Aviva’s change in voice but by her change in personality, too. “This was an entirely different Aviva,” he says, “strangely assertive and uncompromising.” Fisher felt as though he were talking to a separate being and not a fragment of Aviva’s unconscious mind. Russel told Fisher that humanity was divided into two groups: souls and entities. Souls were said to be “created from desire,” while entities were “born of knowledge.” Neither group was superior, said Russel. Although he found the concept difficult to accept, Fisher was glad to be hailed as an entity – clearly the more appealing of the two groups. Entities were classified as individuals, while souls were said to have more of a group mentality.
Fisher’s guide turned out to be a young Greek woman named Filipa Gavrilos. Three centuries earlier, said Russel, she and Fisher had been lovers in a little Greek village called Theros. Apparently they had been together over many lifetimes. The news blew Fisher away as he had always been strongly drawn to Greece, and, as a child, the name Phillipa had appealed to him. Russell described Filipa as an “excitable young lady.” Eventually, he said, she would be able to speak through Aviva. In the meantime, Fisher tried to develop mind-to-mind contact with Filipa, something she had encouraged him to do. Each day, Fisher would close his eyes and will Filipa to communicate with him, a regimen he followed religiously for the next three years.
It didn’t take long before a small group of New Age enthusiasts had gathered around Aviva, all of them eager to communicate with their guides. Regular sessions were held every week. No guide was available for those who were classified as souls, because the souls of guides, it was said, occupied a separate and inaccessible plane to that of entities. In late 1984, Filipa spoke through Aviva for the very first time. Fisher describes her voice as “subdued, pensive and poignantly tender.”
Initially, admits Fisher, he was rather unimpressed with Filipa and had “serious doubts about her intelligence…Her initial responses were almost juvenile, prompting me to remark to Roger and Aviva that I had attracted a ‘disco queen’ for a guide.” As the sessions continued, however, Filipa quickly became “an advisor, a best friend. And my ideal lover.” He adds: “Filipa and I seemed to think alike, feel alike and see the world from a near-identical perspective.”
What complicated the situation is that Fisher had a girlfriend, named Rachel, who also attended the meetings, though very infrequently. Her guide, William, spoke with a thick Scottish accent and claimed to have last lived in Edinburgh during the 17th century. They had strong karmic ties, he said, having shared more than twenty lifetimes together. Fond of William though she was, Rachel couldn’t help but feel slightly repulsed by him and the other guides. “For all their signs and wonders, the guides gave her the creeps,” writes Fisher. While in their presence, she sometimes felt “a certain intangible negativity in the air…” She eventually dropped out of the group, and, in time, she and Fisher drifted apart. He had, after all, found a more suitable partner in Filipa – non-physical though she was – who “knew and understood me more precisely than anyone…”
The guides said they could read the minds of their charges, which seemed to be true. They knew certain things about their charges that only their charges knew. They could, for instance, describe what their charge had been doing or thinking on a particular day and at a particular time – information that could only have been gained psychically.
Every so often, said the guides, it was necessary for them to intervene directly in the lives of their charges. One time Aviva had driven through a snowstorm to collect her six-year-old son from school, despite the fact that Russell had warned her not to, claiming it was too dangerous. She arrived safely at the school. But for some strange reason her car wouldn’t start on the way home. Several drivers gave her a boost, and still the engine wouldn’t respond. “But,” she told Fisher, “as soon as the snowstorm abated, the engine started perfectly, as if nothing had happened.” Questioned about the incident later on, Russell claimed responsibility for the temporary engine failure. Had he not intervened, he said, Aviva would have had a potentially fatal accident on the way home.
Fisher’s daily attempts to communicate with Filipa on a mind-to-mind basis began to yield some interesting results. Whenever contact had been successfully established, “a loud buzzing would reverberate in my ears, a sound that could be likened to an internal droning of cicadas.” (One is reminded of Mary’s “critter” experiences.) During these meditative sessions, images would sometimes appear in his mind. One time he saw the image of woman walking towards him. She was wearing sandals and a long white wrap, her face partially hidden by a garment. He knew the woman was Filipa. “Within seconds, my body was racked with the most profound and unrestrained emotion. I wept out of joy and sadness and loss and anguish, yet to this day I don’t really know why.”
Mind-to-mind contact could best be achieved when Fisher was in a particularly relaxed mood, with very few thoughts running through his head. Sometimes he’d imagine himself hugging Filipa, and this she appreciated greatly. Fisher could tell that she longed for a physical body. “I wish that I could stand there and wipe your face and hold your hand,” she told him on one occasion. Filipa and the other guides disliked nothing more than to be referred to as “spirits” and to be reminded of the fact that they no longer occupied physical bodies. To call one of the guides a spirit was to annoy them, even make them angry. “We’re not spirits!” Russell once shouted. “We’re people just like you. It’s just that we don’t have bodies anymore.” Fisher found it a little dubious that the guides were so attached to the “physical plane,” even though they stressed that they were no more “spiritually evolved” than their charges.
Occasionally, said Fisher, conversations with Filipa “would erupt in my head.” Once, while running up a steep hill, Fisher heard “a voice or implanted thought-form.” So as to make the climb much easier, the “voice” told him to imagine that his feet were not touching the ground. The technique had a positive effect. When next at Aviva’s house, Fisher asked Filipa if she had spoken to him while he was out running. She answered yes, and was able to relate exactly what she had told him. “Somehow,” explains Fisher, “Filipa had to be either living inside me or hovering perpetually close by, picking up via some otherworldly antenna my organism’s every twitch and shudder.”
In a sense, alludes Fisher, he was able to interact physically with Filipa and even have sexual intercourse with her. During a private conversation with Fisher, Wilson asked him if he “meant they [he and Filipa] became lovers in the physical sense, and he said yes, he did. I felt it would tactless to ask exactly how they went about it.”
The guides appeared to have access to an almost unlimited amount of information. They even claimed to know “the nature of God.” However, they said, the amount of time required to explain it would take some three hundred sessions; for this reason, the project was never attempted. Fisher admits to being impressed by the teachings and advice offered by the guides. They were taught, among other things, about the history of Atlantis and Lemuria; about the workings of the mind; about reincarnation, karma, and spiritual development. And so on and so forth. “So rich and so abundant were the insights and observations that there were times when I felt overwhelmed by the veritable geyser of information,” he says. Communicating with the guides was an addictive and thrilling experience.
But as time went on, Fisher grew slightly suspicious of the guides. When, during one session, Filipa said she was aware of every thought he ever had about her, “the remark left me weak with ardent appreciation. Every time I thought of her, she knew. How attentive, I asked myself, can you get?” The guides gave long lectures about the importance of peace and love, but in many ways their teachings rang empty and possessed little substance. Also worrying was that they intervened, both physically and emotionally, in the lives of their charges, while at the same time stressing the importance of free will. Such a massive contradiction was impossible to explain.
In his book The Paranormal, British psychologist Stan Gooch – whose research is detailed in the next chapter – describes the teachings of “spirit guides” as “a kind of intellectual candy-floss…when you chew on these utterances, there is nothing there. The mouth is empty.” The late D. Scott Rogo, a prolific writer and researcher of parapsychological phenomena, was of much the same opinion as Gooch. “I find that most channeled discourses possess the spiritual and philosophical sophistication of a Dick-and-Jane book,” he explains in The Infinite Boundary. He once tried reading the Seth books, he says, “but I eventually found raking up the leaves from my mulberry tree more interesting and spiritually enhancing.”
At times the guides made statements that were just plain ridiculous, one of them being that Jesus Christ was no more “spiritually evolved” than any member of the group. Russell even stated that Jesus has “been back to the earth-bound many, many times.” According to him, the only reason that Jesus managed to achieve what he did is because he spoke the truth, and because he lived during desperate times when people needed someone to follow. As for Guatama Buddha, he hadn’t, to the best of Russell’s knowledge, reincarnated since.
“The more I loved Filipa,” writes Fisher, “the more I hungered for tangible proof of her existence.” For this reason, coupled with the fact that he wished to write a book about discarnate beings and life in the “next dimension,” Fisher set about trying to prove the identities of the guides. He wanted to know if they had lived the lives they said they had. Fisher knew enough about spirits to realize that they were rarely who they claimed to be. He had, in fact, been warned about this by Russell, who, during one of their first conversations, stated clearly that mischievous spirits sometimes like to pose as wise and knowledgeable spirit guides.
The guides were more than happy with Fisher’s desire to prove their identities and were eager to offer him specific details about their lives on earth. First of all, decided Fisher, he would try to follow up on the information given by ex-RAF bomber pilot William Alfred Scott, the guide of a man named Tony. Scott said he had been born in Bristol in 1917, had started his RAF career in 99 Squadron at Mildenhall, Suffolk, and, ironically, had not been killed in the air but in a German bombing raid on Coventry in 1944. Scott knew everything about the squadron, its operations, and his fellow officers. But Fisher discovered, after a visit to the Public Record Office at Kew, that there had been no Flying Officer William Scott in the Squadron.
One surviving member of the Squadron, Norman Didwell, who listened to a recording of Scott’s voice, confirmed that the man had never existed but said that his voice sounded “very, very familiar.” In addition, the alleged place of Scott’s death – a street called Sandrich – was found not to exist. Numerous other details were found to be bogus too. Before leaving England, the country of his birth, Fisher paid a visit to his mother, a devout Christian. “You’re talking to demons,” she told him. “And I don’t like the sound of it one bit.”
When back in Canada and in a bitter mood Fisher confronted Scott as to why he had lied, the once calm and polite entity became peevish and irritable. “I do not wish for my privacy to be violated,” he said. “I have given you all the information you need and, as such, it will stand.” Worming his way out of the situation, Scott claimed that he was unable to stick around for very much longer because he had made plans to reincarnate soon. A suitable “bodily vehicle” had been located in Southern England, he said. After saying farewell, Scott allegedly departed for the “physical plane.” Much later on, Russell provided details of Scott’s “new incarnation” – his name, DOB, place of birth, and the names of his parents. Surprisingly, the information checked out, and Fisher managed to obtain a birth certificate for the infant. Fisher contacted the parents, who, although intrigued by the matter, were unwilling to get involved. He respected their decision.
Attempts to verify Russell’s last incarnation on Earth also met with failure and disillusionment. The same was true of a guide named William Harry Maddox, who claimed to have fought and died during World War I. The war records proved that Maddox had never existed. Fisher’s research, by the way, was absolutely impeccable, as can be expected from a former investigative journalist with many years experience. He searched every nook and cranny for evidence of the guides’ lives. Why it is that some of the information they provided was true, while the crucial facts from their stories were missing, did not make the least bit of sense. If the guides had wanted to be believed, thought Fisher, wouldn’t they have claimed to be people who had actually existed? Were they, perhaps, drawing on the knowledge and memories of other people – either living or dead – to create their identities?
As for his beloved Filipa, she too was found to be a liar and deceiver – or, in Fisher’s words, “a master of deception.” During his travels through Greece, Fisher was unable to find the ruins of Theros, let alone any evidence that the village had actually existed. And not only that, the city of Alexandroupolis, which Filipa had mentioned visiting during the 18th century, had not even existed at that point in history. In fact, Fisher discovered, the city had been named after a 20th century monarch! “I felt like crying for the group of believers in Toronto, for the guides themselves, whoever they were, for the elaborate deception in which I had become entangled, and for all the all-enveloping, myopic struggle of incarnate life,” he writes.
During the remainder of his stay in Greece, while lying in bed late at night and brooding on Filipa’s betrayal, “her buzzing returned to plague me. Once so comforting and reassuring, the noise in my ears took on a shrill and sinister aspect, leaving me sleepless.” At that point, says Fisher, he began to grow afraid of Russell, Filipa, and the other guides. “If they knew us all so intimately – as they had demonstrated on countless occasions – who could say what power they wielded over our lives?”
In Hungry Ghosts, Fisher describes having confronted Russell several times about his lying and manipulative ways, as well of those of “his cronies,” and how, because of their remarkable intelligence and their vast understanding of human psychology, such efforts were totally futile. During one “interrogation,” the group’s “transcriber,” whom Fisher describes as a “slavish apologist,” leapt to Russell’s defense again and again. She was unable to accept the possibility that the guides were even capable of lying. The information needed to prove their identities must be out there somewhere, she insisted.
After the guides had been unmasked, only one or two members left the group. Overall, their faith in the guides had hardly been shaken. Fisher describes Russell – clearly the leader of the guides – as “devious, manipulative and potentially dangerous” and “as slippery as the proverbial eel and a master psychologist to boot.” Fisher was unable to talk to Filipa because, said Russell, “You’ve quite completely shut her out.” They never spoke again. In an article on the Joe Fisher story, the philosopher and paranormal investigator Jonathan Zap suggests that the guides may have actually been “a single shape-shifting entity who, like the devil, ‘hath power to assume a pleasing shape’ and was capable of performing a whole cast of characters of both genders.”
An-ex member of the group, Sandford Ellison, told Fisher how the guides had almost ruined his life. During private sessions with the guides, particularly with Russell, Ellison was told that if he didn’t leave his wife – a soul, not an entity – he would die. They even said that she was trying to kill him “by projecting powerful negative energies” his way. While working with the guides who were teaching him to channel “healing energies,” Ellison suffered from “fierce emotional fluctuations and bouts of muddled thinking.” When no longer in their presence, he felt much better. During his final conversation with Russell, when he explained that he wanted nothing further to do with the guides, Ellison was told “that I would commit suicide in a fit of depression” (my emphasis). Before splitting with the guides, Fisher, like Ellison, had felt poorly. “I was more jittery than usual,” he says, “more susceptible to insomnia and nervous tension…I could not shrug off a cloying sense of contamination which could neither be pinpointed nor explained.”
Having spent years listening to, and talking intimately with, the entities channeled through Aviva, and having spoken with a number of other channeled entities, Fisher was forced to accept, somewhat ruefully, that these ostensibly wise and benevolent beings – “who have wormed their way into that juicy apple of spiritual regeneration known as The New Age” – were nothing more than “lower astral entities” or “hungry ghosts.” Ellison also concluded that the “guides” were “lower astral entities,” adding that they “play on human frailty and feed on our energy and our emotions.”
While investigating the channeling phenomenon (which attracted far more attention during the 1980s than it does now), Fisher befriended a woman named Claire Leforgia, a former nursing assistant who apparently channeled her own spiritual teacher – or guide – an English surgeon from the 19th century named Dr. Samuel Pinkerton. Called “wise” and “adorable” by those in the Toronto New Age community, Pinkerton sometimes “spoke so sweetly that it was hard to tell whether his politeness was genuinely considerate or gloatingly sarcastic,” says Fisher. Fisher eventually concluded that the charming Dr. Pinkerton was yet another hungry ghost posing as a benevolent guru. Attempts to verify his identity were met with failure; Dr. Pinkerton was not who he claimed to be.
When Fisher mentioned to his friend Alexander Blair-Ewart, editor of the Canadian New Age periodical Dimensions, that Dr. Pinkerton enjoyed smoking cigars and drinking alcohol through Laforgia – whom he sometimes referred to as his “instrument” – he was told: “Spirits like Pinkerton get a rush by swooping into a body and satisfying themselves with the sensations of physical life – sensations such as drinking alcohol, for example. This is contrary to the teachings of all the great spiritual masters. This is forbidden. This is possession, not true spirituality” (my emphasis).
In the 2001 edition of Hungry Ghosts, which contains an epilogue not available in the original edition, Fisher relates a chilling story that might help explain the cause of his suicide. Early in 1988, he says, while living in a small house near Lake Ontario and planning to write Hungry Ghosts, he developed a strange abscess on his navel. Each doctor he visited “was equally mystified by the inflammation.” Taking antibiotics did nothing to cure the infection, which got progressively worse and tremendously painful. The third doctor he saw, a wilderness specialist – “a man who had seen everything” – told Fisher “I’ve never seen anything like it.” After treating the infection, he assured Fisher that it would heal in time.
Weeks later, alone, and during the middle of winter, Fisher realized that the infection was only getting worse, and that he needed to take emergency action. He was in so much agony that he had to swallow a strong painkiller every half-an-hour. “Perhaps, I mused, I was under some kind of psychic attack [my emphasis]. Were the various entities, who had ultimately failed to win me over, trying to ensure I would not reveal who they are and what they do?”
Sometime after midnight Fisher climbed into his car and drove twenty minutes to the nearest hospital, hunched over the steering wheel in pain. He was escorted to the emergency ward and given an injection of Dermatol. An ultrasound revealed that he had omphalitis, a condition in which the umbilical cord becomes infected. Rare in adults, omphalitis usually affects newborns and is most likely to occur to those with abraded, ulcerated, or unclean navels. None of these stipulations applied to Fisher, thus it was a complete mystery as to how the abscess had formed. Due to the severity of his condition, Fisher was operated upon within hours of having checked in. After all, he was told, it can sometimes happen that the accumulated pus explodes internally, leading to peritonitis and even death. Fortunately, the operation was successful.
In what sounds like something out of the paranormal thriller The Mothman Prophecies, Fisher received, about an hour after the operation, a mysterious telephone call from Laforgia, who inquired as to his condition. When he asked Laforgia how she had known he was in hospital – for no one had been notified of his admission – she said that Dr. Pinkerton had informed her. That Dr. Pinkerton had attacked him psychically, giving him omphalitis, is a possibility that Fisher was unable to ignore. He writes: “The site of the abscess was symbolic indeed; the navel, the very core of my being.” Following his recovery and while working on Hungry Ghosts, Fisher was in a state of almost constant paranoia – and perhaps understandably so: “Even if my onetime friends ultimately found a way to take my life, I told myself, the book must be finished.”
In his aforementioned article on “spirit possession,” Wilson asks the question: “Was his suicide an attempt to rejoin Filipa?” To support this theory, Wilson explains how Fisher’s involvement with Filipa had “spoiled him for a normal sex life,” as revealed in the following quote, taken from Hungry Ghosts: “My terrestrial love life was doomed. No woman of flesh and blood could hope to emulate Filipa’s love and concern. No incarnate female could ever begin to understand me in the fashion to which I had become accustomed. In a sense, I was lost to the world, living in a limbo land…”
Wilson offers another compelling theory: “I talked about the mystery of Joe’s suicide to Suzanna McInerny, who is the president of the College of Psychic Studies in South Kensington. Suzanna confirmed that long-term involvement with ‘hungry ghosts’ can cause difficult inner problems. A kind of dirt sticks to the medium’s ‘aura’ (or vital energies), which has to be cleaned off by another medium, like a window cleaner polishing off grime. This dirt can cause depression and a sense of unreality. And sometimes, Suzanna said, a ‘hungry ghost’ can even hang around inside somebody, quite unsuspected, and can only be evicted by a medium who understands such matters. She agreed with me that this could well be the explanation of Joe’s suicide.”
Fisher was of the opinion “that no highly-evolved, spiritual being would ever speak through a medium.” He quotes the late Tibetan Buddhist lama Namgyal Rinpoche, founder of the Dharma Centre of Canada, who makes the same point: “As a general spiritual law, no enlightened being would speak through an ordinary human.
(...)
Channeled entities are not just anyone; they’re more “spiritually evolved” than Great Uncle Joe on “the other side” – or at least they profess to be. They include entities like Seth, who spoke through the late Jane Roberts and described himself as an “energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality.” Seth first made his presence known in the early 1960s, when Roberts and her husband began experimenting with an Ouija board – a device known to attract only the lowest class of discarnate entities. Were it not for the publication of Seth’s voluminous, intellectual “teachings,” channeling would never have gained the popularity that it did – and still enjoys, to some extent.
Before receiving him in light trance then full trance, Roberts could hear Seth’s voice in her head. Like so many other mediums, Roberts died at a young age, at 55, in fact, after a long battle with what appeared to be an autoimmune disease. If Seth was indeed a highly evolved being, one can’t help but wonder why he felt the need to invade the body of a human being through whom he enjoyed various physical pleasures, such as drinking the odd glass of wine or beer. He even admitted to enjoying the material realm through Roberts’s senses.
Prior to coming in contact with Seth, Roberts had a mystical experience of sorts – an experience that opened her up to the channeling phenomenon. It was, she recalls, “as if someone had slipped me an LSD cube on the sly…A fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if my skull were some sort of receiving station, turned up to unbearable volume.” The experience Roberts described sounds a little unpleasant, but nowhere near as unpleasant as Australian channeler Shirley Bray’s description of how she was first contacted by a group of entities calling themselves “the Nine”: “I felt as if thin wires, like acupuncture needles, were being inserted into the base of my skull. It was uncomfortable so I stirred, moving my head from side to side. A voice firmly but gently said, ‘Be still, it will not be long.’”
By far the most popular and controversial channeler at work today is the American J.Z. Knight, whose “gift” has earned her many millions of dollars. In 1977, says Knight, while in the company of her husband, she placed a paper pyramid on her head, and “we both started laughing until we cried.” The next thing she knew, a “very large entity” was standing before her. “He looked at me with a beautiful smile and said, ‘I am Ramtha, the Enlightened One. I have come to help you over the ditch.’”
At Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment (RSE), which has attracted some 5,000 students (known as “masters”) worldwide and is based in the town of Yelm, Washington, one can learn, according to their mission statement, “the tools and knowledge to tap into the powers of the mind and explore our human potential.” One can master remote viewing in just four days, promises RSE, and thus be able to “see the past, present and future of anything at any distance at any time.” A weeklong RSE retreat costs about US $1,000. It’s estimated, moreover, that Knight’s company, JZK Inc., earns a whopping US $10 million per year, perhaps even more.
The less than humble Ramtha describes himself as a 35,000-year-old Lemurian Warrior, who, all those years ago, conquered three-quarters of the world, realized the error of his ways, and quickly gained enlightenment. Ramtha makes no qualms about calling himself a god. We, too, are gods, he says – or, more accurately, “sleeping gods” who have forgotten their true potential. Once we begin to love ourselves, and once we come to realize that we create our own reality, we can achieve anything, says Ramtha. Like many a channeled entity of questionable integrity, Ramtha likes to make dire predictions concerning natural disasters and has even directed RSE students and staff to build underground bunkers stockpiled with emergency supplies. He predicted, in 2000, that 56 square miles of South Sound, Washington, would eventually flood. Ramtha has also predicted earthquakes as well as infections from tainted water supplies.
According to various ex-members of RSE, such as outspoken Yelm-resident David McCarthy who belonged to the organization from 1989 to 1996, Knight is nothing but a cult-leader and a “spiritual predator.” The organization, he says, has a small inner circle, to whom its most esoteric Ramtha teachings and pronouncements are revealed – one of them being that the ancient figure Jehovah will return to earth in a spaceship, accompanied by an entourage of flesh-eating “lizard people.” Says McCarthy: “A lot of people deny that these things happened. They say these are sacred teachings and that you (outsiders) wouldn’t understand.”
As was the case with Seth, Ramtha is attached to earthly pleasures and enjoys the occasional glass of alcohol, so much so that he even leads “wine ceremonies.” “Many people now speculate that whatever energy came through J.Z. Knight has either shifted, departed, or been replaced by a less benign entity,” writes journalist Craig Lee in an article that appeared in the Los Angeles Weekly in November 1986.
Were Rivail alive today, it’s fair to say that he would probably be highly suspicious of most, if not all, of the entities who speak through channelers, for as we are warned in The Mediums’ Book: “Repel all spirits who counsel exclusiveness, division, isolation. Such spirits are always vain and shallow; they impose on the weak and credulous by exaggerated praises, in order to fascinate and to domineer over them. As a general rule, distrust all communications of a mystic or fantastic character, as well as those which prescribe ceremonies or eccentric actions.”
The Tibetan Buddhists, believe it or not, have mediums of their own. The Tibetan word for medium is kuten, which means “the physical basis,” and it is through such people that oracles are consulted. Although the practice is rare these days, there used to exist hundreds of oracles in Tibet, probably more. Today there are very few oracles in existence – or, perhaps more accurately, there are very few trained mediums through whom these beings are able to communicate. China’s takeover and assimilation of Tibet probably had something to do with this. And, considering that many of these deities were used to assist governmental decision-making and provide intelligence on matters of state, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese communist government outlawed the consultation of oracles many years ago.
However, the Tibetan government (that is, the Tibetan government in exile) still consults its oracles from time to time, the principal one being the Nechung Oracle, the main protector divinity of the Tibetan Government and the Dalai Lama. Anyone who’s seen the Martin Scorsese film Kundun, about the early life of the fourteen Dalai Lama, would remember a rather disturbing scene in which the oracle is summoned and various political questions are put to it, some of them relating to the Dalai Lama’s safety. In his autobiography, Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama confesses that he has dealings with Nechung “several times a year,” and that “some Tibetans…have misgivings about my continued use of this ancient method of intelligence gathering.” The Dalai Lama describes Nechung as a “wrathful” deity, a “protector and defender.” They are, he says, “very close, friends almost.” Even so, their relationship is such that “I never bow down to him. It is for Nechung to bow to the Dalai Lama.”
In Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama writes: “Nechung has always shown respect for me…he invariably responds enthusiastically whenever asked anything about me. At the same time, his replies to questions about government policy can be crushing. Sometimes he just responds with a burst of sarcastic laughter. I well remember a particular incident that occurred when I was about fourteen. Nechung was asked a question about China. Rather than answer it directly, the Kuten turned towards the East and began bending forward violently. It was frightening to watch, knowing that this movement combined with the weight of the massive helmet he wore on his head would be enough to snap his neck. He did it at least fifteen times, leaving no one in any doubt about where the danger lay.”
When he begins to channel Nechung, the transformation that comes over the medium is a very dramatic thing to watch. The medium’s face changes completely, says the Dalai Lama, “becoming rather wild before puffing up to give him an altogether strange appearance, with bulging eyes and swollen cheeks. His breathing begins to shorten and he starts to hiss violently.” At the beginning of the ritual, a heavy helmet, weighting approximately thirty pounds (13.6 kg), is tied to the medium’s head. In former times, this helmet weighed over eighty pounds (> 36 kg). As to why the helmet was reduced in weight, the Dalai Lama does not say, leading one to speculate that maybe there were more than a few cases of fractured necks.
While channeling Nechung, the medium behaves as though his body were occupied by the devil himself. The process is violent and crass. There can be little doubt that Nechung has no respect for the medium, let alone the medium’s body. Trance mediumship, as a general rule, is most exhausting for the medium and in some cases may even be detrimental to their health. This is certainly true when it comes to Tibetan Buddhist mediumship – more so, in fact, than the type of mediumship witnessed in the West, for it is said that kutens live very short lives. According to the Dalai Lama, this can be explained by the fact that “the volcanic energy of the deity can barely be contained within the earthly frailty of the kuten.” Assuming this is true, the process could be likened to what happens when the fictional character Dr. Robert Bruce Banner becomes angry and suddenly transforms into the Hulk, his clothes tearing at the seams.
Perhaps the Nechung oracle is nothing more than another deceptive lower astral entity. This is an intriguing thought, and one that very few Tibetan Buddhists would be willing to entertain. That the Dalai Lama, said to be an emanation of Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion, has been fooled by a “demon” is enough to make one laugh with incredulity. It is, however, a very real possibility, as Fisher’s story clearly illustrates.
Thanks to what we know so far about the SP phenomenon, and the ways in which spirits are able to influence the minds of humans, a couple of details of Fisher’s story stand out as being of great significance. Firstly, that Fisher achieved partial mind-to-mind contact with Filipa and was able to communicate with her telepathically (though obviously to a limited extent). And secondly, that he was able to have sexual intercourse with her – which, I’m sure, would have occurred on an astral level and which would have been similar in nature to the “succubi” experiences of SP sufferers and others.
Fisher was clearly a victim of spirit possession and to a fairly advanced extent. Being a gentleman, he refused to say much about his sexual encounters with Filipa, which is a shame, I think, because this may have been – probably was, in fact – one of the most important aspects of his relationship with her. Ridiculous though it sounds, they most likely enjoyed a good “astral sex life” and remained closely bonded as a result. Fished stated, remember, that his involvement with Filipa had ruined him for a normal sex life, as pointed out by Wilson.
Perhaps the last word should go to Zap, who warns: “We need to consider the subtle ways that discarnates may influence our thoughts, emotions, sexuality and behavior. Joe Fisher’s apparent suicide adds an ominous implication that these entities are not to be underestimated…”
DARK INTRUSIONS
An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences
By Louis Proud
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