Hungry Ghosts

In my last post I wrote about a course I attended at the College for Psychic Studies. Today I want to write about something that happened soon after, which alerted me to the dangers of ‘hungry ghosts’. JoeFisher had written about this, in an excellent book of the same name, but at the time I had not read it, more’s the pity.

At the aforementioned course I met somebody who claimed to channel a discarnate spirit (a dead person), one who advised and guided him. I have to say that, at the time, in the early eighties, there seemed to be quite a few of these discarnate visionary spirits around (for some reason, a lot of them were native Americans or hailed from Atlantis), many of them having written books via their incarnate (i.e. alive) contacts. They were able to give information about the true nature of reality and, thanks to their ability to access the Akashic records as discarnates, tell living humans about themselves and their histories, including past lives, and even advise on their futures.

My contact, call him Mr. S, belonged to a group of people who had chosen to follow Mr. S’s  ‘spiritual guide’ (you can see immediately the confusion here between the spiritual and the psychic.) The spiritual guide would take over Mr. S and talk through him. It was possible to book an hour with Mr. S to talk to his spiritual guide and ask for advice. This I did. Well, why not? (I was in my twenties, had an impossibly tangled and unsatisfactory love life at the time, and wasn’t sure I’d chosen the right career.)

The appointment was to take place on the other side of the country, involving a 3 hour drive each way. Although the day of that appointment dawned bright and sunny, by the time I had reached the distant hills within which Mr.S lived, it was raining heavily, and I had a pounding sick headache. When I arrived I discovered there had been some mix- up with the time, Mr. S was out, and I had an hour to wait. During this time my headache got worse, despite my taking pain killers. The weather was foul now, with thunder and lightning, and I could not see the apparently wonderful and legendary views  possessed by the house at which I had arrived.

When Mr. S arrived he was preoccupied and rather bad tempered. He had been trying to sort out problems that his group were having with the magnificent property in which we were now sitting, and where they all lived. Mr. S's spirit guide had directed the group to buy it, but it was turning out to be horribly expensive, and draining the group of its funds.   However, we eventually settled down, Mr. S successfully summoned his guide and within seconds the atmosphere in that small room changed dramatically. Mr. S went into a sort of trance, and began speaking in an entirely different voice.

Do you know, I can hardly remember a thing that he said? I kept waiting for the guide to get to the point, and tell me something interesting, but it was all rather vague, with nothing particular to myself, except for an observation that I had failed miserably in my previous life, and that was dogging my present life and holding me back.

I paid the (quite high) fee and left, now feeling emotionally down as well as in physical pain with my headache. I got lost in the erratic and winding lanes leading away from the house, and it was raining so hard now that my car’s windscreen wipers could not cope. Then, to cap it all, in the middle of nowhere, the car suddenly stalled and refused to go a foot further. Without an umbrella or even a decent coat, I had to get out and search for the nearest landline, (this was long, long before I had a mobile phone) to call the AA.

I finally came across an isolated house and knocked on the door, which was eventually opened by a young man, who allowed me to come in to use the household’s phone. It was in a room where three more youths were cleaning and polishing shotguns. I rang the AA, and got back to the car as quickly as I could. The AA turned up, but by then the car started up perfectly by itself. As I drove further away from the house the skies began to clear, as did my headache. I don’t think I’ve been more grateful to get back to my home.

Since then I have learnt much more about people who don’t move on to where they are supposed to after death. Sometimes their ‘essence’ has indeed moved on, but the personalities they had grown during that particular life don’t (by 'personality' I mean the matrix of desires, drives and characteristics that have developed at what is the  'ego' level of a person according to the kabbalistic scheme. ) They don’t want to leave. They try to continue to live through people who are actually still alive. Being dead gives them access to some information the living don’t have, and they use this to try to appear somehow superior to their live hosts. But they are no wiser than you or me, possibly less so. Many seem to claim to have been people they weren't. In his book ‘Hungry Ghosts’ Joe Fisher describes in much more detail the damage that these discarnate beings can cause. As to letting them take control of your body; at the psychic level  most of the greatest spiritual teachers (e.g. Jesus, Buddha) maintain that this is is a pretty unhygienic thing to do, and warn against it.

It is better to avoid all such contact with dead people you haven't known personally (and probably quite a few you have.) You would exercise extreme caution, I hope, having contact with dead and decaying bodies, for obvious reasons; and the same sort of caution should be extended to having contact with discarnate and decaying dead personalities. (Personalities decay and break up, just like physical bodies. though in some cases considerably more slowly, even after the essence of a person is long gone.) This applies also to Ouija boards. Health wise, you might just as well go and dig about in the local cemetery. I would go on here to describe the problems that a  young, female relative of mine had after playing about with a Ouija board, and attracting the attention of a very lascivious, raucously male ghost. But hey, midnight strikes. Time for bed.

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