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Part One: A Breakthrough in Spiritual Consciousness

Chapter 1: The Search for Spiritual reality

1 Part One is called "A Breakthrough in Spiritual Consciousness" because it summarizes the evolution of my personal beliefs about the nature of spiritual reality over a period of about twenty years, from the Sixties up until 1983, when I made the breakthrough that allowed me to receive and understand the channeled messages presented in Parts Two and Three of War in Heaven. I made this breakthrough not by learning facts about spiritual phenomena on the intellectual level, but by achieving a state of awareness and open-mindedness that enabled me to receive what my spirit guides were actually trying to communicate to me, rather than what my prejudiced and brainwashed conscious mind wanted to hear.

2 It may be difficult for the majority of people who read this book to identify with the viewpoint from which I'm writing it. My psychic experiences, beginning with my earliest memories from childhood, are just as real and important to me as my experiences in the physical world. I've been reading minds, communicating with spiritual beings, and practicing psychic healing literally all my life. I believe in these things on exactly the same level as I believe in my ability to speak the English language, so it's not easy for me to communicate with people who do not instinctively realize that such things are real.

3 Whenever I can, I give accounts of my personal psychic experiences to explain why I formed particular spiritual beliefs. Some readers of the preliminary version of this book, published in 1987 under the title of Spiritual Revolution, dismissed these narratives as "lies and garbage." Others said things like "It has the ring of truth to it, even though it contradicts almost every other spiritual book I've ever read." You'll just to have to make up your own mind. All I'll say at this point is that War in Heaven contains no deliberate lies, and I'm neither smart enough nor crazy enough to have hallucinated it all.

4 I also want to make it clear that I really don't care if readers say they accept or reject the theories in this book. My purpose is not to gain followers for a narrow ideology, but to assist certain people in making the same breakthrough I made If you are one of these people, you may not even know it until long after you've finished the book and the ideas in it have penetrated deep into your subconscious.

5 However, I will also offer evidence to convince the reader's conscious intellect that what I'm saying is scientifically true, whenever I can do so without interfering with my primary purpose, which is to present an extremely complex and revolutionary theory about spirituality. Let me start by explaining why I believe that there is sufficient empirical evidence to convince any truly open-minded person that telepathy, spirit-communication, reincarnation, and many other psychic and spiritual phenomena actually exist. Colin Wilson, one of the most rational and pragmatic of the twentieth-century philosophers, has come to a similar conclusion, as shown by the following excerpt from his book The Occult (1971):

6 "It was not until two years ago, when I began the systematic research for this book, that I realized the remarkable consistency of the evidence for such matters as life after death, out-of-the-body experiences (astral projection), reincarnation. In a basic sense, my attitude remains unchanged; I still regard philosophy - the pursuit of reality through intuition aided by intellect - as being more relevant, more important, than questions of "the occult." But the weighing of the evidence, in this unsympathetic frame of mind, has convinced me that the basic claims of "occultism" are true. It seems to me that the reality of life after death has been established beyond all reasonable doubt. I sympathize with the philosophers and scientists who regard it as emotional nonsense, because I am temperamentally on their side; but I think they are closing their eyes to evidence that would convince them if it concerned the mating habits of albino rats or the behavior of alpha particles."

7 Let's use the evidence in support of reincarnation as a starting point. There are thousands of past-life memory cases on record, described in hundreds of different books. Some of them are undoubtedly hoaxes or have explanations other than reincarnation, but many more seem to have been proven valid with physical evidence. For example, young children have demonstrated the ability to speak a foreign language that their parents are sure they have never even heard in their present lifetime. Other subjects traveled to places where they said they had lived during a previous life, described objects they had hidden, and then found them.

8 Colin Wilson's The Case for Reincarnation (1987) presents an impressive amount of this type of evidence, and Reincarnation: A New Horizon in Science, Religion, and Society (1984), edited by Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams, presents even more. In my opinion, these two books, all by themselves, contain sufficient empirical evidence to prove the validity of reincarnation beyond reasonable doubt to anyone with a truly open mind. On the basis of this kind of published evidence alone, and leaving my personal past-life memories out of it, I am as ready to argue with anyone who denies that reincarnation is a scientifically proven fact as I am to dispute an assertion that the Sun revolves around the Earth.

9 Although I've never talked to anyone who was able to verify his or her past-life memories with hard physical evidence comparable to that described in the books, my conversations on this subject with hundreds of different people have still yielded some valuable information. I've talked to dozens whose past-life memory accounts seem historically accurate. Without exception, these people said they had lived before in the quite recent past, and had possessed conscious control over their psychic abilities. Some said they had been American Indians with shamanic training; several had been Hindus skilled in Yoga; and others recounted past lives as Chinese or Japanese students of the martial arts. The majority, however, had been ordinary Americans with low-level occult training in the Rosicrucians, the Theosophists, the Spiritualist movement, etc.

10 The more I talked to some of these people, the more evidence I found that their past-life memories were genuine. They had learned difficult mechanical skills, complicated intellectual knowledge, or even a whole foreign language, with an ease that mystified their teachers. Some of them also reported being criticized by their instructors for instinctively doing things in a manner that is now considered obsolete, but was standard practice fifty or seventy years ago. No single case of this type is conclusive proof of reincarnation by itself, but hearing dozens of such accounts face-to-face is very impressive.

11 I also once had a psychic experience that I feel is excellent first-hand evidence for reincarnation. It is especially valuable because it does not involve past-life memories like most of the other evidence, but direct psychic observation of the reincarnation process. Here is how I described it to one of my correspondents:

12 "I'll tell you why I personally believe in reincarnation absolutely and completely. I have 'seen' it happen. I have stood by the crib of a newborn baby and psychically observed high-level spirit guides approach and assist a soul in entering the infant's body. Before, I got the same vibes I get from an ape in the zoo, after, the vibes of a human baby. It was a very clear-cut psychic experience, and similar to a more common, but sadder, experience you may have had yourselves: being at the bedside of a dying person and psychically perceiving the soul depart from the body. That's the real reason I believe in reincarnation so strongly, and all the inferential evidence in books is pale beside it."

13 Ironically, my own past-life memories aren't of much use in providing proof of reincarnation. They are extremely vivid and occur to me frequently, both in dreams and as flashes of memory when I'm awake; but there is no way to verify them with factual evidence, because they are not memories of a past life on Earth. The people in them, including me, are slightly different anatomically from Earth people, and the setting seems to be an advanced technological society much different from anything I've ever seen described in science fiction.

14 The general impression is that the society lives underground or on a space station of some kind, not on the surface of a planet. The people seem to live entirely indoors in an endless series of inter-connecting rooms, and the "doors" connecting them may be teleportation devices. There are almost no artifacts of any kind visible in most of the scenes, not even furniture: people just sit or recline in mid-air. Maybe it's done with anti-gravity devices. All of the machines seem to be hidden away, and there are no physical control panels. Apparently, everyone is hooked up telepathically to an elaborate computer system, and people operate the equipment just by thinking. However, when someone does this, images of machines and control panels seem to appear in mid-air.

15 I still have vivid memories of dreaming about such things when I was only three or four years old. When I put the childish picture-memories and emotions into adult words, they go something like this: "I dreamed that I was turning into a machine. No, not a mechanical man. I was part of a big machine, like a factory, and it kept getting bigger and bigger, and I knew I was supposed to control it with my thoughts, but I just didn't know the right things to think." These flashes of memory have been very important to me all of my life, because they often contain instructions for controlling and using my psychic powers or other mental faculties that I have trouble accessing with my conscious mind alone. They are probably the single most significant factor that helped prepare me for the breakthrough in spiritual consciousness that led to the writing of this book.

16 I've talked to a number of people who also seem to remember past lives on other worlds, and read books on the subject by Brad Steiger, Ruth Montgomery, and others. Here's what George C. Andrews had to say about it in Extra-Terrestrials Among Us (1986):

17 "The concept of reincarnation implies a latent ability to regress back to former lives, and thus to restore the long-dormant far memory of experience and information accumulated during previous incarnations to conscious awareness. A substantial number of those who have worked on activating this latent ability find that their past lives include incarnations as extra-terrestrials. This occurs so persistently that it has become a commonly accepted belief among those engaged in such work that extra-terrestrials from many different points of origin have incarnated on Earth during this crucial all-or-nothing climax of human history. Some of those who remember previous existences as extraterrestrials also become aware of specific missions they were born to carry out during the present terrestrial incarnation."

18 Here's a summary of my beliefs about reincarnation prior to my breakthrough in 1983. First, most of the well-documented, really plausible past-life memory accounts seem to involve a previous life that ended fifty years or less before the person's present incarnation. Some people claim they have lived dozens or hundreds of lives over many centuries; but I've never seen an account of this type that contained solid supporting evidence, such as intimate knowledge of the language spoken during the past life. My conclusion from the available evidence about reincarnation was that very few people remember more than the last of their past lives in enough detail to be useful, and that spirits don't stay on the astral plane for more than a few decades between earthly lives.

19 Second, the evidence also suggested that only people who were practicing psychics in their last incarnation seem to have vivid, conscious past-life memories in this one. Practically every well-documented account of a past life that I've seen includes descriptions of conscious psychic activity: telepathy, mediumship, prophetic visions, faith healing, divination, etc. The psychic activities may have been the result of deliberate training, or they may have been spontaneous, but they are always there.

20 Third, reincarnation may not be as common as most reincarnationists assume. The Eastern religions teach that all human beings reincarnate after death except a few of the most spiritually advanced, which pass to a higher plane of existence. Most Westerners who believe in reincarnation at all have also accepted the idea that it is a universal phenomenon.

21 In fact, I used to believe this idea myself, and sometimes used it in arguments with Christians. They would say, "You only live once, and then you are judged and consigned to Heaven or Hell for eternity." I would reply, "No, we all live over and over again through reincarnation. When the soul reaches a high enough state of development, it may pass to a higher plane, but everyone else just keeps living life after life on Earth. This is a lot fairer than the system you're describing, because people always get a second chance."

22 However, the more I learned about reincarnation as described in the strongest past-life memory accounts, the less I came to believe that everybody who dies reincarnates. The only thing the evidence demonstrates clearly is that a few people, probably less than one percent of the population, remember a past life well enough to prove it. Many more, maybe a tenth to a quarter of the population, have subconscious past-life memories that can be accessed by hypnotic regression or other techniques. Some New Agers claim that everybody can learn to remember past lives, but I've never felt they even come close to proving it.

23 In the last few years before I made my breakthrough, I admitted to myself that the available evidence wasn't adequate to determine what percentage of the population reincarnates or what happens to the souls of people who don't. I did sometimes speculate that having conscious control over their psychic powers might help people reincarnate, but I found this line of reasoning distasteful. In the absence of real evidence, it seemed elitist and self-serving, so I didn't pursue it. However, having an open mind on the subject prepared me to accept the truth when my spirit guides finally told it to me.

24 Whether reincarnation is common or rare, accepting that it exists at all obliges one to start looking for information about the soul, the entity that transfers from one body to another to carry the past-life memories. Like the nineteenth-century Spiritualists and many other occultists, I postulated that the soul is composed of specialized forms of matter and energy presently unknown to physical science. This hypothesis is quite vague, of course; but it lays a foundation for finding out more about the nature of the soul by scientific methods of investigation.

25 I will next discuss the evidence that some disembodied human souls are active and conscious on the astral plane and can communicate with the living by telepathy. There is even more evidence available in published literature to support this hypothesis than there is to support reincarnation. The organized Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced enough spirit-dictated books to fill a small library, and the modern Channeling movement is generating still more. I admit that some of these are either conscious hoaxes or creations of the author's own imagination, but I am convinced that many are genuine communications from spirits.

26 Because it's difficult to tell genuine channeled books from fakes and products of self-delusion, I recommend works based on scientific investigations of Spiritualist and Channeling movements. Such investigations often employ methods similar to those used by the reincarnation researchers mentioned earlier. For example, a medium will obtain information from the spirit of a deceased person that no living person could know, and the investigator will try to verify it with empirical evidence. Most public libraries contain a few books of this type, and I've read several hundred that each contain sufficient evidence to prove that the dead survive and communicate with the living.

27 Cases where the spirit of a murder victim has passed enough information to a medium to identify and convict the killer are actually quite common. This information often includes detailed instructions for locating physical evidence: weapons, clothing, and especially the body itself. Dozens of such cases are reported in the newspapers every year, and hundreds more are known within the occult community but kept quiet. This is especially true in small towns and rural areas, where psychics routinely help the police solve crimes, and the cops quietly defend them from persecution by religious fanatics. This fragile relationship depends on secrecy, so stories with headlines like "Psychic Locates Murder Weapon" don't appear in the papers as commonly as they should.

28 If you start looking for cases like these in books, magazines, or newspaper files, you'll find the evidence extremely impressive. The same applies to cases where spirits told mediums the sites of treasures buried by deceased people, hidden wills and other papers, etc. I feel there is sufficient evidence in any large library or bookstore to convince anyone who's reasonably unbiased of the reality of contact between the living and the spirits of the dead.

29 If you do start reading to find such evidence, here's something else to look for at the same time. The spirits who pass information to mediums about events that happened while they were alive very often seem so senile, childish, paranoid, or otherwise in distress, that it is difficult and painful for the medium to communicate with them. The authors of mediumistic literature often don't emphasize these negative details, but they are there if you look for them.

30 Since the nineteenth century, Spiritualists and other occultists who practice mediumship have deliberately concealed a lot of important information about the spirit world when they write accounts of their communications with the dead. This is done with the best of motives: to keep from frightening the public, and to avoid giving support to Fundamentalist charges that mediumship involves contact with demonic forces. Most of the literature still gives the reader a misleading impression of what it's actually like to receive messages from the spirit world at a séance, by automatic writing, or through mechanical aids such as Ouija boards.

31 Did you ever wonder why practically all mediums communicate with the majority of spirits indirectly? Both the old-fashioned Spiritualist mediums and the New Age channeling mediums have spirit guides who assist them in finding and communicating with other spirits, but very few are willing to tell you bluntly why they have to operate this way. The reason is very simple: most spirits on the astral plane are in mental states that we'd label as insane or feeble-minded in a living person. They mumble in baby talk or rave like schizophrenics. Their thoughts ramble and get lost in time like those of a person with Alzheimer's disease. They contradict themselves as if their memories had been scrambled up with the contents of someone else's mind. And above all, they act sick, drunk, or drugged. Some say they are in severe pain; others are frightened; still others are calm, but it's the sickly calm of a person who has taken a heavy dose of morphine or Thorazine.

32 If you've experimented with Ouija boards, there's an excellent chance you've spoken to spirits in this condition. And though the mediumistic literature does mention frequent contacts with "lost souls," "earthbound spirits, "entities from the lower astral," etc., it rarely describes them in detail or reveals that the vast majority of spirits the mediums contact are in this category. The plain truth is that if you're going to accomplish anything at all as a medium, you have to work through a spirit guide.

33 A spirit guide is simply a spirit on the astral plane with sufficient mental stability and psychic powers to communicate easily with a particular medium, and who is willing to form a personal relationship. Another thing to look for between the lines of the literature: this relationship is often overtly sexual. A medium's spirit guide often receives some of the energy raised during physical sexual activity. Only the Eastern Tantric magicians and Western students of sex magic write and talk openly about this, but almost all mediums practice it.

34 Explanations of exactly what all this means will be given in Part Two. The rest of Part One will describe other knowledge I had to learn before I could make the breakthrough.

Chapter 3: Conspiracies

1 Although the general public and the scientific investigators of unexplained phenomena started showing a major interest in conspiracy theories only after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, conspiracies have been a major theme in occult literature for centuries. Many of these stories are merely warnings about conspiracies to persecute occultists, or answers to accusations that occult organizations have conspired to overthrow religious and political establishments; but the ones that interested me are much more positive in tone. They're the sort of thing that I read and hope is true, such as the rumors about secret societies of high-level "Masters" who conspire to use their advanced knowledge and formidable psychic powers for benign causes, especially the advancement of human civilization in every area: spiritual, cultural, political, and technological.

2 I felt instinctively from an early age that such positive conspiracies have in fact existed at various times during the past five or six centuries and have been significant in building our modern society. One of my major goals for a long time was to find such a group, if any had survived to the present, both to learn whatever they would teach me and to help them with what they were doing. In a sense, I found it when I made my breakthrough, but it wasn't a conspiracy of living people at all. However, it's still worthwhile to tell of my efforts to trace down the source of the rumors about benign conspiracies of advanced occultists who contribute to the progress of Western civilization.

3 One of the chief focal points for such rumors is the Masonic Order of the eighteenth century, so that's where I'll begin. Detailed histories of some of these lodges and relatively complete descriptions of their doctrines are now in general circulation. They're supposed to be secret, but they really never have been - see William Heckethorn's Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries, first published in 1875 and available in many public libraries. However, there's very little in these books to help researchers find hidden occult conspiracies within the secret societies

4 For example, many historians admit that a large number of the men who made major breakthroughs in many different fields during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and dozens of others - belonged to such lodges. And one of the modern Rosicrucian groups acts as if this is proof that the lodges had access to important occult knowledge: "What secret did these men possess?" Actually, it's just as proper to answer with another question: "With men of that caliber in them, what need did the lodges have of secret occult knowledge to make an impact on the course of history?"

5 Studying the basic philosophical and ethical teachings of the eighteenth century Freemasons and Rosicrucians doesn't directly reveal the existence of a secret occult conspiracy either. There is no doubt that ideas like "consent of the governed" and "inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property" and "the only God we can know is Reason" were widely discussed and taught within the lodges, and considered extremely radical; but there was nothing really new or secret about them even then. They had been published and openly discussed by intellectuals for centuries, and the only unique thing about the Age of Enlightenment is that these theoretical concepts finally began to be put into practice on a large enough scale to affect the evolution of human society.

6 Also, the "secret" histories of the Masonic lodges reveal that they have always been very similar to what they are today: social organizations devoted to mutual aid among members, charitable works in the community, and a philosophy most of us would call "Basic American values." The members underwent initiations into various "degrees" and regularly attended quasi-religious rituals, but the histories make it clear that most lodge brothers considered them mere dramas to stir the emotions and create a mood. The exact details of these rituals are virtually the only things about such lodges that aren't readily available to the public.

7 However, some members of modern occult groups that trace their descent back to certain Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges have put important elements of these traditional rituals into their writings for the general public. The writings of Aleister Crowley and the other Golden Dawn members are the best-known examples. And when one studies these rituals, evidence to support the existence of an occult conspiracy finally begins to emerge. Many of them are directly derived from the rituals of advanced medieval occultism, and there's no doubt that performing them puts the participants in profoundly altered states of consciousness. The OTO (Order of Eastern Templars) and other modern occult groups that use these rituals are among the most advanced magical lodges in existence. (And yes, some people in these groups have very bad reputations for misusing magic. But this reflects only on their morals, not on their knowledge or skills.)

8 The fact that advanced magical techniques were used in the rituals without being openly explained to all of the members is evidence that the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges may have been front organizations for a "secret society within a secret society", which manipulated the other members for its own purposes. Many occultists have postulated the existence of such a group, and named it the "Invisible College."

9 According to this theory, the Invisible College was a group of men with advanced knowledge of medieval occultism, derived from the Knights Templar or other secret societies of the late Middle Ages. They infiltrated Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians around the beginning of the eighteenth century. Once they had assumed leadership, they started teaching the rational, humanistic doctrine that most people today associate with Masonry, which is also the political and ethical philosophy that forms the basis for modern Western civilization.

10 The Invisible College designed rituals (based on medieval occultism) that would have a hypnotic effect on the initiates so their resistance to the radical doctrine would be lowered. The emotional power of the rituals also positively reinforced acceptance of the doctrine. The term "operant conditioning" wasn't added to the vocabulary of science until the Twentieth century, but occultists have practiced the technique for hundreds of years. And it worked very well, resulting in the birth of modern political democracy and liberalism, the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, the rapid advancement of Science, and the decline of Puritanism and other forms of Fundamentalist Christianity that opposed material progress.

11 This particular conspiracy was large enough and effective enough to leave obvious traces in history, but it's much more difficult to trace the operations of similar conspiracies since. Most of the modern books labeled as "conspiracy theories" have been of little use to me in finding occult conspiracies, because they deal only with politics and economics on a completely materialistic level. However, certain well-known mundane conspiracy theories have elements within them that do interest me. An example is the body of rumors about the "Bavarian Illuminati" that received a lot of publicity during the McCarthy-era controversy over Communist conspiracies back in the Fifties.

12 The rumors I'm talking about were published quite openly by members of the "lunatic fringe" of the anti-Communist movement, and some of them had the same "too wild to be untrue" quality as the Shaver Mystery did. They seemed to show a glimpse into another reality, as if the authors, like Shaver, were receiving messages from the spirit world that their conscious minds were totally incapable of interpreting.

13 For example, some of their accusations against the "Illuminati" made no sense at all back in the Fifties when the rumors were published, but when I reread this material in the Seventies and early Eighties, I found that several of their charges had been amazingly prophetic. For example, these particular propagandists had joined the crusade against the fluoridation of public water supplies by claiming that it was part of a wider Illuminati plot to put "drugs and chemicals that weaken the will" into food and water all over America so that people would become more vulnerable to Communist brainwashing.

14 Even the majority within the anti-fluoridation movement - who merely considered fluoridation of water supplies a potential health hazard and a violation of individual rights by the government - thought the charges about "will destroying drugs and chemicals" were totally paranoid. However, when I reread them years later, I suspected that the authors might have had psychic forewarnings about the massive impact of mind-altering drugs on society that started in the Sixties. And I'm not talking only about recreational drug use or LSD as an aid to consciousness-expansion here, but about something much more fundamental: the use of massive doses of powerful tranquilizers on people in prisons and mental hospitals, the frequent use of milder tranquilizers and sedatives by a large part of the population, the ever-increasing use of cocaine and amphetamines, etc.

15 Some of the other rumors started by these same "right-wing kooks" didn't make any sense until after I had made my breakthrough and started writing this book. One of them was that the conspiracies they were trying to expose were a set of Chinese Boxes. On the outer layer were the majority of Americans, who were being brainwashed with false promises of peace and plenty from liberal politicians. The liberals themselves were being duped by Communist agents. Chief among these agents were Josef Stalin and his successors in the Kremlin, but they were not really sovereign over the "world-wide Communist conspiracy." Most of their foreign propaganda and subversion was financed by cliques of Jewish bankers and other wealthy capitalists whose leaders were all members of the Bavarian Illuminati. And at the very center, the Illuminati themselves were accused of being under the control of the "Snake People," who were either "aliens from outer space," or "demons of Satan sent from Hell."

16 The strangest thing about this scenario is that it makes perfect sense if interpreted in terms of some of the information in Part Two of this book. Before I made the breakthrough, I wasn't able to understand what was behind these weird writings; I just felt the authors had received information from "somewhere else." And this information seemed to support the idea that a mysterious conspiracy was doing things the conservatives and reactionaries didn't like. The most interesting thing about it was that telepathy seemed to be involved, which would imply a conspiracy of psychics.

17 There are some ideas almost as wild in Morning of the Magicians (1960), by Louis Pouwells and Jacques Bergier. Among many other things, the book gives evidence that a number of German Nazi leaders were involved with occultism and various pseudo-scientific belief systems closely related to it. Some of this material led me to conclude that the government of Axis Germany may have been infiltrated and manipulated by the same sort of occultists who worked through the old Masonic lodges.

18 Most occultists are reluctant to consider speculation of this kind, because they jump to the conclusion that if "Secret Masters" manipulated the Nazis, they must have done so to help them. Since it's natural to reject the idea that anyone with really advanced occult knowledge and psychic powers could be sympathetic to men as evil as Hitler and his followers, they usually conclude that Nazi occultism was on a rather low level.

19 After closely studying the available evidence, I came to a somewhat different conclusion. I found reason to believe that something similar to the old "Invisible College" influenced both sides in World War II, and that this manipulation was intended to ensure an Allied victory. Since many of the Nazi leaders had been involved with occult organizations from an early age, I concluded that the Invisible College probably had started out trying to control this movement and use it to rebuild Germany after World War I. They obviously failed, though I wasn't sure why.

20 To explain evidence like this, many occultists and conspiracy researchers have postulated that there are two opposing factions of secret manipulators that contend for control of human society. Before I made the breakthrough, I found this concept of "the forces of good versus the forces of evil" too simplistic and unsophisticated to accept very easily, even though I kept discovering evidence to support it.

21 One thing is certain about World War II: whether or not high-level occult conspiracies were involved in such strategic events as the rise of the Nazis to power, occultism and psychic activities had a major impact on the course of the war. History records quite clearly that Hitler and other Nazi leaders believed in occultism enough to listen to advice from psychics, and that much of it was harmful to the Axis cause. For example, Hitler's psychic advisors told him to stop trying to develop an atomic bomb. They also encouraged him to invade the Soviet Union.

22 There is also evidence that Allied leaders received and acted on advice from psychics over the course of World War II, but this does not mean that people like Roosevelt and Churchill believed in occultism in quite the same way that some of the German leaders did. In many cases, professional psychics passed useful military information to people in the regular Allied intelligence community who then passed it up the chain of command along with information gathered by conventional means.

23 If this was all there was to the evidence, there would be no reason to conclude that an important, high-level occult conspiracy was involved. Once it is assumed that psychic powers like telepathy exist, it's logical to make the further assumption that psychically talented individuals are going to use their powers to help whichever side they support in a war. In this context, it makes perfect sense that psychics who were reasonably ethical people would give bad advice to the Nazis and good advice to the Allies.

24 However, now that World War II is long over and most of the major figures involved are dead, some extremely interesting evidence has started to surface. A number of the intelligence agents and low-ranking military officers who passed psychic advice to the Allied leaders are starting to admit that they lied when they said they got the information from professional occultists. That was just a cover story to deceive their colleagues in the intelligence community, who knew they couldn't have gotten such material through their usual sources of information.

25 How did these people really get the information? No one told it to them: they got it through psychic experiences of their own, and in many cases never had a similar experience before or since. Some of the stories they're now telling occult researchers are simply incredible unless you know something about mediumship. If you do, they're quite familiar.

26 Many of them describe getting information from the ghost of a dead comrade, usually in a dream or while falling asleep. Others heard it on the radio: the station the person was listening to would fade out, and the signal that replaced it would convey a few sentences of useful intelligence information. Hundreds of such accounts have now been reported. I'll admit there's no hard evidence to prove most of them true, but they still impressed me, because they appear to be descriptions of mediumistic experiences by people who lack the knowledge to fake such a thing.

27 In addition to this, some of the conspiracy evidence I encountered through my own personal experience mystified and frightened me even more. The Kennedy assassination fits into that category. If my only source of information about it had been the facts available in newspapers and history books, I would have assumed President Kennedy had been murdered for mundane political reasons, such as his liberal stand on civil rights, his equivocal handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, his declaration of a "war on organized crime", or one of his other controversial policies. However, I had some psychic experiences in 1962 and 1963 that strongly indicated that spiritual conspiracies were involved in the assassination.

28 I started having these experiences in late 1962. I would be in a trance state trying to read somebody's mind or contact spirits, and I'd get extremely hateful and threatening feelings about the President - feelings that I was sure didn't originate in my own mind. (Kennedy wasn't a hero to me, as he was to so many Americans at that time, but I didn't hate him, either. For example, I felt his strong stand on civil rights was merely what any decent person would take under the circumstances.) These alien thoughts were just raw emotions, not messages expressed in words or mental pictures, but they were very strong.

29 This might have made sense if I'd been living in a place like Alabama, surrounded by the sort of people who later cheered when they heard that Kennedy had been killed; but I was in the middle of New York City, where he was extremely popular. So where were the negative messages coming from?

30 My personal experiences with telepathy at that time indicated that it was mainly a short-range phenomenon. Whenever I could identify the source of the thoughts and emotions I picked up telepathically, it was usually someone within a few miles of me. The literature is full of accounts of long-range telepathy, but I'd only experienced this a few times in my life. So who was sending all the telepathic poison against Kennedy?

31 My guess was that a secret lodge of occultists with extreme right-wing political views was operating somewhere in New York. I knew vaguely that there were several "black lodges" in the area whose members claimed to be both powerful magicians and fascists. And I felt strongly that if people like that were sending out those telepathic hate messages, then the rest of the occult community should try to do something about it.

32 In the summer of 1963, when I first discussed this with various friends, all occultists about my own age, they talked me out of it. After all, we were working to end the censorship that had banned some of the best contemporary literature as pornography, so why should we even consider practicing "psychic censorship"? And what harm could the messages do anyway? So a few psychics kept hearing "Kill Kennedy, kill Kennedy." So what? Weren't Presidents of the United States guarded with all the latest technology and virtually impossible to assassinate? (Yes, I really was this naive. So were most Americans in 1963.)

33 However, as November of 1963 approached, I could perceive the anti-Kennedy messages growing stronger and more frequent, and people with less and less conscious psychic ability were reporting receiving them. Often, they were getting warnings, not threats: flashes that "Kennedy is in danger, something is going to happen to him." So many people had experiences like this and talked or wrote about them, that the authorities investigating the assassination after it happened filled whole files with them. However, these psychic messages were far too vague to give information about the identity of the actual assassins.

34 In September of 1963, I began to get some information from my own spirit guides about the telepathic hate campaign against Kennedy. At that time, it was extremely difficult for me to receive coherent channeled messages, because my mediumistic powers were not yet highly developed. However, I did manage to get some answers to my questions after weeks of strenuous effort, and they weren't at all what I'd been expecting.

35 Since I knew my spirit guides staunchly supported the Civil Rights movement and other liberal causes, I expected them to say they were trying to protect the President against psychic attacks from black magicians or evil spirits. Instead, they said that they and all the other good spirits on the astral plane were responsible for the anti-Kennedy campaign. They said Kennedy was mentally unstable enough to start a nuclear war, and it was necessary to either disgrace him or kill him before he could do so.

36 The process of receiving this information in garbled bits and pieces took many days, but by the time it was done, I was convinced the anti-Kennedy messages really did come from good spirits, not reactionary magicians. Also, when I reread the news accounts of Kennedy's conduct during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they seemed to support the spirits' contention that he might start a world war. There was evidence (though not the clear proof that's surfaced since) that the President's initial reaction had been to favor a nuclear first strike or massive invasion of Cuba, and that he'd compromised on a blockade only under heavy pressure from his advisors.

37 Because of this personal experience, I took a serious interest in the conspiracy theories that became a fad after the assassination. I also kept on trying very hard to develop my psychic powers and use them to look for evidence that telepathy was being used to guide the evolution of human society. The resurgence of the counterculture and radical politics in the Sixties, which began to receive major publicity soon after the Kennedy assassination, proved to be an excellent source of such evidence, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Chapter 5: Religion and Revolution

1 Until I made the breakthrough in 1983, my attitude toward Christianity and the other major organized religions was ambiguous. On one level, it's quite natural for occultists to feel apprehension toward all religious establishments. Our whole traditional literature is full of accounts of witch-burning and other persecution. I've always been aware that such things could happen right here in Twentieth-century America if the New Right and other political factions controlled by Fundamentalists ever achieved control of the government, or even if the majority of American Christians again became Fundamentalists, as they were in past centuries. That fear has been in the back of my mind all my life, but it was never really a rational fear.

2 In reality, the majority of Americans have become progressively more tolerant of occultism and alternative religious systems over the last twenty years. A Fundamentalist minority still preaches against us, but when they attempt active persecution, even the clergy of the largest Christian sects - Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, etc. - are usually quick to condemn the persecutors as a lunatic fringe and to defend people's First-Amendment rights to be non-Christians.

3 A number of my friends in the Sixties movement considered themselves devout Christians or Jews. They simply dropped those aspects of the traditional doctrine they found incompatible with their beliefs as members of the counterculture, and incorporated the rest into their new lifestyle. For example, they'd quote verses from the New Testament that supported the peace and love doctrine of the counterculture, and make statements like "Jesus was the original hippy." (Jews in this category sometimes expressed regret that Jesus had been persecuted by the Jewish establishment of his day instead of being recognized as a divinely appointed prophet and reformer.)

4 Many of the leaders of the civil rights movement have been members of the Christian clergy, from Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson right on down to the community level, including whites as well as blacks. The same has been true of leaders of the peace and anti-nuclear movement. Most of these people assert that their religious beliefs are what motivate them into political activism, and quote scripture to support their ideologies.

5 Another cause of my ambiguous attitude toward religion is the lack of a clear-cut boundary between organized religion and occultism. Many Spiritualists consider themselves members of the Christian community, even though I myself feel that their actual beliefs and practices make them part of occultism. The same applies to a lot of people who call themselves Gnostics, Magdalenian Christians, Christian Magicians, Cabalists, etc. I've always got along as easily with people in this category as with occultists, Pagans, Witches, and New Agers.

6 However, I took an instant dislike to the "Jesus Freaks" in the Sixties. At first, I couldn't identify exactly what turned me off about these longhaired Christians who proselytized from storefront churches in counterculture areas. Then a few of my Christian friends in the counterculture became Jesus Freaks. They went from saying "Jesus was a hippy. He drank wine, so why should he mind if I smoke dope?" to "Get high on Jesus instead of pot." As a psychic, I had to admit that spiritual experiences are just as efficient at altering consciousness as drugs are; but the longer my friends stayed in the Jesus Movement, the less they seemed to act high at all. They also started arguing with me and preaching to me. Eventually, they all either dropped out of the Jesus Movement or stopped speaking to people like me.

7 And the ones who remained Jesus Freaks gradually dropped out of the counterculture. It all came clear one night when I saw some the movement's leaders interviewed on a television evangelist's program. One said, "We're basically a rescue mission. We go onto Satan's territory up there in the Haight and try to rescue sinners." Then the guy shook his shoulder-length hair and fingered his paisley shirt and continued, "And if we have to wear Satan's uniform while we do it, then that's what we'll do. Praise the Lord!"

8 I was frightened of black militants who preached a fanatical Islamic doctrine that included anti-Semitism, and of Palestinian Arabs who condoned terrorism. However, I was just as disturbed that some militant Zionists condemned all Palestinians for the acts of a few, or asserted that Moslems did not deserve the full rights of Israeli citizenship. And even though I had spent several years studying Vedanta, I felt an instinctive dislike for the Hare Krishnas as well. When people asked me why, I'd say, "They're Vedantic Puritans. The people I worked with were Shivites who smoked ganja, practiced sex magic, and had vibes more like occultists." I didn't realize till I'd made the breakthrough that all these people (Jesus Freaks, Zionists, and Hare Krishnas) had one thing in common. For now, I'll call it Fundamentalism, but I'll have another name for it in Part Two.

9 The principal difference between Fundamentalists and other believers within a given religion is not just conservatism in the sense of unwillingness to make changes in traditional religious doctrine or custom to avoid conflict with the religion's external environment. Instead, the Fundamentalists take social and political action to convert the whole society to their views, whether the rest of the population wants to change or not.

10 It's ironic that modern American Fundamentalists call themselves religious and political conservatives. Their philosophy is really radical or revolutionary, because they desire sweeping changes in social and political institutions, and they try to impose these changes with vigorous action, sometimes including force. However, they call this right-wing radical ideology "conservative" to project a respectable public image.

11 The Fundamentalist-backed New Right claims to be a conservative movement that advocates "a return to the traditional American values." This is a blatant lie. Even the most casual look at American history shows that this country's traditional values are actually quite liberal. Politicians all over the world have used the U.S. Constitution with its Bill of Rights as a model for designing liberal, democratic institutions. The Founding Fathers included some of the most famous liberal political philosophers of all time: Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others. History also shows that American social and political institutions have been moving steadily toward the left during the country's whole history.

12 After I made the breakthrough and learned exactly what the Fundamentalist ideology is and where it comes from, it became obvious why people are so willing to think of it as "traditional" even though it has always been a minority viewpoint in the United States. It's an extremely ancient and powerful ideological system based on a profound knowledge of human psychology and the nature of psychic and spiritual reality; it's also the source of most of the evil in this world, as I will describe in Part Two.

13 My attitude towards Christianity and all other organized religion became increasingly ambiguous during the last ten years before I made the breakthrough. On one hand, I saw many examples of cooperation, tolerance, and openness. For example, a number of occult, Pagan, and New Age groups in the San Francisco Bay Area have rented space and held their meetings in various non-Fundamentalist Christian churches since the Sixties and enjoyed friendly relations with their clergy and congregations. Leaders of some of these Aquarian Age groups have even belonged to local Councils of Churches and participated in their charitable and public service work. This has also occurred in other large cities all over the country.

14 Yet at the same time, Fundamentalist-controlled religious radio and TV stations frequently broadcast outrageous slanders of the Aquarian movement. "All non-Christian religious activity is Devil worship, and everyone who participates in it is possessed by demons." Fundamentalist propaganda also frequently made the news with claims that rock musicians brainwash young people with subliminal messages about Satanism. Even the ultimate lie about occultists and Pagans was mentioned occasionally: that they practice human sacrifice, especially of babies. And the harassment wasn't all verbal: several groves in Bay Area regional parks where Pagans hold outdoor services were routinely vandalized with crosses carved on trees and "Jesus Saves" painted on rocks.

15 During this same period, Fundamentalists in religions besides Christianity were causing major political problems all over the world. Most readers will be familiar with the trouble Islamic Fundamentalists have caused over the last twenty years. The kidnapping of American diplomats by Iranian revolutionaries was partly responsible for Ronald Reagan's victory over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was assassinated by Moslem Fundamentalists because he had made a serious effort to work with Israel and bring peace to the Middle East. Perhaps the most glaring example has been the virtual destruction of Lebanon, which used to be one of the most advanced and progressive countries in the Islamic world.

16 There are many other examples of serious political problems caused by Fundamentalist movements, both in Christianity and in other major religions that most Americans may not identify as such.

17 For example, some of the groups that the press in this country calls "right-wing death squads" in South America are actually Catholic Fundamentalist secret societies, and are merely a highly visible part of a Fundamentalist movement within the Catholic Church in that part of the world. This movement is quite small and confined mostly to the upper and middle social classes, but it has been a significant factor for years in moving South American governments to the right, toward fascist dictatorship. This movement has received much less publicity in the United States than the various left-wing Catholic movements that have formed in reaction to it among the impoverished majority of the population in the same countries, but it is definitely a significant political force in South America right now.

18 The "Moonie" Cult in the United States has attracted major publicity for misrepresenting itself when proselytizing, holding some of its members against their will under conditions of near starvation and hard labor, etc.; and Rev. Moon himself has been in and out of jail on tax charges. All of this has caused minor problems for the Aquarian spiritual movement in this country, because too many Americans don't realize the Moonies have nothing to do with this movement at all.

19 The doctrine of Moon's Unification Church is a mixture of Fundamentalist Christianity with elements from Buddhism and other Eastern religions, and is the direct antithesis to everything the Aquarian movement stands for. The main reason why this import from South Korea hasn't done more harm in this country is that we already have our own Christian Fundamentalist movement, which fits into our culture better and appears less bizarre. However, the Moonies and several similar Fundamentalist groups have a major influence on South Korean politics and are one reason why that country has swung so far to the totalitarian right.

20 Religious Fundamentalism among both the Sikhs and Hindus was a cause of the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the bloody religious warfare between those two groups that's been going on ever since. I'm certain we haven't seen the worst of it yet. One of the basic causes of Apartheid in South Africa is that large numbers of the Afrikaners are Fundamentalist Protestants. Fundamentalism is responsible for much of the repression and totalitarianism in the Black African nations; Islam, Christianity, Vedanta, and various tribal religions are all involved. There's also a Fundamentalist movement within Judaism, which pressures the Israeli government into aggressive military and expansionist policies and makes achieving peace in the Middle East just that much more difficult.

21 These are just a few examples of how Fundamentalist religious movements all over the world seem to be working to sabotage the progress of human civilization. The most significant thing about them is that it is very difficult to see how their activities could serve anyone's self-interest. Until I made my breakthrough, I attributed such activity to a form of insanity: religious fanatics become so obsessed with "pleasing God" in hopes of achieving "eternal bliss" or some other benefit after death that they completely lose contact with earthly reality. However, I was never able to determine why religious fanaticism should do this to people.

22 The puritanical, reactionary philosophy of the Fundamentalists has always put them in conflict with religious as well as political liberals. Since the late Seventies, as the New Right has been trying to achieve political power, I have noticed an increasing liberal backlash within the Christian religion it self. Until recently, only the Fundamentalist wing of Christianity seemed truly vigorous and fanatical. The majority of Christians in this country were liberal or moderate in both their political and religious views, but they were also rather conservative about trying to convert others.

23 Also, for most of this century, the Fundamentalists were the only American Christians who made full use of the psychic power inherent in all organized religion. When most Americans see terms like "charismatic preachers, "religious ecstasy," "faith healing," or "miracles," they associate them only with the Fundamentalists. The liberal wing of the Christian Church has traditionally been more concerned with social and political issues than with spiritual power.

24 This situation has recently started to change. There are now urban Protestant congregations that raise just as much psychic power as the Fundamentalists do, but are definitely liberal. The same churches often have female clergy and racially mixed congregations. Many make an effort to proselytize among homosexuals, feminists, psychedelic drug-users, political radicals, and other types of people whom the Fundamentalists bar from membership in their churches unless they first agree to totally change their philosophy and life-style.

25 Because of the information I learned through my breakthrough, my present opinion of this revolutionary movement within Christianity is still quite ambiguous. I like the political and social ideologies involved, but these people are still doing some dangerous things on the purely psychic and spiritual level.

26 They mean well, but the spiritual forces they are openly opposing are, for the time being at least, still much stronger than they are. Worse yet, they have entered into this conflict with a completely erroneous idea of what they are fighting. I'll follow up on this in Part Two.

27 Before I made the breakthrough, my personal beliefs about deities were just as ambiguous as my attitude towards organized religion. I usually described myself as a Pagan, because I felt vague psychic perceptions that there are beings on the astral plane that seem to be superior to the spirits of ordinary deceased humans. I assumed that these are what all the organized religions have called "gods" and "devils," and that they've had a significant effect on the course of human history by communicating telepathically with living people.

28 However, I wasn't willing to commit myself to devout belief in any particular Pagan sect, because I also had an intuitive dislike of deism in any form, monotheistic or polytheistic. I acknowledged that god-like beings do exist, but I didn't have much to do with them. They're too capricious and egotistical. Instead, when I communicated telepathically with the astral plane, I concentrated on forming working relationships with spirits who say they are not deities, but ordinary people in a discorporate state between earthly lives. Some of the entities I've had as spirit guides have told me that their previous incarnations were on worlds other than Earth, but they still say they are people, not gods. My relationship with my spirit guides has been extremely important to me since I first started becoming aware of it in childhood, but it's very different from the relationship between deists and their gods. What I have is a friendship between equals that doesn't violate my individual sovereignty. It's based mostly on the mutual exchange of information, and on working to achieve shared political or ethical goals, and I've never believed my spirit guides would or could do any harm to me for disagreeing with them.

29 The relationship between deists and gods is more like slavery than friendship: the gods dictate and the worshippers obey. Even worse, deism is based on the postulate that the nature and motives of the gods are beyond human understanding. I don't like totalitarianism or paternalism on Earth, and I don't like them any better in relationships with spiritual beings.

30 Another major area where I disagree with the basic doctrines of all the major religions concerns life after death. A strong belief in reincarnation is one of the foundations of my whole concept of spiritual reality. This automatically puts me in disagreement with Judeo-Christian doctrine, which is based on the concept that people live only one life on Earth and then spend eternity in Heaven or Hell. (Some individual Christians and Jews believe in reincarnation, and a few minor sects of both religions have worked it into their doctrines, but it still contradicts the mainstream of Judeo-Christian belief.)

31 From this, it might appear that I would agree with the doctrines of the major Eastern religions - Vedanta, Buddhism, etc. - since they include reincarnation; but this is not the case. After studying these religions closely over a period of years, I came to the conclusion that their traditional, mainstream cosmology about the afterlife is operationally identical to the Judeo-Christian view, and that the apparent differences are insignificant.

32 The actual mainstream belief of the Eastern religions derived from ancient Vedanta (including hundreds of modern Hindu and Buddhist sects, Jainism, Sikhism, and a number of others - a billion or more believers in all) is centered on moral judgment of the soul by deities and salvation by divine grace just as much as Judeo-Christianity is. Many Westerners fail to realize this because their knowledge of the Eastern religions is based on books that confuse Eastern occultism with the mainstream of Eastern religious doctrine itself.

33 Eastern occultism is very highly developed and has never been formally disavowed by the leaders of the mainstream religions as has happened in the West. However, it is a mistake to equate the two; they are very different belief systems practiced by entirely different types of people. Eastern occultists, like their counterparts in the West, have always been a small minority alienated from the majority of the population. In the West, occultists were persecuted quite openly and their activities made illegal by governments. This did not happen to nearly the same extent in the East; in fact, the leaders of many Eastern religious sects often preach that monks and nuns who specialize in practices that many Westerners would call occultism are especially devout and worthy of veneration.

34 However, even though Eastern occult masters - Yogis, Tantrists, Taoists Zen Masters, etc. - are often publicly venerated as being holy and spiritually advanced, few of the people who honor them actually imitate their beliefs and practices. Both Eastern and Western occultists are seeking spiritual development, whereas mainstream believers in both parts of the world look forward to divine salvation. Such disciplines as Yoga, Tantra, Zen Meditation, etc., are intended to strengthen and enlighten the soul, much as a person gains strength and learns motor skills through physical training and exercise. Traditional Western occultism teaches exactly the same things under different names: i.e. divination, spiritual healing, ritual magic, alchemy, etc.

35 The key to understanding all these practices is that they are things people do on the purely physical, intellectual, or emotional level, under control of the conscious will. They are intended to have a beneficial effect on the soul allowing the person to use various psychic senses and powers to learn about the nature of spiritual reality. In other words, the basic postulate is that an individual can become an adept or saint by his or her own efforts, as one would learn athletic or professional skills. This is a purely humanistic concept: the application of the "doctrine of human perfectibility" to spiritual and psychic development.

36 The viewpoint of both the Eastern and Western mainstream religious system is exactly the opposite of that: people are innately inferior spiritually, and the only way they can make progress is by pleasing the gods enough to receive their "grace." Exactly what people must do to receive this favor varies from sect to sect in both East and West, but it usually involves attending religious services regularly and performing various ritual acts.

37 The next three chapters will describe some of the ideas I was exposed to just before I made the breakthrough.

Chapter 7: The Invisible War

1 This chapter discusses various books that treat the manipulation of human society by unseen agencies as a complex "invisible war" between opposing forces, starting with the works of Robert Anton Wilson. In my opinion, his most useful ideas are in the Illuminatus! trilogy, written in collaboration with Robert Shea and published in 1975. On the surface, the three books are an avant-garde political allegory that uses the concept of the "Illuminati" and conspiracy theories in general as a medium for communicating the author's ideas about freedom and totalitarianism. The trilogy's political content has made it a classic of the modern Libertarian movement, but the material on conspiracies also deserves to be taken seriously.

2 Wilson was originally trained as a historian, and did years of serious but sporadic research on the Illuminati and related topics just to satisfy his own curiosity, so the trilogy contains enough solid conspiracy information to fill several nonfiction books of average size. However, since the conspiracy speculations are embedded in a work of fiction that depends on heavy-handed irony and morbid humor for much of its appeal, it's impossible for the reader to tell when Wilson is being serious and when he's writing for empty shock value.

3 In Cosmic Trigger (1977), Wilson explains how and why the Illuminatus! trilogy was written, and states that he wasn't completely aware himself when he was speculating seriously, and when he was just recording "wild ideas." The book also explains that he was experimenting with psychedelic drugs and a variety of serious occult practices - sex magic, various forms of meditation and ritual, etc. - while he was writing Illuminatus! Since these practices develop the psychic powers, he may have received more of his ideas and conclusions by telepathy than he has ever admitted or consciously realized.

4 Wilson's basic speculations about the agencies responsible for the manipulation of human history down through the ages are similar to those advanced by Shaver, Keel, and Vallee; but since he's writing fiction, he isn't forced to keep them internally consistent. Many different characters in the three books "discover the truth about the Illuminati," and each person's version of it totally contradicts that of all the others.

5 Some of these explanations of the nature of the Illuminati are familiar to readers of other conspiracy and unexplained-phenomena books; others are wilder than anything ever presented as fact or serious speculation. Wilson postulates that the "Lliogor" (the name is from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos) are the ultimate source of the knowledge and power used to manipulate human society and reprogram individual minds throughout history. As in Lovecraft, they are shadowy beings that usually remain in the background in "another dimension," and most of the earthly conspiracies are the work of humans who have learned some of their knowledge second-hand.

6 One of Wilson's characters describes the process that transforms a person into an "Illuminatus":

7 "It's possible for humans, given the right methods, to translate themselves into sentient lattice works of pure energy that will be more or less permanent. The process is called transcendental illumination. Mass human sacrifice is the most reliable method of achieving transcendental illumination."

8 Wilson was referring to this passage when he said in Cosmic Trigger, "I had already incorporated into IIlluminatus a variation on the Lovecraft mythos... in which the "Cthulhu Cult' or some other secret society was aiding the schemes of hostile Aliens. I had attached this theme to the Illuminati as a kind of dead-pan put-on and laughed like hell at the thought that some naive readers would be dumb enough to believe it." However, he then goes on to explain that working with Jacques Vallee, other unexplained-phenomena researchers, and various occultists had started him to thinking that maybe the whole idea wasn't so ridiculous after all.

9 Cosmic Trigger also contains a quotation from a conversation Wilson had in 1974 with Grady McMurty, an occultist whom Aleister Crowley had designated as one of his chosen successors. McMurty, who had read much of the secret knowledge of the OTO and the Order of the Golden Dawn, had said:

10 "I'll tell you what I think. There's WAR IN HEAVEN. The Higher Intelligences, whoever they are, aren't all playing on the same team. Some of them are trying to encourage our evolution to higher levels, and some of them want to keep us stuck just where we are."

11 One of the characters in Illuminatus also describes a connection between conspiracies and organized religion:

12 "I must tell you now that your God is a manifestation of some Lliogor. That is how religion began, and how their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign continue it. All such experiences come from the Lliogor to enslave us. Revelations, visions, trances, and miracles, all of it is a trap.... Every religious leader in human history has been a member of the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all of their efforts are devoted to hoaxing, deluding, and enslaving the rest of us."

13 Another major theme in Cosmic Trigger is Wilson's involvement with the "Sirius Mystery," which many people now believe represents impressive evidence that space travelers from that star visited Earth in the time of the Pharaohs. Since I will present an alternative explanation for this evidence in Part Two, I won't go into the details presented in Robert K. G. Temple's The Sirius Mystery (1979). What's important for my purposes here is that Robert Anton Wilson and a number of other people started consciously receiving telepathic messages concerning Sirius years before Temple's book was written.

14 In 1973, Wilson received a short but extremely vivid telepathic message that said simply, "Sirius is very important." Almost simultaneously, Timothy Leary, who was in prison at the time, received a long series of telepathic communications that also purported to be from extraterrestrials. Leary called these the "Starseed Transmissions," and had them published almost immediately in Terra II (1973).

15 Terra II seemed to contain a serious attempt by some unknown agency to communicate extremely advanced spiritual and scientific knowledge, but I completely failed to understand most of it. I concluded that the book may very well have contained messages from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization; but if so, they were not clear enough for me, or for most Earth people, to comprehend.

16 I now know that the same general group of extraterrestrial spirits who dictated the material for WiH to me ten years later had previously sent the "Starseed Transmissions" to Leary. And Wilson's message about Sirius had the same origin. And some of John C. Lilly's books also contain material channeled from the sane source: Center of the Cyclone (1972), The Programming and Metaprogramming of the Human Biocomputer, and The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography (1978). The spirits themselves will explain more about this in Part Two.

17 Another conspiracy theory that helped me make the breakthrough is described in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The basic premise of the book is that the medieval Knights Templar possessed knowledge that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene; that he left descendants who married into various European royal families; and that this "holy bloodline" can be traced down to the present day.

18 I was already familiar with this legend because it has been part of the secret doctrine of the Gnostics and other Christian splinter groups for many centuries, and there are numerous references to it in occult literature; but the subject had never interested me until the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail analyzed it seriously as a conspiracy theory. They made me realize that there's more to the story than just another religious myth. The legend itself may or may not be based in fact, but the conspiracies it has generated seem to be real and important.

19 The book traces the history of a secret society called the "Priory of Zion" from medieval times to the present, noting its influence on the Templars, on the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges of the seventeenth century, and on the evolution of Western society in general. The book documents the existence of the Priory fairly well, but it doesn't even try to present evidence to prove the validity of the basic premise that Jesus left descendants. The authors are more concerned with the nature of the Priory and its influence over historical events. And this is why the book was important in helping prepare me for the breakthrough: it helped me gain some deep insight into how the Invisible College has worked to manipulate the course of Western history.

20 The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail were mostly concerned with the members of the Priory of Zion as what William Burroughs would call "conscious agents." They may or may not have believed that their secret knowledge about the descendants of Jesus was true, but they were fully conscious of the political power it gave them over a civilization that accepted the "divine right of kings." However, my own reaction to the story was to analyze it on deeper levels, trying to find a conspiracy behind the Priory that its members weren't consciously aware of.

21 Here are some of my speculations. What if the story about the descendants of Jesus was simply a cover story to keep people from seriously looking for an even more important secret? Maybe the Priory possessed some of the "Q Documents" (the lost texts that many Biblical scholars think several books of the New Testament were copied from). Perhaps these had been kept hidden by a secret society because their account of the origins of Christianity was very different from that now accepted by Christians. For example, what would be the impact on modern Christianity if it were learned that they state explicitly that Jesus never claimed to be the "Only Begotten Son of God," but merely a human prophet?

22 Even if the Templars didn't unearth actual copies of the Q documents in Jerusalem, it's likely they talked to Jewish and Islamic scholars and found out that certain Talmudic texts written in the first centuries of the Christian era deny the divinity of Jesus. This might have given them the idea of forging ancient documents proving the Gnostic claim that Jesus left descendants and denying fundamental tenets of Christianity. Such documents, real or faked, would have given the Priory of Zion a potent weapon for political manipulation.

23 They could have set themselves up as king-makers by claiming to have proof that certain rulers were of divine descent, but they'd also have a more potent weapon than that to use against kings and the Church alike: the potential to debunk Christianity and plunge all of Western society into chaos. Thinking about this reminded me that in the fifteen years before Holy Blood, Holy Grail was published, dozens of novels were written on the general theme of the discovery of the Q documents and their political use by conspiracies. Irving Wallace's The Word is the best known of these. Had the Invisible College motivated all these books by sending out telepathic messages on this subject? If they had, I didn't receive them, which is understandable because I had little interest in the subject until I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

24 I found out when I made the breakthrough that this line of conjecture was on the right track, but it didn't go far enough. The "Great Secret" of the medieval Priory of Zion, which was passed on through the Templars to the eighteenth-century Masons and Rosicrucians, was a cosmological theory similar to the one presented in Part Two. I describe this information in terms drawn from modern physics, psychology, etc., which didn't exist back then. The Priory's version was undoubtedly phrased in very different words and analogies drawn from religious and occult mysticism, but many of the essential facts were probably the same. This is why a number of occult books assert, "The Great Secret reveals the true nature of gods and men and the relationship between the two."

25 Holy Blood, Holy Grail was only one of many books that helped to raise my consciousness to the point where I could make a breakthrough. A number of recent works of speculative fiction were also useful. Among the best are Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives series (starting with Shikasta, 1979), which treats the general subject of extraterrestrial intervention in earthly affairs as thoroughly as it's ever been covered in either fiction or non-fiction. One of the best things about her theories is that she doesn't even try to keep them self-consistent, but dramatizes many different alternatives that can be deduced from the available factual information on the subject.

26 Here is a quotation from another of her novels, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (1971):

27 "At the risk of boring you, I must repeat, I am afraid, repeat, reiterate, reemphasize, it is not a question of your arriving on Planet Earth as you leave here. You will lose nearly all memory of your past existence. You will each of you come to yourselves, perhaps alone, perhaps in the company of each other, but with only a vague feeling of recognition, and probably disassociated, disorientated, ill, discouraged, and unable to believe, when you are told what your task really is. You will wake up, as it were, but there will be a period while you are waking which will be like the recovery from an illness, or like the emergence into good air from a poisoned one. Some of you may choose not to wake, for the waking will be so painful, and the knowledge of your condition and Earth's condition so agonizing, you will be like drug addicts: you may prefer to continue to breathe in oblivion. And when you have understood that you are in the process of awakening, that you have something to get done, you will have absorbed enough of the characteristics of Earthmen to be distrustful, surly, grudging, suspicious. You will be like a drowning person who drowns his rescuer, so violently will you struggle in your panic terror.

27 "And, when you have become aroused to your real condition, and have recovered from the shame or embarrassment of seeing to what depths you have sunk, you will then begin the task of arousing others, and you will find that you are in the position of rescuer of a drowning person, or a doctor in a city that has an epidemic of madness. The drowning person wants to be rescued, but can't prevent himself struggling. The mad person has intermittent fits of sanity, but in between behaves as if his doctor were his enemy.

29 "And so, my friends: that's it. That's my message to you. It's going to be tough. Every bit as tough as you expect."

30 During the period immediately before my breakthrough, I re-read several older works of speculative fiction. Here's a quotation from Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites (1967):

31 "We now had an important clue about the origin of the parasites.... They couldn't exist apart from mankind because they were mankind. And it was this that brought a new level of knowledge. When I had said to them. 'Man is not alone,' I had understood what I meant, but all its implications were not clear to me; I was speaking about the source of power, meaning and purpose. Now I realized that, in a far more obvious and simple sense, we were not alone. We had joined the police of the universe, and there were others. Our minds now made instant contact with these others. It was as if we had sent out a signal, which had instantly been picked up by a hundred receivers, who immediately signaled their presence back to us. The nearest of these receivers was situated only about four thousand million miles away, a cruising ship from a planet in the Proxima Centauri system."

32 And it's not just speculative fiction by mainstream avant-garde writers that helped prepare me for the breakthrough. Literally hundreds of books written during the last ten years in the science fiction and fantasy fields contain a few paragraphs or a few lines of useful material. Here's an illustration from a realistic modern fantasy: Mystery Walk (1983), by Robert R. McCaramon:

33 "Why does it hate us?"

34 "Because it's a greedy beast that uses fear to make itself stronger. It feeds like a hog at a trough on the human emotions of despair, torment, and confusion; sometimes it traps revenants, and won't let them break away from this world. It feeds on their souls, and if there's a Hell, I suppose that must be it. But when we work to free those revenants, to take their suffering into ourselves and do something constructive with it, we steal from the shape changer's dinner table. We sent those poor souls onward to where the shape changer can't get at them anymore."

35 Many occult books written for the general reader during the last fifteen years contain similar material. The dozen or so Oversoul Seven and Seth books produced by Jane Roberts during this whole period are an example, as are the recent works of Ruth Montgomery and Brad Steiger.

36 I'll finish this series of quotations with a couple from works that were published after I started making my personal breakthrough in 1983. The ideas they communicate were published earlier in less explicit form, so I was already vaguely familiar with them in 1983, but I feel this chapter will be more effective if I quote the best version of the material now available.

37 First, from Carlos Castaneda's The Fire Within (1985):

38 "...They SAW that it is the Eagle who bestows awareness. The Eagle creates sentient beings so that they will live and enrich the awareness it gives them with life. They also SAW that it is the Eagle who devours that same enriched awareness after making sentient beings relinquish it at the moment of their death.... Sentient beings live only to enrich the awareness that is the Eagle's food."

39 And I'll end with a paragraph from Extra-Terrestrials Among Us by George C. Andrews:

40 "Human psychic energy may be the equivalent of rocket fuel or cocaine to inhabitants of other dimensions. Seen from this angle, the otherwise senseless wars between the devotees of different jealous gods which have recurred constantly throughout human history take on a rational motivation. It would explain why such extraordinary importance has been accorded to the individual's choice of which deity to worship. By worshipping a specific deity, one channels psychic energy in a specific direction..."

41 I acknowledge that all the people mentioned in this chapter so far, and many others as well, contributed to the background knowledge that helped me to understand the spirit communications quoted in Part Two. I found useful ideas in literally hundreds of different books and articles; the works mentioned here are just a sample to show the wide variety of sources where such information can be found. I can't single out one or a few as being more important to this process than the others. The significant items of information and theory in the works of all these authors are present only as isolated passages embedded in material of much less value.

42 I had constant psychic guidance from my spirit guides while I researched this material, and this helped me to recognize what was valid and relevant from what wasn't. My selection of the material for this chapter is intended to help the reader to extract approximately the same information from this literature as I did. I'll continue this process further in the next chapter.

Chapter 9: The Breakthrough

1 Most of my writing in Part One has described intellectual research: how I read this and studied that, and how the conclusions I drew from what I learned affected my understanding of spiritual reality. If you read between the lines, you can also perceive the influence of the Invisible College guiding my working hypotheses along certain lines and leading me in directions my conscious will would never take because of prejudices and preconceptions.

2 However, the most important single factor that helped me to make the breakthrough in consciousness that led to the writing of War in Heaven has received little direct mention in the pages you've read so far, because it's very difficult to describe in words. This is my development as a psychic and my relationship with my spirit guides.

3 Before I could write this book, I had to undergo years of hard work and personal ordeals to develop my psychic skills. The final phase of my preparation for the breakthrough began in 1982, when I started fighting major psychic battles with the spiritual beings I now call "Theocrats." At the time, I had no idea what I was fighting: my spirit guides just told me to go to certain places and perform specific acts of ritual magic which would prepare me to take another step forward in my personal psychic development.

4 I'd undergone similar ordeals once or twice a year since the early Sixties, but this time the series of psychic battles lasted almost six months and brought me to the brink of insanity many times. When the psychic battles with external spiritual forces stopped for a while in the fall of 1982, I was severely shaken and burned out, and I rested for a few months.

5 In late March of 1983, my spirit guides told me it was time to take the next step in my development as a psychic. I started working sex and ritual magic for hours every day, grateful that the goal was personal development, not battles with evil spirits. Within a couple of months I had forged a much stronger magical working relationship with my spirit guides, which allowed me to receive channeled messages more clearly than ever before. I also resumed my intellectual research into the nature of spiritual reality, and by July started to make a major breakthrough in consciousness. One of the first things the Invisible College told me when I started receiving their messages was that I should write a book based on this material. I started a first draft almost immediately, and worked on it whenever I wasn't in trance getting more information.

6 Two years later, I had completed five different typewritten versions of the book, each about 100,000 words long. Each was essentially a new first draft rather than a close rewrite of the previous one, because of the large amounts of new material I was constantly receiving from the spirits. All these drafts were chaotically organized and very difficult to read. The text itself was a mixture of spirit-dictated passages and material I wrote in a normal state of consciousness to elaborate the spirit-dictation with background information and supportive evidence.

7 My worst problem at this time was the poor literary quality of the material that I had received by automatic writing. Much of it resembled an over-literal translation into English from a foreign language with a very different syntax. I was amazed at how sophisticated and explicit the raw information was, but I had to rewrite each passage extensively to make it comprehensible to others.

8 In the fall of 1985, I started a sixth draft, which wasn't intended to include much new spirit-dictated material. Instead, I tried to extract all the valuable information from the previous drafts and reorganize it into a coherent book. The general plan of organization was the same as the one in this book: Part One described the evolution of my own spiritual knowledge during the years preceding the breakthrough, and provided the reader with background information to make the spirit-dictated material in the rest of the book easier to understand.

9 By June of 1986, I'd completed Part One in roughly the same form as the version you've just read, using a personal computer I'd just acquired. At that time, my spirit guides said they didn't want me to rewrite Part Two by extracting the essential elements of spirit-dictated information from the earlier versions and putting it into my own words. Instead, they wanted to dictate the whole thing again, from beginning to end.

10 This time, the material I received by automatic writing came through in reasonably good English: working directly on a computer keyboard seemed to bring in the telepathic signals much more clearly than working on a typewriter. I recorded the channeled messages as a dialog with my spirit guides, but this format is slightly deceptive: the spirits actually telepathically dictated virtually every word of both the questions and the answers. Trance work of this type is grueling labor, and it took until November 1986 to complete Part Two. I spent the next few months revising and polishing what I'd written up to that point.

11 On January 23rd, 1987, I received an extremely coherent piece of spirit dictation that I used as the Foreword when I published the book under the title of Spiritual Revolution a couple of months later. My spirit guides have since dictated a slightly different version of this, which I insert here:

12 This is a message to the people of Earth, from spirits now residing on your astral plane. We have spent our past lives on worlds with technological civilizations much more advanced than yours. Hundreds of thousands of us have been sent here deliberately by our governments to assist you in fighting a war to liberate yourselves from Theocracy, a form of oppression and exploitation that has existed throughout your history.

13 When we are on Earth's astral plane, we work with a political organization of spirits that some of your occult literature calls the Invisible College. After spending a few years as disembodied spirits, we are forced to incarnate on your planet and lose most of the memories we brought with us.

14 Most of us retain some vestigial memories of our past lives on other worlds through our first few physical lives on Earth, but these memories are gradually lost through repeated reincarnations. Our incarnated agents, and many native Earth people as well, can learn to communicate with us telepathically on a completely conscious level if they receive proper psychic training. And any human being can receive telepathic messages from us subconsciously.

15 We want to state right at the beginning that we are ordinary people, not fundamentally different from you. Some of us have lived on other worlds in bodies much like your own, others in bodies that would appear very alien in external appearance, though based on the same basic genetic code. In all cases, our souls are capable of incarnating in human bodies; we couldn't survive here for long if they weren't.

16 We are not innately superior to Earth people in intelligence, morality, or any other quality. However, our knowledge and behavior may give this illusion because they were learned in cultures that are far superior to yours.

17 Some of us who come to your planet possess advanced knowledge in many different fields: ethics, politics, and economics, as well as natural science and physical technology. We also have scientific knowledge about those aspects of the universe you call "spiritual" and "psychic."

18 These phenomena are no more "supernatural" than the purely physical phenomena your scientists are beginning to understand quite well. The civilizations we come from know as much or more about the composition and behavior of the soul and other spiritual phenomena as you know about the atomic theory that forms the basis for your sciences of physics and chemistry.

19 Advanced societies generate psychic energy mechanically as you generate various forms of electromagnetic energy, and can produce changes in "astral matter" as you can produce physical and chemical changes in ordinary matter. This technology was used to send us here; but we come only as disembodied spirits, and are not able to bring with us any of the physical equipment we normally use to generate and control psychic energy or shape astral matter.

20 When your civilization first started to develop rapidly toward a high level of physical technology, we came to a political decision to intervene, for our sake as well as yours. This happened back in the late Medieval Era, and there has been an Invisible College manipulating the development of human civilization on Earth ever since, operating under our leadership and guidance.

21 Our motives in doing this are both altruistic and selfish. If we had not intervened, the human race on Earth would have evolved in directions that posed a serious threat to our own worlds and space colonies. So we are fighting a "preventive war" in our own behalf, but we also feel the overwhelming majority of Earth people will support our cause once we are able to explain the situation fully.

22 Until the last few decades, we have been fighting the Theocrats mostly by indirect means, using our superior social and political knowledge to raise the level of civilization on Earth in constructive ways. Practically everything that's commonly considered good about modern Western civilization is the product of our clandestine manipulations.

23 How do we operate? Mostly by influencing the subconscious minds of Earth people telepathically. We also work through people with conscious control of their telepathic powers when we want to communicate large amounts of explicit information, but the majority of our work has always been done without the conscious knowledge or consent of the people involved.

24 Now, it will be very easy for you to say this is unethical. On one level, we agree. On another, well, we are the ones who taught you philosophical concepts like "The greatest good for the greatest number," and "The end often justifies the means." We're at war here, and we're fighting on your behalf as well as our own.

25 Concepts such as "human dignity and rights," "individual sovereignty," "social justice," "the consent of the governed," and "equality of opportunity" aren't just philosophical abstractions to us: we come from civilizations that actually practice them. We have no choice, because we possess a physical and psychic technology that would totally eliminate individuality if we didn't also have sufficient social, political, and ethical knowledge to keep the technology under control

26 Our societies are forced to live with this threat, as yours must presently live with the threat of nuclear war; and as your own technological level increases, you will have to learn to live with it, too. However, this is not the greatest danger you face in the next few decades. Theocracy and your exploding population are going to cause a spiritual cataclysm that will destroy the human race as it now exists and threaten our own civilizations if it goes unchecked.

27 We will probably be able to avert catastrophe and guide these upheavals in constructive directions, but the fate of many Earth people will still depend on their own actions. These messages about the War in Heaven are intended to help you prepare yourselves. First we will give you the basic facts about Theocracy, then we will describe the spiritual upheavals to come.

28 At the time I received this message, the Invisible College urged me to rush the book to completion and to get a self-published edition into circulation immediately to get reader feedback. I started circulating Spiritual Revolution in March of 1987, advertising it mostly in publications read by people already familiar with some of the material covered in the book: occultists, Pagans, New Agers, unexplained-phenomena and conspiracy researchers, and members of the musical and literary underground. A few hundred of these people read the book, and about half wrote letters of comment.

29 My original intention was to use the readers' criticism of the pre-publication edition to correct minor errors and omissions in the text, and then put the first edition on the market while I worked on a sequel. Simultaneously, I intended to publish selections from the letters of comment and my replies in a separate book or magazine, in hopes of starting a subgroup of the underground press devoted to discussing Spiritual Revolutionary subjects. However, the reader' reaction to SR made me change my mind. I needed to rewrite the book completely, because most readers with inside knowledge of the subject realized that I wasn't telling all I knew.

30 Here is a summary in my own words of the average reaction of insiders to Spiritual Revolution:

31 "Your thesis is probably true as far as it goes, but I can't personally accept the narrow mechanistic concept of the nature of spiritual reality that underlies it. I believe there is evidence that superhuman spiritual beings, both good ones and evil ones, actually exist, and that your description of the astral plane is not all there is to the spirit world. You deal quite adequately with religious mind control and the effects of religious and occult conspiracies on the course of history, but these are not the only forces that affect human destiny.

32 "What about mind control through the electronic media? What about the concept that human beings have a god-like higher self? What about the Gaea hypothesis, which says the Earth is a living, intelligent entity? What about the conflict between physical technology, which you seem to support wholeheartedly, and ecological concern for the Earth's biosphere, which is already being seriously threatened by our present industrial civilization? What about the fact that Western civilization is a privileged elite, surrounded by a Third World that's just a ticking population bomb, ready to explode?

33 "Your book is valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. It's bad enough that you contradict every traditional occult and religious cosmology, every major book on spiritual subjects, and most of the other channeled messages now being received; but at least your mechanistic, non-mystical cosmology is logical and there seems to be some evidence to support it. However, you've left major questions unanswered, and the book as a whole falls short of your stated goal of providing the key to understanding the nature of spiritual reality."

34 The plain truth is that I had already been fully aware that Spiritual Revolution was incomplete and over-simplified. When I had prepared the manuscript for publication, I had removed the answers to many of the questions and objections cited above, simply because my Spirit Guides had asked me to. They thought at the time that oversimplifying the book's thesis would make it easier for people to understand and accept.

35 The Invisible College also wanted to find out how many people with reasonably high-level psychic skills and spiritual knowledge would use the over-simplification to make the same breakthrough I have made, and if they did, how they would react. And especially, the extraterrestrial spirits wanted to "draw fire" from the enemy. And in fact, Theocratic spirits did mount direct psychic attacks against my spirits guides, but they managed to survive.

36 Part Two describes the basic facts about Theocracy, building on the material discussed in Part One. Part Three will carry the story even further, presenting cosmological information not even hinted at in Spiritual Revolution.

Chapter 11: Theocratic Bands

1 Q. Please tell me more about the Theocrats and how they operate. For example, who were they when they lived on Earth?

2 A. Many notorious tyrants, conquerors, evil religious leaders, black magicians, and criminals have become Theocrats after death, but so have some people whom history calls saints or benign geniuses. Power corrupts, and the prospect of achieving immortality corrupts even more. Many people with highly developed souls whose earthly lives were lived quite ethically chose to become Theocrats after death.

3 This has been especially true of people who were religiously devout, then found out the horrible truth about their gods after death. If they were too powerful for the Theocrats to enslave and devour, some became members of the Invisible College and fought Theocracy; but others became Theocrats themselves. The temptation is very strong, because the Theocrats as a class have ruled both the Earth and its astral plane throughout most of human history. For example, most of the medieval Popes and other religious leaders notorious for being cynical and power-hungry are now Theocrats. So are many famous occult leaders, from Cagliostro down to Aleister Crowley.

4 Q. I've learned a lot from Crowley's writings and from members of occult organizations he founded or influenced, but I've always also felt a deep emotional revulsion for him.

5 A. While he was alive, Crowley was very similar to a double agent in espionage. Sometimes he helped us in our battles against the Theocrats, but at other times he worked for them. Of course, we were always aware that no matter which side he said he was on, his only real loyalties were to himself. This kind of egotism is a typical Theocratic personality-type, and proves that Crowley had been a Theocratic spirit between lives many times before. Right now, he's working with various Theocrats of an occultist persuasion, trying to turn some of the occult groups he founded into cults based on his worship. He talked frequently about doing this during his life, and now he's in a position to put it into practice.

6 Q. This makes the War in Heaven sound more like the Allies against the Nazis than the forces of good against the forces of evil.

7 A. It's all just politics. Both sides are working in their own interests. The important thing is that the self-interest of the Invisible College and of living people is the same. We acknowledge that we are part of the same human race as you. The Theocrats are trying to become literally superhuman.

8 Q. Are you implying, then, that the time-honored goal of so many occultists - that of becoming or merging with a god-like being - is evil? That trying to do this turns people into Theocratic spirits who literally eat souls?

9 A. This question doesn't have a yes-or-no answer, and before we can answer it all, we'll have to give you a lot more background information. The question isn't really a matter of morality so much as one of dealing realistically with natural law. For example, it is a serious violation of natural law for a disembodied astral soul to take on large amounts of energy by draining it from another spirit, because there is no template for determining how the energy is assimilated, as there is when the astral soul is attached to a body. In the latter case, the somatic soul acts as such a template. When the somatic soul transmits energy through the silver cord to nourish the astral soul, the pulses of energy are arranged in patterns that keep the growth of astral tissues in proper balance.
By contrast, when Theocrats absorb energy from other spirits, there is no such template, so the growth-pattern is random and may put the functioning of the astral soul out of balance. Because imbalances in the astral nervous system can cause irrational thinking and behavior, most of the Theocrats are insane. And the bigger and older they are, very often the crazier they are. Many Theocrats do irrational and self-destructive things, and most of them eventually become so insane that other Theocrats destroy them.

10 Q. This means the Theocrats aren't really immortal?

11 A. Most of them aren't. They have the potential to be, but only by properly controlling the energies they assimilate, and few of them have the knowledge to do this. There are some very large, old, and stable Theocrats on the astral plane who do seem to have this knowledge, but they don't cause much trouble. They feed themselves by stealing spirits from other Theocrats and don't work directly with living people, so we don't worry about them much. It's the younger Theocrats that cause the most trouble, both for the Invisible College and for living people.

12 Q. Why do the Theocrats maintain bands of spirit followers, and what are these bands like?

13 A. The Theocrats enslave other spirits to provide psychic energy, as slaves or employees on Earth provide physical labor. Individual Theocratic bands can contain from a couple of dozen spirits to several thousand, with the average in the low hundreds. The paintings and poems that describe a Heaven containing millions of souls are inaccurate. The daily activities of a Fundamentalist Theocratic band organized as Heaven are similar to a church service as such sects hold them on Earth, except that they go on perpetually. The Theocrat in charge poses as the Lord God Jehovah, and subordinate Theocrats pose as Christ, various Angels and Apostles, and so forth. God quotes the same Biblical passages and preaches the same sermons as preachers in the same sect do on Earth, and the congregation joins in singing the same hymns.

14 Dead Fundamentalists in Heaven find out they even still have to confess their sins and receive divine forgiveness, because they are still capable of thinking "rebellious and impure thoughts." Of course, since they are in constant, direct telepathic contact with their God, the process is simple and automatic. Christians in Heaven are kept in a perpetual state of religious ecstasy, which activates their psychic powers under the control of their God. The Theocratic leaders of the band then channel this collective psychic energy to perform whatever functions they consider necessary.

15 Most of the activities have to do with the survival of the band, and especially of the Theocratic dictator posing as God. The band recruits new members from among the recently deceased, steals souls from other bands, fights to keep spirits like us from liberating members of the band, and so on.

16 Q. I still don't have a clear picture of how the Theocratic bands on the astral plane relate to living people.

17 A. Each Theocratic band has to have a working relationship with a group of living people, often a religious congregation. Occult and political groups are also used; and now more and more Theocratic bands are controlling groups of people whose common interest is popular music, sports, or something else centered around the electronic media. Traditionally, the majority of Theocrats hung around places of worship, but now you can find them almost any place that crowds gather.

18 Q. Please clarify this. You talk about spirits being on the astral plane as if it's a place, but you also say, "hang around places of worship." Just where is the astral plane? Is it on Earth, in another dimension, or what?

19 A. The astral plane is a condition, not a place. A spirit, meaning an astral soul, on the astral plane is in the condition of not being bound to physical matter through the silver cord. The Earth plane is the surface of the planet Earth as you perceive it with your physical senses. The astral plane is that same place as we perceive it with our psychic senses. We and the Theocrats and all spirits live on the sane world you do. Spirits are present around you all the time, and if you enter the correct state of consciousness to put your psychic senses under conscious control, you can perceive them directly.

20 Q. This makes more sense than anything else I've ever heard about the astral plane. However, you and practically every other disembodied spirit I've communicated with telepathically or seen quoted in the literature still use the term "astral plane" as if it were a place. You make statements like "When the soul separates from the body and arrives on the astral plane…" Why do you do this?

21 A. It's just a verbal convention, but we continue to use it to keep our communications with living people consistent with those of other spirits. You do the sane thing when you use illogical idioms and other grammatical structures simply to conform to common usage.

22 Q. You're right. To get back to the Theocrats, then, every religious congregation has its own individual god?

23 A. Yes, though there are also hierarchies of Theocrats on the astral plane that work very much like political hierarchies on Earth.

24 Q. Does this mean that each Christian congregation has a Theocrat who claims to be an Angel or a Saint or something in charge of it, with some Theocrat equivalent of the Pope out there somewhere claiming to be the Lord God Jehovah Himself?

25 A. This is roughly correct, but the reality isn't this simple. There are many such Jehovahs, thousands of them. The Theocrats who communicate telepathically to individual Christians when they pray also call themselves God or Christ or the Holy Spirit because that's what the believers expect, but they also claim to be angels or saints or devils when that seems appropriate.

26 Q. How are the Christian Theocrats organized - according to sect, or geographically, or what?

27 A. Both. The structure is very complex and constantly changing as Theocrats fight among themselves. The intellectual content of Christian dogma among the living believers is a factor in this, as is the personality-structure of use religious mind control to program the minds of living believers, and the way they are organized as a political structure on the astral plane. However, the structure of the Theocratic bands on the astral plane is even more important.

28 There are many different kinds of spirits that you could lump under the rough heading of Theocrats. High-level Theocrats are rulers who claim to be gods or important servants of gods, angels and the like, and these all have bands of subordinates or servants working under them. They control these subordinate spirits by direct psychic means, something like hypnotism, or by persuasion or intimidation.

29 Q. This sounds very much like certain kinds of political structure on Earth, both in governments and in churches. I take it the Theocrats within each band have an ascending power structure, with a sort of "dictator playing god" at the top, and other classes of Theocrats under them with different degrees of power and privilege. And the lowest class at the bottom is like cattle, eaten by the rest. Correct?

30 A. It is a very complicated structure, and it varies a great deal from band to band. For instance, there are dead Christians who think they are in Heaven, sitting around the throne of Jehovah "eternally singing his praises," when they're really just his slaves and possibly his dinner as well. Now you understand the real significance of "Holy Communion." As practiced in Heaven, there's nothing more unholy.

31 Q. I have always been revolted by the symbolic cannibalism in the Eucharist ritual, and I've heard a lot of other people say the same thing. There's a terrible irony to the Christians eating the body of their god during life, and then having the process reversed after death. Only it's not funny, because in Heaven, the cannibalism is no longer symbolic. It's real.

32 A. Yes. And it's not just the high-level Theocrats who participate. All members of a Theocratic band are offered the Host, who is a rebellious or degenerating member. Not all souls who enter Heaven can survive even through the obscene practice of feeding on other spirits. Many souls simply aren't developed sufficiently to survive very long even when nurtured within a Theocratic band, though they would survive if they reincarnated.

33 Q. Are there also Theocratic bands organized into a version of the Christian Hell, with the boss Theocrat claiming to be Satan and various subordinates claiming to be demons?

34 A. Yes. Some people who deliberately become Satanists on Earth hold positions of power in "Hell" after they die, and the lower classes are composed of Christians who believed the basic mythology but had too little self-confidence to believe themselves "saved." One major irony about Christian Hells is that individual believers usually don't have much power over whether they go to Heaven or Hell. That is determined more by which particular band of Theocrats gets to them as they're in the process of dying. All except the most devout believers have enough self-doubts about the strength of their faith and the certainty of their salvation that Satanist Theocrats can get control of them as they're dying and lead them off to Hell.

35 However, a Theocratic band organized as Heaven is more stable and easier to control than one organized as Hell, so Heavens are more common. There is no other significant difference between the two anyway: they are both just political institutions run to serve the interests of the Theocrats. The Moslem, Hindu, and Buddhist mythologies also describe a variety of afterlife states resembling the Christian Heaven or Hell; they too are Theocratic institutions designed to imprison the souls of believers after death.
As fanatical belief in organized religion declines in the modern era, the Theocrats have even devised ways to persuade atheists and agnostics to join Theocratic bands after death. The most common is simply to invite them to join what appears to be a community of spirits that includes some of their previously deceased relatives or friends, or some famous person they greatly admire.

36 Q. Does this mean there's a "Rock'n'Roll Heaven" presided over by Theocrats who claim to be the shades of Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, etc.?

37 A. There isn't just one, but many of them, and the number grows every year. There are also "Heavens" whose "gods" claim to be politicians, movie stars, writers, and scientists, or even fictional characters. However, we'd like to delay a detailed discussion of this until later. It's easier to describe the nature of Theocracy using the religious infrastructure that's been traditional through most of human history. Once we've done that, we will describe how the Theocrats have changed their methods because of modern technology and other factors, and what they intend to do in the future.

38 For now, we will continue describing the traditional political structure of the Theocratic bands on the astral plane, especially those organized to resemble the Christian Heaven. Most of the lower-level spirits in these bands have no idea of what's actually going on, but genuinely believe that the afterlife is exactly what their earthly faith taught them it would be.

39 Q. People who have had point-of-death experiences have often reported being met by Jesus, angels, or other religious figures who invited them into Heaven; but meeting spirits who claim to be previously deceased relatives or friends is even more common. Is this part of the recruiting process?

40 A. Yes. Point-of-death experiences represent a major mistake by the Theocrats: trying to recruit people who are close to death but not really dying. The silver cord is stretched out very long but not broken, and the mind is in a state of consciousness very similar to that occurring during the actual death process. The Theocrats perceive this and try to recruit the person into their band, but nothing happens because the silver cord is still intact, and disembodied spirits lack the psychic power to break it. Eventually, the person returns to normal consciousness and remembers a point-of-death experience.

41 We call this a major mistake by the Theocrats because many point-of-death experiences reveal information about the afterlife that the Theocrats would like to conceal. Sometimes, members of the Invisible College show up during the encounter and warn the person that the Theocrats are impostors who enslave and destroy souls. Only a few remember this warning consciously and talk about it afterwards, but many more are affected by it enough to become hostile to the Theocratic aspects of religion.

42 Q. I remember reading passages in accounts of point-of-death experiences that support both of your statements. Especially, many people who have had such experiences tend to avoid church attendance and involvement with any sort of traditional religious dogma from then on. I've always been somewhat mystified by this, because it would seem logical for such an experience to strengthen faith in religion, not weaken it.

43 A. The greatest enemy of Theocracy is the truth. The more that people find out about the true nature of the afterlife and other aspects of spiritual reality, the harder it is for the Theocrats to delude and enslave them. This is why so many Theocratic religious sects forbid deliberate mediumistic contact with the spirit world. But point-of-death experiences are accidents, and there isn't much that the Theocrats can do to prevent them.

44 Q. When people see the spirits of dead relatives waiting to greet then during point-of-death experiences, are these fakes like the Theocrats pretending to be Jesus, or are the other spirits really their relatives?

45 A. Quite often, they really are. Theocratic bands often contain many members of one family. There are several reasons for this. Frequently, whole families belong to the same church congregation and are recruited, after death, into the Theocratic band that controls it. Even if not, ties of family affection are also used to recruit spirits after death. One of the most important activities of every Theocratic band is obtaining new members to replace the souls the band devours.
Maintaining a relationship with an organized group of living people also allows the Theocrats to maintain a social and political system here on Earth working in their interest. Theocratic bands maintain their relationships with the living by using religious mind control, which should be described in a separate chapter. Let us end this chapter by pointing out that every single one of the ideas at the core of traditional deistic doctrine is a lie.

46 "Only God (under various specific names in different sects) is good: people are basically evil and are incapable of improving themselves morally by their own efforts." This is a lie.

47 "Only God is naturally immortal, but people can gain immortality by doing proper service for the Deity." This is a lie.
"Human beings can receive forgiveness for their sins, and divine strength to prop up their various weaknesses, by 'Letting God into their hearts' i.e., by creating a powerful psychic bond between themselves and the deity." This is also a lie.

48 Q. From what I've learned so far, the biggest lie of all is that the "gods" worshiped by organized religions are "archetypes of virtue." We humans are bad enough, but the Theocrats are obviously many times worse than the worst of us. And it's not Satan who's the real "Father of Lies." It's God.

49 A. Exactly. However, the important thing to realize about this whole body of lies is that it makes people weaker and more evil than they already are, and increases their dependency on the Theocrats, as we shall describe next.

Chapter 13: Soul, Mind, and Consciousness

1 Q. Even though you've explained how the Theocrats indoctrinate people who attend religious services by conditioning them with a mixture of sensory and telepathic reinforcement, I still find it hard to understand this in terms of what I know about psychology. For example, how can the whole human race be so brainwashed that they don't even speculate consciously about certain aspects of spiritual reality? The idea that evil spirits might pose as gods and exploit people through organized religion is an obvious one, yet almost no one ever talks or writes about it. The whole subject is literally "unthinkable."

2 Also, if religious mind control puts people into conflict with their own human nature, as happens when they are taught that sexual feelings are morally wrong, why doesn't this negative reinforcement cancel out the positive reinforcement of religious ecstasy? And even more important, most Americans right now aren't Fundamentalists. The majority don't even go to churches regularly at all; and many of those who do, go to liberal churches that don't practice religious mind control as you describe it. Since this is so, why aren't all the facts about Theocracy and religious mind control common knowledge?

3 A. The answer to all these questions is the same: the Theocrats simply know a lot more about psychology than people do. An electronic computer analogy applies here. People on Earth right now are like the users of a computer system: they can in-put and retrieve data, and they can run the existing programs to process the data in set ways. Many of them have enough programming skills to modify some of the programs slightly, but they don't understand the basic design of the software very well. On the other hand, the Theocrats not only understand the software far more completely, but also have much easier access to the special "command mode" used to modify it. This command mode is the telepathic chain-reaction used in religious mind control.

4 Of course trained human psychics also have access to it, and so do spirits in the Invisible College; but it is still extremely difficult to free people from Theocratic control. The mind of the average person on Earth right now is run by software designed by the Theocrats to keep people from consciously finding out they exist. And there's no use just telling people the truth: they simply can't understand or believe it, because the mental programs they use for understanding and believing things were designed by the Theocrats.

5 Q. Almost all religious and occult literature, and the majority of modern speculative writing that comes close to discussing Theocracy, assume that "gods," "demons," etc., have the power to kill humans who discover "forbidden knowledge," or at the very least, to over-ride the conscious will and keep humans from remembering such things or pursuing such lines of enquiry further. What are the facts on this? Especially, are the Theocrats aware of telepathic conversations like this one, and what can they do about it?

6 A. Obviously, the Theocrats don't have the psychic power to kill people or analyze their conscious minds, or you wouldn't have survived to write this. They operate through the subconscious, and they keep people from finding out about them by making it difficult to understand certain kinds of spiritual information or draw rational conclusions from it.

7 An explanation of how they do this is quite complex. Like the answers to your first set of questions, it depends on a more complete knowledge of the nature of the mind and the soul than you now have, and this is going to be difficult to explain. Keep in mind, throughout what follows, that much of the terminology from psychology and computer science is going to be misused. We have to use the words in your vocabulary that are closest to the meanings we need to convey, but they aren't always too close.

8 The first thing we need to clarify is the comparison between the human brain and a computer, and between the mind and the software and data in a computer. The only similarity between the human brain and present electronic computers on Earth is that both store and process data. The methods for doing so are quite different. This is where most of the books about biocomputers and psychocybernetics go wrong. They take the analogy between the brain and the computer, and between the mind and computer software, much too literally.

9 The best example is that the electronic computer deals in absolute or "hard" values, whereas the brain deals in comparative or "soft" values. If you create a new file in a computer and enter data into it, the information stays there exactly as entered, and you can retrieve it in its complete original form just by entering the correct access code. If you want to delete something, you can "kill" it instantly and completely by using the correct commands. Everything you know about the human memory and learning process makes it obvious the human mind doesn't work this way.

10 Memory storage and retrieval in the human mind is a cumulative rather than an absolute process. If a person's senses receive a particular set of data only once, fewer of the individual details are recorded in memory than if it is received repeatedly. Also, information may be automatically forgotten if not periodically retrieved, a phenomenon that behaviorists call extinction. These two processes are almost impossible to analyze using a computer analogy.

11 The electronic computer is an artificial construction, designed to do exactly what the human operator tells it to do. It's also basically binary: a circuit is either open or closed, giving a series of "yes" and "no" answers. Computer software is designed exactly the same way, to match the hardware. The internal data-processing functions of the computer can be very complex, but this complexity is always built up out of these simple binary building blocks. Neither the brain nor the mind works this way.

12 Q. Doesn't the biological principle of "irritability" put a binary base under the behavior of living organisms? For example, some microorganisms show positive or negative phototropism: they approach a source of light, or they move away from it.

13 A. This analogy doesn't hold up very well, because even microorganisms often show much more complex behavior than this. Biological behavior is based not on simple "yes" and "no," but on increasing or decreasing orders of probability that an organism will respond in a given way to a given stimulus. The probability that an organism will show a given response is determined by the quantity and quality of reinforcement it receives for performing that response. The behavior of the computer is based on "either A or B." The behavior of the biological organism is based on "degrees of A or B" with the quantitative values of the probabilities being determined by environmental reinforcement of many different kinds.

14 The computer model of the mind is still useful, though, because it's the only way even to begin to discuss the subject in the English language right now, poorly as the available terminology fits the realities. For example, it is much easier to understand the concept of the "subconscious" if you think of the mind as the total data and programs stored in an electronic computer, with many different kinds of files, each kind having different access codes.

15 In other words, what people call "normal consciousness" is like a computer menu, which gives access to certain files and allows them to perform certain operations. Various "altered" states of consciousness give access to entirely different menus. Since the Theocrats have some degree of direct access to the "control mode" for modifying these programs in both the physical and astral mind, they have redesigned many of them to serve their selfish purposes for exploiting human beings both on Earth and after death.

16 Q. Do they get this direct access during the religious mind-control process, and if so, why aren't people who don't attend religious services immune to it?

17 A. Religious mind control is practiced in many different places besides religious services. The Theocrats often practice it on the crowds attending sporting events, in gambling casinos, at political rallies, during musical concerts of many types, and in a number of other places. Whenever many people enter an intense emotional state at the same time and have their collective attention focused on a common objective, Theocratic spirits can use subconscious telepathic manipulation to put them into a religious trance and reprogram their minds with religious mind control.

18 The Invisible College used the rock concerts, peace demonstrations, "love-ins," and similar events of the Sixties for exactly the same purposes. Before that we used meetings of fraternal organizations, a variety of progressive political meetings, and even the circuses and carnivals that used to visit every American village and town, as the Theocrats used, and still use, touring revival meetings. And the Invisible College will continue to practice religious mind control to reprogram people as long as the Theocrats do.

19 The important thing is to get as many of the facts as possible out into the open and let people decide for themselves. And it's finally beginning to happen. References to the truth about Theocracy are beginning to appear in the writings of hundreds of different authors. But the information is still mostly just isolated fragments, and it's also obvious that most of the people who write them down don't really know what they are, or even that they're very important.

20 Even though most of the individual facts that make up the model of spiritual reality being presented in this book are already available to the public, very few people are capable of assembling them into a coherent theory, as you are doing here. This is because the mental programs they use to draw conclusions from information on spiritual subjects were deliberately designed by the Theocrats to be illogical and irrational.

21 Q. I've wondered about this for a long time, because empirical thinking appears to be the natural way for the mind to operate if you assume that the functioning of the thought-process is determined by positive and negative reinforcement.

22 A. Correct. As a general rule, assuming that the truth is true will bring positive reinforcement; assuming that it is false, or that something other than the truth is true, will bring negative reinforcement. There are exceptions to this rule, but it does operate with reasonable consistency, enough to program people with roughly empirical methods of thinking. This is what most people mean by "common sense": drawing conclusions from the available observed information, and being willing to modify those conclusions if they are contradicted by further information when put into practice.

23 Of course, this can get extremely complicated, especially when one is dealing with other people. Since the individual usually has rather incomplete information on a given subject, everyone makes a lot of mistakes. Also, people all tend to be conservative in making decisions: it's easier to keep on doing something the way you've done it before than it is to change just because the circumstances indicate it might be a good idea.

24 Both of these exceptions are important, but you should realize they are also self-limiting. The more information you receive that contradicts your present conclusion, the more likely you are to change it. Also, your basic conservatism or inertia about changing opinions tends to give way when circumstances put enough pressure on you. When you start receiving significant negative reinforcement for behaving in a given way, it gradually becomes obvious that you should find an alternative.

25 This is the way the mind operates in decision-making most of the time, especially in dealing with the physical world. But this kind of natural empirical reasoning is used much less often than one might expect in dealing with other people, and hardly at all in dealing with psychic and spiritual matters. The Theocrats are responsible for this.

26 The key to Theocratic power is the nature of what the behaviorists call reinforcement. As materialists, they think of it as something concrete; but it also has a subjective component, and the Theocrats are able to make use of this fact to manipulate the kind of reinforcement that people receive in response to their behavior.

27 Q. By "a subjective component in reinforcement," do you mean that a concept like "pain" or "pleasure" is subjective in the sense of being subject to interpretation by the person receiving the sensory impulses?

28 A. No. That part of it is objective: the neural impulses we call pain are not the same as the ones we call pleasure; they have different electrical characteristics and travel over different circuits within the nervous system.

29 Q. Yes, that's verified by what I know of scientific conclusions on the subject. Where, then, is the "subjective component"?

30 A. The best name for it in English is "the emotional reaction to sensory stimulus." As sensory stimuli are received by the mind of a person in a normal state of consciousness, they cause the retrieval of ideas and emotions from memory. This component is subjective because it comes out of memory storage rather than from the outside environment, and in many cases it has more effect on decision-making than the sensory input alone.

31 Let's try a specific example. Suppose a racially prejudiced white man takes a job where many of his co-workers are blacks. Initially, he tends to interpret everything they say and do in ways that reinforce his existing prejudice: if they are confident and assertive, they are acting "above their station in life." If they're friendly, they're being presumptuous and impertinent. If they sense his prejudice and keep their distance from him or act hostile, this is proof that people of different races are not meant to work together. And so on. His experience should be teaching him that, on the average, black people are no different from white people; but his own subjective reactions to sensory intake tend to prevent him from learning.

32 Q. The behaviorist literature describes these kinds of reactions, of course, because they are very common, but the psychologists don't even speculate that a deliberate conspiracy is responsible for those elements of human behavior that are irrational or self-destructive. Instead, they take a Darwinian approach. For example, in the case cited above, they'd say that the prejudiced man learned his prejudice in an environment where he had little personal contact with black people: he received positive reinforcement from the prejudiced whites around him for showing negative emotional reactions when blacks were mentioned, so he became prejudiced. When he enters an environment where he comes in contact with black people, these prejudices continue to function until they are extinguished. This is a process very similar to random mutation and natural selection.

33 A. This process does account for a lot of human behavior. However, mental programming from Theocratic spirits has to be added into this equation. The Theocrats don't want people to learn from experience or adjust to new situations in their environment, so they encourage emotionalism over rationality. When people make decisions rationally, they are harder for the Theocrats to control.

34 Religious mind control is a delicate process, because the religious trance is a rather shallow one. If people in a religious trance perform rituals that are unfamiliar, or hear preaching that seriously contradicts their existing beliefs, they return to a normal state of consciousness. Effective religious mind control can be practiced during rituals only when those rituals remain relatively stable. This is also one of the principal reasons why Theocratic religion is socially and politically conservative or reactionary.

35 Q. I still don't see how the Theocrats can program the minds of the entire human race so thoroughly that the truth about Theocracy has never become common knowledge.

36 A. A few people throughout history have, in fact, learned various elements of the truth about Theocracy and written them down in religious and occult literature. However, these elements were always fragmentary; and more important, neither the people who found them nor the rest of the human race were capable of fully understanding them. Especially, no one was able to design experiments to discover further elements of this knowledge and work towards a unified theory to explain the whole thing.

37 Q. Why should the entire human race find it so hard to make the same breakthrough that I'm making, which enables me to discover and accept this kind of information? I understand, at least partially, how religious mind control works on believers, but why should the minds of everyone else be similarly affected?

38 A. This comes back to the basic behaviorist theory that human personality is conditioned into people by their physical environment - this includes the mental programs that they use to evaluate data and decide what is true and what is false. Even if you leave direct telepathic programming during religious mind control out of the picture, people still receive their programming from both their physical and social environments. Programming from the physical environment usually favors empirical thinking, but that from the social environment favors acceptance of doctrine on faith.

39 A large part of the customs and beliefs and instinctive emotional reactions that make up this social environment were created by Theocratic religion. The further back you go into human history, the greater the percentage of people who were devout believers in Theocratic religion and were subjected to religious mind control to a significant degree throughout their lives.

40 Q. This definitely appears to be true when we look at Western history over the last thousand years, but I can see gaps further back. For example, it doesn't seem as if either the Romans or the Greeks were very devout during important periods of their civilizations.

41 A. On the contrary -- the vast majority of the population in both civilizations were devout believers in Pagan religions that practiced effective religious mind control. However, there were periodic weakenings of religious belief among certain segments of the population, which allowed important occult, philosophical, political, and scientific works to be written, works based on some degree of empirical thinking. Remember, the Greek and Roman philosophers were just a tiny elitist group of intellectuals. The majority viewpoint then was not that of Socrates, but that of the people who condemned him to death.

42 The hold of Theocratic religion on most of Earth's living population did not begin to weaken until the Modern Era, from about the 1300's down to the present. And even today, the greater part of the population is still subject to religious mind control. Modern civilization does program people with personality structures that resist religious mind control, but the Theocrats have been able to counter our efforts along these lines by resorting to electronic mind control.

43 Q. My research into secret societies and the forces manipulating human civilization has given me the impression that the Invisible College also makes use of both religious and electronic mind control.

44 A. This is true. We discuss electronic mind control in more detail in the next chapter.

Chapter 15: The History of Theocracy

1 A. Theocracy on Earth has passed through four different stages of development so far, and is now entering a fifth. We will describe the first four stages here, leaving the fifth for a later chapter.

2 The first stage was tribal shamanism of the type that produced the Alta Mira cave paintings thousands of years ago. First-stage Theocratic religions have never entirely died out, and still exist today among certain tribes of North American Indians, Africans, and Australian Aborigines. Most of them, though, have been evolving into more advanced types or have been replaced with outside religions since these peoples came into ever-increasing contact with foreigners over the past few hundred years.

3 Q. In the course of my training as a magician, I've worked with people who practice a number of these "primitive" systems and found that many of them are as skilled at telepathy, psychic mind control, psychic healing, etc., as highly trained Eastern and Western occultists. I've also read extensively about dozens of other shamanic spiritual systems, and they all seem to be designed to teach advanced operational magic techniques as a routine part of religious practice. What's primitive about that? When it comes to magic, it is Christianity and the other modern mainstream religions that are primitive, not the shamanic systems.

4 A. First-stage Theocratic religions are not primitive from a human perspective, but they are from a Theocratic perspective. As you point out, most of them teach extremely sophisticated and effective psychic-development systems. This is what makes them primitive - in the sense of "crude and inefficient" - from the viewpoint of the Theocrats, who judge a religious system by how well it allows them to control every phase of human thinking and behavior, especially the conscious use of the psychic powers.

5 In any society with a first-stage Theocratic religion, the majority of people who learned significant psychic skills in a previous lifetime have an opportunity to develop them consciously during the present lifetime, because the shamans who serve as clergy are conscious psychics themselves. Religious services in a first-stage Theocratic religion are usually conducted with the entire congregation in a psychic trance. This is in direct contrast to the more advanced forms of Theocratic religion, which discourage conscious, independent psychic activity, and employ the religious trance rather than the psychic trance.

6 A religious elite composed of shamans is much harder for the Theocrats to control than one composed of clerical or secular rulers who submit to religious mind control. A shaman is much more likely to put his or her own psychic development above the telepathic commands of the Theocrats. Also, shamanic mythologies often contain major elements of the truth about Theocracy, and so teach people an instinctive aversion for mind control and enslavement by spirits.

7 Q. I know from my reading on the subject that most such religions teach that some disembodied spirits eat others.

8 A. They do, but the information is usually encoded in such a way that the believers, including the shamans who channel it, do not realize that the "Eaters of Souls" are their own gods. Instead, the Eaters of Souls are said to be the gods of enemy tribes, or spirits that are very different from human beings such as the Windigos of various Amerindian tribes), or the ghosts of human criminals and outcasts. The shamanic religions usually teach that a tribe's gods protect their own people from the Eaters of Souls.

9 Also, the powers of the Eaters of Souls are exaggerated. Most of the legends say they can steal the souls of living people, except those of the most powerful shamans. And this idea hasn't died out at all. It's present in the writings of Lovecraft, in the modern Fundamentalist propaganda about demonic possession, and in the extant first-stage religions themselves. For example, the present-day Navajos still have powerful instinctive fears of witches and shape-changers, and much of their traditional religious practice is intended as a defense against these evil beings.

10 Q. When you come right down to it, I myself feel deep instinctive fears that maybe the Theocrats can in fact forcibly take over the minds of living people or somehow damage their souls.

11 A. Of course you have these fears. You learned them from a psychic and social environment still dominated to some extent by the Theocrats and their propaganda. However, the very fact that you are able to write about this is evidence that the Theocrats are liars. Their control over people is indirect, exercised mostly by programming the subconscious mind. They can't overwhelm the conscious will of any normal person, only the wills of people with seriously damaged physical or astral minds; and they can't directly harm or enslave the soul when it is incarnated.

12 However, at a certain point in the future, the Theocrats will probably become more powerful; but this has nothing to do with the history of Theocracy so far. We'll deal with this subject in Part Three. For the time being, we will just say that it is nothing to be unduly alarmed about, because we're prepared to deal with it.

13 Q. OK, let's leave it alone for now and go back to the description of first-stage Theocratic religion.

14 A. First-stage Theocratic religion is far less efficient than the more advanced stages of Theocratic religion in providing nourishment for the Theocrats, because it doesn't provide much opportunity for them to enslave and devour the souls of believers after death. The souls of shamans often don't allow the Theocrats to control them on the astral plane: either they reincarnate, or they set themselves up as independent Theocrats in competition with the existing ones hanging around that particular tribe.

15 The whole religious system encourages people to practice conscious psychic development techniques and to become shamans themselves if they have the necessary talent. Since the shamans enjoy political power and social prestige, there is strong motivation for psychic development, even though the training methods such primitive societies employ are usually extremely laborious, painful, and dangerous.

16 Q. I can see proof of Theocratic mind control and group minds by observing what happens when Amerindians move from isolated reservations to "red ghettos" in the big cities. They suffer more from culture shock than do rural black people when moving to the city, because they are entering a totally alien environment on the psychic level as well as on the physical level. The blacks are already familiar with Christian group minds, but Amerindians who have been raised as believers in a first-stage religion are not. That is why many "City Indians" are skid-row alcoholics, or spend much of their lives in prisons or mental hospitals. It also explains why a large number of City Indians who do adjust to the urban environment become Christian Fundamentalists: they don't have the experience to resist Theocratic propaganda and religious mind control. This leads me ask: do the Theocrats who pose as the gods of a tribe with a first-stage religion find it easy to enslave tribal members who haven't have highly developed shamanic powers?

17 A. Not often, because such people's fears of the Eaters of Souls keep them from approaching their gods after death. They expect to become fearful wanderers after death, and that's exactly what happens. Sometimes the Theocrats manage to catch them and persuade them to put themselves under direct telepathic hypnosis, but that's the exception rather than the rule. The Theocrats of a primitive shamanic religion are usually quite short-lived. Often, deceased shamans try being Theocrats for a while; then they have to reincarnate to keep from literally starving to death.

18 Q. OK. What, then, the second stage of Theocratic religion, and what cultures have practiced it?

19 A. The second stage of Theocratic religion involves mass human sacrifice and usually cannibalism on a large scale as well. The Aztecs practiced it until about five hundred years ago, and some of the ancient Middle Eastern people did also, starting about five thousand years ago.

20 Q. I'm familiar with the practice of large-scale human sacrifice by the Aztecs, the Assyrians, some of the Babylonian and Punic tribes, and others; but don't human sacrifice and cannibalism go back much earlier as common religious and social practices?

21 A. They do. Such practices were part of many primitive shamanic religions. The difference is in the scale of the sacrifices and cannibalism. The second-stage Theocratic religions became possible only when human societies started to become densely populated and highly organized. Such societies built cities and had reasonably sophisticated farming techniques. They also had large, powerful governments and highly organized armies that fought major wars.

22 Q. For some reason, less is known about these societies and their religions than about either primitive shamanism or more advanced societies that existed simultaneously. I take it that the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews were not societies with second-stage Theocratic religions?

23 A. No, both were in the third stage when they first appeared in written historical records, and archaeological evidence shows that they probably went directly from the first stage to the third, as did the Greeks and the rest of the Western Aryan peoples. The second stage of Theocratic religion was a failed experiment from the Theocratic point of view. And from the human point of view, such societies were so repugnant that few people want to learn much about them. This is why historians have written so little about them.

24 For example, the historians of ancient Rome reported that their leaders said, "Carthage must be utterly destroyed," and that the city was eventually torn down stone by stone, the population slaughtered, and the surrounding agricultural area sown with salt. But they didn't explain in much detail what it was the Carthaginians did that justified this genocide, except that they practiced human sacrifice. Now, the Romans also practiced human sacrifice through most of their history: gladiatorial fights to the death and throwing people to the lions are definitely in that category, but the Roman religion was still third-stage, not second-stage. Human sacrifices were only a small, atavistic detail in Roman paganism, not the main focal point of the whole religious system that they were to the Carthaginians.

25 Q. As I understand a second-stage Theocratic religion, it's usually a literal theocracy, with the despotic rulers of the earthly society claiming to be god-like beings superior to the rest of the population. Is this significant?

26 A. No. Third-stage Theocratic religions may also be ruled by "God-Kings." The ancient Egyptians are the best-known example. And the rulers of many societies with fourth-stage religions have also claimed divine descent: the feudal emperors of both China and Japan are examples. Nor do the rulers of a second-stage Theocratic society always pose as divine beings. They may claim only to be a mortal priesthood acting out the will of disembodied gods; or such a society may have separate clergy and secular rulers. This is not a factor in determining whether or not a society has a second-stage Theocratic religion.

27 Among the determining factors are a large, densely populated, totalitarian society and the practice of human sacrifice on a large scale. The most important factor is deism as we defined it previously: belief in gods that are omnipotent or at least significantly superhuman. This separates the three higher levels of Theocratic religion from primitive shamanism, which considers the gods rather similar to earthly shamans, except that they are disembodied spirits. Often they are simply called "The Spirits of Our Ancestors" or "The Shamans in the Spirit World."

28 Q. OK then, under a second-stage religion, people believe in superhuman gods who must be placated with mass human sacrifices that also often involve cannibalism. Is the cannibalism a significant factor?

29 A. No. It was practiced only by those second-stage Theocratic societies that were short of red meat in their diet: the Aztecs and the ancient Polynesians, for example, who didn't have many domesticated food animals. The reason that second-stage Theocratic religion practiced mass human sacrifice was to supply the Theocrats with a constant food supply. When the victims were killed as part of a large public religious ceremony, the telepathic chain-reaction generated by a congregation in the religious trance was sufficient to put the victims' astral souls into a hypnotic trance before death. When they were suddenly and violently killed, the Theocrats were usually able to get control of the souls before they had a chance to flee. This is one of the few examples in the history of Theocracy where the Theocrats were able to seize souls by force, and they could do it only with the help of large numbers of living people.

30 Q. This makes sense. Does it also mean that human sacrifices performed by some of the more odious cults today don't have the support of the Theocrats?

31 A. Well, the Theocrats, all of them, like to see cultists do terrible things like this because it gives occultists and everyone else outside Theocratic religion a bad name, but they don't usually get control of the soul of the sacrificial victim. There simply aren't enough people at such ceremonies to generate sufficient psychic power.

32 The main reason that second-stage Theocratic religion has been quite rare in history is simply that it's so cruel and violent. Societies like that had to fight endless wars against their neighbors, or else enslave and sacrifice a significant portion of their own population. Either way, they tended to become unstable because of the mass violence, or to be conquered by their enemies. However, the real reason such religions were short-lived is that they couldn't compete with third- or fourth-stage Theocratic religions when they came in contact with them.

33 Q. OK. It's time to go on to discussing the third stage.

34 A. The third stage of Theocratic religion involves mass animal sacrifices. Although they prefer human souls, Theocratic spirits can nourish themselves off the astral souls of lower animals to some extent. And these souls are easier to paralyze and control with religious rituals than human souls are. However, the astral tissues of animal souls aren't very compatible with the astral souls of the Theocrats, so they are not a good food source. The main reason the third stage is considered higher than the second is simply that societies with such a religion can remain stable for long periods of time.

35 Q. If the nutrition from animal souls isn't really adequate, do third-stage Theocrats tend to be short-lived?

36 A. Yes, except that they also receive some nourishment from the psychic energy generated by their worshippers, which is better for them than the animal souls alone. Even more important, most of the major third-stage religions have had some fourth-stage components as well. This was especially true of the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Hindus, and Western Aryan Pagans. Judaism and Vedanta eventually evolved into fully developed fourth-stage religions. The others survived for a long time with a mixture between the two.

37 One of the chief characteristics of all third-stage Theocratic religions is their lack of concern for life after death. Greek and Roman mythology, for example, gives an extremely accurate description of what the afterlife was actually like for believers in those religions. Most people simply wandered aimlessly in Hades - the astral plane - for a few years and then sank into "forgetfulness." The concept of reincarnation was known, but only a few elite groups comparable to modern occultists put much stress on it: the Greek mystery cults, and a number of similar Roman sects, for example.

38 Religious practice in third-stage religions was concerned almost entirely with gaining the favor of the gods during earthly life, not with life after death. The Theocrats running such religions didn't know how to enslave souls on the astral plane, so they ignored them. Instead, they programmed living people to send them the souls of sacrificed animals, and to broadcast psychic energy during orgiastic rituals.

39 Q. What about the Fourth stage of Theocratic religion?

40 A. The fourth stage of Theocratic religion is the one represented by all the major modern religions. Its most important characteristic is that the Theocrats use religious mind control to delude souls into deliberately putting themselves under Theocratic control after death, thinking they are entering "eternal bliss in Heaven" or "union with the Godhead."

41 The nature of fourth-stage Theocratic religions has already been adequately discussed in previous chapters, so we will now leave the history of Theocracy and discuss the other side for a while: the Invisible College.

Chapter 17: Satan and Buddha

1 A. The whole mythology of Satan and the Rebellion of the Angels was the creation of spirits fighting Theocracy long ago, and the original teachings of the Buddha contain similar elements.

2 Q. Why does the Invisible College deliberately use terms like "Satan"? Doesn't your use of this kind of terminology make it easier for Theocratic propaganda to accuse all of your friends on Earth of being "devil-worshippers"?

3 A. Somewhere in this book we're going to have to deal with accusations of this sort, so we might as well do it here. We have good reason to use terms that encourage people to take a closer look at the Biblical myths about Satan, which we'll describe later in this chapter. For now, we'll just refute the charge that the Invisible College advocates worship of Satan, because we totally reject the concept of "worship" as the term is usually defined: "Absolute, unquestioning belief in and obedience to a spiritual being or a body of doctrine."

4 Individual sovereignty is the most fundamental postulate of the philosophy of the Invisible College. Each person must assume full responsibility for making value judgments on ethical and political matters. We never advocate absolute obedience to any authority, even our own. We urge people to resist orders from leaders if they disagree with them, and to use laws, customs, and ideologies only as guides for making their own decisions on specific issues. Assuming personal responsibility for running their own lives makes people wiser and stronger, because they are usually rewarded for their successes and punished for their mistakes. Unquestioning obedience to orders or fixed doctrine only makes them increasingly dependent and powerless.

5 To get back to our discussion of the devil, the concepts that Satan is a "God of Evil" who demands the same kind of worship as Jehovah or other Theocratic conceptions of deity, and that he tempts people to do exactly the reverse of all the individual ethical principles in the Judeo-Christian moral code, are both Theocratic propaganda incorporated into religious doctrine to keep people from understanding our original and constructive purpose in creating the myth about Satan and getting it incorporated in the Bible.

6 Q. This is obvious once you point it out. Satan has a much more favorable image in literature and folk-tradition in all the Judeo-Christian cultures than you'd expect him to have if he was really the archetype of reversed Biblical morality that religious doctrine claims he is.

7 A. Quite true. Look at all the folk tales in which the Devil simply opposes the puritanical, "bluenose" aspects of Christian morality that say that sex and other sensual pleasures are intrinsically evil. We've already pointed out the role these puritanical doctrines play in the religious mind-control process.

8 The Theocrats want religious believers to feel guilty every time they feel sexual desire or enjoy any "pleasures of the flesh." The guilt literally addicts them to attending church services that subject them to religious mind control. When the Devil of folk tradition says that sensual pleasure is not immoral in itself, then he is actually advocating an ethical code superior to the Judeo-Christian one.

9 Q. Satan, in other words, often preaches a perfectly valid, humanistic morality, rather than the inversion of Judeo-Christian morality that religious doctrine attributes to him. I've certainly seen examples of this in literature from many different countries and eras.

10 A. In ancient Hebrew, the word "satan" simply meant "adversary" or "enemy." We communicated the myth about the "temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent" to some of the prophets who wrote the Old Testament just to ensure that people who read Judeo-Christian scripture would realize that Jehovah has enemies. We are also responsible for other elements in that myth: that disobeying Jehovah by eating the "forbidden fruit" enabled human beings to discern good from evil, and that there was another secret, that of the tree of life" that would give people eternal life without involvement with Jehovah or other Theocrats.

11 Q. Now that you point it out, the whole myth of the "Fall of Man" doesn't seem to belong with the rest of the creation myth in Genesis.

12 A. The material in the book of Genesis, even though it pertains to the Creation and the earliest history of the Hebrews and the Jewish religion, was mostly dictated to Jewish prophets after the Exodus. Judaism started to adopt important elements of fourth-stage Theocratic religion during the Egyptian Captivity, not long after Ikhnaton tried to change Egyptian Paganism into a fourth-stage religion and failed. Fourth-stage Theocratic religions all have a creation myth that includes the concept of Original Sin.

13 Q. I had formed the impression that Christianity was a fourth-stage religion from its beginning but that Judaism was still in the third stage at the time it was founded. My understanding is that the practice of animal sacrifice is the primary distinguishing characteristic of a third-stage Theocratic religion. First-century Judaism still practiced animal sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem.

14 A. No, Judaism was almost entirely into the fourth stage itself when Christianity broke away from it. It started becoming a fourth-stage religion at the time of Moses, though the process was gradual rather than sudden. Survival of limited amounts of animal sacrifice was just an atavism. The core of Jewish doctrine from the time of Moses down to the present has been that Jehovah is both an angry, judgmental deity who condemns people for Original Sin, and a loving god who forgives their sins after various acts of faith and ritual atonement. All the Christians did was assign separate names to these two different aspects of the one deity: Jehovah, or God the Father, to the judgmental aspect, and Jesus, or God the Son, to the forgiving aspect.

15 Q. OK. I understand this part well enough. Please continue explaining the creation myth in Genesis and the origin of the concepts of Satan and the War in Heaven.

16 A. First of all, a fourth-stage Theocratic religion has no need for a god of evil to tempt people into sin: the concept of Original Sin itself makes any sort of Devil superfluous. However, if such a concept survives as an atavism from an earlier stage of the religion's development, it does no harm, any more than did the token sacrifices of doves by the Jews at Jerusalem, as described in the New Testament. Judaism had originally been a polytheistic religion. Most of the angels with names ending "iel" had originally been "god of..."; for example, "Barakiel -- God of Lightning." Therefore Judaism already had a concept of "Satan" similar to the "adversary" or "trickster" gods in other third-stage religions. It was quite natural to incorporate Satan into the creation myth to tempt people into Original Sin.

17 Q. Was the Hebrew Pagan deity Satan originally a god in serpentine form like Damballa and some of the other African trickster deities?

18 A. Possibly. We really don't know. What we're telling you here is mostly derived from our knowledge of modern religious and occult works, supplemented to some extent by rumors that have circulated on the astral plane for thousands of years. We have no exact historical details on any of this, just educated guesses. However, the choice of a serpent image for the deity that tempted people into disobeying Jehovah is obvious if you realize that it was enemies of Theocracy who dictated the myth in the form in which we know it.

19 The serpent was intended as a symbol of reincarnation, because snakes shed their skins, leaving behind a casting that resembles a dead snake to a casual glance, while the animal crawls on about its business with a shiny, new, young-looking skin. The Theocrats who called themselves "Jehovah" did not want people to believe in reincarnation, even though the fourth-stage religious concept of "dwelling in the House of the Lord forever" was probably not known to the Jews at the time the creation myth was first dictated.

20 Q. Many scholars today don't think the concept of reincarnation was even known to the Jews at that time. Was it?

21 A. As we said before, we have no exact historical knowledge of the time, just age-old rumor and inference from literature on Earth. However, our best guess is that every human culture throughout history and back into prehistory has had at least rudimentary knowledge of reincarnation. There are references to it in literature from every culture we know about, including those in the ancient Near East contemporary with the people who wrote Genesis, so we assume the concept was known to them. More important, a small number of people in every culture have always possessed enough conscious past-life memories to circulate persistent rumors about reincarnation, even though a Theocratic religion does its best to suppress them.

22 Q. An aside. I've gotten the impression from what you've told me so far that the Invisible College has only been in existence for a few centuries, that it started around the end of the Middle Ages or after. If so, who was opposing Theocracy at the time of Moses, or whenever the myth concerning Adam and Eve and the serpent was written?

23 A. Exact names for the forces opposing Theocracy are actually arbitrary and unimportant. We prefer to reserve the term "Invisible College" to refer to the highly organized opposition to Theocracy that started when large numbers of spirits from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations started coming to Earth voluntarily about six or seven hundred years ago. However, small numbers of such spirits have been accidentally transported to Earth's astral plane throughout history and far back into prehistoric times, and many of them have tried to fight Theocracy as best they could. One spirit with advanced knowledge could have been responsible for the creation myth we're describing here. You already understand how the Theocrats dictate "Holy writ" to religious believers, don't you?

24 Q. Well, I assume from reading about Mohammed and the Koran and similar cases that the process is almost identical to what we're doing here to produce this book: some form of automatic writing or other mediumistic reception of data from spirits on the astral plane. The only difference is that the spirits involved are Theocrats instead of members of the Invisible College.

25 A. You're right. However, it's extremely difficult for the mediums themselves to tell exactly who in the spirit world is dictating to them at a given time. That's why we always review everything you receive from us several times and leave you to be the final judge as to whether what you've received is really from us or is Theocratic deception.

26 Q. I realize that I have to be responsible for that, to ensure that what I receive is internally consistent and agrees with my own rational judgment based on the evidence available in my memory. I suspect that the Invisible College finds it easier to send anti-Theocratic messages to the prophets of Theocratic religions, who don't normally question divine revelations, than its for Theocrats to deceive conscious Spiritual Revolutionaries like me.

27 A. Yes. And this is exactly what happened with the myth about the serpent and the Fall. A spirit hostile to Theocracy managed to dictate the story to one of the Hebrew prophets, and somehow it survived long enough in folk tradition to be written into the Old Testament. And we're glad it did, because it reveals some important spiritual truths to anyone capable of understanding them.

28 One is that Jehovah has an enemy who communicates with people and urges them to rebel. Another is that these messages of rebellion are involved with ethics and morality. Jehovah says, "Right and wrong are only what I tell you they are, and they are absolute values that never vary." Satan, on the other hand, says, "Use your intellect to determine what is right and wrong in a given situation, because such value judgments are highly dependent on the environment you're in at a given time." Since the latter statement is rational and the former irrational, people are put into conflict with Theocratic religious doctrine every time they use their intellect to make rational value judgments.

29 Q. Most organized religions seem rather proud of the fact that people have to accept their doctrine on faith simply because it isn't rational.

30 A. They do, because they have no choice. And this religious myth is one of the reasons why. The Theocrats don't want people to become consciously aware of the basically illogical nature of absolute moral doctrine, but there is nothing they can do about it. The more highly developed a person's rational intellect, the less likely he or she is to accept religious doctrine on "blind faith."

31 The serpent myth is only a minor detail in Judeo-Christian mythology, but it has been very important over the centuries in the fight against Theocracy. And it's also obvious why the Judeo-Christian Theocrats countered it with further mythology about Satan as the Father of Lies who goes around telling people it's good to kill and steal and otherwise do the opposite of the religious moral code.

32 The Theocrats tried to obscure the information about using the intellect to make ethical decisions on a rational basis. They added many extraneous details to the mythology about Satan. For example, they included the idea that telepathy, mediumship, and other human psychic powers are either "works of God" or "works of the Devil." This allows them to forbid religious believers to communicate with spirits hostile to Theocracy without revealing various facts about spiritual reality that the Theocrats wish to conceal.

33 And then there's all the propaganda about demonic possession. As we discussed earlier, the irony of the whole concept of "possession" is that the Theocrats themselves practice something rather similar to it when they program people into becoming willing slaves through religious mind control.

34 The important thing to remember whenever possession is mentioned is simply this: no spirit, Theocrat or otherwise, can actually force living people to do things contrary to their conscious will and their customary ideas of right and wrong. Even religious mind control can only reprogram a person's opinions and beliefs one small step at a time: it's a slow, gradual process, not a sudden, dramatic takeover. It's very important for the reader to realize this.

35 However, we do have to point out that even gradual reprogramming can produce some extremely evil and violent people if it continues over a whole lifetime. There are plenty of people in this country right now who are emotionally and morally capable of "killing a Commie for Christ" or acting on the literal meaning of the Biblical passage, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." However, this has nothing to do with the sudden, violent "possession by evil spirits" that Fundamentalist propaganda spreads around so freely, and that many serious occultists also accept. That, fortunately, is a myth.

36 Q. You haven't covered the Tree of Life yet. What was that supposed to represent?

37 A. As the serpent myth represents the concept that people have the right to determine good and evil for themselves through the free exercise of the conscious intellect, the Tree of Life represents certain essential details of the breakthrough information - the concepts that people can only achieve immortality through reincarnation and that the "eternal life in heaven" offered by deities is a delusion. However, you must remember that the Tree of Life is mentioned only so the Theocrats can gloat that they prevented people fromgaining this knowledge.

38 Q The myth states that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and learned to distinguish right from wrong with the rational intellect, but they were expelled from the Garden of Eden before they could "eat also of the fruit of the Tree of Life, that is also in the Garden, and become like unto us." Many occultists and Biblical scholars have been intrigued by that passage, not just for the tantalizing references to a secret of immortality, but because it s one of the only passages in the whole Bible in which Jehovah uses the first-person plural, "us" instead of "me".

39 A. The secret referred to in this passage is not just immortality, but the complete knowledge that Theocratic spirits have about the nature of the soul, reincarnation, psychic powers, etc. Apparently the spirit who dictated these passages tried to communicate the whole breakthrough and failed.

40 The beginning of Buddhism is a similar case in which enemies of Theocracy tried to help people to make the breakthrough but didn't quite succeed. After the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he made some statements that seemed self-contradictory, at least on the surface. He attributed his spiritual progress to his own efforts, not to a "gift" from omnipotent deities. He also stated in so many words that ordinary people could achieve enlightenment through practicing the proper psychic development techniques. But at the same time, his statements about reincarnation appeared paradoxical. He said that achieving enlightenment meant that he no longer needed to reincarnate, but he also said that he would continue to do so to help other people achieve enlightenment.

41 Q. This seems to be a major contradiction, because if enlightenment had made him a sort of "super-god," superior to the Vedantic gods, then he wouldn't need to incarnate to assist people in spiritual development. He could do it as a disembodied spirit, remaining on the astral plane and using his enormous psychic powers to communicate whatever information people needed.

42 A. Once people make the breakthrough, it becomes obvious that there is no contradiction in any of these statements about the Buddha. What the Buddha called his enlightenment is actually a version of this breakthrough. He became consciously aware of exactly what the Vedantic gods really are and how they operate, even though the words in which his followers wrote down his knowledge are somewhat confusing.

43 They understood the most important part of his message quite clearly: the path to enlightenment is the disciplined practice of various psychic development techniques. Notice too that the Buddha himself didn't limit his followers in which specific techniques they used, because part of his knowledge must have been that different techniques work better for a given individual than others. He was quite vague on this, and Buddhists ever since have practiced a wide variety of techniques drawn from Yoga, Tantra, and other sources within Vedanta.

44 However, the basic teachings of Buddha are anti-deistic whereas those of Vedanta were highly deistic. Many modern Buddhists believe that if they personally achieve enlightenment, their souls will merge with the soul of Buddha into Nirvana, a "state of blissful nothingness." Vedantic doctrine in the time of the Buddha already taught that enlightened souls would merge with Brahma or some other god. This doctrine was grafted onto the Buddha's teachings after his death, when Buddhism was taken over by the Vedantic Theocrats.

45 Q. You're saying that Buddhism was originally founded to fight Theocracy?

46 A. Yes. So were Gnosticism and some forms of early Christianity. But to get back to Buddhism, the Buddha implied by his own example that the enlightened were capable of transcending reincarnation but deliberately chose not to do so in order to be of service to the human race. The Buddha realized he could become a Theocrat and remain on the astral plane indefinitely, but he refused to do so for ethical reasons. This interpretation of the early Buddhist teaching is possible for people who have already made the breakthrough from some other source, but it is not stated clearly enough in the writings themselves to make finding and understanding it very easy.

47 Even though he founded a major religion, the enlightenment the Buddha achieved was still only a partial breakthrough. Much of what he learned from the Invisible College was on a subconscious level; it is reflected indirectly in his various teachings and practices as described by his followers after his death when they wrote the early literature, but much of it never came out in so many words in his actual teachings.

48 Q. In other words, he didn't actually say that the Vedantic gods are evil beings who eat souls, or that enlightened souls need to reincarnate for their own good as well as that of living people.

49 A. This vital information is implied, but never directly stated. For example, the Buddha did teach that animal sacrifices and "austere practices" - by which he meant self-torture, starvation, etc. - are not mandatory for onto achieve enlightenment; but he didn't antagonize the Vedantic majority around him, or their gods, by saying that "The gods are evil." However, after his death, the legends portrayed the Vedantic gods as "worshipping" the enlightened Buddha, implying at the least that they had no power over him.

50 It is also important to remember that the Buddha was preaching to an audience with far different religious beliefs from those of modern Westerners, or of modern Buddhists, for that matter. The Vedanta of his time was a third-stage Pagan religion based on large-scale animal sacrifice and orgiastic rituals, but its doctrine also included many atavistic myths surviving from the first stage. As well as being the priests of third-stage Vedanta, the Brahmins also functioned as first-stage shamans who insured that various spiritual beings were "fed" to keep them from eating human souls after death. Direct references to the gods as "Eaters of Souls" occur in Vedantic hymns used in the Soma ritual.

51 Q. I've also noticed another seeming incongruity about the teachings of Buddha. He stresses that enlightenment is achieved only through psychic development practices, but most of his actual sermons or lectures seemed to be on ethics. Buddhist ethics are very similar to the traditional Vedantic ethics of the culture he lived in. He stressed certain elements more than others - for example, total non-violence against both people and animals - but these were already present in the Vedantic doctrines, which contained many inconsistencies.

52 A. Yes, he preached a version of the Vedantic ethical code and religious customs stripped of some of the worst self-contradictions, like the concept of non-violence co-existing with animal sacrifice and with various forms of violence against oneself in the name of religious practice. However, it is easy to misunderstand what he was actually doing, which was to separate ethics from the process of achieving enlightenment.

53 Q. In other words, he said living ethically was important, but not directly related to the psychic development that causes enlightenment. Again, this interpretation is possible from reading the Buddhist literature, but the point is not made clearly enough for most people to understand it. Certainly most modern Buddhists don't.

54 A. Modern Buddhism, except for a few occult groups associated with it, is a Theocratic religion. Buddhists feel that their ethical conduct as well as their psychic development practices will earn them enlightenment by pleasing various incarnations of the Buddha, all of which are imagined to co-exist as gods similar to the Vedantic gods. This is not what Buddha taught at all.

55 Q. Certain Zen masters, whom I class with the occult minority within Buddhism, have said things like, "There are no gods; there are no Buddhas."

56 A. When they do this, they are fighting against the tendency of the majority of Buddhists to worship the Buddha as a god, instead of seeking enlightenment through their own efforts and practicing ethical conduct for humanistic reasons - to serve their own interests and that of other people - instead of to earn divine favor. Zen masters have even told students who were drifting into deism, "Contemplate the Buddha as a piece of dried shit."

57 Q. Before I made the breakthrough, I put a pantheistic interpretation on passages like this: "The Buddha is everywhere, including in the desiccated turd." Now I see that this is an attempt to answer the Theocratic tendencies in Buddhism by trying to extinguish the believer's tendencies to fall into deism.

58 A. This anti-deistic, anti-Theocratic teaching is even more evident in the doctrines of some of the Eastern occult secret societies involved with the martial arts. These secret societies have often worked under the direction of the Invisible College to fight against the control of both religion and politics in China and Japan by the Theocrats. That's why they sometimes tell initiates, "we are devils," because they are literally fighting against the "gods," in the sense of fighting deism and defending the idea that people can achieve enlightenment through their own efforts. However, you have to be careful when you read about secret societies of this type, because many of them have fought for the Theocrats at one time and against them at other times, depending on the personalities and beliefs of the members.

59 At this point, we'll leave the adversaries of Theocracy within religion and go back to discussing the work of the Invisible College in building modern Western civilization.

Chapter 19: A Revolution in Consciousness

1 Q. The term "revolution in consciousness" is usually associated with the Sixties psychedelics movement. Can you answer some of the questions I've had about drugs that I've never been able to figure out on my own?

2 A. There's much more to the revolution in consciousness that's now going on than just the widespread use of consciousness-altering drugs, but it's a good starting point. Especially, the drug issue illustrates that there's a War in Heaven going on: we try to teach people how to use drugs for their own good, and the Theocrats work to create the "drug problem" in an effort to sabotage our attempts to take human consciousness on this planet another major step forward.

3 The modern struggle between the Theocrats and the Invisible College over the recreational and other uses of psychoactive drugs started long before the Sixties; and the drug then involved was alcohol. The real reason that the Prohibition Amendment passed after World War I is that we suddenly stopped opposing the anti-alcohol movement that Theocratic Fundamentalists had been leading for decades.

4 In other words, we decided, "Let the Christian Temperance Union and the other prohibitionist organizations have their way; maybe total prohibition of alcoholic beverages will fail so miserably that it will convince the majority of Americans that puritanical laws regulating intimate details of the personal lives of individuals are a bad idea." And our plan worked.

5 Government policy and general opinion in this society are now treating alcoholism more as a medical and psychiatric problem than as a moral or criminal problem. This is actually a significant step forward for the whole civilization: learning how to deal with a social problem to minimize the total harm it does to the society.

6 Q. I've always found it inexplicable that Western society can deal with the alcohol problem in a reasonably sensible and sophisticated manner, but not with problems caused by drugs other than alcohol.

7 A. This is happening because the drug controversy is now one of the two or three most important battlegrounds between the Theocrats and the Invisible College. The key to understanding why involves certain side effects of LSD and various psychedelic drugs closely related to it: mescaline, psilocybin, etc., in both their pure and their botanical forms.

8 Q. I was right at the heart of the Psychedelics Movement in the Sixties and Seventies, but I never really figured out what was going on. Obviously, the Invisible College was urging large numbers of people to take these drugs, seemingly indiscriminately; but I never found out why. In fact, I often got angry with you for trying to "turn on the world" to LSD, seemingly with little regard for the consequences.

9 0ccultists have used powerful psychedelic drugs of this family for centuries as aids to psychic development, but always with a great deal of caution and respect. Only occultists at a reasonable level of advancement were supposed to take them; their use was denied to the really immature and unstable. Also, occultists have always taught that psychedelics use was should be combined with other psychic training techniques, to maximize the benefits and minimize the dangers.

10 However, when I tried to teach these methods of psychedelics use in the context of the Sixties counterculture, I found that very few members of the movement had the patience for such a conservative approach. Practically everybody just said, "I'm going to keep on dropping acid until I get rid of my hangups and expand my mind, and then I'll worry about all this stuff about meditation and psychic exercises." And I was aware why so many people felt this way: at this stage of my psychic development, I was beginning to become consciously aware of your telepathic messages advocating indiscriminate use of LSD and similar drugs. Quite frankly, I disapproved of this policy, because I saw so many people hurt themselves with irresponsible drug-use.

11 A. You are aware by now, aren't you, that most of the people who experienced "acid freakouts" during the Sixties didn't suffer significant permanent damage?

12 Q. This seems to be true on the average, yes. Also, I'm now mature enough to realize that a lot of the drug-users in the Sixties Movement who killed themselves, committed serious crimes, or became insane enough to be institutionalized, would probably have done something similar sooner or later anyway, even if they'd never used drugs.

13 A. True. This was a significant factor in our decision to take the risk of starting the Psychedelics Movement. We still have to admit that there were casualties, though, and we're sorry about it. However, we have to point out once again that a war is being fought and it's your freedom, that of the entire human race, that's at stake.

14 Q. I understand all this by now, though I'm not sure how many of my readers will. Well, there's nothing I can do about this except tell as much as I can of the facts and let people make up their own minds about who's right and wrong. What I'd most like to know about the whole drug question is simply what the Sixties Psychedelic Movement was for. What, exactly, were you trying to accomplish, and did it succeed?

15 A. The answer to your second question is, "Yes, fairly well. Better than our expectations." The answer to the first is technical and almost impossible to describe in English, but we'll try. Since you, and probably a significant number of your readers, are familiar with electronic computers, we will use computer terminology for our explanation.

16 First, you have to realize that a normal state of consciousness is comparable to a computer program that's already running in an input or output mode instead of a command mode. In an input mode, you can enter data into the files of the computer to be stored or processed. In an output mode, you can retrieve information that's already been processed, and print it out or make some other use of it. On most modern computers, you can switch between these two modes very easily, and this analogy seems to apply to the mind as well.

17 The input mode of normal consciousness consists of receiving information through the senses and entering it into the memory, where it is processed in various ways and is available for later retrieval. The output mode consists of making use of data that the mind has already processed to feel emotions, think, speak, listen, move the body, and perform a wide variety of other activities. The whole thing is much more complex and sophisticated than anything conceivable for electronic computers, even in theory, but the analogy should be clear.

18 However, you can't modify the program that's running on an electronic computer set to an input or output mode. In order to do that, you'd have to enter some kind of command mode.

19 Q. As an example, before I typed this paragraph, I entered the command mode of this word processing program and changed the margins for this one paragraph. But now I'm back in the input mode to write this.

20 A. When this analogy is applied to states of consciousness in the human mind, you have to realize that the situation is very complex. On one level, you feel that you have a great deal of free will, a large measure of control over what you think and do and even over how you react emotionally. This is simply because you are aware of a large number of different alternative courses of action open to you at any given time.

21 You are much less aware of those alternatives that are not open to you. For example, large areas of your total memory are not available to conscious access at any particular time. Like many electronic computers, the human mind arranges memories in banks, and you normally have access to only a few of these at any one time. You can change banks by an act of conscious will, but this often loses you access to information you could recall easily before, from the other memory bank. In addition, there's the subconscious, which contains memories that are very rarely available for conscious access.

22 Q. It also appears to me that normal consciousness includes at least limited command functions: for example, deliberately "putting yourself in a mood" to do a particular thing that you couldn't do without advance concentration and preparation. This may be analogous to certain capabilities on this word processing program: for example, I don't have to leave the input mode to PRINT IN ALL CAPS or to underline.

23 A. Yes, but you can't change the line-length except by going into a command mode, as you did above. Now the point we're trying to make here is that LSD and related psychedelic drugs create a state of consciousness that is similar to putting a computer into a command mode and making changes in the program that is being run.

24 Q. This brings us back to my original objections to your advocacy of indiscriminate use of powerful psychedelics during the Sixties. Going into a command mode on a computer is useless, and usually detrimental to finishing the job at hand, unless you know exactly what you're doing. For example, the command mode I entered to change the margins could also have been used to delete the whole file I'm working on, and that could have been done by pushing only two keys.

25 A. Fortunately, the very complexity of the human mind makes it much less vulnerable than that. What actually happened when the average person in the Sixties Psychedelics Movement took LSD wasn't the same as the limited work with entering a "command mode" and doing deliberate mental reprogramming that Western occultists have traditionally done when they used psychedelics. It operated on a level unknown to the occultists.

26 In other words, you yourself, and all the people you considered serious occultists, underwent the same involuntary mental changes as the "street hippies" did because of taking LSD. You accomplished your limited psychic training goals, while they did nothing but "sit and groove"; but the drug itself was doing something much more fundamental to every one of you, every time you took it.

27 Q. I'd already guessed most of this, but it's still a little disturbing to see it put into words. Exactly what changes are you talking about, and how do they relate to the analogy about command modes?

28 A. Well, the computer you are using to write this book has several different levels of command modes, doesn't it?

29 Q. Yes. For example, the lowest level is the one I used to change the margins. Beyond that is another level at which I could enter another application entirely, such as creating and sorting data in an address file. Beyond that, I could write a program in Basic or Assembly Language and create a word-processing file similar to this one, but with whatever modifications we desired. And beyond that, I could write or install a Machine Language program that would change the computer's capabilities for writing new programs, including teaching it an entirely different computer language.

30 A. OK. By this analogy, the traditional use of psychedelics by occultists is on the level of writing a Basic program. That's how people learn to use telepathy and other psychic powers: they actually write a new program, but to do so, they use capabilities already present in their mind all along, as your computer has the Basic programming language among its files.

31 Q. This explains why psychedelics are not essential to psychic training. They can speed up the process under the right circumstances, but they don't seem to be able to give a specific psychic talent to just anybody. There are large numbers of otherwise intelligent and creative people who simply can't learn to become telepaths or mediums, for example, with or without taking drugs. On the other hand, a lot of experienced occult teachers who dislike drugs assert that they can accomplish exactly the same degree of psychic training for a given person without using drugs as could be accomplished with them; it would just take longer. I tend to agree with them in general, though I still fall into the "pro" rather than the "anti" camp of occultists when it comes to psychedelic drugs as a psychic training aid.

32 A. The real reason we advocated widespread use of LSD in the Sixties had nothing to do with the short-term effects of the drug, or with conscious use of those effects for psychic training. To get back to the computer-language analogy we've been using, the "mind-expansion through LSD" that we were advocating involved a Machine Language program, not merely a Basic program.

33 Repeated use of LSD over several years makes fundamental changes in people's mental programming, and we used LSD plus direct telepathic conditioning techniques to significantly reprogram the minds of several million Americans. We also used environmental conditioning through the general emotional climate of the Sixties counterculture itself, as expressed in its art, music, slogans, etc.

34 Q. To tell the truth, I found all that stuff about "Peace and Love and Flower Children and Dropping Out and Everything Should Be Free" to be naive and impractical at best, and at worst to be self-destructive.

35 A. You felt this way because you already had high ideals and were concerned mostly with trying to put them into practice. We created the emotional atmosphere you find naive and self-destructive simply to teach a certain amount of idealism to young people who had been raised in average Fifties American homes that almost completely lacked it. Throughout their childhoods, they had been taught to value various shallow forms of material success more than anything else. We were trying to push them in the right direction, and advocating widespread use of the powerful psychedelics was our principal means of doing so.

36 Q. How did the reprogramming that you carried out through the Sixties counterculture and psychedelics movement compare in effectiveness with that accomplished through religious mind control by Theocratic religious groups?

37 A. There is a tremendous difference, roughly that between doing something using a high level of technology and doing it by human muscle power, with the psychedelic drug being analogous to the machinery. We did more reprogramming in a few years on more people than the traditional religious Theocrats do in the same number of decades. Unfortunately, the Fifth-stage Theocrats now have access to mental reprogramming techniques just as effective as those we used in the Sixties; but this is a subject we'll discuss later.

38 Q. Well then, why did you stop? Why didn't you let the Sixties Movement continue indefinitely? I realize that you would have had to make the material you were using to reprogram people much more complex, but wouldn't this have happened naturally as they matured and gained in knowledge and experience?

39 A. No, it doesn't work that way, unfortunately. It was extremely difficult just to program large numbers of LSD users with a set of vague idealistic principles that would make their opinion-forming and decision-making processes more tolerant and flexible. It was totally impossible to start teaching a detailed, sophisticated ideology.

40 The major reason for this is that we were working almost entirely through people's subconscious minds, so that they were absorbing short strings of data at random places in their mental files. As long as these messages were simple, clear, and positive - and it's this that made you call them "naive" - then they did more good than harm. If we'd tried using more complex material, it would have merely confused the recipients, probably to the point of interfering with ordinary mental functions. In fact, most people in the Sixties counterculture suffered temporarily from a significant degree of this kind of confusion and impairment anyway.

41 Q. OK. I'm pretty sure I understand now. You were only trying to reprogram as many Americans as possible with some vague principles that would make them more socially and politically liberal, on a very fundamental level. Even before I made the breakthrough, I was aware that something like this had happened.

42 A. At this point, let us end the discussion of drugs and go on to other aspects of the War in Heaven that mark the beginning of a new age of human civilization on Earth.