Q. The term “revolution in consciousness” is usually associated with
the Sixties psychedelics movement. Can you answer some of the
questions I’ve had about drugs that I’ve never been able to figure
out on my own?
A. There’s much more to the revolution in consciousness that’s now
going on than just the widespread use of consciousness-altering
drugs, but it’s a good starting point. Especially, the drug issue
illustrates that there’s a War in Heaven going on: we try to teach
people how to use drugs for their own good, and the Theocrats work
to create the “drug problem” in an effort to sabotage our attempts
to take human consciousness on this planet another major step
forward.
The modern struggle between the Theocrats and the Invisible College
over the recreational and other uses of psychoactive drugs started
long before the Sixties; and the drug then involved was alcohol. The
real reason that the Prohibition Amendment passed after World War I
is that we suddenly stopped opposing the anti-alcohol movement that
Theocratic Fundamentalists had been leading for decades.
In other words, we decided,
“Let the Christian Temperance Union and
the other prohibitionist organizations have their way; maybe total
prohibition of alcoholic beverages will fail so miserably that it
will convince the majority of Americans that puritanical laws
regulating intimate details of the personal lives of individuals are
a bad idea.”
And our plan worked.
Government policy and general opinion in this society are now
treating alcoholism more as a medical and psychiatric problem than
as a moral or criminal problem. This is actually a significant step
forward for the whole civilization: learning how to deal with a
social problem to minimize the total harm it does to the society.
Q. I’ve always found it inexplicable that Western society can deal
with the alcohol problem in a reasonably sensible and sophisticated
manner, but not with problems caused by drugs other than alcohol.
A. This is happening because the drug controversy is now one of the
two or three most important battlegrounds between the Theocrats and
the Invisible College. The key to understanding why involves certain
side effects of LSD and various psychedelic drugs closely related to
it: mescaline, psilocybin, etc., in both their pure and their
botanical forms.
Q. I was right at the heart of the Psychedelics Movement in the
Sixties and Seventies, but I never really figured out what was going
on. Obviously, the Invisible College was urging large numbers of
people to take these drugs, seemingly indiscriminately; but I never
found out why. In fact, I often got angry with you for trying to
“turn on the world” to LSD, seemingly with little regard for the
consequences.
0ccultists have used powerful psychedelic drugs of this family for
centuries as aids to psychic development, but always with a great
deal of caution and respect. Only occultists at a reasonable level
of advancement were supposed to take them; their use was denied to
the really immature and unstable. Also, occultists have always
taught that psychedelics use was should be combined with other
psychic training techniques, to maximize the benefits and minimize
the dangers.
However, when I tried to teach these methods of psychedelics use in
the context of the Sixties counterculture, I found that very few
members of the movement had the patience for such a conservative
approach.
Practically everybody just said,
“I’m going to keep on
dropping acid until I get rid of my hangups and expand my mind, and
then I’ll worry about all this stuff about meditation and psychic
exercises.”
And I was aware why so many people felt this way: at
this stage of my psychic development, I was beginning to become
consciously aware of your telepathic messages advocating
indiscriminate use of LSD and similar drugs. Quite frankly, I
disapproved of this policy, because I saw so many people hurt
themselves with irresponsible drug-use.
A. You are aware by now, aren’t you, that most of the people who
experienced “acid freakouts” during the Sixties didn’t suffer
significant permanent damage?
Q. This seems to be true on the average, yes. Also, I’m now mature
enough to realize that a lot of the drug-users in the Sixties
Movement who killed themselves, committed serious crimes, or became
insane enough to be institutionalized, would probably have done
something similar sooner or later anyway, even if they’d never used
drugs.
A. True. This was a significant factor in our decision to take the
risk of starting the Psychedelics Movement. We still have to admit
that there were casualties, though, and we’re sorry about it.
However, we have to point out once again that a war is being fought
and it’s your freedom, that of the entire human race, that’s at
stake.
Q. I understand all this by now, though I’m not sure how many of my
readers will. Well, there’s nothing I can do about this except tell
as much as I can of the facts and let people make up their own minds
about who’s right and wrong. What I’d most like to know about the
whole drug question is simply what the Sixties Psychedelic Movement
was for. What, exactly, were you trying to accomplish, and did it
succeed?
A. The answer to your second question is,
“Yes, fairly well. Better
than our expectations.”
The answer to the first is technical and
almost impossible to describe in English, but we’ll try. Since you,
and probably a significant number of your readers, are familiar with
electronic computers, we will use computer terminology for our
explanation.
First, you have to realize that a normal state of consciousness is
comparable to a computer program that’s already running in an input
or output mode instead of a command mode. In an input mode, you can
enter data into the files of the computer to be stored or processed.
In an output mode, you can retrieve information that’s already been
processed, and print it out or make some other use of it. On most
modern computers, you can switch between these two modes very
easily, and this analogy seems to apply to the mind as well.
The input mode of normal consciousness consists of receiving
information through the senses and entering it into the memory,
where it is processed in various ways and is available for later
retrieval. The output mode consists of making use of data that the
mind has already processed to feel emotions, think, speak, listen,
move the body, and perform a wide variety of other activities. The
whole thing is much more complex and sophisticated than anything
conceivable for electronic computers, even in theory, but the
analogy should be clear.
However, you can’t modify the program that’s running on an
electronic computer set to an input or output mode. In order to do
that, you’d have to enter some kind of command mode.
Q. As an example, before I typed this paragraph, I entered the
command mode of this word processing program and changed the margins
for this one paragraph. But now I’m back in the input mode to write
this.
A. When this analogy is applied to states of consciousness in the
human mind, you have to realize that the situation is very complex.
On one level, you feel that you have a great deal of free will, a
large measure of control over what you think and do and even over
how you react emotionally. This is simply because you are aware of a
large number of different alternative courses of action open to you
at any given time.
You are much less aware of those alternatives that are not open to
you. For example, large areas of your total memory are not available
to conscious access at any particular time. Like many electronic
computers, the human mind arranges memories in banks, and you
normally have access to only a few of these at any one time.
You can
change banks by an act of conscious will, but this often loses you
access to information you could recall easily before, from the other
memory bank. In addition, there’s the subconscious, which contains
memories that are very rarely available for conscious access.
Q. It also appears to me that normal consciousness includes at least
limited command functions: for example, deliberately “putting
yourself in a mood” to do a particular thing that you couldn’t do
without advance concentration and preparation. This may be analogous
to certain capabilities on this word processing program: for
example, I don’t have to leave the input mode to PRINT IN ALL CAPS
or to underline.
A. Yes, but you can’t change the line-length except by going into a
command mode, as you did above. Now the point we’re trying to make
here is that LSD and related psychedelic drugs create a state of
consciousness that is similar to putting a computer into a command
mode and making changes in the program that is being run.
Q. This brings us back to my original objections to your advocacy of
indiscriminate use of powerful psychedelics during the Sixties.
Going into a command mode on a computer is useless, and usually
detrimental to finishing the job at hand, unless you know exactly
what you’re doing. For example, the command mode I entered to change
the margins could also have been used to delete the whole file I’m
working on, and that could have been done by pushing only two keys.
A. Fortunately, the very complexity of the human mind makes it much
less vulnerable than that. What actually happened when the average
person in the Sixties Psychedelics Movement took LSD wasn’t the same
as the limited work with entering a “command mode” and doing
deliberate mental reprogramming that Western occultists have
traditionally done when they used psychedelics.
It operated on a
level unknown to the occultists.
In other words, you yourself, and all the people you considered
serious occultists, underwent the same involuntary mental changes as
the “street hippies” did because of taking LSD. You accomplished
your limited psychic training goals, while they did nothing but “sit
and groove”; but the drug itself was doing something much more
fundamental to every one of you, every time you took it.
Q. I’d already guessed most of this, but it’s still a little
disturbing to see it put into words. Exactly what changes are you
talking about, and how do they relate to the analogy about command
modes?
A. Well, the computer you are using to write this book has several
different levels of command modes, doesn’t it?
Q. Yes. For example, the lowest level is the one I used to change
the margins. Beyond that is another level at which I could enter
another application entirely, such as creating and sorting data in
an address file. Beyond that, I could write a program in Basic or
Assembly Language and create a word-processing file similar to this
one, but with whatever modifications we desired. And beyond that, I
could write or install a Machine Language program that would change
the computer’s capabilities for writing new programs, including
teaching it an entirely different computer language.
A. OK. By this analogy, the traditional use of psychedelics by
occultists is on the level of writing a Basic program. That’s how
people learn to use telepathy and other psychic powers: they
actually write a new program, but to do so, they use capabilities
already present in their mind all along, as your computer has the
Basic programming language among its files.
Q. This explains why psychedelics are not essential to psychic
training. They can speed up the process under the right
circumstances, but they don’t seem to be able to give a specific
psychic talent to just anybody. There are large numbers of otherwise
intelligent and creative people who simply can’t learn to become
telepaths or mediums, for example, with or without taking drugs.
On
the other hand, a lot of experienced occult teachers who dislike
drugs assert that they can accomplish exactly the same degree of
psychic training for a given person without using drugs as could be
accomplished with them; it would just take longer. I tend to agree
with them in general, though I still fall into the “pro” rather than
the “anti” camp of occultists when it comes to psychedelic drugs as
a psychic training aid.
A. The real reason we advocated widespread use of LSD in the Sixties
had nothing to do with the short-term effects of the drug, or with
conscious use of those effects for psychic training. To get back to
the computer-language analogy we’ve been using, the “mind-expansion
through LSD” that we were advocating involved a Machine Language
program, not merely a Basic program.
Repeated use of LSD over several years makes fundamental changes in
people’s mental programming, and we used LSD plus direct telepathic
conditioning techniques to significantly reprogram the minds of
several million Americans. We also used environmental conditioning
through the general emotional climate of the Sixties counterculture
itself, as expressed in its art, music, slogans, etc.
Q. To tell the truth, I found all that stuff about “Peace and Love
and Flower Children and Dropping Out and Everything Should Be Free”
to be naive and impractical at best, and at worst to be
self-destructive.
A. You felt this way because you already had high ideals and were
concerned mostly with trying to put them into practice. We created
the emotional atmosphere you find naive and self-destructive simply
to teach a certain amount of idealism to young people who had been
raised in average Fifties American homes that almost completely
lacked it.
Throughout their childhoods, they had been taught to
value various shallow forms of material success more than anything
else. We were trying to push them in the right direction, and
advocating widespread use of the powerful psychedelics was our
principal means of doing so.
Q. How did the reprogramming that you carried out through the
Sixties counterculture and psychedelics movement compare in
effectiveness with that accomplished through religious mind control
by Theocratic religious groups?
A. There is a tremendous difference, roughly that between doing
something using a high level of technology and doing it by human
muscle power, with the psychedelic drug being analogous to the
machinery. We did more reprogramming in a few years on more people
than the traditional religious Theocrats do in the same number of
decades. Unfortunately, the Fifth-stage Theocrats now have access to
mental reprogramming techniques just as effective as those we used
in the Sixties; but this is a subject we’ll discuss later.
Q. Well then, why did you stop? Why didn’t you let the Sixties
Movement continue indefinitely? I realize that you would have had to
make the material you were using to reprogram people much more
complex, but wouldn’t this have happened naturally as they matured
and gained in knowledge and experience?
A. No, it doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. It was extremely
difficult just to program large numbers of LSD users with a set of
vague idealistic principles that would make their opinion-forming
and decision-making processes more tolerant and flexible. It was
totally impossible to start teaching a detailed, sophisticated
ideology.
The major reason for this is that we were working almost entirely
through people’s subconscious minds, so that they were absorbing
short strings of data at random places in their mental files. As
long as these messages were simple, clear, and positive – and it’s
this that made you call them “naive” – then they did more good than
harm. If we’d tried using more complex material, it would have
merely confused the recipients, probably to the point of interfering
with ordinary mental functions.
In fact, most people in the Sixties
counterculture suffered temporarily from a significant degree of
this kind of confusion and impairment anyway.
Q. OK. I’m pretty sure I understand now. You were only trying to
reprogram as many Americans as possible with some vague principles
that would make them more socially and politically liberal, on a
very fundamental level. Even before I made the breakthrough, I was
aware that something like this had happened.
A. At this point, let us end the discussion of drugs and go on to
other aspects of the War in Heaven that mark the beginning of a new
age of human civilization on Earth.