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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,
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:
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”
-
“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.
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