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‘The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship. The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the "self"; it is manifested in the experience: “I am only that!” Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination – that is, ultimately limited – we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!’
A mother communicates telepathically with her deceased son, learning secrets from higher spheres beyond our own.
Her son survived Hitler only to be killed off in a car crash back home. After waiting years for her Philip to return from sea battles, Alice lost him on land. His body fast decayed and was lowered into the ground at a funeral surrounded by everyone he had touched in this life. Yet as the priest intoned prayers and lament over her dead son’s corpse, Alice heard an ethereal voice to the right of her suddenly say, ‘Whatever is he bleating like a sheep over that thing for – it’s not me!’
Alice Gilbert was convinced that her son, Philip, was telepathically communicating with her from beyond the grave, as he rose through a higher realm of spiritual spheres. Receiving and recording these messages – often into the wee hours of the morning – Alice published them in numerous manuscripts, including Philip in Two Worlds (1948), Philip in the Spheres (1952), and Leaves from Philip’s Scrapbook (1958). While Philip in Two Worlds covered three months during the immediate aftermath of her son’s death, Philip in the Spheres recorded the subsequent three years from 1948 to 1951.
Since Alice was Philip’s mother during ‘his short stay here’, their sustained connection yields a chain of communication governed by a ‘broad brand of vibration which can pass currents of emotion and thought’. Moreover, Alice can switch off these signals between them like a television. When Philip is telepathically present, he will often make tables shake playfully, filling ‘the room with that feeling of joie-de-vivre which was so much his Sagittarian personality’.
However, such telepathic thoughts not only communicate but create. Philip informs his mother about how the higher spheres are constituted almost entirely by such ‘thought creations'. We can use our thoughts to heal and generate a ‘strong thought wall of protection’ around ourselves and others. In this way, once one has thought something into being, this image now takes on a life of its own. Indeed, hospitals and headquarters have been thought into existence amidst these higher realms. Those whose earthly lives were all about material things – for example, cars, houses, money – usually struggle to transition to this immaterial sphere of thought. Whereas those who spent their earthly time in imagination, music, color, or study tend to be naturals.
While higher realms of thought may seem abstract, they can actually prove more real than anything on Earth. Energy vibrations have to slow down and spread out in order to become material in our earthly sense, and if they continue down this path, they will eventually dissipate into nothing at all. Thus, the higher realms are actually fuller and more real than our seemingly ‘solid’ world. Even silence in these higher spheres contains and releases an infinite array of song and sound, just as the colour white contains and unleashes all the colors of the rainbow.
In a more universal sense, these higher realms can be all things to all people, becoming heaven to those who did good upon the Earth and hell to those who now reap what they sowed. Some ‘clingers’ are still so attached to Earth that they try to pull these higher realms down to their planetary level, visiting old friends, watching over their possessions, and often being confused for ghosts. While skeptics want spirits to ‘prove’ themselves via revealing secret knowledge of earthly affairs (for example, who killed John F. Kennedy, where Jimmy Hoffa is buried), it is only the less evolved spirits that remain preoccupied with bothering to know such things.
Readers – and parents, in particular – may find Philip in the Spheres to be a horror story with a happy ending, with Alice losing her son only to find him once more through telepathy. It spins not only a meaty tale but the promise that the tragedies we face in our own lives are not the end but just the beginning; whereby death hopefully offers a means to a realm where nothing and no one is lost forever. In the process, this message enables us to remain receptive to wisdom from beyond about how to live here and now.
Copyright © 1952 by Alice Gilbert and the Aquarian Press.
