Q. Exactly how does
religious mind control work?
A. It involves what modern psychologists call "operant
conditioning": altering behavior and mental programming by positive
and negative reinforcement on the physical and sensory level. The
Theocrats strengthen this conditioning on the physical level by
transmitting ideas and emotions directly into people's subconscious
minds by telepathy.
Religious mind-control techniques are easier to
understand if you realize that the Theocrats use people's own
psychic powers to control other members of the congregation.
Q. I've attended enough religious services of many different kinds
to know that they frequently put believers into an altered state of
consciousness and that they often generate quite a bit of
psychic
power. Is this what you're talking about?
A. The key to the whole religious mind-control technique is putting
people into a state of consciousness best called the "religious
trance." It is essentially a mild hypnotic trance in which the
conscious will is awake but passive, as opposed to deep trances, in
which it is completely inactive. People in a religious trance are
completely aware of what is going on around them, and are recording
these events in their memories exactly as they would in a normal
waking state.
They are also capable of thinking and acting
voluntarily, but can only do so within certain very definite limits
without breaking out of the religious trance and assuming normal
consciousness.
Q. How do people enter the religious trance?
A. People fall into a state very similar to the religious trance
when they read, listen to music, watch television or a movie, listen
intently to a lecture or radio broadcast, etc. The passive state
that the will assumes during these activities is often called
identification with the sensory intake, as in "reader
identification" or "audience identification." Identifying with what
is being read, seen, or heard, actually means accepting the sensory
intake uncreatively and uncritically on both the intellectual and
emotional levels.
It also means agreeing with the ideas being
presented and feeling the same emotions being described in the song,
story, play, etc.
Q. It's fairly common to describe someone who's concentrating
intently on reading, listening to music, or watching television, as
"hypnotized." You're saying that this is literally true?
A. Yes, but remember, it's a rather light trance. If the material
being presented begins to contradict the person's existing opinions
or knowledge, identification breaks down. He or she assumes full
normal consciousness and thinks, "I don't agree with this," or "I
don't understand this," or "This is wrong." However, identification
with sensory input can make people accept things they would reject
if they were fully conscious, as long as the input isn't
controversial or unfamiliar enough to break their concentration.
Identification with sensory input is just the first step in entering
the religious trance state. Once the conscious will becomes passive,
the flow of character, assuming a level closer to that during sleep
than that during normal wakefulness. In a person fully trained to
enter the religious trance, electrical activity in the physical
nervous system becomes stable at exactly the right level to allow an
equal flow of energy into and out of the astral soul. This allows
the astral will to awaken partially, and creates a direct, two-way
link between the physical mind and the astral mind.
As long as the religious trance lasts, information can pass
reasonably freely between the physical mind and the astral mind and
vice versa. Also, the physical mind can receive impressions from the
psychic senses of the astral soul more or less directly.
Q. How does this compare to the trance state I'm in to receive this
communication? Is it the same?
A. No. You are in a "psychic trance," which is not the same as a
"religious trance." It's a much less passive state of consciousness,
and involves much larger flows of energy into and out of the astral
soul. The psychic trance is controlled by both the physical will and
the astral will acting in concert. The religious trance is
controlled by outside sensory input into both the physical and
astral minds. The psychic trance is an active state of consciousness
that leaves you free to ask questions and make comments using your
full creative powers.
The religious trance is a passive state used
to control and brainwash people.
The purpose of a psychic trance is for an individual to take
conscious control of his/her psychic powers and use them to receive
messages by telepathy or perform some other psychic working. What
happens during the religious trance is not quite the same. Once
people are completely in the religious trance, they are able to
receive telepathic messages from everyone around them and from any
disembodied spirits present; but the process is not nearly as
conscious as what you're doing right now in a psychic trance.
When religious believers say they "feel the presence of God" at
church services, they are referring to telepathic communication
without even realizing it. Since the individual will is passive
during the religious trance, the members of a religious congregation
cannot use their psychic powers deliberately, under conscious
control, as people in a psychic trance do. They simply identify with
what is sent to them, both intellectually and emotionally. Most of
the telepathic intake received by an individual at a religious
service comes from other members of the congregation; this is
usually a more powerful influence than anything sent by spirits.
The actual religious mind-control process, the technique that
provides telepathic emotional reinforcement to help program people's
minds, is a sort of "psychic chain-reaction" that occurs while a
group of people are in the religious trance together. In other
words, the telepathic messages sent out by every member of the
congregation influence the emotions and thinking of every other
member, like a box of matches catching fire or an atomic chain
reaction.
This process creates a "religious group mind": the telepathic
transmissions of the entire congregation mutually reinforce one
another until everyone present is thinking and feeling the same
thing very, very strongly. People in such a state can feel extremely
strong emotions, as strong as those that accompany the most powerful
physical sensations such as sexual orgasm or extreme pain.
But this
is done without much sensory stimulation - usually just preaching,
hymn singing, or
praying - because the reinforcement is coming from
the psychic chain-reaction.
Q. I've heard this described as "religious ecstasy," but thought it
was caused mostly by the sensory stimulation of the ritual itself
combined with people's own desires to be deeply moved emotionally. I
knew that psychic activity often occurred simultaneously, but never
realized it was the key motivating factor for the whole thing.
A. The most important thing about this state of group religious
ecstasy is that it generates large amounts of psychic energy. Part
of that energy may be directly absorbed by any Theocratic spirits
present, but most of it is diverted back into the physical minds of
the members of the congregation to indoctrinate them with whatever
the Theocrats want them to believe or feel or do.
This is the
essence of religious mind control.
In other words, a Theocratic spirit sends a telepathic message into
the minds of people in such a state of religious ecstasy, and they
generate powerful surges of telepathically transmitted emotion that
program them to believe and act on the messages they receive. For
example, the idea "Abortion is murder" might generate powerful
feelings of hate, whereas "All Christians shall be as brethren"
might generate feelings of familial love among all the members of
the congregation.
Within certain limitations, this is an extremely powerful method for
controlling people's motivations and future behavior. One of its
worst features is that the people being controlled enjoy it more
than anything else in life. You might call it the ultimate "high."
And it's more addictive than any chemical drug.
Q. This means that the Jesus Freaks in the Sixties were speaking
quite literally when they talked about "getting high on Jesus." At
first thought, it is rather ironic that the Fundamentalists, who say
they hate recreational drugs so much, are literally "Jesus junkies."
But once the thought sinks in, it's really tragic, like everything
else I've heard so far about Theocracy.
A. Yes. And the Theocrats deliberately make the religious
mind-control process as addictive as possible to enslave believers.
The whole vicious circle of sin, guilt, and forgiveness was
deliberately designed to create a cycle of addiction that is almost
impossible to break.
Q. The religious mind-control process resembles some of the direct
electronic mind control described in anti-utopian fiction. George
0rwell exaggerated when he thought the state described in his novel
1984 would arise out of modern Democracy and Socialism, but he
missed something much more important. His totalitarian state with
its mind-control has always existed. It's as close as your local
Fundamentalist church.
A. That's one of the most important things we're trying to tell you.
People have always been "property" and "cattle" just as
Charles Fort
speculated, but it's not on the physical level.
What has been
enslaved is the mind during life and the soul after death.
Q. This is what
Lovecraft
was really hinting at in his
Cthulhu
mythos, isn't it? And it also explains Shaver's Deros and hundreds
of other references in fiction and serious speculation.
A. Very few of the people who wrote these references knew much about
Theocracy as we're describing it here. All that really happened is
that we were able to transmit a few words or some visual images to
them telepathically.
Sometimes these were received in conscious
"flashes" of vision or inspiration; but more often they sank
directly into the subconscious, and were later called up and
considered original creations of the imagination.
Q. One example that comes to mind is the material about the
Devil
eating souls in
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. He must have
picked up a glimpse of the truth about Theocracy, but he was so
deeply brainwashed that it didn't liberate him. His conscious
intellect just twisted the information around to support his
Christian belief system.
Let's get back to the cycle of sin and forgiveness. I consider this
one of the weakest points of Christian doctrine, because it seems to
grant forgiveness without doing anything concrete to punish "sin."
Even the token penance of saying prayers, etc., that Catholic
priests hand out during confession doesn't seem like a realistic
form of negative reinforcement to extinguish unwanted behavior
patterns.
A. This is quite true. The last thing the Theocrats want is for
religious believers to stop sinning. That is why they made sexual
pleasure a sin, and why Christianity and most other organized
religions teach the obvious fallacy that women are inferior to men.
Q. In other words, when the Theocrats made up religious doctrine,
they included deliberate lies in it so that people would never be
able to be completely virtuous.
A. No. It's worse than that. Fallible human beings can never be
completely virtuous in the sense of being able to obey the absolute
letter of any rigid ethical code. However, falling short of
perfection in obeying most ethical codes provides reinforcement for
modifying behavior in positive ways: the more people are punished
for disobedience or rewarded for obedience, the closer their average
behavior gets to the code.
The "better" they behave, the more
positive reinforcement and less negative reinforcement they get.
Even though they never reach perfection, they tend to feel the code
is constructive because progress is rewarded and retrogression is
punished.
Q. This is easy enough to understand, but how does it apply to a
moral code that says sex is sinful?
A. That's the point we're trying to make. This kind of logic doesn't
apply to such a code. Sexual desire originates on the biochemical
level and cannot be extinguished by manipulating the programming of
the mind. People can be conditioned to hate and fear their sexual
feelings and to avoid sexual behavior, but this doesn't stop the
feelings themselves. They don't originate in the mind, so they can't
be gotten rid of no matter how the mind is reprogrammed.
In this context, we are defining "mind" as "The information stored
in the brain, plus the software for retrieving and processing that
information." Do you now understand the full magnitude of the
problem that a completely false item of religious doctrine causes
people? It's an inherently frustrating situation. The subjugation of
women makes life much less pleasant for both genders. It turns women
into slaves, forever unable to live full lives. And it does just as
much harm to men when it turns them into oppressors and exploiters.
This creates a no-win situation, because Fundamentalists still
receive negative reinforcement even if they obey their moral code
perfectly. For example, trying to live up to Christian ideals of
chastity is always going to create guilt feelings and internal
conflict, because believing that sexual feelings are wrong does not
extinguish them, even though it might repress or sublimate them.
And
living within a sexist family structure always creates interpersonal
conflicts.
Q. I see now why you say this process is similar to drug addiction.
The Fundamentalist moral code contains elements that can't help
making people feel frustrated or guilty, which creates an artificial
need for "divine forgiveness of sins."
A. There's a significant difference between a humanistic ethical
code and the moral codes of Theocratic religion. The former are
designed to meet people's needs, the latter to meet the Theocrats'
needs. Even though most humanistic ethical codes are too idealistic
to follow rigidly, "human nature" itself regulates reinforcement in
response to them in ways that prevent excessive guilt and
frustration.
In other words, committing murder or assault is severely punished,
cursing and screaming at people less so, but the social environment
of most societies does not punish people for merely feeling anger
but not expressing it in word or deed. However, the negative
emotions themselves are a form of negative reinforcement. Notice
that this process is self-limiting: serious offenses receive severe
punishment, whereas minor ones receive light punishment. This is not
true of violations of religious morality based on absolutes.
You and your readers should also be constantly aware that
the
Theocrats do not confine their activities to religion and occultism,
but corrupt and control human beings through all activities that
produce certain states of altered consciousness.
For example, when
people use the electronic media for passive recreational purposes -
listening to popular music over the radio or on recordings, watching
televised sports events and game shows, and playing the simpler
computer games - they often enter a trance state that renders them
vulnerable to telepathic mind-control by Theocratic spirits.
We will
discuss this electronic mind control in a later chapter; we must
first give more background information about the nature of spiritual
beings and psychic powers in general.