Photo: National Media Museum (PD)
Original link from Forteania, as pointed out by the Society for Psychical Research
‘Invisible Masters’ pop up in surprising places. Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy movement, founded and maintained in part from communication with discarnate beings, influenced folks as disparate as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Frank Loyd Wright and the 33rd Vice President of the United States, Henry Wallace. Even Napoleon Hill, whose book on success, Think and Grow Rich, has remained at the top of Business Week’s list of best sellers for over 70 years, admited later in his career to having received his inspriation from a council of 33 ‘invisible masters.’
The question is, exactly who are these masters?
Dr. Andrija Puharich, a researcher who worked with the Stanford Research Institute during their human potential studies brought this concept into the late 20th century during his experiments in communicating with with a group of discarnate galactic intelligences called ‘The Nine.’ Over 2 decades he met with some of the most influential socialites, military and intelligence officers, and scientists such as Arthur Young, who invented the Bell Helicopter, in a series of seances that brought forth supposed revelations for humanities future.
How much influence did this have on shaping culture in the late 20th century? We’ll probably never know, but a series of experiments conducted in Canada during the same period leads us to ask, outside of the potential for a straight up con, are these really discarnate entities, or are the experimenters themselves stuck in a powerful feed back loop with their own consciousness? And if so, what does it say that our invisible masters don’t know who they’ve been talking to.
“During the 1970s a group from the Toronto Society for Psychical Research, along with a Dr. A.R.G. Owen (who was a mathematician) meet in order to see if they could, in essence, create a ghost. The group was comprised of Dr. Owen, his wife, a former chairperson of Mensa, an industrial designer, an accountant, a housewife, a bookkeeper and a sociology student. Additionally a psychologist by the name of Dr. Joel Whitton would also attend some of their experiments. The original idea was that this group of people could create a ghost seemingly by meditating on the idea of him including the history of the ghost. They would then attempt to make contact with this discarnate entity through séances and gain information from it…
…As a part of their weekly meetings the group would come together and meditate on both the image of Philip and also his history. The group did this for about a year with no positive results. Some members of the group did claim during this time that they were able to sense a presence, but apparently nothing that was verifiable. The group was quite determined and rather than let the last year be for waste they decided to change up the tactics a bit. In order to have better results with conjuring Philip, the group began to replicate the séances of old.
Candle light, sitting around a table, soft music playing, the whole thing. They even had pictures of castles like the one Philip would have lived in, had he ever actually lived that is. This new method seemed to do the trick. During one of the group’s séances, they began to receive communication from an entity. Through a series of rappings (reminiscent of the early Spiritualism movement) the group was able to determine that they were finally talking with Philip. The entity revealed this to the group through a series of raps. Speaking through raps, Philip continued to display his own unique attitude. This was discovered by how long Philip would pause in between answering the questions which the researchers posed to him…At the end of the day it’s hard to say what it was that was actually occurring in this situation. It certainly seems to fit in with the concept of the tulpa, especially as explained by [Alexandra] David-Neel in her classic work on the topic, [Magic and Mystery in Tibet]. I only wish that more of the documentary existed so that it could be seen. Ostensibly, if this experiment was truly as easy as the group proclaimed I suppose that anyone could conceivably do this at home. Before you do decide to go through with this and conjure your own ghost, I feel I must leave you with a parting warning from David-Neel:
“…..the practice is considered as fraught with danger for everyone who ….is not aware of the nature of the psychic forces at work in the process. Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker’s control…..Sometimes the phantom becomes a rebellious son and one hears of uncanny struggles that have taken place between magicians and their creatures, the former being severely hurt or even killed by the latter.” (pg 313)”
