The Age of ReasonIn this War in Heaven text, The Age of Reason refers to the work of the Invisible College in the old Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges several hundred years ago, when these organizations had so much influence over the development of modern civilization. They wanted initiates on the lower levels to be reprogrammed to accept what's now called the "Philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment." [It's unclear if this is meant to be synonymous with "Age of Reason."] This included the form of political liberalism sketched out in the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, support of capitalism and industrial technology, a progressive attitude towards innovation in science and the arts, reliance on rational pragmatic decision-making over dependence on tradition, and a general attitude toward life that was constructive, optimistic, and tolerant. The Invisible College realized it wasn't possible to turn most of those people into high-level psychics or magicians or to teach them much about the true nature of Theocracy; they just wanted to turn them into what would be defined in the United States today as "good average citizens". Two types of consciousness-raising programs were used within the lodges: one trained initiates in the lower degrees to become rational atheists and political liberals; the other, more advanced, program, taught high-level occult knowledge and conscious control over the psychic powers. The first of these programs always had many more members than the second. Initiates who learned to accept the Masonic philosophy often became immune to falling into a religious trance during the rituals. This is an example of the difference between the way the Invisible College reprograms people's minds and the way the Theocrats do. The Invisible College continually plants information in the subconscious that says,
This is almost the opposite of the Theocrats' programming that takes place during Fundamentalist Christian services. They want worshippers to say "Thy will be done," and submit completely to the telepathic influences they receive, as well as to obey religious doctrine to the letter. The method of the Invisible College tends eventually to liberate initiates from the influence of religious mind control: the more people are affected by the reprogramming process, the less motivation they have to enter the religious trance, which involves voluntarily allowing the conscious will to lose control. The more people become accustomed to making decisions rationally and forming an accurate appraisal of their self-worth, the less likely they are to fall into a religious trance during rituals. When individuals in one of the old lodges reached this stage of being in a normal state of consciousness during the rituals most of the time, they automatically progressed to one of the "higher" degrees and assumed one of the numerous positions of subordinate leadership. Initiates on this level were expected to study the lodge's traditions, mythology, and doctrine intensely on a strictly intellectual level. This wasn't done at rituals that employed the religious trance, but through ordinary reading and tutorial study, exactly as if the initiates were learning history or mathematics. This is the level that tried to replace Christian faith with "worship of the Goddess of Reason," and then went into a philosophy that would be called "scientific materialism" and "rational humanism" today. This middle level of initiation was intended to produce a personality type similar to one very common in American society today - the millions of people who are not very much interested in spiritual matters of any kind, but are chiefly concerned with their personal survival and happiness here on Earth. Some of them call themselves atheists or agnostics, but just as many profess nominal belief in Christianity or some other religious or occult system. However, regardless of what they say they believe, spirituality has very little emotional impact on their daily life. People like this are still either a slight majority or a very large minority in American society. When they started this process several centuries ago, the influence of Theocratic religion was still so strong that it was easier to turn people into atheists or agnostics than to teach them directly about spiritual reality. People were taught to relate positively to the material world, and to the advanced civilization that was beginning to develop around them, as more than just "a vale of tears to pass through on the way to Heaven." The Invisible College wanted the relationship between people and their earthly environment to become more important than their relationship with "God" and religion. The Invisible College had to proceed step by step, using the methods of behavioral psychology, which are based on knowledge of how the human mind is actually programmed. States of consciousness (religious trances) and environmental reinforcement are the most important factors to consider here. First, they took people who had been raised within Theocratic religion and had been entering the religious trance during church services all their lives. They manipulated them into attending the rituals of the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges. These rituals also employed the religious trance and, on the lower levels of initiation, taught a doctrine that was not so alien to the average lodge member's existing Christian beliefs that it broke the trance. During these rituals, lodge members were gradually reprogrammed to become more rational in their thinking and more materialistic in their emotional goals for their lives. The social environment of the lodge increased their self-esteem, so they no longer thought of themselves as "miserable sinners in need of salvation" but as "free men under God," and eventually as "free members of a brotherhood of equals." Lodge members received positive reinforcement through religious mind control during lodge rituals. This made the members feel good while they learned various philosophical principles quite different from those at the core of Fundamentalist Christianity even though phrased in many of the same terms. One very important thing to realize here is that the basic ethical philosophy of the eighteenth-century Freemasons was very, very similar to the moral codes of the various Theocratic Christian sects of the day. At least ninety-five percent of the individual precepts were the same. In fact, there is only one fundamental difference between the two codes of conduct, which affects a small number of separate ethical precepts. Christian doctrine says,
By contrast, the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment says,
These statements are diametrically opposed in theory, but in the routine circumstances of life in a reasonably stable society, they produce behavior that is almost identical. In other words, both the Christian and the Freemason valued a work ethic, tried to avoid harmful excesses of all kinds, etc. The difference is not in what people did in the way of detailed, routine ethical behavior, but in the long-term effects that the two radically different philosophical codes had on total personality development. The Christian code took people deeper into bondage to the Theocrats; the Masonic code liberated them from that bondage without substituting any other master for "God." What's most important here is that the Masonic initiates were taught to receive increasing amounts of positive reinforcement from their material and social environment, and decreasing amounts from religious mind control. The Invisible College was using the significant increase in the quality of individual life resulting from technological advances to extinguish the influence of religious mind control over people's emotional life and personality development. Eventually, a great many members of the lodges became immune to religious mind control and remained in a normal state of waking consciousness during the rituals. More important, they taught these same principles to their children of both genders, so the all-male lodges eventually changed the average personality structure of the whole society. The idea that people can significantly improve the quality of life on Earth by their own efforts is one of the most important strategies that the Invisible College uses in fighting Theocracy. Its strongest point is that they don't need to use subconscious emotional manipulation or intellectual persuasion to get people to accept it. Just living and working within a modern technological society proves the basic validity of a humanistic philosophy by direct environmental conditioning. On the conscious level, people may think about the problems modern society has not yet solved and yearn for "the good old days"; but on a deeper level, they know they are as well off, on the average, as human beings on this planet have ever been. Theocratic propaganda and religious mind control have great difficulty extinguishing this intuitive feeling, because it's caused by environmental conditioning rooted in physical reality. So the disembodied spirits in the Invisible College telepathically manipulated the subconscious minds of leaders in the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges to design their rituals and doctrines in certain ways. Many of the individual elements of these rituals and doctrines were drawn from the writings and practices of previous occult groups, including some that were quite advanced in both spiritual knowledge and psychic training techniques. But the vast majority of the men who actually incorporated these elements into Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had only the vaguest idea of what they were doing. They read various occult works, talked to members of many different occult organizations, and incorporated those ideas that "felt right" into the lodges they were founding or reorganizing. Of course, it was the Invisible College's subconscious telepathic influence that guided this process. Not that the process was without conscious human conspiracy. There were many different conscious conspiracies of advanced occultists, in the seventeenth century and later, who believed they were manipulating the development of the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges that were gradually beginning to have a major influence on the progress of Western society toward what we now call modern civilization. Practically every advanced occultist in Europe joined one or more of these lodges at this time. And once they'd joined, they tried to teach their particular school of knowledge to their lodge-brothers and to influence the development of the lodge's doctrines and rituals to conform to their particular preconceptions. These occultists included Cabbalists, Gnostics, Alchemists, Hermetics; influences from all these spiritual systems are still visible today in the Masonic and Rosicrucian doctrines. There are spiritual knowledge and psychic-training techniques brought from China and India by the Islamic Sufi sect and taught to the medieval Knights Templar. There's knowledge inherited from the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and Babylonians, taught to the Masons and Rosicrucians by Cabbalists, Gnostics, and Astrologers. One very important source of psychic training techniques came from the ancient Greeks by way of the medieval Alchemists: a system of homosexual sex magic. This is one reason why so many high-level occult lodges were exclusively male for so long: they knew homosexual sex magic techniques but not heterosexual ones. There has always been some heterosexual sex magic in the Western occult tradition as well, from both Middle Eastern and European Pagan sources, but it's only been in the last century or so, after direct contact was established with the Orient, that the two began to become equally common. Many of the occultists had some conscious knowledge of what the Invisible College was doing, and were actively cooperating. Unfortunately, some of them actively opposed the Invisible College by trying to turn their lodge into a Theocratic Cult. Possessing advanced occult knowledge doesn't automatically make a person morally virtuous. Even today, some of the advanced occult lodges derived from the Masonic-Rosicrucian tradition are "Black Lodges" (lodges under the control of the Theocrats). It's extremely important to realize that Theocratic enslavement and psychic vampirism are not things that happen only to disembodied spirits after death. Living people can do virtually the same things to other living people. Black magicians can't literally devour other people's souls the way the disembodied Theocrats do to other spirits, but they can still deprive people of all free will and self-esteem, and eventually drive them into insanity or suicide. This can be done in a Christian context, as Jim Jones did with the People's Temple, or in the context of almost any other religious or occult group. Many of the modern cults are also examples of this Theocracy-on-Earth: the Moonies, the Rajneesh Cult, etc. However, such groups aren't always openly identified as religious or occult organizations. The Symbionese Liberation Army was such a group, and so was the Manson Family. So are many terrorist groups, especially those in the service of Islamic Fundamentalists. A number of present-day rock groups are actually bands of living Theocrats, enslaving their fans and draining energy from them at concerts. This last type of living Theocrat is especially dangerous right now, because such people can influence a large number of people who listen to their music on records or over the radio, using electronic mind control techniques that we will describe later. One of the worst things about this movement is that some of these people have made the breakthrough. They know what they are doing, and they still do it. In other words, a person can find out the truth about Theocracy and say,
This attitude is becoming more and more common as more people make the breakthrough and become consciously aware of the existence of Theocracy. This is another main reason for having written this book: to warn potential victims of this new type of mind control and teach them how to avoid it. More will be said about this fifth stage of Theocracy later. It is important to remember that people have been making the breakthrough for centuries, in the sense of realizing that the "gods" behind many religious groups are simply the spirits of ordinary deceased human beings playing politics and trying to remain in positions of power on the astral plane for long periods of time. But this knowledge, in itself, doesn't automatically make people hostile to Theocracy. Many advanced occultists have made a fatal error in not realizing that Theocracy is what you might call a disease or abnormal state. Remaining on the astral plane for long periods of time and absorbing vital energy from other spirits is not a natural or healthy condition for a human spirit. All Theocrats eventually become degenerate and insane. The Invisible College has always told this to anyone capable of holding conscious telepathic conversations with them, but they haven't always been believed. The illusion of achieving immortality for the ego is a very powerful corrupting influence. You can see why many occultists wouldn't want to listen. The quality and completeness of a person's breakthrough knowledge are very important. Until very recently, communicating many of the individual details that constitute the breakthrough has been extremely difficult. It is much harder to understand Theocracy without the background of many terms and concepts from recent scientific discoveries: computer science, behavioral psychology, modern physics, etc.
The presence of the lodges in Western society increased the number of advanced occultists enormously, because they served as a visible training ground for people who otherwise might never have had access to psychic training and spiritual knowledge outside organized religion. The rituals and jargon of the lodges were secret, but everyone knew approximately what went on inside them - or at least, anyone with the potential to become an advanced occultist could guess. This meant that fewer people who had possessed occult training in a past life would spend a "wasted" incarnation in which they had no access to formal training.
The War in Heaven is not a conflict between absolutes of good and evil. It is completely a matter of politics, and neither side is completely good or bad. But the members of the Invisible College are convinced that theirs is better than the side of the Theocrats by any reasonable ethical standard. Summing up, the Age of Reason was a major step in the progress of Western civilization and a significant victory for the Invisible College over the Theocrats in the War in Heaven. During the period from about 1700 to the 1960s, there was just as much improvement in the average level of individual human consciousness as there was in physical technology, scientific knowledge, and the design of social and political institutions. The goal was to break the hold of religious mind control over the majority of people in the First World, and it has been accomplished reasonably well. Large numbers of people are still enslaved to Theocratic religion, of course, but such belief systems no longer dominate the collective consciousness of the society to the extent they once did. Today, even the majority of people in the advanced Western countries who consider themselves devout religious believers actually put reason above faith, and humanistic concerns before blind obedience to traditional doctrine. This was accomplished through the use of the quasi-religious rituals of the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges. In other words, a form of religious mind control was used. And even the most advanced magical lodges based on the Masonic/Rosicrucian tradition still train their members with rituals that employ the religious trance. But now the word is being spread telepathically that the Age of Reason is ending and a new age is beginning. Its starting point is another major revolution in consciousness, as will be discussed next.
A Revolution in ConsciousnessThe 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 the Invisible College suddenly stopped opposing the anti-alcohol movement that Theocratic Fundamentalists had been leading for decades. In other words, they decided,
And this plan worked. Government policy and general opinion in this society now treat 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. Yet while Western society deals with the alcohol problem in a reasonably sensible and sophisticated manner, it fails to apply the knowledge learned from the "noble experiment" to psychoactive drugs other than alcohol. This is 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. Notice that most of the people who suffered "acid freakouts" during the Sixties weren't permanently damaged by them. Consider also that many 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. The Invisible College understood and expected this. It was a significant factor in their decision to take the risk of starting the Psychedelics Movement. Yet there were casualties. The Invisible College admits that and is sorry about it. However, they point out once again that a war is being fought and it's our freedom, that of the entire human race, that's at stake. What was the Invisible College trying to accomplish and did it succeed? The answer to the second question is, "Yes, fairly well. Better than our expectations." As to the first question, they explain that repeated use of LSD over several years makes fundamental changes in people's mental programming. They used LSD plus direct telepathic conditioning techniques to significantly reprogram the minds of several million Americans. They also used environmental conditioning through the general emotional climate of the Sixties counterculture itself, as expressed in its art, music, slogans, etc. They created that emotional atmosphere 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. The Invisible College was trying to push them in "the right direction," and advocating widespread use of the powerful psychedelics was their principal means of doing so. How did the reprogramming that the Invisible College carried out through the Sixties counterculture and psychedelics movement compare in effectiveness with that accomplished through religious mind control by Theocratic religious groups? 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. They 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 used by the Invisible College in the Sixties; but this is a subject to be discussed later. The Invisible College let the Sixties Movement stop when they had reached the limit of what could be programmed through the use of psychedelics. 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 the Invisible College was 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, then they did more good than harm. It generally made people more socially and politically liberal. If they had 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.
The Aquarian AgeThe Invisible College had nothing to do with putting the term "Aquarian Age" into common use. However, once large numbers of people started using it entirely on their own, they invented their own mythology around the rudiments of the Aquarian Age story and have been transmitting it telepathically into the subconscious minds of many different people. It now appears in messages channeled to the New Agers, in popular song lyrics, and many different places in fiction and poetry. First, here's the basic astrological myth about the Aquarian Age. The Age just ending was called the Piscean Age, after the constellation of Pisces, the Fishes. It's an appropriate name, because this was the Age of Christianity, which has the fish as one of its symbols because in the Greek that the early Christians spoke, the word for "fish" is also an acronym for the phrase,
And the Age just beginning is called the Aquarian Age after the constellation of Aquarius, which represents a human being pouring water out of a jar. Now, here's the Invisible College's supplemental mythology about the Aquarian Age, which centers around the concept of "water." In this context, Water symbolizes spiritual power. During the Piscean Age, the human race on Earth resembled an enormous school of fish: they were utterly dependent on the water, and had very little control over it. They simply lived in it and hoped to survive. The New Age symbol is the human being taking control of the water that represents spiritual power. However, if you take a closer look at the astronomical mythology represented by the constellations, you'll see that the water poured out by the Water Carrier is the source of the great celestial river, the constellation Eridanus that runs from the celestial equator far down in the southern sky. This huge outpouring of spiritual power represents several things to be covered later in the book: the apocalyptic events that will free the human race on this planet from Theocracy, and the birth of new gods. Griffith mentions that he needs details like this for this book, even when not directly connected to the point being discussed, because they demonstrate that there's a an external creative intelligence behind many of the intuitive flashes that inspire people to create modern mythologies. The guides respond with another example concerning several modern UFO researchers who received telepathic communications containing words in an unknown language from sources that identified themselves as "space people." Occultists later identified the words as belonging to the "Enochian" language. Over three hundred years ago, the English occultist John Dee received a long series of channeled messages in this language, and occultists still study it today. The reason the Invisible College telepathically transmitted Enochian words like "affa" - meaning, very appropriately, "nothing" - to the UFOlogists was to steer their thinking in a certain direction. The Invisible College knew that if they published these words or repeated them very much, someone with occult knowledge would tell them where they came from. It was just another way of supplying evidence that there is a connection between what modern UFOlogists call telepathic contact with space people, and the mediumistic communication with spirits that occultists have been practicing throughout history. Even with evidence like this to guide them, most of the UFOlogists remain materialists. The Invisible College keeps telling them,
They keep telling them this whenever they are in telepathic contact, and the UFOlogists keep right on theorizing about interstellar space travel and other dimensions. The book's discussion next turns to the so-called "Sirius Connection." This was a complicated ploy of exactly the same type as the one just mentioned. They started sending telepathic messages like "Sirius is very important" when they found out that news of the explicit astronomical knowledge about the invisible companion of Sirius in the Sudanese Dogon Tribe's mythology was about to surface. In the early Seventies, when the Invisible College started sending such messages, the same information that later appeared in The Sirius Mystery was already known to certain anthropologists and members of the occult and UFO communities, especially French-speaking ones. This information is extremely impressive, because it contains the period of revolution of the companion around the larger star and the fact that this companion star is composed of super-dense matter. The information is too detailed to be easily accounted for by coincidence, and there is evidence that the Dogon possessed the information before it was discovered by Western scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Dogon got the information centuries ago. They may or may not have gotten it second-hand from the ancient Egyptians, but they could have. This and many other pieces of advanced astronomical and astrophysical information have been in circulation among free spirits for thousands of years. Griffith asks if the Invisible College sent out telepathic messages about Sirius to get the attention of "materialists" like Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, and various UFOlogists, knowing they'd encounter the information quite soon... since he presumes the Invisible College knew in advance that The Sirius Mystery was being written. They reply that it's more complicated than that. If they hadn't started the telepathic communications, several of these people would have accepted the information about Sirius and the Dogon as hard proof of physical visitations to Earth by Ancient Astronauts. As it was, the Invisible College managed to complicate the issue in their minds, and may have kept them from seriously misleading the significant number of people who regard their opinions as authoritative. For example, Wilson made a connection between the modern Sirius Mystery and the "Great star" legends of the Masons, Rosicrucians, and various occult groups. The "Great Star" is also the "Great Secret": a version of the truth about Theocracy. This same symbolism is also being used by a number of different factions of spirits and living people involved in the psychic warfare to be described later in the book. Some of them call themselves "cats" or "lions" and refer to certain other types of spirits as "dogs" or "Sirians." These terms refer to different details of the physiology of the astral soul, and there are spirits of each type in the service of both the Theocrats and the Invisible College. The remainder of this section is a slightly-edited transcript from the book, of a dialog between Griffith and the Invisible College. Recall that War in Heaven was published in 1988.
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