Here is an excerpt from Mike Rhyner’s review of War in Heaven in the February 1989 issue of Critique:

“War in Heaven is based on messages channeled from a group of extraterrestrial disembodied spirits who call themselves the Invisible College. They say that your soul is nourished on psychic energy generated during life, and when you ‘die,’ it lives off the energy stored up during embodiment. There are also spiritual beings that the Invisible College calls the Theocrats, the ‘bad guys,’ who do not reincarnate but instead get the energy needed to sustain their souls by sucking the energy from other souls: psychic vampirism and spiritual cannibalism.

“The Theocrats are the creators of certain forms of organized religion, which claim that you will have eternal life in Heaven when you pass over. They create an illusion of this Heaven in your mind by posing as gods, meanwhile giving you the after-death state that you expect, whether it is a Heaven or Hell or an eternal orgy. For instance, if you expect to go to ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven’ and worship at the feet of Elvis Presley or Jimi Hendrix, they will create this illusion for you. However, there are techniques you can use to avoid Theocratic entanglement after death, which are described in War in Heaven.

“Before I read War in Heaven, the more I studied various spiritual systems, the more disillusioned I became. My main paths had been Theosophy and its descendants, and the study of channeled messages of all kinds, particularly those from ‘Ascended Masters’ and ‘Space Brothers’. Each book I read in these fields claimed to teach the work of highly evolved beings, yet each contained glaring contradictions of the others. Then I read War in Heaven and found out why these contradictions occur – the authors don’t have an adequate theoretical frame of reference to correctly interpret the messages they channel, even though much of the raw information is perfectly valid.

“War in Heaven contains a revolutionary yet completely logical cosmology which provides such a frame of reference, and has answered questions that couldn’t be answered by any other spiritual system that I studied. Reading it did cause more questions to crop up in my mind, but most of them are answered by the time I finished the book. The author says that the purpose of War in Heaven is to help readers make a major ‘Breakthrough in Consciousness,’ and after reading it, I know what he means. It may well be the most important book ever published.”

The following is from a letter by Colin Wilson, dated 2/15/89:

“War in Heaven arrived while I was in California last year, and when I got back, I had so many letters to write that I didn’t have a chance to read it properly. I have just done so and find it an absolutely absorbing and fascinating piece of work. If I had received it fifteen years ago, not long after I’d written The Occult, I would have thought that it was all wildly imaginative. But since then, I have learned a great deal more about this whole field of the paranormal, and a lot of what you say seems to me to make a great deal of sense. Anyway, very many thanks indeed for your kindness in sending me this extraordinary piece of work.”

And here is an excerpt from a review by Jay Kinney that was included in the Preface of the first printing of WiH in 1988. It originally appeared in Gnosis #6, and was written about the pre-publication edition of the book, which was circulated in 1987 under the title of Spiritual Revolution, but it describes War in Heaven equally well.

“This self-published book is among the most fascinating, and most troubling, books I’ve read in some time. It is fascinating because it consists of channeled (i.e. automatically written) material that is not only clear and pointed but also flies in the face almost all other channeled teachings. And it’s troubling because to take Spiritual Revolution (SR) seriously entails entering into a topsy-turvy worldview that most of us would normally consider to be highly paranoid.

“Briefly put, the material in SR claims to emanate from a group of disembodied spirits informally called the ‘Invisible College.’ As one might guess from its name, this group says it was the force behind the development of groups such as the Freemasons and Rosicrucians. More surprising, however, is its claim to also have influenced the rise of the civil rights movement, the spread of LSD, the anti-war movement, and even rock’n’roll. So far so good: if this were all, one could peg the ‘Invisible College’ as the hippest bunch of inner plane guides around, whispering bright ideas in the ears of the unsuspecting. However, there’s more.

“The group is apparently engaged in a ongoing struggle against another powerful conglomeration of inner plane spirits it calls ‘the Theocrats’. These types are apparently the ones behind most world religions, and, in fact, hang around churches and other places of worship soaking up the psychic energy that devout believers beam their way in prayer. These fiends are fond of meeting the newly deceased as they reach ‘the other side’ and ushering them into an illusory Heaven where their souls are gobbled up by the top Theocrats. In other words, according to SR, spiritual traditions, which teach love of God, and ultimately, union with the divine, are really scams run by the inner plane Theocrats to rip off psychic energy and souls. SR spells all this out in far more detail than I have space for here.

“Considering that most channeled messages sound like their spirit authors have been cribbing from each others’ notes, SR’s revelations about a “War in Heaven” stand out as decidedly unique … Spiritual Revolution is a startling book that makes one re-examine all of one’s spiritual assumptions … Considering that SR’s thesis undercuts the spiritual moorings of world civilization, there ought to be some heated discussions to come.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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):

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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):

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been involved in the movement investigating UFOs and other unexplained phenomena since I was a teenager back in the Fifties, but from the viewpoint of an occultist, not that of a materialist. For example, I’ve always felt that most of the evidence concerning visits to Earth by ancient astronauts can be accounted for by postulating telepathic contact with beings from advanced extraterrestrial societies, and that many close encounters with UFOs involve psychic contact with spiritual beings.

In the Fifties and Sixties, the occultists in the movement were regarded as credulous and unscientific for putting a psychic and spiritual interpretation on much of the evidence; but as the years have passed, more and more investigators of unexplained phenomena have begun to draw similar conclusions from the available data. However, I myself have always remained part of the “lunatic fringe,” because my favorite theory in the whole field is the Shaver Mystery, which has never gained respectability. Even today, almost everyone in the Ufology and occult communities treats people who believe in it as fools or paranoids. I am neither, but I still take it very seriously, because many of the details in Shaver’s writings match my dreams and visions of what seem to be past lives on other worlds.

During World War Two, Ray Palmer, editor of the science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories, received several short novels from an amateur writer named Richard S. Shaver. The stories were rather poorly written, but the idea content so impressed Palmer that he and various ghostwriters polished them up for publication.

When the Shaver stories started appearing in Amazing, the magazine’s circulation increased dramatically; some versions of the story say it doubled or tripled. Shaver’s writing was a highly complex and imaginative new treatment of a theme that had long been common in science fiction: the concept that we share this planet with the descendants of ancient astronauts who always remain hidden from us, but who use their advanced scientific technology to manipulate us.

Because most of Shaver’s literary output – millions of words over more than twenty years – was chaotically organized and was rewritten by many different hands to make it suitable for publication, very few people today have an over-all understanding of his cosmology. Many occult and unexplained phenomena writers have borrowed from it, usually without identifying it as their source, but no one has yet bothered to publish a coherent synopsis of Shaver’s theories in any detail.

Here is a brief summary. Thousands of years ago, extraterrestrial space travelers visited Earth and established huge underground colonies here. They couldn’t live on the surface because solar radiation shortened their lifespan, which was normally measured in centuries. Eventually, the civilization that had planted the colonies became moribund, and contact with the parent worlds became less and less frequent. Because the underground colonies were cut off from outside supplies, some of the colonists were forced to live permanently on the surface to grow food and obtain the raw materials necessary to sustain life in the underground cities.

Over a long period of time, the “detrimental radiation” of the sun caused the minds of the surface dwellers to degenerate, and eventually they reverted to complete barbarism. However, they did retain enough intelligence to start progressing again, finally achieving human civilization as we read about it in our history books.

During this whole period, the many inhabitants of the underground colonies, which Shaver simply calls “Caves,” survived and retained a significant amount of the original knowledge and technology. However, the population of Cave dwellers gradually decreased because of constant shortages of supplies from the surface. After the surface people forgot completely about the origin and nature of the underground cities, the Cave dwellers started posing as gods and other supernatural beings to coerce surface people into providing them food and other necessities. The Cave people possess machines for generating “Rays” that give them certain kinds of power over surface dwellers.

Some types of Rays can kill or wound people, but others can be used to heal sickness or injury or to slow down the aging process. The Rays can also be used for telepathic communication and to control the thoughts and emotions of others at a distance. They seem to be most effective at close range, but some are powerful enough to have a significant effect on surface people.

The Cave dwellers have used their Ray technology to manipulate surface society throughout history, especially to obtain food and other supplies without the majority of people on Earth being aware of it. A few surface people were in on the plot and acted as agents of the Cave dwellers; these included members of such diverse groups as political rulers, religious leaders, wealthy merchants and traders, smugglers, and pirates.

However, the population in the Caves has decreased steadily over the ages because of continual shortages of raw materials. Shaver described the current situation in the underground cities as grim and desperate, with the political and social structure in almost complete collapse. Starvation and cannibalism are commonplace, and many of the inhabitants have turned themselves into literal monsters through improper use of the Rays. These “Deros” have become insane tyrants, and most have deformed their bodies as well, by trying to use the life prolonging Rays to achieve physical immortality. Because “detrimental radiation from the Sun penetrates even into the Caves,” and because many of the Ray machines themselves have deteriorated through ages of constant use and makeshift repairs, the Deros resemble the living dead of legend. The Rays alone aren’t enough: to survive, they also have to eat human flesh like ghouls, and drink human blood like vampires.

However, some of the Cave dwellers are still normal: they call themselves “Teros,” and often use their Rays to help people on the surface, especially to combat the evil being done by the Deros. However, they aren’t militarily strong enough to conquer and destroy the Deros, and the only reason they survive at all is that they sometimes receive help from extraterrestrials who arrive in spaceships.

Unfortunately, these modern space travelers are also incapable of defeating the Deros. According to Shaver, they’ve been trying for centuries to get some government or other elsewhere in the galaxy to “send in the Marines and clean up Earth,” but so far it hasn’t happened. Earth is just one small planet in a remote backwater of the universe, and no advanced interstellar civilization has bothered to come here and fight a war to liberate us from the Deros.

Some of Shaver’s stories assert that such civilizations still exist, and that “help from the stars” might arrive at any time. Others are pessimistic and say they all fell long ago. The stories saying that some worlds have retained sufficient technology to permit interstellar travel also make it plain that such cultures are degenerate remnants of once-great civilizations, now fallen into decay. In either case, the Teros fight on, barely holding their own. They use their Rays to communicate with people like Shaver, hoping that eventually civilization on the surface will develop technologically to the point where we will be able to help them defeat the Deros, but they make it clear this point is far in the future.

The Deros lack the technical knowledge necessary to keep their Ray machines in good repair, so they are no longer able to keep political control of surface society or prevent technological progress. However, the machines they have inherited from ancient times are still far too advanced for our present scientists to duplicate, and they continue to have a great deal of power to manipulate both surface society as a whole and the minds of individuals.

Here is a sample of Shaver’s actual writing: an excerpt from Mandark, a two-hundred-thousand word novel, serialized in 1947 and ‘48 in his own mimeographed publication, Shaver Mystery Magazine. As far as I know, this was not edited or revised by anyone else.

“To all you young idealists there will come a time when all those things you think of Life with your bright, trusting and believing eyes will become dust and slime. A time when you will understand the terrible and stupid horror that life may be, in reality.

“To each of you will come at last an apparition, wearing like Scrooge, his chains, a mask of terror that hides a deep basic stupidity – a dumbness that is deeper than human. …

“They have life, those things, just as you have life: but they are not understood and are so terribly feared that men will neither speak of them or write of them openly. …

“Always, I too, feared the evil ones, the ignorant, degenerate and cannibalistic ray people who catch and kill us when they can. But they did not catch many of us, for we had some old ray women from the Deep Schools with us, and we were not easy to catch. …

“We need men like you to aid us in our constant struggle with the living devils that inhabit much of these underground warrens. But when we try to approach men for this purpose, they fear the whole thing as madness or ghosts or whatever they have been taught. …

“Almost immediately upon the visi-screen a scene of utter horror became visible. … It was a Hell, with its Devils at work. … ‘Do you see them, those things that should not live’?

“I looked in horror upon the things that moved as men move upon the screen of life. They were a thing that could not possibly live except for the protection of the hidden caverns, and the support of the great beneficial rays keeping their degenerate and evil carcasses in motion.

“Dead they must have been but for the supply of super-energy which the ancient generators poured through their bodies forever. These evil people must live on long after they would normally die, to become as undead as they were. It seems to be this fact that contributes to their evil nature, for the slow decay of their brains is energized by the synthetic electric life-force, and their resultant thought is but the reflection of life upon the stagnating brain tissues. … ”

As Shaver describes it, only a few people on the surface know about the Caves at all, and they are mostly agents of the Deros. Some are conscious, willing agents seeking wealth and power; others are mere slaves, whose minds are completely controlled by the Deros’ Rays. The only surface people who know the whole truth about the “Hidden World” and are willing to fight the Deros instead of collaborating with them are Shaver and a few of his friends.

When presented as fiction, these ideas aroused only mild interest among the readers of Amazing Stories. However, when Palmer printed letters from Shaver and various readers stating that the theories expounded in the Mystery were literally true, the Shaver Mystery started receiving major attention from the science-fiction community, almost all of it unfavorable.

However, the publicity attracted large numbers of new readers: probably the same people who supported the UFO movement, which started a few years later. The increased circulation did not prevent the publishers of Amazing from firing Palmer after he admitted that he himself accepted the Mystery as fact. They felt that the long-term success of their magazine depended on support from people who read science fiction regularly, a group that reacted very negatively to claims that the Shaver Mystery was true.

Shaver continued to get his work into print by publishing his own amateur magazine, and quickly attracted what would now be called a “cult following.” After Palmer was fired from Amazing, he went into business for himself, publishing books and magazines in the unexplained-phenomena and occult fields. His magazines included Flying Saucers, Search, and Mystic, which gave some coverage to the Shaver Mystery, and The Hidden World, which was devoted almost entirely to it. They weren’t spectacularly successful in attracting readers, but one or another of the titles appeared on newsstands almost continuously until about 1975.

I read Palmer’s publications during this period, but rarely discussed them with my friends in the unexplained-phenomena or occult communities. I had assumed from my first contact with the Mystery that Shaver was a medium that received messages from the spirit world, but also a materialist who rationalized his psychic experiences as a physical phenomenon. I interpreted his Teros and Deros as good and evil spirits and his Rays as the psychic powers of both living people and disembodied spirits used to work magic. Such an interpretation was unacceptable to most UFO investigators, and even to the majority of Shaver’s own followers, because they were strict materialists.

However, occultists didn’t like the Shaver Mystery either; they called it negative and paranoid. People in both groups dismissed Shaver and his supporters as “nuts and crackpots who give all the rest of us a bad reputation.”

However, I noticed from the late Sixties on that more and more of Palmer and Shaver’s ideas were appearing in books on occultism, conspiracies, and unexplained phenomena. All too often the authors didn’t even credit these men as the source.

Recently, years after his death, Palmer has finally begun to get some of the recognition he deserves as a creative, courageous pioneer in all three fields; but Shaver’s name is rarely mentioned, except by a few members of his original following in their own small-circulation publications.

I reread much of the Shaver Mystery material during the early Eighties when I was consciously trying to make my breakthrough, and I found that his basic cosmology seemed to fit the total available evidence about the nature of spiritual reality better than any of the traditional cosmologies in religious and occult literature. It’s quite grim and paranoid, but then so is a lot of the raw spiritual evidence that psychics have channeled over the course of history.

Books on Spiritualism and other forms of traditional Western occultism usually portray the astral plane as a rather benign and orderly place, presided over by benevolent deities or advanced human spirits, just as the major religions do. The wicked may be punished there, but the just are rewarded; and above all, the life after death takes place in a stable environment with law and order.

However, many of the spirits I’ve communicated with over years of mediumistic practice describe the astral plane as an environment almost as harsh as Shaver’s Caves. As I said in the last chapter, spirits often appear to be insane, feeble-minded, or child-like; and even those who seem normally intelligent and mature sometimes become mysteriously incoherent during the course of a telepathic conversation, as if something were attacking them or jamming the communication process.

If, as all the religious and occult mythologies claim, the astral plane is really governed by benign gods or other highly-evolved spiritual beings, they do not seem to be doing a very efficient job of helping the dead find stability or happiness there. In fact, the messages that supposedly come from the spiritual entities in charge on the astral plane are among the most confusing and frightening communications that mediums receive. Many times, I’ve made contact with entities that say, “I am God,” and then go on into ravings as immoral as Hitler’s and as incoherent as something you’d expect to hear coming out of a padded cell.

Of course, both the occultists and the religious believers claim that such messages are from demons and other evil or insane spirits, but that doesn’t answer the most important question. If the astral plane is under the control of benign forces, why does so much of the observed evidence portray existence there as extremely harsh and unpleasant?

Most of the occultists I discussed this with over the years before I made the breakthrough were not interested in doing serious research into this. Many put the blame on me: “You’re too political and too concerned with the Earth plane, and this puts you in contact only with the lowest levels of the astral plane. If you’ll stop trying to play scientist, and simply submit your will to the spiritual forces that run the Universe, your mediumistic experiences will become calm and serene and you’ll start contacting the really advanced spirits and deities.”

My reply usually went something like this: “Maybe I really am at a lower stage of spiritual development than you are, but if so, then I’ve got a lot of company. My personal communications with spirits tell me that the vast majority of the human race is not composed of high-level occultists capable of avoiding the evil spirits on the lower astral and going on to a higher plane of existence. Instead, when they die, it’s very likely they’ll join the lost souls calling for help. My sympathies are with them, and I’d like to learn how to help them.”

My actual opinion was that both traditional and New Age occultists, and all the believers in organized religion as well, were deluding themselves with false optimism because they were afraid to recognize and fight evil. However, I rarely said this openly because doing so would only be destructive criticism. I had no alternative to offer; just the vague feeling that there is something terrible going on in the spirit world.

When I finally made the breakthrough, I found out that it is a literal “War in Heaven,” a struggle to the death between two political factions of disembodied spirits; and that spirits from one of these factions had telepathically inspired my life-long fascination with the Shaver Mystery. My new knowledge also confirmed my rejection of Shaver’s physical, science-fiction-oriented interpretation of the Mystery. The Caves, the space people, and even the Ray machines do exist, but on the spiritual plane, not the physical plane. Shaver was simply an unconscious medium that received important messages about the nature of spiritual reality from the same group of spirits who are helping me with this book.

And since the Sixties, these spirits have had an ever-increasing subconscious influence on many Ufologists and conspiracy theorists, leading them into hypotheses similar to the Shaver Mystery. For example, during the Seventies, Jacques Vallee and several other respected UFO researchers virtually stopped searching for evidence that flying saucers were physical objects, and concentrated on studying the effects of the UFO phenomenon on individuals and on society as a whole. However, treating UFOs as a psychological and sociological phenomenon didn’t really explain anything, because the investigators kept finding evidence that UFOs had objective existence. Most cases could be explained as hoaxes, hallucinations, mass-suggestion, or media hype, but not all of them.

Investigators like Vallee kept talking to people who had experienced “close encounters” with UFOs and undergone profound psychological changes as a result. When I and other occultists read these accounts, we saw their similarity to descriptions in our own literature of encounters with spiritual beings, psychic attacks, illumination experiences, etc. Eventually, Vallee and other well-known UFO writers grudgingly began to admit that the UFOs were “real but nonphysical.” This concept will be discussed further in a later chapter.

They also found that their investigations of the effects of UFO encounters on people forced them to consider seriously the idea that unseen forces manipulate the course of human history. In the Fifties, the mainstream of the UFO investigation movement had ostracized Palmer and Shaver for talking about mind control and secret conspiracies.

Twenty years later, many of these same investigators found that they were being drawn down the same path, the one marked “This way lies paranoia.”

The next chapter will give some general background information on conspiracy theories. I will return to the role of the UFO investigators later.

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.

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.

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 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?”

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.

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.

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.)

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As the Fifties ended, the media were saying that the Beat Movement was dying, but I found out when I moved to New York at the end of 1959 that these rumors were completely misleading. The general public was losing interest in reading about the Beats, but the bohemian counterculture itself was still alive and growing. By 1962, the counterculture in New York had outgrown Greenwich Village and so many young bohemian-types were living in the Lower East Side that it was being called the East Village. The same thing happened in San Francisco: as the population of the counterculture outgrew the space available in the old bohemian area of North Beach, it spread to a residential neighborhood called the Haight-Ashbury.

This happened without attracting much media publicity, and well before the beginning of the events commonly described as the causes of the Sixties movement. For example, it predated widespread campus radicalism by several years. I’m certain of this because I was among the “outside agitators” who tried to interest college students in the anti-draft, anti-war, free speech, and civil rights issues before many of them were willing to listen to these messages.

I also know that people like Timothy Leary didn’t start the psychedelic drug movement, because college students were already starting to “Turn on, Tune in, and Drop out” years before Leary coined the phrase. They were turning on to the “weed and wine” popularized in the Beat literature, because LSD had not yet become widely available; they were tuning in to the Zen-influenced philosophy of Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others; and they were dropping out and trying to join a movement they really didn’t fit into very well.

The original Beatniks had been typical American bohemians, little different from those who had lived in Greenwich Village and similar bohemian colonies for over a hundred years. Most of them were well above average in both intelligence and education, and had a serious interest in at least one creative activity: art, literature, music, drama, social or political reform, etc. As an occultist and political radical, I felt comfortable in the Beat movement; but many of the recent dropouts didn’t.

The majority of people entering the counterculture from the early Sixties on didn’t have the customary personality profile for bohemians. They didn’t have a consuming passion for specific intellectual, artistic, or political endeavors, but had interests that were more personal and low-key. This is not to say they were less intelligent or creative than the traditional bohemians; they just had different goals. By the mid-Sixties, they had started their own segment of the underground press and were putting these goals into words, talking about “alternative life-styles” and “doing your own thing.”

My experiences with overhearing psychic messages regarding the Kennedy assassination made me start looking for evidence that someone was telepathically influencing large numbers of ordinary young people to take drugs, drop out, and join the counterculture. And yes, when I started asking people, they said they had first started using marijuana or LSD because they’d had dreams, visions, or simply “hunches” that they ought to, and that these “feelings” predated any intellectual knowledge about psychedelics.

Many of the people I talked to had first learned about LSD and the other powerful psychedelics through reading accounts of the scientific experiments with them in popular magazines. These accounts described only the psychedelics experiments conducted by professional researchers working within the medical establishment; there was not one word in them to encourage widespread use of the drugs by the public. However, when these young people read the accounts, they felt very strong desires to use psychedelics. In many cases, the principal reason they’d joined the counterculture was to meet people who could get them peyote, mescaline, or LSD.

I also started doing formal rituals to listen for telepathic messages urging people to use psychedelics, and found them quite common. However, I was never able to tell exactly who was sending them. Sometimes it seemed to be spirits, sometimes groups of living people; but my psychic powers were not yet developed enough for me to isolate the source.

Even more significant, I found that someone was sending out powerful telepathic messages supporting not just personal experimentation with psychedelics, but all the other major ideological elements of the counterculture movement of the mid and late Sixties as well. There were messages about peace, sexual freedom, equality for women and minorities, occultism and experimentation with non-Christian religious systems, general hostility toward the Establishment, etc.

The emotional tone of many of these telepathic messages was extremely militant, often bordering on what most people would call paranoia and delusions of grandeur, as if someone were trying to turn people into fanatics. My impression of this was that someone was literally trying to start a social revolution on a very deep level, one that would completely transform Western civilization if it succeeded. Some of these telepathic messages even suggested that we call ourselves “Spiritual Revolutionaries.”

Even though I often received the messages themselves quite clearly, I still didn’t know who was sending them. The commonest rumor within the counterculture said the collective unconscious of the human race was responsible. Other rumors attributed the messages to the Bavarian Illuminati, space people, or a wide variety of deities. When I tried sending telepathic questions asking the identity of whoever was sending the messages, I found out the source of all these apparently conflicting rumors was that mysterious “Invisible College” I’d been speculating about for a long time.

Sometimes I’d ask, “Are you the Illuminati?” and be told, “Yes, we are the Invisible College.” But when I’d ask “Are you living people?” I’d get the reply, “No, we are dead people.” Then I’d ask them, “Are you the Ascended Masters the occultists talk about?,” and the spirits would answer, “No, we are the enemies of the Masters.” I’d ask “Are you from outer space?” and be told, “Yes. But so are you. So are many people on this planet.”

If I asked “Are you gods?” I’d get one of two replies: either “No, we are people, just like you,” or “No, we are the enemies of the gods.” I sent these questions many different times and always received versions of the same answers. The replies were always short and cryptic, and they really left me no wiser than before. Now that I’ve made the breakthrough, they make perfect sense; but they meant little to me in the Sixties and early Seventies.

Sometime in 1966, I started calling myself a Spiritual Revolutionary and dropped out of regular political activism, concentrating instead on assuming a minor leadership role in the psychedelic-drug movement and the new occult movement that was growing out of it. I felt my psychic powers were far from fully developed, but as long as I knew more than the people I was teaching, I could be of help. The next eight years are full of chaotic memories of guiding LSD trips, leading various rituals, teaching sex magic and mediumship, and writing all sorts of things for the underground press. I still wasn’t sure what was going on, but it was obvious what needed doing from one day to the next.

One of the things that mystified me the most about the Sixties Movement was the way it seemed to make rapid progress without leadership in the usual sense. Oh, there were plenty of people who said they were leading the movement. The press made media heroes of them as if they were movie stars or sports champions, and the government frequently threw them in jail even if it had to bend the law and the Constitution to do so. However, very few of these people were actually providing leadership as it is usually defined. They issued very few direct orders, and when they did, not many members of the counterculture obeyed them.

The psychedelic drug movement is an excellent example of this. Timothy Leary was acknowledged as the leader of this movement by both the general public and the acidheads themselves, but he was just a figurehead. Leary lectured and held quasi-religious rituals as the “High Priest of LSD,” but the people in the psychedelics movement treated him more like a statue of a god in a temple than like an actual priest. A priest preaches, and members of his religious congregation are expected to put his teachings into practice; but this simply didn’t happen in the Sixties psychedelic movement.

Very few of the hundreds of thousands of people experimenting with LSD and other psychedelics were taking advice or instruction from anyone. Books on psychedelics by Leary and many other people sold very well, but my own experiences as a low-level leader of the drug movement showed me that not many acidheads took the books seriously or tried to learn from them. Nor did they practice the much simpler instructions of the “How To Be Your Own Trip Guide” type that people like me wrote for the underground press. They were simply buying acid on the black market and stuffing it down their throats, with very little regard for the consequences. Once they’d survived a few acid trips, they figured their personal experience qualified them as trip guides, and they started giving LSD to all their friends.

People just worked out their own methods of controlling their own LSD trips by personal experimentation. Often, they said they were using Leary’s instructions as a guideline, but I could see little resemblance most of the time. The general attitude was: “Who wants to fast and meditate to prepare for a trip? And why bother to recite a bunch of mumbo-jumbo when I can just groove on the Stones?”

At first, I was quite hostile to this attitude. I’d learned the use of psychedelics by studying Western occultism and Amerindian shamanism, which teach that the drugs should be taken under very structured conditions involving elaborate ritual. However, when I was persuaded to try the less controlled approach that everyone around me was using, I found it both safe and effective. By this time, I had enough conscious control over my psychic powers to perceive directly that an outside agency was telepathically communicating with people who took LSD and was reprogramming their minds.

My explanation for the phenomenon at the time was that the collective telepathic emanations from hundreds or thousands of people taking LSD simultaneously sent messages to everyone else and guided their trips. I also found that I could receive these psychic messages even when I wasn’t on drugs, just by assuming the right kind of trance state. The content of the telepathic messages was the usual ideology of the Sixties movement as reported in the underground press: “Peace now,” “Love everybody, even the pigs,” “Expand your consciousness,” etc. There were also hundreds of phrases from popular song lyrics by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Donovan, Tim Buckley, Simon and Garfunkel, and many more. Often, I’d receive a phrase telepathically months before I heard it in a song, and speculate that the songwriter had gotten it by the same means and from the same source.

Many people in the counterculture believed that some of these people, especially Bob Dylan, were fully conscious of what was going on and had a complete understanding of what all these cryptic phrases meant, but my own telepathic experiences made me doubt this. I was reasonably certain they received the same tantalizing fragments of telepathic information I received, and had no more understanding of them than I did. Numerous passages in the song lyrics themselves could be interpreted as saying this.

If what I was overhearing was really just a consensus of the thoughts of the people on LSD at that time, the messages were exactly what I expected they would be, in a general sense; but there was also something rather odd about them. I naturally expected the random thoughts of “a bunch of stoned hippies” to be extremely diverse and incoherent and to contain a wide variety of different emotions and images. Instead, what I received seemed quite simple, clear, and well controlled.

I had no idea who was sending those telepathic messages, but whoever they were, they were extremely anarchistic. They urged people not to follow leaders at all, but to learn everything by personal experimentation and become masters of their own fate. Even though I’ve always lived my own life by this philosophy, I felt uneasy receiving these messages, because there were so many immature and irresponsible people in the Sixties movement. I was afraid that the policy of “Do your own thing” and “Don’t follow leaders, become a leader yourself” would keep the movement from developing enough political organization to make significant reforms in society.

However, the unseen forces who were influencing minds by telepathy seemed to oppose completely the idea of injecting formal political structure into the movement.

People kept saying “We’ve got to get it together,” but this proved completely impossible. The telepathic manipulators countered by sending “We don’t need to get it together. It already is together.” No one could figure out exactly what this was supposed to mean, but it sounded reassuring. Besides, by the time this message was sent, the movement was dying out anyway, and few people were expecting immediate revolution, political or spiritual, any more.

After the Vietnam War ended and the counterculture stopped receiving major publicity, I stayed in the new wing of the occult community for a few years, then gradually drifted out of it and concentrated all my efforts on my personal psychic development. I felt I was no longer needed, because by this time the Neo Pagan, Human Potentials, and New Age movements were well under way, training their own leaders and designing their own operating techniques. And I was looking further into the future, believing that both the “alternative lifestyles” of the Sixties and the “spiritual alternatives” of the Seventies were just precursors of the real beginning of a “New Age,” which was still to come. By the early Eighties, just before I made my personal breakthrough, I was able to look back on the Sixties Movement and realize just how successful it had been in preparing American society for the overt Spiritual Revolution of the Eighties and Nineties.

During the late Sixties and early Seventies, many people outside the movement kept saying, “This is just some sort of weird fad, and eventually it will pass and things will return to normal – unless, of course, those damn Hippies stir up so much trouble that the political center collapses and the country goes Communist or Fascist.” At the same time, most of us within the movement itself who hadn’t become complete fanatics expecting an instant Utopia kept saying, “This can’t be happening. Most Americans are still quite conservative, anti-intellectual, graspingly materialistic, and somewhat bigoted. The Establishment is growing stronger, not weaker, and the totalitarian policies of the Communist countries are undermining the foundation of the peace and anti-imperialist movements. The drug movement is getting so corrupted with real drug abuse – heavy use of the opiates, the amphetamines, cocaine, barbiturates, etc. – that the legalization and controlled use of the psychedelics is beginning to appear impossible.”

Because of this, I believed all through the Sixties that the Establishment would eventually suppress the counterculture by force. All the “superstar” leaders would go into jail or exile, most of the rank-and-file members of the movement would be scared away from it, and the rest of us – those deeply committed but not conspicuous enough to be identified and persecuted – would carry on our activities underground until the heat died down and we could surface again.

That’s what my knowledge of history told me was most likely, but it didn’t happen. The Sixties movement neither challenged the Establishment nor was challenged by it, but simply kept getting larger and more diffuse until it faded away into the background. By the late Seventies, I realized that this had been the plan of the unseen forces behind the movement all along, and that it had proven extremely successful.

What happened was that the essential philosophy of the Sixties counter-culture spread very widely within the general population while the organized parts of the movement died out. Many of the beliefs and opinions of the “Silent Majority” changed without the people involved being consciously aware of it. Most Americans continued to say they disliked hippies and the hippy philosophy, while at the same time their personal opinions on many important issues were moving closer and closer to those the counterculture had actually lived by.

The most important of these changed attitudes was simply an increased tolerance for people with opinions or behavior different from their own. This has happened so gradually and smoothly all over the country during the Seventies and into the Eighties that it has never received much attention, but there’s no doubt the change is real and significant.

The course that American society has actually taken from the end of the Sixties movement to the late Eighties has been quite different from what either insiders or outsiders had been predicting. The overt phase of the movement withered away without making too many political changes. Psychedelics remained illegal. The nuclear arms race and American imperialism still existed even though we did finally pull out of Vietnam. Every President from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan has been either conservative or moderate, and the very term “liberal” remained in bad repute. Above all, the extreme optimism about the future that was one of the hallmarks of the Sixties movement gave way to alternate waves of militant pessimism (such as predictions of imminent ecological catastrophe or economic collapse) and self-indulgent indifference (the philosophy of the “yuppies” and many New Age groups).

However, these surface appearances are misleading. Western society in the 1980s is significantly different from the way it was in 1960, and many of the changes have been those advocated by the Sixties movement. There is still racial bigotry and ghetto poverty, for example, but the present generation of black Americans lives in a much less racist social environment than did previous generations. Millions of blacks have now achieved effective equality with whites: in education, in housing, in small-business ownership, in professional and executive-level employment, and to an increasing extent in labor unions and well-paid blue-collar jobs. Although the civil rights movement is correct when it says there is still a need for even more reforms before our society achieves complete racial equality, there is absolutely no doubt that enormous strides have already been made. When I first started supporting the concept of equal rights for minorities, I never thought I’d live to see this much real progress.

Also, even the most speculative radical writings of the early Sixties didn’t come close to predicting the achievements of the present feminist movement. During the last twenty years, women have achieved even more progress towards social and economic equality than blacks. Again, there’s still a long way to go and an ongoing movement fighting for further progress, but there’s no doubt a young girl today will live in a better world than her mother did when it comes to opportunities for women. And the progress is not just in having women in high political office or positions of business leadership; changes for the better in male-female relations within the family itself can be observed all around us.

There has also been a significant increase in sophistication in this country since the Sixties. Europeans used to consider Americans relatively uncultured compared to themselves. Before the last decade or two, the majority of artistic and social innovations and fads started in Europe and spread to the rest of the world. Now many of them start in the United States.

The most striking thing about all these changes is that they reverse the historical pattern for social evolution. Typically, a change in the society’s political or economic structure occurs first, then a change in individual opinions and behavior. For example, it took more than a century after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights for the majority of Americans to realize that it is impossible to have government by, for, and of the people without political equality for women and racial minorities.

The social changes of the last few decades have reversed this pattern: they first occur as changes in individual opinions and behavior – the popular term for it is “raised consciousness” – which then force changes in the political system and other organized social institutions. The American Revolution was the work of a small political elite who forced modern democracy on a population who really hadn’t asked for it and weren’t prepared to make full use of it, and many of the social changes since the Sixties have been caused by a series of spontaneous, grass-roots movements without strong leadership that forced reforms on the Establishment.

The next chapter continues describing the social and political changes that have been occurring as our civilization enters a New Age, but from a different perspective. It discusses the role that organized religion is playing in all these events.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 itself. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

During the early Eighties, I made a serious effort to identify the spiritual forces that seemed to be having an ever-increasing effect on society. When I started systematically reading the literature on this subject, both fiction and non-fiction, I found several consistent patterns in it. The most obvious was what people in the Sixties Movement called “paranoia.” This is not the mental disease described in psychology texts, which involves uncontrollable emotions of fear over imaginary dangers, but the intellectual conclusion that something you dislike is about to happen, even though you can’t actually prove it. Most “paranoia” of this type in the Sixties Movement was focused on harassment of the counterculture by the government or private individuals; the “paranoid” ideas discussed in this chapter focus mostly on the concept that unknown forces are manipulating the course of human history in directions that seem sinister and frightening.

One of my starting points was to re-examine the work of Charles Fort, the founder of modern research into unexplained phenomena. Starting with Book of the Damned in 1918, he was the first to publish many of the simplest and most obvious explanations for a number of strange occurrences. For example, he proposed that the inhabitants of other worlds might be visiting the Earth in space ships long before the terms “flying saucer” and “UFO” were invented, and he also speculated that we might be receiving visitations from the future or from other dimensions.

Fort didn’t assume, as did most of the UFO researchers in the Fifties, that these visitations represented mere scientific exploration, but speculated that the visitors had selfish reasons for coming to Earth. He said that “certain esoteric ones” throughout history have received “messages from elsewhere,” and hinted that these have helped shape modern civilization. I assumed he was talking about the Invisible College and the Eighteenth-century Freemasons and Rosicrucians, but his mentions of this subject are all quite vague.

However, Fort’s negative speculations were more numerous than his positive ones. He is widely quoted as saying, “I think we are property. Someone owns us,” and for his further speculations that these “proprietors” have always had willing collaborators on Earth, “a cult or order, members of which function as bellwethers to the rest of us. …” At his most morbid, he compares us not to “property,” but to “cattle” – a dark hint that the mysterious outsiders might slaughter Earth people for food or “diabolical experiments.”

I found the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote at about the same time as Fort, to be both more interesting and more disturbing. His horror tales make utterly grotesque monsters seem entirely real to the reader, as if the author himself believed what he was writing. The basic theme of most of Lovecraft’s stories is the persecution of his characters by evil, superhuman beings called the “Great Old Ones.” Sometimes they are described as physical beings with octopus-like bodies, but in other stories they seem to be non-corporeal. Lovecraft frequently describes them with phrases such as “Dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.”

The human characters in his stories are scientists or occultists who deliberately or accidentally release some of the Great Old Ones from captivity, often by reciting magic spells from a fictional occult text called the Necronomicon, which means “book of the names of the dead.” Once released, Cthulhu and his cohorts often devour both the body and the soul of the unfortunate magician; and if they remain on Earth very long, they cause children in the area to be born as deformed monsters.

One of the things that make Lovecraft’s stories more terrifying than most horror fiction is that they have little heroism and very few happy endings. There is no exorcist to drive out the Devil, no Dr. Van Helsing to drive a stake through the vampire’s heart. Instead, the story ends when the protagonist dies or is driven mad, leaving the reader to wonder if the Great Old Ones are still loose, and whether they’ll eventually destroy the world if they are.

What do these morbid horror stories have to do with spiritual knowledge and occult secrets? In terms of the plots of the stories themselves, nothing. However, anyone with sufficient conscious mediumistic powers to receive messages from the spirit-world with any regularity finds certain details in Lovecraft’s horror tales disturbingly familiar. Some of the “evil spirits” commonly contacted on the astral plane express many of the same thoughts as Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, and numerous “Lost Souls” – spirits at a low level of development who seem to be having trouble adjusting to life after death – sound just like the hapless victims in the stories. My conclusion from this was simply that Lovecraft, like Shaver, channeled a lot of the details in his stories from the spirit-world.

Of course, the most important question still remained: exactly who originates the telepathic messages that frighten people like Lovecraft and Shaver into writing fantastic fiction? I couldn’t find real answers from the details in Lovecraft’s stories any more than I could from Shaver’s, because I had no theoretical frame of reference to fit the information into. Nothing theorized by Fort, Shaver, Lovecraft, or anyone else was helpful in interpreting this kind of data.

The work of a more recent imaginative writer, William S. Burroughs, proved to be of greater use. Even though Burroughs’ name is synonymous in the public mind with chaotic avant-garde writing and with “the author as junkie and madman,” his work is easier to read and contains more useful knowledge about the spiritual conspiracies I was looking for than that of Lovecraft or Shaver. One of the major themes that run through his books is that mysterious “agents” are working to manipulate the course of human history. Burroughs assumes that not all agents are on the same side, though he never clearly reveals how many different factions are involved or what their ideologies are. He does hint from time to time that some of the agents are extraterrestrials, or perhaps beings from other dimensions.

He also makes it clear that one of their chief duties involves reprogramming the minds of individual Earth people, manipulating their emotions and thoughts along desired lines. In most of his books, Burroughs describes this as being done on a strictly physical level: through violence, intimidation, bribery, or just plain “hard sell” persuasion. Both psychedelics like LSD and hard drugs like heroin are also widely used by the agents to alter people’s consciousness in connection with other means of manipulation. There is frequent mention of telepathy and other psychic powers, but they are usually described in vague terms.

One idea of his that seemed to resolve some of the paradoxes and contradictions in the body of information available about conspiracies and telepathic mind-control was the concept of “conscious” and “unconscious” agents. I found the idea that agents can vary in consciousness to be very useful. A simple example of how the “consciousness of agents” operates can be drawn from real-world espionage. For example, take a low-level CIA agent whose immediate superior and control is a double agent. Now, the second agent’s role is complex enough; he’s playing both sides, and perhaps actually favoring one of them over the other. But the first agent’s role is in a totally different category: he or she is functioning as a double agent without knowing it. A lie-detector test would affirm this agent’s loyalty to the CIA, yet the person’s actual work could all be against the interests of that organization.

Burroughs uses this kind of power structure in a much more complex form to describe the conspiracies that are trying to alter the course of human history in various directions. Most of his agents are unconscious, in the sense that they don’t know who is giving them orders or even what they’re trying to accomplish. They simply do what they’re told, for pay, out of fear, or for less explicable reasons.

On the other hand, many of the agents in the Burroughs stories are conscious in the sense that they believe they’re working for some definite organization or cause. However, the conscious agents very often seem to be in the same mess as the unfortunate spy we mentioned earlier. The reader is given reason to doubt that the organization the agent is working for is actually what it purports to be.

In itself, this concept does not sound very important, but I made a lot more progress after I started using it. When most people look for conspiracies, they assume that the conspirators know what they’re doing and approve. This, in turn, means that conspiracies have to make at least rough sense in terms of motivation and self-interest. And I hadn’t found out much during all my years of looking for negative conspiracies that furthered the interests of the people in them.

Here are a couple of quotations to illustrate Burroughs’s style and some of his major themes. I will begin with one from his first published book, Naked Lunch (1959):

“Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book. … How-to extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall. … Doors that only open in Silence into vast, other planet landscapes. … Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse. … There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. … I am a recording instrument. … The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth. … This is Revelation and Prophecy of what I can pick up without FM. … Chicago calling … come in please. A mighty wet place, reader. … Possession they call it. … The Answering Service. … Wrong! I am never here. … Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill advised moves. … Patrolling is, in fact, my principal occupation. … ‘What Are You Doing Here? Who Are You? … You were not there for the Beginning. You will not be there for The End. … Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative’ … most of them don’t want to know … and you can’t tell them anything. … ”

Next, here are some excerpts from one of his latest books, The Place of Dead Roads (1983):

“Kim Carsons does he exist? His existence, like any existence, is inferential … the traces he leaves behind him … fossils … fading violet photos, old newspaper clippings shredding to yellow dust. … And this book. He exists in these pages as Lord Jim, the Great Gatsby, Comus Bassington, live and breathe in a writer’s prose, in the care, love, and dedication that evoke them: the flawed, doomed, but undefeated, radiant heroes who attempted the impossible, stormed the citadels of heaven, took the last chance on the last and greatest of human dreams, the punch-drunk fighter who comes up off the floor to win by a knock-out, the horse that comes from last to win in the stretch, assassins of Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins, agents of Humwawa, Lord of Abominations, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, of Pan, God of Panic, of the Black Hole, where no physical laws apply, agents of a singularity. Those who are ready to leave the whole human comedy behind and walk into the unknown with no commitments. Those who have not from birth sniffed such embers, what have they to do with us? Only those who are ready to leave behind everything and everybody they have ever known need apply. No one who applies will be disqualified. No one CAN apply unless he is ready. Over the hills and far away to the Western lands. Anybody gets in your way, KILL. You will have to kill on the way out because this planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave. Kill all the guards and walk. …

Ghostwritten by William Hall, punch-drunk fighter, a shadowy figure to win in the answer, Master of Assassins, Death for his credentials, Lord of “Quien Es?” Who is it? Kim, ka of Pan, God of Panic. Greatest of human dreams, Quien Es? The horse that comes from there, who is it? Lord of the future son, does he exist? Inferential agents of a singularity, the fossils fading leave the whole human comedy shredding to yellow dust. … Unknown with no commitments from birth. No one can apply unless he breathes in a writer’s prose hills and faraway Western Lands. … Radiant heroes, storm the citadel. … Kill the last guards and walk. Guns glint in the sun, powder smoke drifts from the pages as the Old West goes into a penny-ante peep show, false fronts, a phantom buckboard. … The Lords have lived here since time began. To go on living one must do things that you Earth people call ‘evil.’ It is the price of immortality. … I cannot save your companions … they are already dead. … Worse than dead. They are already eaten: body and soul.

John Keel is another writer whose theories seem quite paranoid on the surface but proved very helpful to me in making the breakthrough. He is the Ufologist who claimed back in the Sixties that mysterious “Men in Black” often pose as government agents and harass people who have seen UFOs to keep them from talking about their experiences. A major theme in all of his books is that the U.S. Government, and other governments all over the world, deliberately interfere with independent UFO investigations and make a major effort to cover up the truth about UFOs.

I agree that there have been cover-ups and interference with private Ufologists, but I don’t accept Keel’s conclusion that they are proof that governments have hard evidence that physical UFOs and aliens exist. I’ve come to the opposite conclusion from the same evidence, because my long experience as a political radical has taught me that modern Western governments are just as afraid of the people as the people are of them. I think the cover-ups conceal ignorance, not knowledge.

I also agree with Keel that government and military officials have often lied to the public by claiming that all official UFO investigations have been discontinued for lack of evidence that the phenomenon is real. The government’s own records document quite clearly that the military, as well as various police and intelligence agencies, has been investigating UFOs very seriously since 1948, and that these investigations continue right down to the present. What has all this expensive bureaucratic investigation learned about UFOs? I suspect that the government files contain roughly the same type of information, as do the private UFO investigators’ files, except that there’s more of it and it’s written in different jargon.

I believe that if the government had definitive information about the nature of UFOs, someone would have leaked it long ago, as Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers. However, I do believe that government investigators are able to find enough information to keep them convinced that there is something real and important behind the phenomenon. So the investigations continue, and the government covers up their magnitude to prevent public criticism for spending so much tax money without discovering any real answers to the UFO mystery.

In The Eighth Tower (1975), Keel concluded that UFO contact reports had a common origin with certain very intense religious and occult experiences, such as visitations from gods, angels, or demons. He postulated that the cause of all these events is a natural phenomenon, which he names the “Superspectrum.” Keel’s Superspectrum seems to be based loosely on Jung’s concept that the human race possesses a “collective unconscious,” but he carries the idea much further than Jung did. Jung had conceived of the collective unconscious only as a body of information stored in the subconscious minds of many different individuals that causes all of them to think or behave in similar ways.

Keel carries this concept much further, and postulates that the Superspectrum involves specialized forms of matter and energy unknown to present-day science. He borrows concepts from occultism and coins scientific-sounding new terms to describe them. His Superspectrum simply seems to be another way of saying “influence by spiritual beings and psychic powers.” However, he doesn’t conclude that the Superspectrum is a being or group of beings, as the occultists usually do with their concepts of gods, demons, and spirits. Instead, it is simply a kind of natural phenomenon with a “computer-like intelligence.” The next writer I discuss has researched this same line of reasoning even further.

In one sense, it’s an insult to Jacques Vallee to discuss his works in a chapter called “Passport to Paranoia,” because his approach to Ufology has always been as rational and scientific as that of anyone in the field; but his books from the Sixties and Seventies show a pattern that fits right into what I’ve been describing here. When Vallee started his investigations in the Sixties, his working hypothesis assumed that UFOs were a physical phenomenon: either extraterrestrial spaceships or advanced flying machines built on Earth. However, in 1969 Vallee published Passport to Magonia, in which he reluctantly admits that many accounts of UFO sightings and “close encounters” with their occupants resemble religious and mystical experiences more than they do observations of physical events. He obviously didn’t want to do this, but he really had no choice if he wanted to remain truly scientific and empirical in his methods, because that’s where the information he was gathering led him.

After investigating hundreds of such cases, Vallee concluded that the early Ufologists had not been truly scientific when they dismissed UFO contact stories as hoaxes or hallucinations. Professional psychologists have tested many contactees with polygraphs, hypnosis, “truth” drugs, and a wide variety of psychoanalytic techniques, and have concluded that they are neither lying nor showing recognizable symptoms of psychotic delusion. Vallee also learned that contactees all over the world, regardless of their background knowledge of the subject or their personality type, received similar information from the “space people” and underwent similar personality changes afterwards. This lead him to believe that “close encounters” with UFOs are not a purely subjective psychological phenomenon, but have an objective cause.

However, he didn’t find the “close encounter” stories consistent enough in their details to allow him to simply take them literally and conclude that the contactees had indeed met extraterrestrials face-to-face or been inside physical space ships. Instead, much of the evidence concerning UFO-encounters resembled descriptions of psychic and spiritual phenomena in occult literature. This introduced a further complication; Jacques Vallee is one of the world’s best-known computer experts, and he did not want to jeopardize his reputation with the scientific establishment by using terms drawn from occultism or religion to describe the phenomena he was studying. So instead of talking openly about telepathy, spirits, etc., he invented a jargon of his own to describe the same concepts.

As Vallee’s investigations went further, he gradually formed the opinion that the contactee phenomenon represents interference in human affairs by essentially benign forces. In 1975, he published The Invisible College, in which he recounts further cases of mental reprogramming through UFO encounters and cites evidence that similar encounters with “mysterious visitors” have been occurring for hundreds of years. He mentions that secret conspiracies may have influenced the development of modern science and political theory while working through the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries.

The name of the book is derived from the use of the term “Invisible College” to describe some of these secret societies, but Vallee doesn’t emphasize that most writers who’ve used it were occultists and have assumed that the Invisible College indoctrinated people using psychic powers and occult rituals. Instead, he postulates that the Invisible College employed methods similar to those used by modern behavioral psychologists, based entirely on operant conditioning by physical means.

The Invisible College also contains some interesting speculation about the purpose of the mental reprogramming received by UFO contactees. For example, the majority come away from their experience believing that a higher power had chosen them to play a special role in advancing human civilization. They seemed filled with hope, optimism, and creative energy, expressing the belief that contactees are going to help the “Space Brothers” lead the human race into a New Age in which Earth will take its place among the advanced civilizations of the universe.

The specific elements of ideology advocated by the contactees were completely familiar to me: world peace, universal brotherhood, and social justice. They also talked about the general concept that the Sixties counterculture called “consciousness expansion,” especially forms of it achieved without using psychedelic drugs, but they usually expressed it in terms that wouldn’t directly identify them with the controversy over drugs and hippies. It was immediately obvious to me that this was just another form of the “Aquarian Age Message,” phrased in terms of space-traveling aliens and galactic civilizations instead of the terminology of the counterculture.

However, by 1979, when Vallee published Messengers of Deception, he apparently had changed his opinions on UFOs to something approaching those John Keel had expressed in The Eighth Tower. Vallee had become extremely disillusioned with the whole concept of mysterious conspiracies that meddled in earthly affairs and tried to change the course of history by reprogramming the minds of individuals. He was more convinced than ever that such conspiracies existed, but had gone from considering them beneficial to condemning them as evil.

He described how some of the UFO contactees had founded cults that resembled “high-demand religion”. Some leaders of contact cults were saying “democracy is obsolete,” and becoming despots over their groups. A few had taken reactionary stands on social and political issues that resembled the views traditionally held by Fundamentalist churches. Others reminded him of the Nazis by saying that contactees are a “master race” with extraterrestrial blood in their veins. Above all, he was disturbed to see contact-cult members running their lives according to messages passed to the leaders from “space people” instead of thinking for themselves.

Messengers of Deception contains a possible explanation for the whole UFO and contact-cult phenomenon that is very similar to Keel’s Superspectrum.

“I believe there is a system around us that transcends time as it transcends space. I remain confident that human knowledge is capable of understanding this larger reality. I suspect that some humans have already understood it, and are showing their hand in several aspects of the UFO encounters.”

Vallee isn’t certain who these people are, only that they don’t seem to be physical extraterrestrials or supermen. He speculates they might be government intelligence agents, especially of the CIA and KGB, or perhaps members of extra-governmental conspiracies like the hypothetical “Illuminati.” Whoever they may be, he doesn’t like them.

However, Vallee seems to have changed his mind again during the Eighties and decided that there are several different factions of secret manipulators, some good, some evil. The main reason for this change is apparently that he has started working with Robert Anton Wilson, who has held the “good guys and bad guys” view of the whole thing for years, as I describe in the next chapter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of Wilson’s characters describes the process that transforms a person into an “Illuminatus”:

“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.”

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.

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:

“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.”

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

“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.”

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

“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.

“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.

“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.”

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):

“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.”

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:

“Why does it hate us?”

“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.”

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. 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. First, from Carlos Castaneda’s The Fire Within (1985):

“… 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.”

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

“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. …”

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. 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.

Although much of the material that helped prepare me for the breakthrough was directly devoted to occult or unexplained-phenomena themes, the books most valuable to me in the last year or so before I made it were works on psychology, behavioral science, political theory and philosophy, and the history of natural science. Some of these were standard works in their field, whereas others were more speculative, such as Colin Wilson’s history of astronomy, Star Seekers, and Jeffrey Goodman’s book on human evolution, The Genesis Mystery.

One of the questions I kept asking during my reading was, “Since I find it obvious that there is sufficient empirical evidence to prove that reincarnation and other spiritual phenomena are real, why haven’t more scientists come to this same conclusion?” I already knew that most materialistic scientists would answer that my methods of investigation, and those of everyone else who has drawn similar conclusions, simply aren’t scientific. However, the more I studied the history and methods of science, the more convinced I became that there really is a materialistic bias in science: a literal closing of people’s minds to factual evidence if it concerns spirituality.

Colin Wilson’s Star Seekers (1980) is an excellent starting point for readers who want to duplicate some of my research along these lines. He provides the evidence to support all the major points of my conclusions, though he did not actually make them himself.

The materialistic bias in science seems to have originated no earlier than the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, simultaneously with the Protestant Reformation in Christianity, the beginning of the Age of Discovery, the rise of the modern nation-states, etc. All these changes in Western civilization mark the transition between the Medieval Era and the Modern Era, and can be attributed directly or indirectly to a sudden increase in the general level of technology.

Most of these technological innovations were small in themselves, and many were made by ordinary people – farmers, sailors, artisans, etc. – rather than by intellectuals. They were things with immediate practical use, like better plows, harness, wagons, water mills, spinning and weaving devices, sails and rigging-plans for ships, etc. They included gunpowder, the eyeglass lenses that led to the telescope and microscope, better methods of preserving food, and many other things. Taken together, they produced profound demographic, economic, and political changes in European society.

A full description of the sudden progress of European society at that time is beyond the scope of this book. The change that interests us here is the shift in the balance of power from the Catholic Church to secular institutions of all types. When the northern half of Europe became Protestant, organized religion in that region lost direct control over government, the economy, education, science, and most other important social institutions. The Protestant churches still exerted a major influence over society in Northern Europe, but they didn’t control the crowning of kings, the running of schools and universities, the certification of doctors and lawyers, the writing and circulation of books, etc., to nearly the extent that the Catholic Church had dominated them in the Medieval times.

In the southern part of Europe, which remained Catholic, the beginning of the Modern Era also weakened the control of the Church over secular institutions, but the process was more gradual. The efforts of the Church to retain its control over social and political institutions in Catholic countries are plainly described in history books, but the actual motivations of the Popes and other Catholic leaders are not so obvious.

The series of events that I call the Copernican Compromise, which created the materialistic bias in Western science, is an example: it is easy enough to see what happened, but harder to figure out why. Until the first half of the Seventeenth century, when Galileo was prosecuted by Pope Urban VIII for supporting the Copernican astronomical theory, European scientists had not yet been put in a category separate from other intellectuals doing research into the nature of the universe. They were all called simply “philosophers,” and one person might do research in many different fields: botany, medicine, astronomy, astrology, theology, and even ceremonial magic.

Individual philosophers were sometimes persecuted, even put to death, for publishing or teaching ideas that displeased the Church authorities, but there was no generalized prohibition of research into what is now called occultism. Philosophers could study the “natural” and “supernatural” aspects of the universe with equal freedom as long as they remained good Catholics and didn’t challenge the doctrines, customs, or political structure of the Church.

Most astronomers were also astrologers. Physicians dispensed as many healing prayers as they did pills, and practiced “laying on of hands” as freely as they set broken bones or bandaged wounds. One writer might produce bestiaries, herbals, and catalogues of the different types of demons and angels. The books written by the medieval alchemists show they experimented with sex magic and psychedelic drugs to develop their psychic powers as well as doing primitive experiments in chemistry. Much of this research did not involve scientific experimental techniques in the modern sense; but when such methods were employed, they were just as commonly applied to studying spiritual and psychic phenomena as to studying purely physical phenomena.

The Copernican Compromise changed all this. In 1600, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy. It’s widely believed that the reason for his immolation was his support of the Copernican theory, but this was not mentioned in the charges against him. It is true he was a Copernican; but what the Church executed him for was not his scientific views, but applying empirical methods of research to occult and religious subjects. He wrote treatises on Hermetic Magic and general philosophical works that challenged both the infallibility of the Pope and the omnipotence of God.

The persecution of Galileo a couple of decades later is widely regarded today as a victory for science, not for the Church, and this same attitude was expressed by many intellectuals at the time. The Pope made Galileo recant formally; but that actually helped popularize his ideas, not suppress them. However, one of the first steps in making my personal breakthrough was to realize that Galileo’s victory was a hollow one. Galileo was not only one of the founders of modern science because of his contributions to physics and astronomy, he was also one of the instigators of the materialistic bias that has plagued science ever since.

Ironically, his writings about himself show him not as an atheist, but as a reasonably devout Catholic who kept his religious life and his scientific life completely separate. He confined his scientific research to studies of physical phenomena, and his writings recognize Papal Infallibility in matters of religious doctrine and practice. The only reason why Galileo refused to back down when Pope Urban objected to his acceptance of the Copernican model of the solar system was that he felt the Pope was overstepping the bounds of his spiritual authority by getting involved in matters that were purely physical. Galileo never tried to challenge the Pope’s right to interpret the Bible on spiritual matters, but felt that he, as a natural philosopher, shouldn’t be over-ruled from the Papal Throne on enquiries into phenomena that are physical rather than spiritual.

The whole debate over the Copernican Theory hinges on the interpretation of a single Biblical passage, Joshua 10:13, which describes a miracle by Jehovah in the middle of a battle: “And the Sun stood still.” Since the time of Saint Augustine, this had been interpreted by the Catholic Church as proof that the Sun moves around the Earth. Augustine himself had been a bishop in Egypt not long after Ptolemy, another Egyptian, had published his astronomy texts endorsing a geocentric model of the Solar System.

However, it was obvious to Galileo that the original passage in the Bible could just as easily refer to a subjective description of the Sun as to an objective one. In other words, observers saw the sun appear to stop moving in the sky and simply said, “The Sun stood still.” This effect could just as easily happen because a spinning Earth stopped as because a moving Sun stopped. Above all, he never argued that the passage was false because it involved a miracle. Miracles were part of the supernatural, and not the business of a natural philosopher.

All Galileo asserted was that careful observations of the apparent motions of the planets among the fixed stars provide evidence that the Sun, not the Earth, is the point around which they revolve. On the surface, Pope Urban won the debate by forcing Galileo to recant publicly, sentencing him to perpetual house arrest, and forbidding him to publish any more scientific books.

In reality, Galileo, who was an old man at the time and died a few years later, simply went home to his comfortable suburban estate and continued his research and writing. His next book was smuggled out of Italy by French diplomats and published in Holland, and the opinion of intellectuals all over Europe was in his favor. Star Seekers states that Pope Urban was afraid to execute Galileo, as his predecessor had Bruno, because he knew that such an outrage would seriously damage his reputation and undermine his power.

I think Wilson missed a more important point here. Pope Urban could probably have had Galileo closely watched and prevented him from publishing any more books without suffering serious political harm. He’d already withstood the opposition raised by passing the sentence, and the public outcry over enforcing it would probably have been weaker, provided that Galileo was not harmed physically. The fact that the Pope didn’t carry through and effectively silence Galileo is evidence he didn’t consider the debate over the Copernican theory important in itself. He was punishing Galileo for openly challenging his political and spiritual authority, not for doing scientific research.

The Pope was sending a very clear message to all of the early scientists without saying it in so many words: “If you confine your scientific research to the physical world, the Church will leave you alone.” The earlier immolation of Bruno had already sent the negative half of this message: “Scientists who do research into the nature of psychic phenomena or publish theories that challenge the official position of the Church on cosmological matters will be severely punished.”

I call this unspoken, unwritten agreement “The Copernican Compromise,” and believe it’s the origin of the whole materialistic bias in Western science. The Copernican Compromise was never openly discussed by either the scientists or the Catholic hierarchy, and it is likely that both sides simply drifted into it without being consciously aware that the Church was still actively persecuting scientific occultists while becoming increasingly tolerant towards scientists who avoided research into psychic and spiritual phenomena, especially those who claimed such research was impossible. Even though their motivations were mostly subconscious, more and more scientists adopted a materialistic bias during the 16th and 17th centuries; and if they also were involved in occultism or other spiritual research, they hid their activities in secret societies.

If there were only this one example of the Copernican Compromise, the anomalies might be explained by personality differences involving the two Popes and the two scientists, but I’m talking in more general terms here. The Copernican Compromise came about because of an unspoken attitude on the part of many Catholic leaders over a long period of time, interacting with hundreds of different scientists and philosophers.

One of the last books I read before I started making the breakthrough was Jeffrey Goodman’s The Genesis Mystery, published early in 1983. It’s fitting that my old conception of spiritual reality should be brought to the breaking point by the work of a scientist who has been virtually ostracized by the academic community for blatantly breaking the Copernican Compromise. Goodman has impressive formal credentials as an anthropologist, and has published three reasonably popular books: American Genesis (1982), The Genesis Mystery (1983), and We Are the Earthquake Generation (1983). His scholarship seems perfectly sound, but his books have mostly been ignored or dismissed as pseudo science by other professionals in his field because he includes psychic powers, reincarnation, and disembodied spiritual beings in some of his scientific hypotheses. This might be too far out for the scientific establishment, but it was exactly the push I needed to make my breakthrough.

The Genesis Mystery points out that the evolutionary theory commonly called “Darwinism” is not rigorously scientific, nor has it ever been accepted by the majority of the experts in the pertinent fields or by most of the general public. Instead, it’s always been a propaganda weapon for atheists and materialists to use against religion and other belief-systems that teach that spiritual agencies were involved in the creation of human and other life on Earth.

Goodman shows that Alfred Russel Wallace, co-author of The Origin of Species along with Charles Darwin (and believed by many scientific historians to be responsible for most of the theories presented in the book), was never a true “Darwinist” in the sense of believing that evolutionary process was guided entirely by a series of accidents. Wallace called himself a practicing Christian, though his beliefs seem to have been what we would call “Liberal Christianity” today. He was also one of the scientists who investigated the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement and decided there was empirical evidence that the spirits of the dead really do sometimes communicate with the living. Even though he contributed at least as much as Darwin himself to the basic Darwinian Theory of Evolution, Wallace’s personal opinions on the matter were that spiritual forces were involved along with the random mutation and natural selection described in the theory itself.

Goodman, like Wallace before him, calls this concept “Interventionism.” Interventionists believe that, although random mutations account for most evolutionary change, some parts of the evolutionary process – especially the creation of human beings out of pre-human stock – were directed by a conscious outside agency. Wallace called this agency “God,” and so do many liberal Christians today, but occultists and New-Agers talk about “spirits” and “cosmic intelligences.”

The majority of people in the modern Western world who aren’t strict materialists have traditionally taken a similar view of evolution, and this group includes scientists as well as non-scientists. Most American Christians, except for the staunch Fundamentalists, see no real conflict between their religious cosmology and the scientific theory of evolution. They simply say that the evolutionary process was the means their God used to create people and other species of animals and plants, and that the materialistic Darwinists are wrong only in asserting that the process is random rather than guided by an outside intelligence.

The Genesis Mystery also points out that there is considerable evidence to contradict the Darwinian claim that the creation and evolution of life on this planet could have happened by pure chance. Whenever statisticians try to calculate the mathematical probabilities involved, the figures look very negative. Evolution by chance simply appears too improbable to have happened during the time period the geological and paleontological evidence marks out. All the materialists can say is, “Well, life exists and had to come from somewhere, so the low probabilities for random evolution have to be in error. They’re sure to increase as more information becomes available.”

However, as new information is discovered in every scientific field related to evolution – biochemistry, genetics, paleontology, etc. – the evidence against traditional, materialistic Darwinism gets stronger, not weaker. This is especially true of the appearance of modern human beings on Earth: recent fossil evidence shows that human beings may have evolved almost simultaneously from different pre-human species in different parts of the world. The probabilities of that happening by chance are almost zero, yet the paleontological evidence showing that it did happen grows stronger every year.

Most of The Genesis Mystery is devoted to a detailed presentation of the material sketched out above: Goodman’s own conclusions about Interventionist Evolution are confined to a few pages at the end. He mentions three possible sources for this intervention: “God,” “spacemen,” and “hitch-hiking spirits.” I was already familiar with everything Goodman had to say about the first two concepts, but I found the third original and extremely thought provoking.

Here is Goodman’s “hitch-hiking spirits” hypothesis in his own words:

“Finally, some take the intervenors to have been spirits from other realities visiting earth to experience its unique properties. As this theory goes, these visiting spirits hitched a ride within existing hominids to enjoy the physical pleasures of wine, women, and song. After many nights of too much reveling, they soon found themselves stuck within their physical vehicles. The only release was through death, but once addicted, many insisted on returning through reincarnation for just one, and then another, and yet another ride. Realizing that there was no way out of this vicious circle, some of the spirits set to work altering their hominid hosts to create better physical vehicles through which they could eventually escape the seductive pull of earthly pursuits. This may explain why modern man with all his advantages still seems torn between the two realities.”

The concept that certain human souls are not native to Earth, that they came here from another world or plane of existence, is mentioned in many different religious mythologies and occult theories, though most of the references are cryptic and hard to understand. Authors seem reluctant to discuss such a wild idea openly, but I’ve always found it plausible because of my past-life memories and numerous telepathic contacts with spirits who say that they were extraterrestrials in former lives.

Reading Goodman’s speculations about “hitch-hiking spirits” was one of the principal factors that helped me start making my personal breakthrough about the nature of spiritual reality. When he said in so many words that the first human souls might have come to Earth from elsewhere, started incarnating in pre-human bodies, and assisted in the creation of the human race as a fully intelligent species, my immediate reaction was to say, “Yes. This is one of the answers I’ve been looking for all my life.”

This was a purely instinctive reaction. The idea just seemed true and obvious when I read it at that particular time in my life. However, when I began thinking analytically about the subject, I realized that modern occult and psychic research provides a lot more evidence to support Goodman’s speculations than he presents in his book. The idea that spirits could cause genetic mutations in pre-humans that would help them evolve into true human beings is not nearly as implausible as it appears on the surface. During the last thirty years, many different occultists and parapsychologists have speculated that human beings might be able to manipulate genetic material psychokinetically at the sub-molecular level.

For example, this hypothesis has been in use for a number of years to explain those cases of psychic healing that involve regeneration of tissue and conversion of cancerous tissue back to normality. Enough cases of this type of psychic healing have been documented by medical experts to serve as proof beyond reasonable doubt for me and many other people. The idea that the mechanism involved in psychic healing might be psychokinetic manipulation of the DNA had occurred to me long before, and I tended to accept it even though I couldn’t think of a way to prove it with evidence.

It is very easy to extend this concept to include genetic engineering by psychic means. If the DNA of cancerous cells can be manipulated by psychokinesis to turn them back into normal cells, then there is no reason why something similar can’t be done to germ cells to produce controlled mutations in the organism’s offspring. How people could do this without being consciously aware of it was not yet clear to me; but I had no doubt that psychic healing occurs, and I was aware that there is also evidence from other sources that psychic genetic manipulation exists.

There is evidence that domestic plants and animals undergo genetic mutation much more rapidly than wild stock, and that many of the new forms are those desired by the people who raise them. Materialistic scientists don’t want to speculate about why this is true, but their own literature makes it quite clear that it is. They keep on saying that the genetic diversity in domestic plants and animals was already present in the ancestral stock, and that all present forms were produced by selective breeding to bring out desired traits, or by hybridization between different species. They insist that actual mutations in domestic plants and animals are extremely rare and due to pure chance, but they also record the data to disprove this conclusion.

Just as there are major genetic differences between human beings and the most closely related lower primates, so also many common domestic plants are far different from their closest wild relatives. Some geneticists have admitted that the chromosome-structures of cotton, corn, and a number of other domestic plants have an artificial look to them, as if these important food crops had been created out of the wild stock by modern gene-splicing techniques.

When UFO investigators asserted that this is evidence that ancient astronauts visited Earth, these same scientists answered with a theory that’s actually no more probable. They postulated that this gene-splicing might have been caused when genetic material was transferred from one organism to another by viruses. Now, evidence has recently been discovered to support this idea on the mechanistic level, but the theory still doesn’t explain why a useless weed would turn into a corn plant useful for human food. Natural selection doesn’t account for it, because domestic corn isn’t even viable in the wild state: even the most primitive forms cultivated by the Amerindians have to be pollinated by hand.

My conclusion was that psychokinetic genetic manipulation might account for these and numerous other bodies of observed data that defy explanation by the materialistic scientists. For example, it might explain why the gene pool of the domestic dog is much more diverse than that of the timber wolf, which is assumed to be its wild ancestor. Does a wolf, with its two-inch erect ears, carry the genes for the six-inch drooping ears of a hound dog? Geneticists say it does, but they can’t offer proof. Personally, I think a mutation was involved.

In fact, I think mutations caused by psychokinetic genetic manipulation have occurred on a large scale right in my own lifetime. They involve domestic animals with short life cycles: cats, rats, mice, hamsters, rabbits, and many different species of birds. These species produce many generations of offspring in a comparatively short period of time, and can be observed changing quite radically. The hairless cats now appearing in cat shows are an example. So are flop-eared rabbits and common rats in sizes and colors never observed in the wild. Again the geneticists say the potential to produce all these new forms was present in the original stock, and again I doubt it very strongly.

Literally thousands of new varieties of vegetables, grains, flowers, trees, and other plants are developed in nurseries every year, and hundreds are put on the market. Many of these are so different from typical plants of their particular species that if botanists found them in the wild, they would be classified as new species. However, when the same botanists know that such plants were bred under cultivation from familiar stock, they insist that no genetic mutation was involved.

It was extrapolating from the ideas in the Wilson and Goodman books that brought me to the “Breaking point” in my understanding of spiritual reality. I started making the actual breakthrough by going into mediumistic trances and asking my spirit guides to clarify the half-formed ideas I’d been speculating about: the motivations behind the Copernican Compromise, the full story behind Goodman’s Interventionist theory of evolution, etc.

It quickly became obvious that the spirit-dictated answers I was receiving were part of a coherent whole of amazing complexity; but I had no idea at the start just how long it would take to receive the information, or just how controversial it would be. Actually, I’m sure I still haven’t received all of it, but Parts Two and Three of War in Heaven describe what I’ve learned so far.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

“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.

“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?

“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.”

The plain truth is that I had already been fully aware that Spiritual Revolution was incomplete and over-simplified. When had I 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.

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 spirit guides, but they managed to survive. 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.

Parts two and three of WiH are presented as a dialog between my spirit guides and me. However, I wish to make it clear that very little of the material presented here was channeled in a single session. I would receive a few hundred words by automatic writing while in a fairly deep trance-state, then I would rewrite it while in a normal state of consciousness. Later, I would go back into trance to transmit the edited text to my spirit guides, and they would suggest corrections and additions. This process, repeated over and over, produced the dialog you are about to read. My spirit guides are responsible for the content and wording of both the questions and the answers.

This dialog starts with their answer to my request for knowledge of the Great Secret. …

A. The spiritual beings worshiped as gods by many religious groups are impostors. They are nothing more than the disembodied spirits of human beings who refuse to reincarnate. They remain on the astral plane, where they exercise power over other spirits and over living people. We call them “Theocrats,” a name also used to describe the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and other earthly rulers who justified their demand for absolute political power by posing as divine beings.

The concept that gods are impostors is the first postulate of a theory that provides explicit answers for almost any question about the nature of spiritual reality. Part of this theory is scientific. It explains what the soul is made of and how it functions. It also explains how the body, mind, and soul are inter-related and how psychic powers operate. The rest of the theory is political. It describes the political organization of spirits on the astral plane, and the relationships that different factions of disembodied spirits have with living people.

The Theocrats are violating natural laws when they refuse to reincarnate. The souls of all living beings are constructed to incarnate and draw energy from the physical body. This is the only natural and efficient way in which the soul can get the vital energy it needs to function and regenerate itself. Although the mechanics of this process are quite complicated, we will explain them in some detail to allow you to understand the rest of the theory.

The soul is actually an astral body, made up of a special form of matter. This matter is composed of subatomic particles like ordinary matter, but with different properties. Let us call this special form of matter astral matter, and the ordinary form physical matter.

The subatomic particles that compose astral matter have different properties from the particles that compose physical matter. Physicists on Earth have named and described some of these properties, such as mass, spin, and electrical charge. You also have terms like “charm” in your vocabulary for properties the scientific community apparently understands much less clearly.

The principal difference between astral matter and physical matter is that all astral subatomic particles possess much less mass than equivalent particles of physical matter. The charges and the mass ratios of the particles of astral atoms are about the same as those of physical atoms. In other words, the particles that compose the nucleus of an atom of astral matter have a positive or neutral electrical charge and their mass is greater than that of the negatively charged particles that revolve around the nucleus. However, the astral subatomic particles equivalent to physical protons and neutrons are much less massive than physical electrons. Since physicists often describe physical electrons as having ”negligible mass” compared with physical protons and neutrons, this means that the total mass of astral atoms is extremely small.

Q. How can astral matter exist in the presence of physical matter? Why don’t the tiny astral atoms simply get sucked in by the gravitational attraction of the physical atoms and end up orbiting them the way electrons do?

A. Astral subatomic particles have a different characteristic that determines gravitational attraction. They are attracted by gravity to each other but not to particles of physical matter. In fact, the astral atoms and molecules that make up the soul occupy the same space as the physical matter that makes up the body. Both kinds of matter are mostly empty space between particles anyway, and since there is no gravitational attraction between the two kinds of matter, the molecules simply slip by one another. This also explains people’s inability to see astral matter or detect it with physical laboratory instruments.

Energy also exists in two different forms, physical energy and astral energy. The photons that make up the two types again have different characteristics. Under most circumstances, astral photons do not react with physical subatomic particles. Nor do physical photons react with astral particles. However, the exception is important.

Q. You’re saying that light and other electromagnetic energy do not affect astral matter. Does this mean that psychic energy is not in the electromagnetic spectrum at all, but in a different one?

A. Yes. Advanced civilizations possess a unified field theory that describes the relationship between the two, but we can’t describe it to you right now. What’s important in this discussion is that psychic or astral energy normally works only on astral matter. It does not produce physical or chemical changes in physical matter. The reverse is also true.

Q. How does psychokinesis work then, or does it exist at all?

A. It exists, but it’s nothing like what you now think. In fact, your whole concept of the nature of psychic powers is a jumble of oversimplifications and errors. Psychokinesis does not move or change physical matter directly, but can do so by working through the links between physical and astral matter. These links are the “Secret of Life.”

The difference between living and non-living matter is that living matter is linked to astral matter but non-living matter is not. Complex organic molecules of physical matter can form a chemical bond with similarly constructed molecules of astral matter, and the resulting structure shows the characteristics of life: irritability and the ability to reproduce.

This process is very complicated, and your knowledge of physics is not adequate to understand all it completely. Here’s an attempt to explain why astral matter can react chemically with physical matter only within living molecules and not within simpler molecules. It has to do with the vibrational frequencies of photons produced when electrons of both physical and astral matter change energy levels within complex organic molecules. These frequencies are the same allowing physical photons to convert to astral and vice-versa. This happens only in certain kinds of molecules, not in all. These energy conversions allow a sort of chemical bonding to occur if the two molecules are similar enough.

Q. Does this mean that astral matter – in other words, the soul – plays a part in cell division?

A. Yes, in the whole genetic process: it affects the reduplication of DNA. It also affects many different aspects of cell metabolism. And the breaking of the molecular bonds between physical molecules and astral molecules causes the phenomenon commonly called “death”.

Q. How does this tie in with the idea that the body supplies the energy to nourish the soul?

A. Some of the electromagnetic energy generated chemically by the cell’s metabolic processes is converted into astral energy by the links between the physical and astral molecules. This energy flows into the astral matter that composes the soul, powering its various functions and providing the raw material for regeneration of its astral matter. In other words, some electro-magnetic energy is converted into astral energy, passed into the soul, and converted into astral matter there to perform cellular growth and repairs.

The astral plane is actually higher on an ecological energy chain than the Earth plane, which means it receives less total usable energy. Plants convert solar energy into chemical energy. When animals eat the plants, they absorb this energy and use most of it in growth, repair of tissues, moving around, and other activities. However, some of it is also converted into astral energy and passed into the soul. Since each of these energy conversion processes is less than completely efficient, each link in the energy chain has access to less total energy than the one below it.

Q. The impression of the human soul I get from this is that it’s exactly the same size and shape as the body, linked to it cell-by-cell and molecule-by-molecule. This is very different from my previous concept, which was that it is attached to the body at only one point through the traditional “silver cord.” Please explain.

A. Human beings actually have two souls, not one. So do all other animals; but plants have only one. The soul we’ve been talking about so far is a primitive structure, an astral body that is merely an analog of the physical body. It is alive in the sense that it is made up of molecules of living astral matter, but it is not sentient. It has a nervous system but not a mind. The true soul, the one you were just talking about, is a separate structure of astral matter.

Using the term “somatic soul” for the primitive soul linked cell-by-cell to the body and “astral soul” for the other will make it easier to discuss this subject. The astral soul is a body of astral matter linked to the somatic soul’s nervous system by what you call the silver cord. This is structured like a segment of plant root with feeder roots at both ends. The feeders at one end tap into the somatic soul’s nervous system; those at the other end tap into the astral soul’s nervous system. Energy flows into the astral soul from the somatic soul and indirectly from the body through this cord. Energy flowing through the silver cord is the astral soul’s only truly efficient source of nourishment.

Q. This makes sense. I take it, then, that the silver cord breaks when the body dies, leaving the astral soul free.

A. Correct. Remember, though, that the astral soul loses its best source of energy when it separates from the body. By contrast, when the body dies, the somatic soul does not also separate and live on independently. It simply decomposes when the body decomposes. Remember, it’s very closely linked to the body with chemical bonds.

Q. I conclude from this that a new somatic soul is created during the embryological development of every new human being.

A. Correct. In fact, a cell of living physical matter can’t divide unless the astral cell linked to it also divides. Living cells and molecules can exist only in pairs, one physical, and one astral. This is why many complex organic molecules undergo chemical reactions differently in living cells from the way they do in a test tube.

Q. I assume, then, that reincarnation occurs when an existing astral soul attaches itself to the developing somatic soul of a fetus. You’ve also given a reason why the astral soul needs to reincarnate: to link itself to a source of vital energy and nourishment. Where in the process of embryological development does this occur?

A. There are two very different reincarnation processes. The commonest occurs even before conception. Sexual activity often attracts a nearby spirit and causes a temporary attachment to a woman’s somatic soul at the genital chakra. (The same attachment can happen to a man, but it generally lasts only a few minutes, because the attachment point in a male’s somatic soul is vestigial, whereas the female’s is fully functional.) The attachment can last up to about twenty-four hours; and if conception occurs during this time, some of the hormonal secretions that accompany the process cause the woman’s nervous system to send energy to her somatic soul that keeps the attachment intact through the entire pregnancy. Late in pregnancy, when the somatic soul of the fetus becomes sufficiently developed, another hormonal change causes the mother’s genital chakra to reject the link to the attached soul, which then remains attached only to the fetus.

Q. I think this information might also explain why students of sex magic in both the East and the West have written so much about the relationship between the female menstrual cycle and various psychic and spiritual phenomena. Most of them have noticed that kundalini energies vary significantly in both quantity and nature at various points during the cycle, and that there is also a connection to mediumship and even possession.

A. Yes, this information can help magicians work out better theoretical explanations for the mechanisms of such phenomena. At present, the theories they use to explain their observed data are among the most complex and mystical hypotheses you’ll find in occult books. This same concept should also be useful to people trying to explain some of the phenomena described by Whitley Strieber in Communion: women experiencing phantom pregnancies after “UFO abduction” experiences, etc.

To get back to our discussion of the mechanisms of reincarnation, the primitive, involuntary form of reincarnation occurs in many of the more intelligent types of “lower animals,” and it happens spontaneously to any human soul at a relatively low state of psychic development who happens to come close to a couple having intercourse. Although it allows the soul to survive death, it has serious disadvantages for both mother and child.

All during her pregnancy the mother suffers serious psychic energy imbalances, which can cause her both mental and physical illness. These are usually more uncomfortable than they are dangerous, but the damage suffered by the attached astral soul is often much more serious. Signals intended for the mother’s astral soul are also transmitted into the attached soul, and they usually scramble the contents of its astral mind quite badly. For this reason, few people who reincarnate by this method show the typical characteristics of the twice born: past-life memories, precocious intellectual or psychic development, etc.

Q. What happens if an existing astral soul doesn’t link to the mother’s somatic soul? Does this cause an early miscarriage? Recent medical evidence shows that about half of all pregnancies terminate spontaneously within a week or two after conception; since an early miscarriage of this type closely resembles normal menstruation, the woman isn’t aware she was ever pregnant.

A. This has nothing to do with reincarnation, but has purely physical causes. Every human being has to have an astral soul. If an existing astral soul is not already attached to the mother, the fetus starts generating an astral soul of its own late in pregnancy. At this point, two things can happen. Either a late reincarnation can occur, or the baby is born with a completely new soul, spontaneously created during its embryonic development.

The people the Hindus call “twice born” are those in which an astral soul at a reasonably high state of development has incarnated shortly before or after birth, a process that keeps the infant from developing its own new soul. On the average, people with twice-born souls have a head start over those with new souls or souls received through early reincarnation. The astral soul of a twice-born person transfers memories into the physical mind during infancy and childhood that “teach it how to learn.” This is equivalent to raising the person’s effective intelligence and creativity. Energy to nourish the soul flows from the body through the somatic soul to the astral soul, but there are smaller energy flows both ways that convey information. The astral souls of the twice born give them a head start by feeding valuable information into the physical mind.

Q. Why do the Theocrats refuse to reincarnate?

A. Remember Satan in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” saying, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”? The Theocrats are spirits with great knowledge and psychic power.

They are a sort of ruling class on the astral plane, and they don’t want to give up their power and privilege by reincarnating. Highly advanced souls who aren’t Theocrats reincarnate and take the chance that their soul can properly educate their new mind, and that their next reincarnation will be a pleasant and valuable one. But it still involves taking a chance: the body might have hidden flaws that they don’t detect before incarnating, or the child’s earthly environment can take an unforeseen turn for the worse.

Also, the late reincarnation process itself is as traumatic as the physical ordeals of giving birth or being born. This trauma erases many of the memories stored in the astral soul and damages the programming that governs the astral soul’s functioning. The Theocrats are too selfish and egotistical to take these chances, even though the alternative is extremely immoral.

Another reason why Theocrats don’t want to reincarnate is that human beings have two minds as well as two souls. One mind is in the physical body’s brain, the other is in the astral soul, and both have separate consciousness. Normally, the astral mind is conscious while the body sleeps and unconscious while the physical mind is awake.

The two are conscious simultaneously only during certain states of altered consciousness. This “time-sharing” is humiliating for the astral mind’s ego, which considers itself superior to that of the physical mind. Theocrats want total consciousness for their astral ego, in addition to power over other spirits.

This brings us to one of the most important things we have to tell you in this whole series of communications. The nourishment that disembodied spirits receive from living people as radiant psychic energy is not enough to sustain them by itself. This is why all non-Theocratic spirits reincarnate within ten to fifty years after physical death: if they don’t, the astral soul starts to degenerate because of a sort of malnutrition. The astral matter that makes up its tissues can’t regenerate itself properly and reverse the effects of entropy. So the choice is reincarnation or illness, insanity, and death.

The Theocrats have found an alternative to this, but it is an evil one: cannibalism. They use their telepathic powers to hypnotize spirits less highly developed than they are; then they attach the silver cord to them just as if the other astral soul were the somatic soul of an infant. They can draw out enough energy this way to sustain themselves on the astral plane indefinitely, but the process destroys the other spirit.

Q. This is very frightening. Can they do this to just any other spirit, and can they do it to an astral soul incarnated in a body?

A. Fortunately, no to both. If they could, neither you nor we would be here talking about it. The Theocrats would have eaten up all of us just to get rid of us. They claim to be gods, but their powers are actually quite limited. Some of them are both more knowledgeable and psychically more powerful than most of the rest of us, living and disembodied, but they are far from omnipotent.

They can’t damage an embodied soul or override its conscious will, and they usually can’t capture and devour disembodied souls who resist them, except for the weak and untrained ones that mediums call “lost souls.” And even the majority of lost souls are capable of random psychokinetic bursts that allow them to flee the Theocrats when threatened. The Theocrats obtain victims by posing as gods and persuading religious believers to enter their bands by promising them “eternal bliss in Heaven.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Q. This means the Theocrats aren’t really immortal?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

Q. Exactly how does religious mind control work?

A. It involves what modern psychologists call “operant conditioning”: altering behavior and mental programming by positive and negative reinforcement on the physical and sensory level. The Theocrats strengthen this conditioning on the physical level by transmitting ideas and emotions directly into people’s subconscious minds by telepathy. Religious mind-control techniques are easier to understand if you realize that the Theocrats use people’s own psychic powers to control other members of the congregation.

Q. I’ve attended enough religious services of many different kinds to know that they frequently put believers into an altered state of consciousness and that they often generate quite a bit of psychic power. Is this what you’re talking about?

A. The key to the whole religious mind-control technique is putting people into a state of consciousness best called the “religious trance.” It is essentially a mild hypnotic trance in which the conscious will is awake but passive, as opposed to deep trances, in which it is completely inactive. People in a religious trance are completely aware of what is going on around them, and are recording these events in their memories exactly as they would in a normal waking state. They are also capable of thinking and acting voluntarily, but can only do so within certain very definite limits without breaking out of the religious trance and assuming normal consciousness.

Q. How do people enter the religious trance?

A. People fall into a state very similar to the religious trance when they read, listen to music, watch television or a movie, listen intently to a lecture or radio broadcast, etc. The passive state that the will assumes during these activities is often called identification with the sensory intake, as in “reader identification” or “audience identification.” Identifying with what is being read, seen, or heard, actually means accepting the sensory intake uncreatively and uncritically on both the intellectual and emotional levels. It also means agreeing with the ideas being presented and feeling the same emotions being described in the song, story, play, etc.

Q. It’s fairly common to describe someone who’s concentrating intently on reading, listening to music, or watching television, as “hypnotized.” You’re saying that this is literally true?

A. Yes, but remember, it’s a rather light trance. If the material being presented begins to contradict the person’s existing opinions or knowledge, identification breaks down. He or she assumes full normal consciousness and thinks, “I don’t agree with this,” or “I don’t understand this,” or “This is wrong.” However, identification with sensory input can make people accept things they would reject if they were fully conscious, as long as the input isn’t controversial or unfamiliar enough to break their concentration.

Identification with sensory input is just the first step in entering the religious trance state. Once the conscious will becomes passive, the flow of character, assuming a level closer to that during sleep than that during normal wakefulness. In a person fully trained to enter the religious trance, electrical activity in the physical nervous system becomes stable at exactly the right level to allow an equal flow of energy into and out of the astral soul. This allows the astral will to awaken partially, and creates a direct, two-way link between the physical mind and the astral mind.

As long as the religious trance lasts, information can pass reasonably freely between the physical mind and the astral mind and vice versa. Also, the physical mind can receive impressions from the psychic senses of the astral soul more or less directly.

Q. How does this compare to the trance state I’m in to receive this communication? Is it the same?

A. No. You are in a “psychic trance,” which is not the same as a “religious trance.” It’s a much less passive state of consciousness, and involves much larger flows of energy into and out of the astral soul. The psychic trance is controlled by both the physical will and the astral will acting in concert. The religious trance is controlled by outside sensory input into both the physical and astral minds. The psychic trance is an active state of consciousness that leaves you free to ask questions and make comments using your full creative powers. The religious trance is a passive state used to control and brainwash people.

The purpose of a psychic trance is for an individual to take conscious control of his/her psychic powers and use them to receive messages by telepathy or perform some other psychic working. What happens during the religious trance is not quite the same. Once people are completely in the religious trance, they are able to receive telepathic messages from everyone around them and from any disembodied spirits present; but the process is not nearly as conscious as what you’re doing right now in a psychic trance.

When religious believers say they “feel the presence of God” at church services, they are referring to telepathic communication without even realizing it. Since the individual will is passive during the religious trance, the members of a religious congregation cannot use their psychic powers deliberately, under conscious control, as people in a psychic trance do. They simply identify with what is sent to them, both intellectually and emotionally. Most of the telepathic intake received by an individual at a religious service comes from other members of the congregation; this is usually a more powerful influence than anything sent by spirits.

The actual religious mind-control process, the technique that provides telepathic emotional reinforcement to help program people’s minds, is a sort of “psychic chain-reaction” that occurs while a group of people are in the religious trance together. In other words, the telepathic messages sent out by every member of the congregation influence the emotions and thinking of every other member, like a box of matches catching fire or an atomic chain reaction.

This process creates a “religious group mind”: the telepathic transmissions of the entire congregation mutually reinforce one another until everyone present is thinking and feeling the same thing very, very strongly. People in such a state can feel extremely strong emotions, as strong as those that accompany the most powerful physical sensations such as sexual orgasm or extreme pain. But this is done without much sensory stimulation – usually just preaching, hymn singing, or praying – because the reinforcement is coming from the psychic chain-reaction.

Q. I’ve heard this described as “religious ecstasy,” but thought it was caused mostly by the sensory stimulation of the ritual itself combined with people’s own desires to be deeply moved emotionally. I knew that psychic activity often occurred simultaneously, but never realized it was the key motivating factor for the whole thing.

A. The most important thing about this state of group religious ecstasy is that it generates large amounts of psychic energy. Part of that energy may be directly absorbed by any Theocratic spirits present, but most of it is diverted back into the physical minds of the members of the congregation to indoctrinate them with whatever the Theocrats want them to believe or feel or do. This is the essence of religious mind control.

In other words, a Theocratic spirit sends a telepathic message into the minds of people in such a state of religious ecstasy, and they generate powerful surges of telepathically transmitted emotion that program them to believe and act on the messages they receive. For example, the idea “Abortion is murder” might generate powerful feelings of hate, whereas “All Christians shall be as brethren” might generate feelings of familial love among all the members of the congregation.

Within certain limitations, this is an extremely powerful method for controlling people’s motivations and future behavior. One of its worst features is that the people being controlled enjoy it more than anything else in life. You might call it the ultimate “high.” And it’s more addictive than any chemical drug.

Q. This means that the Jesus Freaks in the Sixties were speaking quite literally when they talked about “getting high on Jesus.” At first thought, it is rather ironic that the Fundamentalists, who say they hate recreational drugs so much, are literally “Jesus junkies.” But once the thought sinks in, it’s really tragic, like everything else I’ve heard so far about Theocracy.

A. Yes. And the Theocrats deliberately make the religious mind-control process as addictive as possible to enslave believers. The whole vicious circle of sin, guilt, and forgiveness was deliberately designed to create a cycle of addiction that is almost impossible to break.

Q. The religious mind-control process resembles some of the direct electronic mind control described in anti-utopian fiction. George 0rwell exaggerated when he thought the state described in his novel 1984 would arise out of modern Democracy and Socialism, but he missed something much more important. His totalitarian state with its mind-control has always existed. It’s as close as your local Fundamentalist church.

A. That’s one of the most important things we’re trying to tell you. People have always been “property” and “cattle” just as Charles Fort speculated, but it’s not on the physical level. What has been enslaved is the mind during life and the soul after death.

Q. This is what Lovecraft was really hinting at in his Cthulhu mythos, isn’t it? And it also explains Shaver’s Deros and hundreds of other references in fiction and serious speculation.

A. Very few of the people who wrote these references knew much about Theocracy as we’re describing it here. All that really happened is that we were able to transmit a few words or some visual images to them telepathically. Sometimes these were received in conscious “flashes” of vision or inspiration; but more often they sank directly into the subconscious, and were later called up and considered original creations of the imagination.

Q. One example that comes to mind is the material about the Devil eating souls in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. He must have picked up a glimpse of the truth about Theocracy, but he was so deeply brainwashed that it didn’t liberate him. His conscious intellect just twisted the information around to support his Christian belief system.

Let’s get back to the cycle of sin and forgiveness. I consider this one of the weakest points of Christian doctrine, because it seems to grant forgiveness without doing anything concrete to punish “sin.” Even the token penance of saying prayers, etc., that Catholic priests hand out during confession doesn’t seem like a realistic form of negative reinforcement to extinguish unwanted behavior patterns.

A. This is quite true. The last thing the Theocrats want is for religious believers to stop sinning. That is why they made sexual pleasure a sin, and why Christianity and most other organized religions teach the obvious fallacy that women are inferior to men.

Q. In other words, when the Theocrats made up religious doctrine, they included deliberate lies in it so that people would never be able to be completely virtuous.

A. No. It’s worse than that. Fallible human beings can never be completely virtuous in the sense of being able to obey the absolute letter of any rigid ethical code. However, falling short of perfection in obeying most ethical codes provides reinforcement for modifying behavior in positive ways: the more people are punished for disobedience or rewarded for obedience, the closer their average behavior gets to the code. The “better” they behave, the more positive reinforcement and less negative reinforcement they get. Even though they never reach perfection, they tend to feel the code is constructive because progress is rewarded and retrogression is punished.

Q. This is easy enough to understand, but how does it apply to a moral code that says sex is sinful?

A. That’s the point we’re trying to make. This kind of logic doesn’t apply to such a code. Sexual desire originates on the biochemical level and cannot be extinguished by manipulating the programming of the mind. People can be conditioned to hate and fear their sexual feelings and to avoid sexual behavior, but this doesn’t stop the feelings themselves. They don’t originate in the mind, so they can’t be gotten rid of no matter how the mind is reprogrammed.

In this context, we are defining “mind” as: “The information stored in the brain, plus the software for retrieving and processing that information.” Do you now understand the full magnitude of the problem that a completely false item of religious doctrine causes people? It’s an inherently frustrating situation. The subjugation of women makes life much less pleasant for both genders. It turns women into slaves, forever unable to live full lives. And it does just as much harm to men when it turns them into oppressors and exploiters.

This creates a no-win situation, because Fundamentalists still receive negative reinforcement even if they obey their moral code perfectly. For example, trying to live up to Christian ideals of chastity is always going to create guilt feelings and internal conflict, because believing that sexual feelings are wrong does not extinguish them, even though it might repress or sublimate them. And living within a sexist family structure always creates interpersonal conflicts.

Q. I see now why you say this process is similar to drug addiction. The Fundamentalist moral code contains elements that can’t help making people feel frustrated or guilty, which creates an artificial need for “divine forgiveness of sins.”

A. There’s a significant difference between a humanistic ethical code and the moral codes of Theocratic religion. The former are designed to meet people’s needs, the latter to meet the Theocrats’ needs. Even though most humanistic ethical codes are too idealistic to follow rigidly, “human nature” itself regulates reinforcement in response to them in ways that prevent excessive guilt and frustration.

In other words, committing murder or assault is severely punished, cursing and screaming at people less so, but the social environment of most societies does not punish people for merely feeling anger but not expressing it in word or deed.

However, the negative emotions themselves are a form of negative reinforcement. Notice that this process is self-limiting: serious offenses receive severe punishment, whereas minor ones receive light punishment. This is not true of violations of religious morality based on absolutes.

You and your readers should also be constantly aware that the Theocrats do not confine their activities to religion and occultism, but corrupt and control human beings through all activities that produce certain states of altered consciousness. For example, when people use the electronic media for passive recreational purposes – listening to popular music over the radio or on recordings, watching televised sports events and game shows, and playing the simpler computer games – they often enter a trance state that renders them vulnerable to telepathic mind-control by Theocratic spirits. We will discuss this electronic mind control in a later chapter; we must first give more background information about the nature of spiritual beings and psychic powers in general.

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.”

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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