Chapter 6:

Passport to Paranoia

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 crone 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.

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Chapter 7:

The Invisible War

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 Castañeda’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.

Back to Contents

Chapter 8:

The Breaking Point

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 interventors 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 tome 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.
 

Back to Contents

Chapter 9:

The Breakthrough

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.