(ORDO NEWS) — In the 1970s, Joe Fisher established a reputation as one of Canada’s leading investigative reporters. But he also had another side.
The rebellious son of Christian fundamentalists, he became increasingly fascinated with Eastern religions and eventually became a popular paranormal expert in the media.
While exploring the practice of “trance channels”, he abandoned his professional skepticism by falling in love with a spiritual entity named Philip – an obsession that will lead him down a dangerous path.
Among those who take mediumship and channeling seriously and sincerely believe in the existence of embodied entities, very few are willing to admit that such beings can be liars and manipulators – and not just liars, but purposefully malevolent.
There is, admits writer Michael Prescott, “the dark side of the paranormal. It’s not all benevolent angels and comforting words from deceased relatives.
It could be possession, deterioration of rational thinking, general fantasies, even falling into insanity. There could be hungry ghosts.”
There is no more disturbing and tragic story when it comes to encounters with “hungry ghosts” than that of Canadian journalist and bestselling author Joe Fisher.
Fisher committed suicide at the age of 53 on May 9, 2001, by throwing himself off a limestone cliff in Elora Gorge, Canada. One of the newspapers suggested that he might have been killed.
Shortly before his death, Fisher’s last book, The Siren Calls Hungry Ghosts, an investigation into channeling and spirit guides described by the publisher as “a thrilling journey into the realm of darkness and deceit”, was reprinted by Paraview Press.
Adding a strange twist to this story is that in one of his last communications with editor-in-chief Patrick Huyge, Fischer claimed that the spirits he allegedly angered as a result of writing the book were still causing him trouble.
Fisher’s writings include the metaphysical classics Life Between Lives, Predictions, and The Case for Reincarnation, the latter of which includes a foreword by the 14th Dalai Lama.
In an article on “spirit possession,” renowned British writer Colin Wilson, who acknowledges Fisher as a friend, mentions that he “was cheerful and normal, and no one, myself included, could believe he had committed suicide.”
In addition, he mentions that Fisher believed in life after death and adhered to the theory of reincarnation. “What puzzled me was that he must have been convinced that suicide would only leave him with a different set of problems.” Wilson was right, because in The Case for Reincarnation, Fisher wrote the following:
“Those who learn that they have killed themselves in past lives quickly come to the realization that suicide, far from solving life’s problems, is (instead) a violent break in the lifeline.
If (the suicide) could only be aware of the resulting this intensification of the difficulties that must enter into the Hereafter, (suicide) would never have been (undertaken).”
That Fisher’s death was caused by a group of malevolent embodied entities – who may have been influencing his consciousness – might seem far-fetched and sensational to some. However, such a possibility cannot be ignored, as anyone who has read The Hungry Ghosts will probably agree with.
Unable to accept the fact that an optimistic, spiritually minded person like Fisher would want to commit suicide, Wilson writes: “I find myself wondering if his suicide was related to a strange experience he had in the 1980s. years”.
Fischer meets his “Spiritual Guide”
This “weird experience” began in 1984 when Fischer met an Australian-Canadian psychic named Aviva Nuemann, who was suffering from chronic leukemia.
Aviva contacted Fischer and invited him to attend a channeling session at her home, because, according to her, she did not feel very comfortable in the role of a “mouthpiece” for embodied entities and hoped that he, an expert in metaphysics, could shed light on this issue. .
When they first met, Aviva, a lab technologist, stressed that she “never believed in the so-called psychic world. I think astrology is absolute crap and I don’t have time for anything that is considered paranormal…”. She told him the amazing story of how she became a channeler for “guides”.
According to her, it all started with the fact that she agreed that her friend and neighbor Roger Belancourt tried to heal her under hypnosis. His goal was to convey positive medical suggestions to her subconscious, such as “Your bone marrow will immediately start producing the extra red blood cells your body needs.”
These hypnotic sessions became experimental when Roger began to probe Aviva’s mind for past life memories.
Looking even deeper, Roger was able to connect with another part of Aviva’s mind, even more aware than her subconscious. She called herself an “alter-consciousness”. Roger discovered that every organ of Aviva’s body and every aspect of her personality has its own alter consciousness, each with its own voice. He used these “voices” to monitor Aviva’s health.
For example, by communicating with the blood alter consciousness, Roger could determine whether the number of red blood cells in Aviva’s blood had increased or decreased. This higher aspect of Aviva’s consciousness – what might be called her “superconsciousness” – proved to be very knowledgeable in spiritual matters.
The purpose of reincarnation is “forward development,” she said, “that is, “self-understanding.” When Aviva returned to full consciousness, she did not remember anything about what happened during the trance. It looked like she was in deep sleep.
Since her alter mind seemed to know almost everything, Roger decided to ask him if “spiritual guides” actually existed, as he had long suspected that he was being watched by a deceased Tibetan lama named Jai-Ling.
To his delight, Roger discovered that he could communicate with Jai-Lin through Aviva’s alter-consciousness, which, according to Fisher, “acted as an intermediary, relaying messages from another world.” His “guide” told Roger that he “should always think positively” and that “you have a lot to learn in self-discipline.”
Annoyed that Roger couldn’t control his negative emotions, Jai-Lin told Roger that he should move on to meet new challenges elsewhere. Jai-Lin was eventually replaced by another “guide”, an affectionate entity named Hanni, who claimed to have been Roger’s mother in the Netherlands in a past life.
Roger was told that every incarnated person is entitled to a spirit guide. But this did not necessarily mean that a person had the same vehicle throughout their entire life – or, for that matter, several lifetimes.
Sometimes the guide left his “ward” – the embodied person, for whom he was supposed to “look after” – and another guide took his place.
After mastering the ability to manipulate Aviva’s vocal cords a process said to have taken some time Hanni was able to speak through the enchanted Aviva.
Fischer describes Hanni’s voice as “soft and gentle”, quite unlike Aviva’s voice. Although Hanni was the guide of her own guide – a Yorkshire farmer named Russell who claimed to have last lived on earth in the 19th century – the voice that came out of Aviva’s mouth was also unlike her own, so much so that left Fischer shaken.
“Gone is the grandiloquent jocularity with a pronounced Australian accent,” he says. “Now her pronunciation was unmistakably masculine; the English accent was unmistakable.”
In a conversation with Russell, Fischer was surprised not only by the change in Aviva’s voice, but also by the change in her personality.
“It was a completely different Aviva,” he says, “strangely assertive and uncompromising.” Fischer felt that he was talking to a separate being, and not, for example, to a fragment of Aviva’s unconscious mind.”
Russell told Fisher that humanity is divided into two groups – souls and essences. Souls were said to be “created from desire” and entities “born from knowledge”. According to Russell, none of these groups is superior.
Although he had difficulty accepting the concept, Fischer was pleased to be called the entity—apparently the more attractive of the two groups. Entities are classified as individuals, while souls are said to have a more group mentality.
Fisher’s guide was a young Greek woman named Philip Gavrilos. Three centuries ago, according to Russell, she and Fisher were lovers in a small Greek village called Theros.
Obviously, they have been together for many lifetimes. This news shocked Fischer, as he had always been strongly drawn to Greece, and as a child he liked the name Philip.
Russell described Philip as “an excitable young lady”. In time, he said, she would be able to speak through Aviva. Meanwhile, Fischer tried to make mental contact with Philippa. Every day, Fischer would close his eyes and ask Filip to talk to him, a routine he strictly followed for the next three years.
In late 1984, Filipa spoke through Aviva for the first time. At first, Fischer admits, he was unimpressed by Filip and “had strong doubts about her intelligence … Her first responses were almost childish, which made me remark to Roger and Aviva that I had hired a ‘disco queen’ as a guide.”
However, as the sessions continued, Filipa quickly became “adviser, best friend. And my ideal lover.” He adds: “Filipa and I thought the same way, felt the same way, and looked at the world from almost the same point of view.”
The guides said they could read the minds of their charges, and that seemed to be true. They knew certain things about their charges that only their charges knew. For example, they could describe what their ward was doing or thinking on a particular day and at a particular time information that could only be obtained psychically.
Fischer’s daily attempts to communicate with Philipa on a “mind-to-mind” basis began to bring interesting results. Each time contact was successfully established, “a loud buzzing sounded in my ears, which could be compared to the internal hum of cicadas.”
During these meditation sessions, images sometimes appeared in his mind. One day he saw the image of a woman walking towards him. She wore sandals and a long white veil, her face partially hidden by her clothes. He knew that this woman was Philip.
“In a few seconds, my body was seized with the deepest and most unbridled emotions. I cried with joy, sadness, loss and suffering, but to this day I don’t know why.” According to him, it was “one of the most touching experiences in my life.”
Thought contact was achieved when Fischer was in a particularly relaxed mood, with very few thoughts running through his head. Sometimes he imagined himself embracing Philip, and she appreciated that very much. Fisher could tell she yearned for a physical body.
Philipa and the other guides did not like being called “spirits” and being reminded that they did not have physical bodies. To call one of the guides a spirit meant to irritate and even anger them. “We are not spirits!” shouted Russell one day.
“We are people just like you. We just don’t have bodies anymore.” Fischer finds it somewhat doubtful that guides were so attached to the “physical plane”, although they stressed that they were no more “spiritually developed” than their charges.
From time to time, Fischer said, conversations with Philip “flashed in my head.” One day while running up a steep slope, Fischer heard “a voice or an implanted thought-form.” To ease his ascent, the “voice” told him to imagine that his feet were not touching the ground.
This technique has had a positive effect. Arriving at Aviva’s house, Fischer asked Philipa if she had spoken to him while he was running. She answered in the affirmative and was able to tell what exactly she told him.
“Somehow,” Fischer explains, “Filipa had to either live inside me, or constantly hang around, catching on some otherworldly antenna every twitch and shudder of my body.”
There is suspicion
It turned out that the guides had access to an almost unlimited amount of information. They even claimed to know “the nature of God.”
However, according to them, it would take about three hundred sessions to explain it; for this reason, the project was never realized. Fischer admits that he was impressed by the teachings and advice given by the guides.
Among other things, they were told about the history of Atlantis and Lemuria, about the work of the mind, about reincarnation, karma and spiritual development. And so on and so forth.
“The insights and observations were so rich and abundant that there were moments when I felt overwhelmed by a real geyser of information,” he says. Talking to the guides was a fun and exciting experience.”
Over time, Fischer became somewhat suspicious of the guides. When, during one of the sessions, Philip said that she knew all his thoughts about her, “this remark caused me weakness and warm gratitude. Every time I thought about her, she knew. How attentive, I asked myself, you can be ?”.
The guides gave long lectures on the importance of peace and love, but in many ways their teachings were empty and contained nothing of substance.
Also disturbing is that they intervened, both physically and emotionally, in the lives of their charges, while at the same time emphasizing the importance of free will. Such a massive contradiction could not be explained.
In his book Paranormal, Stan Gooch describes the teachings of “spirit guides” as “a kind of intellectual sweetness…when you chew those sayings, there’s nothing there. The mouth is empty.”
The late D. Scott Rogo, a prolific writer and researcher of psychic phenomena, was of much the same opinion as Gooch. I find that most channeled discourses have the spiritual and philosophical sophistication of a Dick and Jane book,” he explains in Endless Frontier.
Mischievous spirits
“The more I loved Philip,” writes Fischer, “the more I longed for tangible evidence of her existence.” For this reason, and also because he wanted to write a book about embodied beings and life in the “next dimension”, Fischer attempted to prove the identity of the guides.
He wanted to know if they lived the lives they talked about. Fischer knew enough about spirits to know that they are rarely who they say they are.
He was warned about this by Russell, who, during one of his first conversations with him, clearly stated that mischievous spirits sometimes like to pretend to be wise and knowledgeable spirit guides.
The guides were more than pleased with Fischer’s desire to prove his identity and willingly told him the specific details of their earthly life. First of all, Fisher decided, he would try to follow the information given by former USAF bomber pilot William Alfred Scott, the guide of a man named Tony.
Scott said that he was born in Bristol in 1917, began his career with No. 99 Squadron RAF at Mildenhall, Suffolk, and, ironically, died not in the air, but during a German raid on Coventry in 1944. Scott knew all about the squadron, its operations, and his fellow soldiers.
However, as Fisher found out, there was no officer William Scott in the squadron, which was proved by a visit to the Public Records Office in Kew. Numerous other details were also found to be fake.
When, back in Canada, Fisher bitterly asked Scott why he had lied, the once calm and polite subject became irritable and short-tempered. “I don’t want my privacy violated,” he said. “I have given you all the information you need, and as such it will stand.”
Getting out of the situation, Scott said that he could not stay here for a long time, because he had plans for an early reincarnation. According to him, a suitable “bodily vehicle” was found in southern England.
Saying goodbye, Scott went to the “physical plane”. Much later, Russell gave details of Scott’s “new incarnation” – his name, date of birth, place of birth, and names of his parents.
Surprisingly, the information was confirmed, and Fisher managed to obtain a birth certificate for the baby. Fischer contacted the parents, who, although intrigued by the matter, did not want to get involved. He respected their decision.
If the guides wanted to be believed, Fisher thought, wouldn’t they be claiming to be people who actually existed? Maybe they used the knowledge and memories of other people – living or dead – to create their own identity?
As for his beloved Philippa, she, too, turned out to be a liar and a deceiver – or, in Fisher’s words, “a master of deceit.” During his travels in Greece, Fischer was unable to find the ruins of Theros, let alone any evidence that the village actually existed.
Moreover, the city of Alexandroupolis, which Philipa mentioned visiting in the eighteenth century, did not even exist at that time. In fact, Fischer discovered, the city was named after a twentieth-century monarch!
During the rest of their stay in Greece, lying in bed late at night and thinking about Philipa’s betrayal, “her buzzing began to torment me again.” Once so soothing and reassuring, the noise in my ears took on a piercing and ominous quality, depriving me of sleep.”
At this point, Fisher says, he began to fear Russell, Philippa, and the other guides. “If they knew us all so intimately – what they have demonstrated countless times – who can say what power they had over our lives?”
After the guides were exposed, only one or two people left the group. On the whole, their faith in guides was hardly shaken.
Fischer describes Russell – apparently the leader of the guides – as “devious, manipulative, and potentially dangerous” as well as “slippery as the proverbial eel, and also a master of psychology”. Fischer couldn’t talk to Philipa because, Russell said, “you shut her out completely.” They never spoke again.
In his article on the history of Joe Fisher, philosopher and paranormal researcher Jonathan Zap suggests that the Conduits may have been one being – “a single werewolf who, like the devil, “has the power to assume a pleasing form” and was capable of impersonating a range of characters of both sexes. “.
A former member of the group, Sandford Ellison, told Fisher how the guides nearly ruined his life. During private sessions with guides, especially with Russell, Ellison was told that if he did not leave his wife – the soul, not the essence – he would die.
They even said “that she is trying to kill me by projecting powerful negative energies in my direction.” While working with guides who taught him to channel “healing energies”, Ellison suffered from “violent emotional fluctuations and bouts of confused thinking.”
When he was no longer in their presence, he felt much better. During the last conversation with Russell, in which he explained that he did not want to have anything more to do with the conductors, Ellison was told “that I would kill myself in a fit of depression.”
Before the break with the conductors, Fisher, like Ellison, felt bad. “I was more nervous than usual,” he says, “more prone to insomnia and nervous tension … I could not get rid of the obsessive feeling of infection, which could neither be defined nor explained.”
After spending years listening to and interacting closely with the entities channeled through Aviva, and associating with a number of other channeled entities, Fischer was forced to admit with some regret that these allegedly wise and benevolent beings “who have worked their way into the juicy apple of spiritual rebirth known like the New Age” – were nothing more than “lower astral entities” or “hungry ghosts”.
Fisher defines these vampiric beings, these poor, unfortunate souls, as “people whose mind at the time of physical death was unable to free itself from desires. Enslaved in this way, the personality is trapped in the lower planes, even retaining memory and individuality for a while.
Hence the term “lost soul”, a residual entity that is nothing more than an astral corpse in waiting. She has doomed herself to death; she has chosen the “second death”.
Suicide hungry ghost
In his aforementioned article on “spirit possession,” Colin Wilson asks, “Was his suicide an attempt to reunite with Philippa?”
In support of this theory, Wilson explains that Fisher’s association with Philippa “ruined his normal sex life”, as evidenced by the following quote, taken from the book “Hungry Ghosts”: “My earthly love life was doomed.
No woman of flesh and blood could hope to match Philippa in love and care. No embodied woman could begin to understand me the way I used to. In a sense, I was lost to the world, lived in the land of limbo … “.
Wilson offers another compelling theory:
“I spoke about the mystery of Joe’s suicide with Suzanne McInerney, who is president of the South Kensington College of Psychic Research. Suzanne confirmed that prolonged exposure to ‘hungry ghosts’ can cause complex internal problems.
Some dirt that another medium has to scrub away, much like a window washer cleans dirt, that dirt can cause depression and feelings of unreality, and sometimes, Susannah said, a “hungry ghost” can even lurk inside someone completely unaware of it, and only a medium who understands such matters can exorcise him. She agreed with me that this may well be the explanation for Joe’s suicide.”
Fisher is of the opinion “that no highly developed, spiritual being will ever speak through a medium.” He quotes the late lama of Tibetan Buddhism Namgyal Rinpoche, founder of the Dharma Center Canada, who says the same thing: “As a general spiritual law, no enlightened being will speak through an ordinary person.
Embodied spirits who make themselves known through channeling are one in their desperate need for love. Their audience is a generation that also yearns for love.”
In light of Fisher’s sad story, it is easy to form the view that all channeled entities are unpleasant – perhaps even malevolent – lower astral entities, and that, as 2 Corinthians 14 says, “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” For a fundamentalist Christian – and your author is not one – such a superficial view would be deeply pleasing.
But life is not so black and white. Perhaps Zap should have the last word, who warns: “We need to consider the subtle ways that discarnates can influence our thoughts, emotions, sexuality, and behavior.” Joe Fisher’s apparent suicide adds an ominous hint that these entities are not to be underestimated…”
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