A. The whole mythology of Satan and the Rebellion of the Angels was
the creation of spirits fighting Theocracy long ago, and the
original teachings of the Buddha contain similar elements.
Q. Why does the Invisible College deliberately use terms like
“Satan”? Doesn’t your use of this kind of terminology make it easier
for Theocratic propaganda to accuse all of your friends on Earth of
being “devil-worshippers”?
A. Somewhere in this book we’re going to have to deal with
accusations of this sort, so we might as well do it here. We have
good reason to use terms that encourage people to take a closer look
at the Biblical myths about Satan, which we’ll describe later in
this chapter. For now, we’ll just refute the charge that the
Invisible College advocates worship of Satan, because we totally
reject the concept of “worship” as the term is usually defined:
“Absolute, unquestioning belief in and obedience to a spiritual
being or a body of doctrine.”
Individual sovereignty is the most fundamental postulate of the
philosophy of the Invisible College.
Each person must assume full
responsibility for making value judgments on ethical and political
matters.
We never advocate absolute obedience to any authority, even
our own. We urge people to resist orders from leaders if they
disagree with them, and to use laws, customs, and ideologies only as
guides for making their own decisions on specific issues. Assuming
personal responsibility for running their own lives makes people
wiser and stronger, because they are usually rewarded for their
successes and punished for their mistakes. Unquestioning obedience
to orders or fixed doctrine only makes them increasingly dependent
and powerless.
To get back to our discussion of the devil, the concepts that Satan
is a “God of Evil” who demands the same kind of worship as
Jehovah
or other Theocratic conceptions of deity, and that he tempts people
to do exactly the reverse of all the individual ethical principles
in the Judeo-Christian moral code, are both Theocratic propaganda
incorporated into religious doctrine to keep people from
understanding our original and constructive purpose in creating the
myth about Satan and getting it incorporated in the Bible.
Q. This is obvious once you point it out. Satan has a much more
favorable image in literature and folk-tradition in all the
Judeo-Christian cultures than you’d expect him to have if he was
really the archetype of reversed Biblical morality that religious
doctrine claims he is.
A. Quite true. Look at all the folk tales in which
the Devil simply
opposes the puritanical, “bluenose” aspects of Christian morality
that say that sex and other sensual pleasures are intrinsically
evil. We’ve already pointed out the role these puritanical doctrines
play in the religious mind-control process.
The Theocrats want religious believers to feel guilty every time
they feel sexual desire or enjoy any “pleasures of the flesh.” The
guilt literally addicts them to attending church services that
subject them to religious mind control. When the Devil of folk
tradition says that sensual pleasure is not immoral in itself, then
he is actually advocating an ethical code superior to the
Judeo-Christian one.
Q. Satan, in other words, often preaches a perfectly valid,
humanistic morality, rather than the inversion of Judeo-Christian
morality that religious doctrine attributes to him. I’ve certainly
seen examples of this in literature from many different countries
and eras.
A. In ancient Hebrew, the word “satan” simply meant “adversary” or
“enemy.” We communicated the myth about the “temptation of Adam and
Eve by the serpent” to some of the prophets who wrote the Old
Testament just to ensure that people who read Judeo-Christian
scripture would realize that Jehovah has enemies.
We are also
responsible for other elements in that myth: that disobeying Jehovah
by eating the “forbidden fruit” enabled human beings to discern good
from evil, and that there was another secret, that of the tree of
life” that would give people eternal life without involvement with
Jehovah or other Theocrats.
Q. Now that you point it out, the whole myth of the “Fall of Man”
doesn’t seem to belong with the rest of the creation myth in
Genesis.
A. The material in the book of Genesis, even though it pertains to
the Creation and the earliest history of the Hebrews and the Jewish
religion, was mostly dictated to Jewish prophets after the Exodus.
Judaism started to adopt important elements of fourth-stage
Theocratic religion during the Egyptian Captivity, not long after
Ikhnaton tried to change Egyptian Paganism into a fourth-stage
religion and failed.
Fourth-stage Theocratic religions all have a
creation myth that includes the concept of Original Sin.
Q. I had formed the impression that Christianity was a fourth-stage
religion from its beginning but that Judaism was still in the third
stage at the time it was founded. My understanding is that the
practice of animal sacrifice is the primary distinguishing
characteristic of a third-stage Theocratic religion. First-century
Judaism still practiced animal sacrifices at the Temple in
Jerusalem.
A. No, Judaism was almost entirely into the fourth stage itself when
Christianity broke away from it. It started becoming a fourth-stage
religion at the time of Moses, though the process was gradual rather
than sudden. Survival of limited amounts of animal sacrifice was
just an atavism. The core of Jewish doctrine from the time of Moses
down to the present has been that Jehovah is both an angry,
judgmental deity who condemns people for Original Sin, and a loving
god who forgives their sins after various acts of faith and ritual
atonement.
All the Christians did was assign separate names to these
two different aspects of the one deity:
Jehovah, or God the Father,
to the judgmental aspect, and Jesus, or God the Son, to the
forgiving aspect.
Q. OK. I understand this part well enough. Please continue
explaining the creation myth in Genesis and the origin of the
concepts of Satan and the War in Heaven.
A. First of all, a fourth-stage Theocratic religion has no need for
a god of evil to tempt people into sin: the concept of Original Sin
itself makes any sort of Devil superfluous. However, if such a
concept survives as an atavism from an earlier stage of the
religion’s development, it does no harm, any more than did the token
sacrifices of doves by the Jews at Jerusalem, as described in the
New Testament.
Judaism had originally been a polytheistic religion.
Most of the angels with names ending “iel” had originally been “god
of...”; for example, “Barakiel—God of Lightning.” Therefore Judaism
already had a concept of “Satan” similar to the “adversary” or
“trickster” gods in other third-stage religions. It was quite
natural to incorporate Satan into the creation myth to tempt people
into Original Sin.
Q. Was the Hebrew Pagan deity Satan originally a god in serpentine
form like
Damballa and some of the other African trickster deities?
A. Possibly. We really don’t know. What we’re telling you here is
mostly derived from our knowledge of modern religious and occult
works, supplemented to some extent by rumors that have circulated on
the astral plane for thousands of years. We have no exact historical
details on any of this, just educated guesses. However, the choice
of a serpent image for the deity that tempted people into disobeying
Jehovah is obvious if you realize that it was enemies of Theocracy
who dictated the myth in the form in which we know it.
The serpent was intended as a symbol of reincarnation, because
snakes shed their skins, leaving behind a casting that resembles a
dead snake to a casual glance, while the animal crawls on about its
business with a shiny, new, young-looking skin. The Theocrats who
called themselves “Jehovah” did not want people to believe in
reincarnation, even though the fourth-stage religious concept of
“dwelling in the House of the Lord forever” was probably not known
to the Jews at the time the creation myth was first dictated.
Q. Many scholars today don’t think the concept of reincarnation was
even known to the Jews at that time. Was it?
A. As we said before, we have no exact historical knowledge of the
time, just age-old rumor and inference from literature on Earth.
However, our best guess is that every human culture throughout
history and back into prehistory has had at least rudimentary
knowledge of reincarnation. There are references to it in literature
from every culture we know about, including those in the ancient
Near East contemporary with the people who wrote Genesis, so we
assume the concept was known to them.
More important, a small number
of people in every culture have always possessed enough conscious
past-life memories to circulate persistent rumors about
reincarnation, even though a Theocratic religion does its best to
suppress them.
Q. An aside. I’ve gotten the impression from what you’ve told me so
far that the Invisible College has only been in existence for a few
centuries, that it started around the end of the Middle Ages or
after. If so, who was opposing Theocracy at the time of Moses, or
whenever the myth concerning Adam and Eve and the serpent was
written?
A. Exact names for the forces opposing Theocracy are actually
arbitrary and unimportant. We prefer to reserve the term “Invisible
College” to refer to the highly organized opposition to Theocracy
that started when large numbers of spirits from advanced
extraterrestrial civilizations started coming to Earth voluntarily
about six or seven hundred years ago.
However, small numbers of such
spirits have been accidentally transported to Earth’s astral plane
throughout history and far back into prehistoric times, and many of
them have tried to fight Theocracy as best they could. One spirit
with advanced knowledge could have been responsible for the creation
myth we’re describing here.
You already understand how the Theocrats
dictate “Holy writ” to religious believers, don’t you?
Q. Well, I assume from reading about
Mohammed and the Koran and
similar cases that the process is almost identical to what we’re
doing here to produce this book: some form of automatic writing or
other mediumistic reception of data from spirits on the astral
plane. The only difference is that the spirits involved are
Theocrats instead of members of the Invisible College.
A. You’re right. However, it’s extremely difficult for the mediums
themselves to tell exactly who in the spirit world is dictating to
them at a given time. That’s why we always review everything you
receive from us several times and leave you to be the final judge as
to whether what you’ve received is really from us or is Theocratic
deception.
Q. I realize that I have to be responsible for that, to ensure that
what I receive is internally consistent and agrees with my own
rational judgment based on the evidence available in my memory. I
suspect that the Invisible College finds it easier to send
anti-Theocratic messages to the prophets of Theocratic religions,
who don’t normally question divine revelations, than its for
Theocrats to deceive conscious Spiritual Revolutionaries like me.
A. Yes. And this is exactly what happened with the myth about the
serpent and the Fall. A spirit hostile to Theocracy managed to
dictate the story to one of the Hebrew prophets, and somehow it
survived long enough in folk tradition to be written into the Old
Testament.
And we’re glad it did, because it reveals some important
spiritual truths to anyone capable of understanding them.
Jehovah says,
“Right and wrong
are only what I tell you they are, and they are absolute values that
never vary.”
Satan, on the other hand, says,
“Use your intellect to
determine what is right and wrong in a given situation, because such
value judgments are highly dependent on the environment you’re in at
a given time.”
Since the latter statement is rational and the former
irrational, people are put into conflict with Theocratic religious
doctrine every time they use their intellect to make rational value
judgments.
Q. Most organized religions seem rather proud of the fact that
people have to accept their doctrine on faith simply because it
isn’t rational.
A. They do, because they have no choice. And this religious myth is
one of the reasons why. The Theocrats don’t want people to become
consciously aware of the basically illogical nature of absolute
moral doctrine, but there is nothing they can do about it. The more
highly developed a person’s rational intellect, the less likely he
or she is to accept religious doctrine on “blind faith.”
The serpent myth is only a minor detail in Judeo-Christian
mythology, but it has been very important over the centuries in the
fight against Theocracy. And it’s also obvious why the
Judeo-Christian Theocrats countered it with further mythology about
Satan as the Father of Lies who goes around telling people it’s good
to kill and steal and otherwise do the opposite of the religious
moral code.
The Theocrats tried to obscure the information about using the
intellect to make ethical decisions on a rational basis. They added
many extraneous details to the mythology about Satan. For example,
they included the idea that telepathy, mediumship, and other
human
psychic powers are either “works of God” or “works of the Devil.”
This allows them to forbid religious believers to communicate with
spirits hostile to Theocracy without revealing various facts about
spiritual reality that the Theocrats wish to conceal.
And then there’s all the propaganda about
demonic possession. As we
discussed earlier, the irony of the whole concept of “possession” is
that the Theocrats themselves practice something rather similar to
it when they program people into becoming willing slaves through
religious mind control.
The important thing to remember whenever possession is mentioned is
simply this: no spirit, Theocrat or otherwise, can actually force
living people to do things contrary to their conscious will and
their customary ideas of right and wrong. Even
religious mind
control can only reprogram a person’s opinions and beliefs one small
step at a time: it’s a slow, gradual process, not a sudden, dramatic
takeover.
It’s very important for the reader to realize this.
However, we do have to point out that even gradual reprogramming can
produce some extremely evil and violent people if it continues over
a whole lifetime. There are plenty of people in this country right
now who are emotionally and morally capable of “killing a Commie for
Christ” or acting on the literal meaning of the Biblical passage,
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
However, this has nothing
to do with the sudden, violent “possession by evil spirits” that
Fundamentalist propaganda spreads around so freely, and that many
serious occultists also accept. That, fortunately, is a myth.
Q. You haven’t covered the Tree of Life yet. What was that supposed
to represent?
A. As the serpent myth represents the concept that people have the
right to determine good and evil for themselves through the free
exercise of the conscious intellect, the Tree of Life represents
certain essential details of the breakthrough information – the
concepts that people can only achieve immortality through
reincarnation and that the “eternal life in heaven” offered by
deities is a delusion.
However, you must remember that the Tree of
Life is mentioned only so the Theocrats can gloat that they
prevented people from gaining this knowledge.
Q. The myth states that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge and learned to distinguish right from wrong with the
rational intellect, but they were expelled from the Garden of Eden
before they could “eat also of the fruit of the Tree of Life, that
is also in the Garden, and become like unto us.”
Many occultists and
Biblical scholars have been intrigued by that passage, not just for
the tantalizing references to a secret of immortality, but because
it s one of the only passages in the whole Bible in which Jehovah
uses the first-person plural, “us” instead of “me”.
A. The secret referred to in this passage is not just immortality,
but the complete knowledge that Theocratic spirits have about the
nature of the soul, reincarnation, psychic powers, etc. Apparently
the spirit who dictated these passages tried to communicate the
whole breakthrough and failed.
The beginning of Buddhism is a similar case in which enemies of
Theocracy tried to help people to make the breakthrough but didn’t
quite succeed. After the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he made some
statements that seemed self-contradictory, at least on the surface.
He attributed his spiritual progress to his own efforts, not to a
“gift” from omnipotent deities. He also stated in so many words that
ordinary people could achieve enlightenment through practicing the
proper psychic development techniques.
But at the same time, his
statements about reincarnation appeared paradoxical. He said that
achieving enlightenment meant that he no longer needed to
reincarnate, but he also said that he would continue to do so to
help other people achieve enlightenment.
Q. This seems to be a major contradiction, because if enlightenment
had made him a sort of “super-god,” superior to the Vedantic gods,
then he wouldn’t need to incarnate to assist people in spiritual
development. He could do it as a disembodied spirit, remaining on
the astral plane and using his enormous psychic powers to
communicate whatever information people needed.
A. Once people make the breakthrough, it becomes obvious that there
is no contradiction in any of these statements about the Buddha.
What the Buddha called his enlightenment is actually a version of
this breakthrough. He became consciously aware of exactly what the
Vedantic gods really are and how they operate, even though the words
in which his followers wrote down his knowledge are somewhat
confusing.
They understood the most important part of his message quite
clearly: the path to enlightenment is the disciplined practice of
various psychic development techniques.
Notice too that the Buddha
himself didn’t limit his followers in which specific techniques they
used, because part of his knowledge must have been that different
techniques work better for a given individual than others.
He was
quite vague on this, and Buddhists ever since have practiced a wide
variety of techniques drawn from Yoga, Tantra, and other sources
within Vedanta.
However, the basic teachings of Buddha are anti-deistic whereas
those of Vedanta were highly deistic. Many modern Buddhists believe
that if they personally achieve enlightenment, their souls will
merge with the soul of Buddha into Nirvana, a “state of blissful
nothingness.” Vedantic doctrine in the time of the Buddha already
taught that enlightened souls would merge with Brahma or some other
god.
This doctrine was grafted onto the Buddha’s teachings
after his
death, when Buddhism was taken over by the Vedantic Theocrats.
Q. You’re saying that Buddhism was originally founded to fight
Theocracy?
A. Yes. So were Gnosticism and some forms of early Christianity. But
to get back to Buddhism, the Buddha implied by his own example that
the enlightened were capable of transcending reincarnation but
deliberately chose not to do so in order to be of service to the
human race. The Buddha realized he could become a Theocrat and
remain on the astral plane indefinitely, but he refused to do so for
ethical reasons. This interpretation of the early Buddhist teaching
is possible for people who have already made the breakthrough from
some other source, but it is not stated clearly enough in the
writings themselves to make finding and understanding it very easy.
Even though he founded a major religion, the enlightenment the
Buddha achieved was still only a partial breakthrough. Much of what
he learned from the Invisible College was on a subconscious level;
it is reflected indirectly in his various teachings and practices as
described by his followers after his death when they wrote the early
literature, but much of it never came out in so many words in his
actual teachings.
Q. In other words, he didn’t actually say that the Vedantic gods are
evil beings who eat souls, or that enlightened souls need to
reincarnate for their own good as well as that of living people.
A. This vital information is implied, but never directly stated. For
example, the Buddha did teach that animal sacrifices and “austere
practices” – by which he meant self-torture, starvation, etc. – are
not mandatory for onto achieve enlightenment; but he didn’t
antagonize the Vedantic majority around him, or their gods, by
saying that “The gods are evil.”
However, after his death, the
legends portrayed the Vedantic gods as “worshipping” the enlightened
Buddha, implying at the least that they had no power over him.
It is also important to remember that the Buddha was preaching to an
audience with far different religious beliefs from those of modern
Westerners, or of modern Buddhists, for that matter. The Vedanta of
his time was a third-stage Pagan religion based on large-scale
animal sacrifice and orgiastic rituals, but its doctrine also
included many atavistic myths surviving from the first stage.
As
well as being the priests of third-stage Vedanta, the Brahmins also
functioned as first-stage
shamans who insured that various spiritual
beings were “fed” to keep them from eating human souls after death.
Direct references to the gods as “Eaters of Souls” occur in Vedantic
hymns used in the Soma ritual.
Q. I’ve also noticed another seeming incongruity about the teachings
of Buddha. He stresses that enlightenment is achieved only through
psychic development practices, but most of his actual sermons or
lectures seemed to be on ethics. Buddhist ethics are very similar to
the traditional Vedantic ethics of the culture he lived in. He
stressed certain elements more than others – for example, total
non-violence against both people and animals – but these were
already present in the Vedantic doctrines, which contained many
inconsistencies.
A. Yes, he preached a version of the Vedantic ethical code and
religious customs stripped of some of the worst self-contradictions,
like the concept of non-violence co-existing with animal sacrifice
and with various forms of violence against oneself in the name of
religious practice. However, it is easy to misunderstand what he was
actually doing, which was to separate ethics from the process of
achieving enlightenment.
Q. In other words, he said living ethically was important, but not
directly related to the psychic development that causes
enlightenment. Again, this interpretation is possible from reading
the Buddhist literature, but the point is not made clearly enough
for most people to understand it. Certainly most modern Buddhists
don’t.
A. Modern Buddhism, except for a few occult groups associated with
it, is a Theocratic religion. Buddhists feel that their ethical
conduct as well as their psychic development practices will earn
them enlightenment by pleasing various incarnations of the Buddha,
all of which are imagined to co-exist as gods similar to the Vedantic gods.
This is not what Buddha taught at all.
Q. Certain Zen masters, whom I class with the occult minority within
Buddhism, have said things like, “There are no gods; there are no Buddhas.”
A. When they do this, they are fighting against the tendency of the
majority of Buddhists to worship the Buddha as a god, instead of
seeking enlightenment through their own efforts and practicing
ethical conduct for humanistic reasons – to serve their own
interests and that of other people – instead of to earn divine
favor. Zen masters have even told students who were drifting into
deism, “Contemplate the Buddha as a piece of dried shit.”
Q. Before I made the breakthrough, I put a pantheistic
interpretation on passages like this:
“The Buddha is everywhere,
including in the desiccated turd.”
Now I see that this is an attempt
to answer the Theocratic tendencies in Buddhism by trying to
extinguish the believer’s tendencies to fall into deism.
A. This anti-deistic, anti-Theocratic teaching is even more evident
in the doctrines of some of the Eastern occult secret societies
involved with the martial arts. These secret societies have often
worked under the direction of the Invisible College to fight against
the control of both religion and politics in China and Japan by the
Theocrats.
That’s why they sometimes tell initiates, “we are
devils,” because they are literally fighting against the “gods,” in
the sense of fighting deism and defending the idea that people can
achieve enlightenment through their own efforts. However, you have
to be careful when you read about secret societies of this type,
because many of them have fought for the Theocrats at one time and
against them at other times, depending on the personalities and
beliefs of the members.
At this point, we’ll leave the adversaries of Theocracy within
religion and go back to discussing the work of the Invisible College
in building modern Western civilization.