Q. Even though you've explained how the Theocrats indoctrinate
people who attend religious services by conditioning them with a
mixture of sensory and telepathic reinforcement, I still find it
hard to understand this in terms of what I know about psychology.
For example, how can the whole human race be so brainwashed that
they don't even speculate consciously about certain aspects of
spiritual reality? The idea that evil spirits might pose as gods and
exploit people through organized religion is an obvious one, yet
almost no one ever talks or writes about it. The whole subject is
literally "unthinkable."
Also, if religious mind control puts people into conflict with their
own human nature, as happens when they are taught that sexual
feelings are morally wrong, why doesn't this negative reinforcement
cancel out the positive reinforcement of religious ecstasy? And even
more important, most Americans right now aren't Fundamentalists. The
majority don't even go to churches regularly at all; and many of
those who do, go to liberal churches that don't practice religious
mind control as you describe it.
Since this is so, why aren't all
the facts about Theocracy and religious mind control common
knowledge?
A. The answer to all these questions is the same: the Theocrats
simply know a lot more about psychology than people do. An
electronic computer analogy applies here. People on Earth right now
are like the users of a computer system: they can in-put and
retrieve data, and they can run the existing programs to process the
data in set ways.
Many of them have enough programming skills to
modify some of the programs slightly, but they don't understand the
basic design of the software very well. On the other hand, the
Theocrats not only understand the software far more completely, but
also have much easier access to the special "command mode" used to
modify it. This command mode is the telepathic chain-reaction used
in religious mind control.
Of course trained human psychics also have access to it, and so do
spirits in the Invisible College; but it is still extremely
difficult to free people from Theocratic control. The mind of the
average person on Earth right now is run by software designed by the
Theocrats to keep people from consciously finding out they exist.
And there's no use just telling people the truth: they simply can't
understand or believe it, because the mental programs they use for
understanding and believing things were designed by the Theocrats.
Q. Almost all religious and occult literature, and the majority of
modern speculative writing that comes close to discussing Theocracy,
assume that "gods," "demons," etc., have the power to kill humans
who discover "forbidden knowledge," or at the very least, to
over-ride the conscious will and keep humans from remembering such
things or pursuing such lines of enquiry further. What are the facts
on this? Especially, are the Theocrats aware of telepathic
conversations like this one, and what can they do about it?
A. Obviously, the Theocrats don't have the psychic power to kill
people or analyze their conscious minds, or you wouldn't have
survived to write this. They operate through the subconscious, and
they keep people from finding out about them by making it difficult
to understand certain kinds of spiritual information or draw
rational conclusions from it.
An explanation of how they do this is quite complex. Like the
answers to your first set of questions, it depends on a more
complete knowledge of the nature of the mind and the soul than you
now have, and this is going to be difficult to explain. Keep in
mind, throughout what follows, that much of the terminology from
psychology and computer science is going to be misused. We have to
use the words in your vocabulary that are closest to the meanings we
need to convey, but they aren't always too close.
The first thing we need to clarify is the comparison between the
human brain and a computer, and between the mind and the software
and data in a computer. The only similarity between the human brain
and present electronic computers on Earth is that both store and
process data. The methods for doing so are quite different. This is
where most of the books about biocomputers and psychocybernetics go
wrong. They take the analogy between the brain and the computer, and
between the mind and computer software, much too literally.
The best example is that the electronic computer deals in absolute
or "hard" values, whereas the brain deals in comparative or "soft"
values. If you create a new file in a computer and enter data into
it, the information stays there exactly as entered, and you can
retrieve it in its complete original form just by entering the
correct access code. If you want to delete something, you can "kill"
it instantly and completely by using the correct commands.
Everything you know about the human memory and learning process
makes it obvious the human mind doesn't work this way.
Memory storage and retrieval in the human mind is a cumulative
rather than an absolute process. If a person's senses receive a
particular set of data only once, fewer of the individual details
are recorded in memory than if it is received repeatedly. Also,
information may be automatically forgotten if not periodically
retrieved, a phenomenon that behaviorists call extinction. These two
processes are almost impossible to analyze using a computer analogy.
The electronic computer is an artificial construction, designed to
do exactly what the human operator tells it to do. It's also
basically binary: a circuit is either open or closed, giving a
series of "yes" and "no" answers. Computer software is designed
exactly the same way, to match the hardware. The internal
data-processing functions of the computer can be very complex, but
this complexity is always built up out of these simple binary
building blocks.
Neither the brain nor the mind works this way.
Q. Doesn't the biological principle of "irritability" put a binary
base under the behavior of living organisms? For example, some
microorganisms show positive or negative
phototropism: they approach
a source of light, or they move away from it.
A. This analogy doesn't hold up very well, because even
microorganisms often show much more complex behavior than this.
Biological behavior is based not on simple "yes" and "no," but on
increasing or decreasing orders of probability that an organism will
respond in a given way to a given stimulus.
The probability that an
organism will show a given response is determined by the quantity
and quality of reinforcement it receives for performing that
response. The behavior of the computer is based on "either A or B."
The behavior of the biological organism is based on "degrees of A or
B" with the quantitative values of the probabilities being
determined by environmental reinforcement of many different kinds.
The computer model of the mind is still useful, though, because it's
the only way even to begin to discuss the subject in the English
language right now, poorly as the available terminology fits the
realities. For example, it is much easier to understand the concept
of the "subconscious" if you think of the mind as the total data and
programs stored in an electronic computer, with many different kinds
of files, each kind having different access codes.
In other words, what people call "normal consciousness" is like a
computer menu, which gives access to certain files and allows them
to perform certain operations. Various "altered" states of
consciousness give access to entirely different menus. Since the
Theocrats have some degree of direct access to the "control mode"
for modifying these programs in both the physical and astral mind,
they have redesigned many of them to serve their selfish purposes
for exploiting human beings both on Earth and after death.
Q. Do they get this direct access during the religious mind-control
process, and if so, why aren't people who don't attend religious
services immune to it?
A. Religious mind control is practiced in many different places
besides religious services. The Theocrats often practice it on the
crowds:
-
attending sporting events
-
in gambling casinos
-
at political
rallies
-
during musical concerts of many types
-
in a number of
other places.
Whenever many people enter an intense emotional state
at the same time and have their collective attention focused on a
common objective, Theocratic spirits can use subconscious telepathic
manipulation to put them into a religious trance and reprogram their
minds with religious mind control.
The Invisible College used the
rock concerts, peace demonstrations,
"love-ins," and similar events of the Sixties for exactly the same
purposes. Before that we used meetings of fraternal organizations, a
variety of progressive political meetings, and even the circuses and
carnivals that used to visit every American village and town, as the
Theocrats used, and still use, touring revival meetings.
And the
Invisible College will continue to practice religious mind control
to reprogram people as long as the Theocrats do.
The important thing is to get as many of the facts as possible out
into the open and let people decide for themselves. And it's finally
beginning to happen. References to the truth about Theocracy are
beginning to appear in the writings of hundreds of different
authors. But the information is still mostly just isolated
fragments, and it's also obvious that most of the people who write
them down don't really know what they are, or even that they're very
important.
Even though most of the individual facts that make up the model of
spiritual reality being presented in this book are already available
to the public, very few people are capable of assembling them into a
coherent theory, as you are doing here. This is because the mental
programs they use to draw conclusions from information on spiritual
subjects were deliberately designed by the Theocrats to be illogical
and irrational.
Q. I've wondered about this for a long time, because empirical
thinking appears to be the natural way for the mind to operate if
you assume that the functioning of the thought-process is determined
by positive and negative reinforcement.
A. Correct. As a general rule, assuming that the truth is true will
bring positive reinforcement; assuming that it is false, or that
something other than the truth is true, will bring negative
reinforcement. There are exceptions to this rule, but it does
operate with reasonable consistency, enough to program people with
roughly empirical methods of thinking.
This is what most people mean
by "common sense": drawing conclusions from the available observed
information, and being willing to modify those conclusions if they
are contradicted by further information when put into practice.
Of course, this can get extremely complicated, especially when one
is dealing with other people. Since the individual usually has
rather incomplete information on a given subject, everyone makes a
lot of mistakes. Also, people all tend to be conservative in making
decisions: it's easier to keep on doing something the way you've
done it before than it is to change just because the circumstances
indicate it might be a good idea.
Both of these exceptions are important, but you should realize they
are also self-limiting. The more information you receive that
contradicts your present conclusion, the more likely you are to
change it. Also, your basic conservatism or inertia about changing
opinions tends to give way when circumstances put enough pressure on
you. When you start receiving significant negative reinforcement for
behaving in a given way, it gradually becomes obvious that you
should find an alternative.
This is the way the mind operates in decision-making most of the
time, especially in dealing with the physical world. But this kind
of natural empirical reasoning is used much less often than one
might expect in dealing with other people, and hardly at all in
dealing with psychic and spiritual matters. The Theocrats are
responsible for this.
The key to Theocratic power is the nature of what the behaviorists
call reinforcement. As materialists, they think of it as something
concrete; but it also has a subjective component, and the Theocrats
are able to make use of this fact to manipulate the kind of
reinforcement that people receive in response to their behavior.
Q. By "a subjective component in reinforcement," do you mean that a
concept like "pain" or "pleasure" is subjective in the sense of
being subject to interpretation by the person receiving the sensory
impulses?
A. No. That part of it is objective: the neural impulses we call
pain are not the same as the ones we call pleasure; they have
different electrical characteristics and travel over different
circuits within the nervous system.
Q. Yes, that's verified by what I know of scientific conclusions on
the subject. Where, then, is the "subjective component"?
A. The best name for it in English is "the emotional reaction to
sensory stimulus." As sensory stimuli are received by the mind of a
person in a normal state of consciousness, they cause the retrieval
of ideas and emotions from memory. This component is subjective
because it comes out of memory storage rather than from the outside
environment, and in many cases it has more effect on decision-making
than the sensory input alone.
Let's try a specific example. Suppose a racially prejudiced white
man takes a job where many of his co-workers are blacks. Initially,
he tends to interpret everything they say and do in ways that
reinforce his existing prejudice: if they are confident and
assertive, they are acting "above their station in life." If they're
friendly, they're being presumptuous and impertinent. If they sense
his prejudice and keep their distance from him or act hostile, this
is proof that people of different races are not meant to work
together. And so on.
His experience should be teaching him that, on
the average, black people are no different from white people; but
his own subjective reactions to sensory intake tend to prevent him
from learning.
Q. The behaviorist literature describes these kinds of reactions, of
course, because they are very common, but the psychologists don't
even speculate that a deliberate conspiracy is responsible for those
elements of human behavior that are irrational or self-destructive.
Instead, they take a Darwinian approach.
For example, in the case
cited above, they'd say that the prejudiced man learned his
prejudice in an environment where he had little personal contact
with black people: he received positive reinforcement from the
prejudiced whites around him for showing negative emotional
reactions when blacks were mentioned, so he became prejudiced. When
he enters an environment where he comes in contact with black
people, these prejudices continue to function until they are
extinguished.
This is a process very similar to random mutation and
natural selection.
A. This process does account for a lot of human behavior. However,
mental programming from Theocratic spirits has to be added into this
equation. The Theocrats don't want people to learn from experience
or adjust to new situations in their environment, so they encourage
emotionalism over rationality. When people make decisions
rationally, they are harder for the Theocrats to control.
Religious mind control is a delicate process, because the religious
trance is a rather shallow one. If people in a religious trance
perform rituals that are unfamiliar, or hear preaching that
seriously contradicts their existing beliefs, they return to a
normal state of consciousness. Effective religious mind control can
be practiced during rituals only when those rituals remain
relatively stable.
This is also one of the principal reasons why
Theocratic religion is socially and politically conservative or
reactionary.
Q. I still don't see how the Theocrats can program the minds of the
entire human race so thoroughly that the truth about Theocracy has
never become common knowledge.
A. A few people throughout history have, in fact, learned various
elements of the truth about Theocracy and written them down in
religious and occult literature. However, these elements were always
fragmentary; and more important, neither the people who found them
nor the rest of the human race were capable of fully understanding
them.
Especially, no one was able to design experiments to discover
further elements of this knowledge and work towards a unified theory
to explain the whole thing.
Q. Why should the entire human race find it so hard to make the same
breakthrough that I'm making, which enables me to discover and
accept this kind of information? I understand, at least partially,
how religious mind control works on believers, but why should the
minds of everyone else be similarly affected?
A. This comes back to the basic behaviorist theory that human
personality is conditioned into people by their physical environment - this includes the mental programs that they use to evaluate data
and decide what is true and what is false. Even if you leave direct
telepathic programming during religious mind control out of the
picture, people still receive their programming from both their
physical and social environments.
Programming from the physical
environment usually favors empirical thinking, but that from the
social environment favors acceptance of doctrine on faith.
A large part of the customs and beliefs and instinctive emotional
reactions that make up this social environment were created by
Theocratic religion. The further back you go into human history, the
greater the percentage of people who were devout believers in
Theocratic religion and were subjected to religious mind control to
a significant degree throughout their lives.
Q. This definitely appears to be true when we look at Western
history over the last thousand years, but I can see gaps further
back. For example, it doesn't seem as if either the Romans or the
Greeks were very devout during important periods of their
civilizations.
A. On the contrary - the vast majority of the population in both
civilizations were devout believers in Pagan religions that
practiced effective religious mind control. However, there were
periodic weakenings of religious belief among certain segments of
the population, which allowed important occult, philosophical,
political, and scientific works to be written, works based on some
degree of empirical thinking. Remember, the Greek and Roman
philosophers were just a tiny elitist group of intellectuals. The
majority viewpoint then was not that of Socrates, but that of the
people who condemned him to death.
The hold of Theocratic religion on most of Earth's living population
did not begin to weaken until the Modern Era, from about the 1300's
down to the present. And even today, the greater part of the
population is still subject to religious mind control.
Modern
civilization does program people with personality structures that
resist religious mind control, but the Theocrats have been able to
counter our efforts along these lines by resorting to electronic
mind control.
Q. My research into
secret societies and the forces manipulating
human civilization has given me the impression that the Invisible
College also makes use of both religious and electronic mind
control.
A. This is true. We discuss electronic mind control in more detail
in the next chapter.