extraordinary%20encounters

200 Philip
Kimball, Richard W., 1995. “American Indian
Prophecies Confirm the Reality of Flying
Saucers.” Prescott [Arizona] Daily Courier Gazette
(December 24).
Waters, Frank, 1963. Book of the Hopi. New York:
Viking Press.
Williamson, George Hunt, 1959. Road in the Sky.
London: Neville Spearman.
Philip
“Philip” is an imaginary entity said to have
been given a degree of physical reality when a
Toronto-based parapsychological group consciously
“invented” him. He was part of an experiment
intended to demonstrate that mental
energies can create the sorts of entities
reported in spiritualist séances and poltergeist
episodes.
In September 1972, members of the
Toronto Society for Psychical Research invented
Philip, laying out a detailed personal
biography. A pro-royal aristocrat during England’s
Civil War, Philip fell in love with a
Gypsy woman but lost her when authorities
tried and burned her at the stake as a witch.
His failure to find a way to save her filled him
with guilt and grief and prevented his soul
from passing on to the afterlife, leaving it an
earthbound spirit. The group, whose members
included psychologist A.R.G. Owen and
his wife Iris, began to meditate on Philip in
hopes that he would “appear” to them in
some fashion. Nothing happened for a year.
Then the group decided to try a different
tactic. Members decided to imitate the methods
of nineteenth-century spiritualist circles,
on the theory that skepticism inhibited the
occurrence of paranormal phenomena. Like
the earlier spiritualist sitters, they sat in a circle,
sang, or otherwise tried to create an atmosphere
conducive to the manifestation of
the unknown. Within a few weeks, they began
hearing raps from the table. They were able to
communicate with the knocker by asking simple
“yes” or “no” questions. Once the table apparently
levitated. Eventually, Philip seemed
to take on a personality of his own, independent
of the one the group had assigned him.
He would reject or contradict his “life” story.
Once, when a member reminded him that he
was purely imaginary, he disappeared for
some weeks, to reappear only when members
managed to recapture some semblance of belief
in his actual existence.
On one occasion, the group demonstrated
Philip’s manifestations on a television program.
Iris Owen and another member, Margaret
Sparrow, wrote a book on the episode,
which they believed demonstrated the reality
not of ghosts but of psychokinesis. One subsequent
observer, however, cautions that though
“potentially highly significant, the experiment
has not been repeated by other researchers”
(Dash, 1997).
See Also: Tulpa
Further Reading
Dash, Mike, 1997. Borderlands. London: Heinemann.
Owen, Iris M., and Margaret Sparrow, 1976. Con -
juring up Philip. New York: Harper and Row.
Planetary Council
Celeste Korsholm, a Sedona, Arizona, channeler
and metaphysical counselor, learned of
the Planetary Council one day in 1991. In an
out-of-body state, she met the twelve ascended
masters who compose the ruling body
of Earth’s solar system. Over the next few
years, they returned individually to channel
the histories of the planets and their futures.
Each planet, she learned, is like a university.
Each of us comes from somewhere else, from
a higher dimension of existence known as the
Source, and enters through star gates such as
Lyra, Orion, Sirius, and the Pleiades, “where
our higher frequencies of Light are gradually
decreased to prepare for life in the denser
third dimension,” in Korsholm’s words (Korsholm,
1991), on the way to the solar system.
The education starts at the Schools of Sa turn,
where the pilgrim gets a crash course in
each planet’s vibrations before spending a separate
lifetime on at least one other planet before
making the decision whether to volunteer for
“postgraduate work on Eart h” (Ko r s h o l m ,