Robo-Sapiens

THE DEGRESSION FROM spiritual knowledge to materialist ideology appears to follow a graduated path from one into the other. We can chart this process beginning at the top with how an accurate spiritual perspective might define spiritual and physical realities, and proceed down to how a materialist perspective would define them:

Modern Western culture appears to be situated somewhere around the lower middle of the above chart. Leading the trend towards the bottom is a practice known as “scientific psychiatry.”

There are many fine people working in psychiatry, but the field as a whole has become increasingly politicized due to its use by governments in a variety of settings, and it has come to promote a strict materialist view. Modern psychiatry has sadly obliterated the last vestige of spiritual reality acknowledged even by Marx. To understand this development, let us briefly survey the history of scientific psychiatry.

Efforts to cure people of mental affliction are as old as history. It is to the ancient Greeks and Romans that modern psychiatry traces many of its origins. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek physician, Hippocrates (ca. 400 B.C.), had classified various forms of mental illness and rejected the popular notion that mental ills were caused by angry Gods or demonic possession. In later Rome, physician Galen (2nd century A.D.) was one of the first to theorize a connection between the brain and mental functioning. After Galen, Western psychology reverted back to a belief in demons and witches for many centuries.

Perhaps the most important breakthrough in psychiatry occurred in Austria. Between 1880 and 1882, Viennese physician Josef Breuer discovered that he was able to cure a girl of severe hysteria by having her remember and relive under hypnosis a traumatic incident from her past. Her symptoms disappeared for good. Dr. Breuer had discovered that a person could actually be cured of mental ills simply through the act of remembering and confronting past incidents which may remain hidden from conscious memory without the assistance of a therapist. In some way, mind-aberrating pain is relieved through this process.

Dr. Breuer had stumbled onto something extraordinarily significant, yet his discovery, though utilized to some extent in the psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud, was never fully explored in psychiatry. Even Freud’s psychoanalysis failed to take the next step, which was to develop precision methods for helping people accurately pinpoint aberrational incidents from the past and discharge the mental, physical and emotional pain contained in those incidents.

Freud strayed off into his sloppy “free-association” methods which made the remembering process less precise. He also over-emphasized sexual incidents.

Breuer’s vital breakthrough was dealt an even mightier blow by what was happening in neighboring Germany during his day. “Scientific psychiatry” was emerging.

One of the earliest centers of “scientific psychiatry” was Leipzig, Germany. There a man named Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) established the world’s first psychological laboratory in 1879. Until that time, universities usually placed the study of psychology in their philosophy departments because of a lingering belief that there exists a spiritual side to man. It was Wundt’s contention, however, that psychology belonged in a biological laboratory. To Wundt, human beings were only biological organisms to which there were no spiritual realities attached. He therefore considered his approach “scientific” rather than philosophical.

Wundt’s theory about the mind was that human thought is caused by external stimulation bringing about bodily identification with other stimuli which the body had received and recorded in the past. When this identification occurs, the body, or brain, mechanically creates an act of “will” which responds to the new stimulus. There is no such thing as self-created thought or free will. To Wundt and his followers, man was but a sophisticated robot-type organism.

Wundt’s ideas were based upon experiments conducted in his laboratories and elsewhere. Some of those experiments revealed that one could produce the physiological manifestations of different emotions by applying electronic stimulation to different parts of the brain. Experimenters erroneously concluded that the brain must therefore be the source of personality because it triggers the physical manifestations of emotion and thought. The fallacy in this reasoning is obvious. The person conducting the experiment is applying external stimulation. In other words, the brain centers are not self-triggering except in a very limited sense. The experiments proved that it takes something else, something external, to trigger those brain centers.

What, then, triggers those centers when the experimenter is no longer applying his electrodes? There must be another external source—a missing element. That missing element appears to be the spiritual entity which produces its own energy output. Although Wundt and others used the experiments to "prove” a pure biological basis to human thought, the results were, in fact, subtly pointing in the opposite direction.

Erroneous or not, the stimulus-response model of behavior developed at Leipzig quickly became the “new wave” in psychiatry and received considerable support from the German government. Wundt himself remained the most influential figure in scientific psychiatry for 40 years. The Leipzig labs attracted many students from around the world, many of whom later became prominent names in psychiatry. For example, one Leipzig student from Russia was Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936), who gained fame for his experiments with bells and salivating dogs.

Dunae P.Schultz, writing in his book, A History of Modern Psychology, sums it up well:

Through these students, the Leipzig Laboratory exercised an immense influence on the development of psychology. It served as the model for the many new laboratories that were developing in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The many students who flocked to Leipzig, united as they were in point of view and common purpose, constituted a school of thought inpsychology.1

By redefining the nature of thought and behavior, scientific psychiatry also redefined the nature of mental abnormality and its cure. Methods to bypass human free will and intellect (behavior modification) were explored and developed. Because human beings were viewed as strictly biological-chemical-electrical organisms, all mental illnesses were said to be the result of physiological processes somehow going “out of kilter.” Experimenters theorized that mental illness could be cured by strictly physiological means, such as with drugs, shock treatment, or brain surgery. It was believed that such treatments could remedy the chemical or electrical “imbalances” and thereby cure the mental illness itself.

Out of these theories arose a multibillion dollar drug industry which pours out huge quantities of mood-altering drugs every year. These drugs are designed to relieve every mental ill from “can’t get to sleep at night” to violent psychosis. In addition, many psychiatrists use special machines to send electrical shocks through a person’s brain. Some may even resort to brain surgery. Now that we have had almost half a century to observe these cures in action, we can ask: have they benefited mankind? Is the world a saner place today than it was 50 years ago? To answer these questions, we might do well to analyze the cure most often prescribed by psychiatrists: psychotropic (“mind-affecting”) drugs.

Psychotropic drugs are a mammoth industry. They comprise a large portion of the total prescription drug trade which in 1978 amounted to an estimated $16.7 billion wholesale value in global sales by U.S. manufacturers alone. This figure does not even include sales by Swiss and other European manufacturers. An excellent book, The Tranquilizing of America, revealed that the most frequently-prescribed psychotropic drug, Valium (Roche Laboratories), was prescribed over 57 million times in 1977, refills included. According to an advertisement published by Roche in 1981, almost eight million people, or about five percent of the adult U.S. population, would use Valium in that year!

Add to that enormous figure the tens of millions of prescriptions for other psychotropic medications and we discover that an enormous quantity of mind and mood altering drugs are being consumed every year. In 1977, for example, the total number of U.S. prescriptions for twenty major psychotropic drugs amounted to over 150 million. That amounted to approximately 8.35 billion pills! These medications are being prescribed in similar quantities today.

This epidemic drug use is not an accident. Powerful psychotropic medications are energetically promoted to the medical community in glossy Madison Avenue advertisements in such publications as the American Journal of Psychiatry and through workshops and seminars sponsored by the drug companies.

Justified criticism has been leveled against drug-oriented psychiatry because of the number of patients who actually deteriorate as a result of their psychiatric treatment. For example, a surprisingly large number of people who commit apparently senseless acts of violence, such as shooting sprees and other grisly headline-grabbing acts, are people who were previously treated with psychotropic drugs.

John Hinckley, Jr., for example, was under the influence of Valium when he attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Such coincidences are usually explained as an indication that those people were already mentally deranged before the violent episodes and, at worst, the drugs were simply not able to help them. On the other hand, critics point out that such individuals were often not violent before their treatment, but became violent only afterwards. Did psychiatric treatments actually worsen their mental states to the point of their going completely psychotic?

One of the great feathers in the cap of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is its requirement that all drug manufacturers must list the side effects, or “adverse reactions,” that their drugs have been known to cause. This mandatory disclosure warns physicians of possible dangers and guides them in knowing when to take a patient off a drug. Unfortunately, by the time an adverse reaction is visible to the doctor, the damage may already be done. Most adverse reactions do vanish when the medication is discontinued, but some side effects can be permanent and cause lasting complications. This is especially worrisome when we discover that many adverse reactions are psychological.

A person opening a copy of the American Journal of Psychiatry and seeing the drug ads for the first time may react with shock at not only the slick sales pitches, but also at the small print. Every advertised psychotropic medication has a long list of potential physical and psychological adverse reactions. Most of the listed side effects are in medical terms incomprehensible to the layman; however, many of them are quite understandable.

Here is a sampling of some listed potential adverse reactions to popular psychotropic medications that have been advertised and prescribed in the 1980’s:

The drug Surmontil (Ives Laboratories), which is promoted as a drug for helping a person overcome symptoms of depression, lists among its possible side effects: confusional states (especially in the elderly) with hallucinations, disorientation, delusions, anxiety, restlessness, agitation, insomnia and nightmares, hypomania [abnormal excitement]; exacerbation [intensification] of psychosis. 2

 

Haldol (McNeil Pharmaceutical) is advertised as a way of handling an acutely agitated patient. It can cause:

Insomnia, restlessness, anxiety, euphoria, agitation, drowsiness, depression, lethargy, headache, confusion, vertigo, grand mal seizures, and exacerbation of psychotic symptoms including hallucinations, and catatonic-like behavioral states... 3

 

Thorazine, which is promoted as a medication for handling psychotic adults and children, belongs to a class of drug which has been known to cause the following: ...psychotic symptoms, catatonic-like states, cerebral edema [excess brain fluid], convulsive seizures, abnormality of the cerebrospinal fluid proteins. . . . 

 

NOTE: Sudden death in patients taking phenothiazines [the drug classification to which Thorazine belongs] (apparently due to cardiac arrest or asphyxia due to failure of cough reflex) has been reported but no causal relationship has been established.4

The last sentence in the above quote is a remarkable bit of doublespeak. It states that giving someone this class of drug has coincided with their suddenly dying, but the manufacturer denies that there is any evidence that the drugs were responsible for the deaths! No doubt it was just an extraordinary coincidence that some people have had cardiac arrests or cough reflex failures at the time of taking the drug. Fate must indeed work in mysterious ways.

Stelazine, another Smith Kline drug, lists many of the same adverse reactions as Thorazine, and adds “hypotension (sometimes fatal); cardiac arrest” 5 to its long list of medical adverse reactions. The drug is advertised as “A Classic Antipsychotic.”

Norpramin (Merrel Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.) lists the same adverse reactions quoted earlier for the drug Surmontil, but adds “heart block, myocardial infraction, stroke.”6

Even the relatively “mild” drug, Valium, so widely prescribed today, warns:

Paradoxical reactions, such as acute hyper excited states, anxiety, hallucinations, increased muscle spasticity, insomnia, rage, sleep disturbances and stimulation have been reported; should these occur, discontinue drug.7

The above drugs are only a sample. Nearly every medication advertised in the American Journal of Psychiatry has a long list containing identical or similar potential adverse reactions. The implications of this are significant. These drugs have been known to sometimes seriously worsen a person’s mental state or cause mental problems far more severe than those the patient began with!

As noted, physicians prescribe these drugs because the severe adverse reactions reportedly occur only in a minority of cases, and many side effects are reversible by discontinuing the drug. However, the road back from many adverse reactions can be a long one. A person suffering a psychotic break, whether from emotional stress or a drug, may take a long time to recover. In the meantime, he may do considerable damage to himself or to others. When we consider the enormous scale on which these drugs are prescribed, even a small percentage of patients suffering a severe psychological reaction will amount to a large number of individuals.

This immediately explains the puzzle of why some mental patients seem to truly “go off the deep end” after treatment. Regrettably, few people will blame the drug even in cases where the drug may be the cause, but will instead blame the patient (“he was always teetering near the edge anyway”) or society (“look at what society has done to this poor crazed individual”). The great tragedy is that some children may be affected by this. Many schools and treatment centers are quick to give powerful psychotropics to problem children and adolescents.

It is argued that the number of people who are helped by the drugs far exceed those who are worsened. Advocates cite statistics showing that drugs enable many patients to leave psychiatric institutions sooner and return to the community. Psychotropic drugs seem to enable some people to keep their psychological symptoms under control enough for them to lead useful lives in society. The question is: at what cost are these apparent benefits being obtained?

As many psychiatrists acknowledge, psychotropic drugs rarely cure mental illness. They simply suppress the symptoms. In this respect psychotropics are like cold medicines which can make a person feel better and appear healthier, but they rarely cure the underlying illness itself. When a person is removed from the medication, the symptoms usually recur. The patient functions no better than he or she did before, and may even be worse off from having suffered side effects from the drug. Many psychiatrists therefore do not speak of “cure,” but of “maintenance.” Psychiatry boasts a low “cure” rate, but a high “maintenance” rate. As long as factories churn out pills, drug “maintenance” can continue.

Is this fair to the patient? In the long run, is society really being helped?

The danger with maintenance-oriented psychiatry is that mental illness is in a sense “contagious.” This fact is most obvious in the phenomenon of “mob psychology,” as well as in other circumstances. If people are not actually being cured of mental ills but are only having their symptoms masked, and meanwhile mental aberration spreads from other causes, it follows that mental illness will probably increase in any society relying upon drug therapy. If psychotropics are also slamming thousands of people every year into a deeper psychological morass because of dangerous side effects, we can see that drug-oriented psychiatry risks pushing a society to ruin; yet psychotropics constitute the main form of therapy in most psychiatric institutions today.

The dangers of heavy psychotropic drugs are increased by another factor. A large problem facing today’s psychiatric community is the abnormally high suicide rate of its practitioners. Psychiatrists in the United States have a suicide rate about six times that of the general population. The highest percentage of those self-inflicted deaths occur among practitioners working in mental hospitals.

This high suicide rate is often viewed as an occupational hazard caused by frustration and by a psychiatrist’s continuous contact with mental illness. Whatever the cause of it may be, this suicide statistic is a reason to be concerned for the welfare of mental patients. Suicides are usually preceded by a period of declining mental health. One rarely finds a genuinely stable and well-adjusted person committing suicide. One of the major duties of a psychiatrist is accurate diagnosis and proper treatment, yet one of the most common manifestations of mental illness is the visualization of one’s own problems in other people.

A psychiatrist in a pre-suicidal state therefore risks being the source of grievous misdiagnosis because he may diagnose a patient as having what the doctor is actually suffering from. Because wrong diagnosis and mistreatment can ruin a person’s life, especially in a hospital setting where strong psychotropics, shock therapy and psychosurgery are used, it is vital that the treating psychiatrists and technicians be genuinely sane, social, and well-adjusted. Sadly, a statistically large minority of them are not.

The epidemic use of psychotropic drugs creates yet another significant problem. Drug abuse is considered one of today’s major social ills. Law enforcement agencies spend an enormous amount of time and money to combat it. The fight against drug abuse is based on the philosophy that people should not take illegal drugs to alter their moods or mental states. Modern psychiatry defeats this campaign. Drug-oriented psychiatry tells us:

• Feeling depressed? Take a drug.

• Feeling too happy (manic)? Take a drug.

• Feeling unable to cope? Take a drug.

• Feeling too able to cope (megalomaniacal)? Take a drug.

• Feeling confused and uncertain? Take a drug.

• Feeling too certain (delusional)? Take a drug.

• Can’t sleep? Take a drug.

• Too sleepy? Take a drug.

• Seeing things that aren’t there (hallucinations)? Take a drug.

• Not seeing things that are there? Take a drug.

Maintenance-oriented psychiatry promotes the very attitude upon which the illegal drug trade flourishes: want to feel better mentally and emotionally? Take a drug.

The great irony is that some of the very same “conservative law-and-order” judges and lawmakers who demand stiffer penalties against illegal drug pushers are among those who are quickest to set up the legal machinery for committing people involuntarily to mental institutions where drugs as powerful as anything on the illegal market are routinely and openly used.

The purpose of this discussion is not to impugn the general mental therapy field. As I mentioned earlier, there are many fine psychiatrists in practice today. It should also be noted that many therapists and counselors who specialize in communication-oriented (“talk”) therapy without drugs achieve excellent results and do much to help their clients. To understand the specific problems of scientific psychiatry, it is perhaps wise to remember that psychiatrists (but not most psychologists) are people with medical degrees.

Doctors are trained in medical schools to cure physical problems by physical means: bombard an infection with antibiotics or fix a broken leg with a cast. Where many doctors stray is in their belief that a mental problem is the same as a broken leg or viral infection, and so they bombard the “mental illness” with a drug, or they shock it with electricity. Such an approach misses the mark because a “broken mind” must be healed under an entirely different set of rules. This is well recognized by the fact that most nations permit people to become therapists and counselors without a medical degree.

Have philosophies of strict materialism brought about a flourishing psychiatric profession which is bringing about greater sanity to patients, practitioners, and the world as a whole? Sadly, the answer seems to be no. Psychiatry started on the right track when it discovered that the mind could be cured of its inorganic ills by confronting past hidden traumas, but it failed to develop that discovery beyond the crude and haphazard techniques used today in psychotherapy. Psychiatry was derailed when it began to mask mental problems with chemicals, and when it developed bizarre methods for bypassing individual free will in favor of stimulus-response manipulation (behavior modification).

It is perhaps time to move away from the strict materialist perspective, to get off the drugs, and to begin restoring a sense of respect for the free will and intellect of human beings. We may then be able to truly start back on the road to genuine mental, social, and spiritual recovery for the human race.

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St. Germain Returns

THE UPHEAVALS OF the early 20th century convinced many people of that era that the Judgment Day was at hand. Many Christians and mystics anticipated an imminent Second Coming of Christ. True to prophecy, it came.

Heralding Jesus’s “Second Coming” was the resurrected Count of St. Germain—the mysterious Brotherhood agent of the 18th century whose activities we followed in Chapter 26. After St. Germain’s reported death in 1784, he was made to seem physically immortal. In the early 1930’s, a man named Guy Warren Ballard claimed that St. Germain had spoken to him on a mountain in California. That conversation gave birth to an interesting new branch of the Brotherhood that would not only sponsor the return of St. Germain, but also the reappearance of “Jesus Christ.”

Guy Warren Ballard was a mining engineer. In 1930, he went on a business trip to Mount Shasta in northern California. Ballard had become interested in mysticism before his trip and he wanted to use his off-duty hours at Mount Shasta to unravel rumors about the existence of a secret branch of the Brotherhood called the “Brotherhood of Mount Shasta.” The Shasta Brotherhood was said to have a secret underground headquarters inside the famous California mountain.

The legends which had caught Mr. Ballard’s interest began circulating before the turn of the century. Persistent rumors told of secret dwellers living inside Mount Shasta who practiced a profound mystical tradition. The secret dwellers were said to be descended from inhabitants of the ancient lost continent of “Lemuria” in the Pacific Ocean.

Whatever the truth behind such legends may or may not be, it is unquestioned that Mount Shasta has long been a focus of mystical activity. Associated with that mystical activity has been a significant UFO phenomenon. For example, in the May 1931 issue of the Rosicrucian Digest (published in the year following Mr. Ballard’s trip to Shasta and a decade and a half before UFOs were popularized in the media), we read the following description of a flying “boat” in an article about the Shasta mystics:

Many testify to having seen the strange boat, or boats, which sail the Pacific Ocean, and then rise at its shores and sail through the air to drop again in the vicinity of Shasta. This same boat was seen several times by the officials employed by the cable station located near Vancouver, and the boat has been sighted as far north as the Aleutian Islands. 1

According to the same article, the boat “has neither sails nor smokestacks.”2

Against this background, Mr. Ballard’s experience on Mount Shasta takes on added significance.

Mr. Ballard writes that he had hiked up the side of the mountain and paused by a spring. As he bent down to fill a cup with water, he felt an electrical current passing through his body from head to foot. Looking around, he saw behind him a bearded man who looked to be in his 20’s or 30’s.

The stranger later introduced himself as the Count of St.Germain.*

* The physical appearance of St. Germain on Mount Shasta was considerably different than the St. Germain of the 18th century. The earlier St. Germain was in his 40’s, black-haired and clean-shaven. The Mount Shasta St. Germain is depicted as a younger brown-haired man sporting a beard.

As a result of this meeting, Mr. Ballard began a full-time career spreading the teachings of the new St.Germain. Ballard established the “I AM Foundation”— an organization with secret initiations and step-by-step teachings. Mr. Ballard claims that he had been introduced to members of the highest levels of the Brotherhood, under which the I AM was founded.

The tales Mr. Ballard tells of his experiences with St. Germain are so extraordinary that many people have derided them as fantasy. Surprisingly, when we strip away the interpretations which both Mr. Ballard and his critics give to his experiences, we find that his stories present a picture not only consistent with the rest of history as we have been viewing it, but they add remarkable new claims with rather startling implications for our own time.

The initial meetings between Ballard and “St. Germain” took place between August and October 1930. During the earliest of those meetings, St. Germain had Ballard drink a liquid which caused a strong physical reaction and made Ballard go “out of body.” (This same out-of-body phenomenon is often reported by people taking strong drugs.) After imbibing this fluid on several occasions, Ballard said that he was able to go “out of body” without the drink. This testimony is consistent with other evidence indicating that once a person learns to go “out of body,” it can become easy to do for a time.

Ballard alleges that while he was in some of his “out-ofbody” states, St. Germain, who was also “out of body,” took him to some rather remarkable places. One locale was a mountain in the Teton Range of Wyoming—a mountain Mr. Ballard calls the “Royal Teton.” According to Ballard, there was a sealed tunnel entrance near the top of the mountain that led to elevators. The elevators took their occupants to a location two thousand feet down into an underground complex of huge halls, storage spaces, and mines.

In one of the large underground rooms, Mr. Ballard claims that he saw an All-Seeing Eye symbol on the wall. There was also a large machine, which Ballard described as:

. . . a disc of gold—* at least twelve feet in diameter. Filling it so that the points touched the circumference-blazed a seven pointed star—composed entirely of yellow diamonds—a solid mass of brilliant goldenLight.3

 

* Ballard breaks up his sentences with dashes (—). I have included the dashes as they appear in the original texts.

Around the main disc were seven small discs, which Ballard gave symbolic meaning to. Mr. Ballard quickly revealed, however, that this large machine was not a mere symbol:

As I learned later, at certain times for special purposes—Great Cosmic Beings pour through these discs—their powerful currents—of force.4

“Great Cosmic Beings” was the term used by Ballard to denote leaders at the highest echelons of the Brotherhood. In his writings, Mr. Ballard claims that some of the Brotherhood’s “Great Cosmic Beings” are of extraterrestrial origin.

Ballard was told that the currents of force emitted by the machine were directed “to the humanity of earth.”5 The purpose?
This radiation affects—the seven ganglionic centers [nerve centers outside the brain and spinal cord] within every human body on our planet—as well as all animal and plant life.6

This is an astonishing claim, for it would mean that powerful electronics were used by the Brotherhood’s “Great Cosmic Beings” to affect the human nervous system on a widespread scale. According to an I AM Foundation magazine, the purpose of the radiation was behavior modification designed to “consume and purify the vortices of force, produced by the discordant and vicious activities of mankind.”7

The idea of behavior modification through electronic radiation is by no means an absurd one. In recent years, the Soviet Union has been developing and using electronic tranquilizing machines to behaviorally affect large populations. Such devices are also being proposed for classroom use in the United States. We will discuss those devices in an upcoming chapter.
Although the alleged purpose of the Royal Teton radiation machine was to reduce discordant human activity, such radiation will usually have the opposite long-term effect because the emanations are actually irritants to the central nervous system, even if they do cause a superficial sedation.

It is perhaps ironic that within less than a decade after Ballard wrote of his experience, the world exploded into one of its bloodiest conflicts: World War II. Either the machine of the “Great Cosmic Beings” did not work ... or it did.

In his first books, Mr. Ballard claims to have visited four secret underground locations altogether: two of them while “out of body” and two by regular human means. Interestingly, each location corresponded to a region in which there existed earlier in history a major civilization worshiping the Custodial “Gods.” The Teton location coincided with the ancient North American civilizations.

A similar underground location in South America went hand-in-hand with the Incan civilization on that continent. A trip by boat and automobile resulted in a stopover at a reputed underground location on the Arabian peninsula, which matched the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations. The fourth location in the mountains above the city of Darjeeling, India, corresponded to the ancient Aryan civilizations of the Indian subcontinent.

The underground locations were reportedly quite expansive and served a number of functions. In addition to holding electronic gadgetry, the caves were reportedly filled with enormous quantities of precious metals and ‘ gems. This is interesting because we know that most of the ancient civilizations worshiping the Custodial “Gods” regularly made substantial offerings of gold, silver, gems, and other precious minerals to those “Gods.”

Mr. Ballard alleged that the treasures he viewed came from some of those civilizations:

In these containers, gold is stored from the lost continents—of Mu and Atlantis—the ancient civilizations of the Gobi and Sahara Deserts*—Egypt—Chaldea—Babylonia—Greece—Rome—and two others.8

*The “ancient civilizations of the Gobi and Sahara Deserts” were major civilizations which are believed to have once existed respectively in the Sahara Desert of northern Africa and the Gobi Desert of east-central Asia. Like Mu and Atlantis, these two civilizations are said to have existed before Sumeria and are therefore relegated to the status of fiction by most historians. The Gobi and Saharan civilizations are said to have been technologically advanced, and the deserts on which they sat are believed to have once been lush with vegetation.

It has generally been assumed by historians that the ancient offerings went to the priest class. If, however, we take the existence of the Custodial “Gods” seriously, it is more likely that the “Gods” really did carry the stuff away.

The legends state that the Saharan and Gobi civilizations were destroyed in a cataclysmic war. Modern geologists have discovered traces of atomic explosion in those regions, but the traces are usually explained as being caused by the spontaneous combustion of natural radioactive elements a long time ago. Others believe that the traces are more likely the result of atomic weapons used thousands of years ago which destroyed the ancient civilizations and surrounding vegetation, causing the areas to become deserts.

Mr. Ballard’s testimony would indicate that a great many of the precious stones and metals were stored by the “Gods”in inaccessible underground locations on Earth, perhaps to help finance Custodial activities and to keep the corrupted Brotherhood functioning.

Precious metals and stones are expensive largely because of artificial scarcity. When Cecil Rhodes developed his near-monopoly on diamond mining in southern Africa, he was able to maintain the high price of diamonds by creating a very rigid channel through which his diamonds were sold. This is still true of the diamond trade today.

According to Mr. Ballard, the “Ascended Masters” of the Brotherhood intended to keep precious metals and gems scarce. Said Mr. Ballard:

If all this gold were to be released into the outer activity of the world—it would compel sudden readjustment— in every phase of human experience. At present—it would—not—be part of wisdom.9

 

St. Germain reportedly stated -that the huge quantities of gold and treasure would be released into the outer world “when mankind has transcended its—unbridled— selfishness.”10

The implication is that these precious gems and minerals exist in sufficient quantities on Earth to cause a dramatic drop in their value if they should all be released into the public domain. A further implication is that they are hoarded and made scarce to preserve the wealth of the Brotherhood. If the treasures do indeed exist, then the Brotherhood is a sizable hidden economic power on Earth. According to Mr. Ballard, this hidden economic might does exist and has been used to influence human activities.

During his tour of the Teton location, St. Germain reportedly told Ballard:

No one— in this world —ever accumulated a great amount of wealth— without the assistance and radiation of some — Ascended Master. There are occasions— in which individuals can be used as a focus of great wealth — for a specific purpose — and at such times — greatly added power is radiated to them — for through it —they can receive personal assistance. Such an experience is a —test— and opportunity — for their growth.11

It is certainly true that wealth has traditionally been concentrated in the hands of a small minority. It is also true that many members of that minority throughout history have been affiliated with the mystical Brotherhood network. The problem with this state of affairs would not be the narrow control of wealth, it would be that this control has so often been used to breed war and spiritual decay.

During his trips to the alleged underground locations, Ballard was also shown some radio-type gadgets. One such gadget could reportedly tune in on conversations taking place in various parts of the world—including in the offices of the Bank of England! As we recall, the Bank of England was one of the earliest institutions founded on the inflatable paper money system. That system was largely the creation of mystics and revolutionaries affiliated with the Brotherhood network. The Bank of England has continued to be a principle center of that system up until today.

The alleged eavesdropping capability of Mr. Ballard’s “Ascended Masters” is therefore remarkable because it would indicate a direct monitoring of a principle central bank in the international paper money system by top echelons of the Brotherhood. This becomes even more interesting in the next chapter when we consider the assistance that the Bank of England’s director, Montague Norman, gave to Adolph Hitler and the German Nazi movement during the very time that this electronic snooping was reportedly occurring.

Earlier in this book, we noted the large-scale destruction of irreplaceable religious and historical records in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres by zealous Christians. Historians have been able to piece together much of human history anyway; but is that history complete? According to Mr. Ballard, it is not.

Mankind lost additional records to Brotherhood leaders who had deliberately removed and hidden the writings. Ballard claims that he saw some of those ancient historical works inside the underground mountain complex north of Darjeeling, India. He added that the records would not be released to the human race until the “Ascended Masters” so ordered:

These records are not brought forth into the use of the outer world at the present time, because of lack of spiritual growth and understanding of the people. The race has a restlessness and critical feeling, that is a very destructive activity,... the Ascended Masters of the Great White Brotherhood, have always foreseen such destructive impulses, and have withdrawn all important records of every civilization, and preserved them, then left the less important to be destroyed by the vicious impulse of the vandals.12

If true, the above quote is a stunning admission. Mankind’s “lack of spiritual growth” has been caused by the very organizations to which these alleged “Ascended Masters” belong.

It was the Brotherhood that turned spiritual knowledge into incomprehensible symbols, unfathomable mysteries, superstitious rites, savage apocalypticisms, and all of the other ills which ensue there from.

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that human beings would experience a “restlessness and critical feeling.” The “solution” of withholding knowledge would certainly not correct those human deficiencies.

Such a “solution” can only deepen the problem. The claim that important records must be hidden to prevent their destruction is spurious. In Ballard’s day, book printing was a well-established art. Any important records could be easily duplicated and mass produced with the originals safely stored away. If indeed such hidden records existed, we must conclude that the only purpose for hiding them was to keep mankind ignorant about the past.

The I AM movement created by Mr. Ballard preached a Judgment Day philosophy and strong anti-Communism. Despite attacks from the press and U.S. government, the I AM movement attracted a large following during the late 1930’s and early 40’s. The I AM taught that communism was the final evil in the world and that it would soon be destroyed by the Ascended Masters. Interestingly, no mention was made of Nazism, which was rapidly growing in Germany at the time.

The “Ascended Masters” and their followers were clearly political creatures. According to Mr. Ballard, members of the Brotherhood were deeply involved in espionage and police organizations in the 1930’s. Brotherhood members reportedly served in the American Secret Service, and Mr. Ballard claims that he had met agents of the French Secret Service (France’s national intelligence organization) who were members of the Brotherhood and who called themselves “Brothers of Light.”

As if the reappearance of “St. Germain” in 1930 was not enough, the I AM movement hosted another most distinguished speaker: “Jesus Christ.” Jesus was a featured guest in New York on October 24, 1937, and in Oakland, California on February 15, 1939. Whether this “Jesus” was actually a person claiming to be Christ or was simply Mr. or Mrs. Ballard acting as mediums to channel the “spirit voice” of Jesus, I have not been able to discover. Whichever it may have been, may I respectfully submit that this was as bona fide a “Second Coming” of Jesus as the Custodial religions will probably ever deliver? This “Second Coming” in the 1930’s was sponsored by the same Brotherhood network which had sponsored and betrayed Jesus centuries before, and which has kept alive apocalyptic teachings predicting Jesus’s return ever since. Naturally, this newest “Second Coming” did not result in a thousand years of peace and spiritual salvation. It merely helped set the stage for World War II.

The I AM movement died down rather quickly after its peak in the 1940’s. It is quite small today.*

* The I AM has inspired several splinter groups. One such group is the “Summit Lighthouse,” which is currently the largest of the I AM groups, even though it is not recognized by, nor formally affiliated with, the original I AM organization discussed in this chapter. Headquartered in Malibu, California, the Summit Lighthouse is currently led by its cofounder, Elizabeth Claire Prophet, who, along with her late husband, Mark Prophet, had reportedly been a member of another I AM splinter group called the “Bridge to Freedom” before founding the Lighthouse. Like Ballard’s I AM, the Summit Lighthouse believes St. Germain to be an Ascended Master. The Summit Lighthouse is worth mentioning because Ms. Prophet teaches that many UFOs are hostile to human well-being.

It never gained the following or influence that so many other Brotherhood branches had attained. To most people, today’s I AM Foundation is little more than a curiosity run primarily by retired people. Indeed, the I AM is not important to us for what it is now; it is significant for what it was in the 1930’s and ‘40’s.

Was Ballard’s I AM Foundation the concoction of blatant spiritual quacks offering a home-brewed spiritual elixir to people seeking a ray of hope in a world gone awry? Or did Mr. Ballard really meet someone that afternoon in 1930on Mount Shasta? Was the I AM simply a bit of mystical razzle-dazzle designed to make money for the Ballard family as critics have maintained, or did Mr. Ballard’s reported experiences offer a rare glimpse into some of the activities of the Brotherhood in the 20th century?

It is a pity that Mr. Ballard is not here today to make his confession.

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