Part One
A Breakthrough in Spiritual Revolution
Chapter 1:
The Search for Spiritual Reality
Part One is called "A Breakthrough in Spiritual Consciousness"
because it summarizes the evolution of my personal beliefs about the
nature of spiritual reality over a period of about twenty years,
from the Sixties up until 1983, when I made the breakthrough that
allowed me to receive and understand the channeled messages
presented in Parts Two and Three of War in Heaven.
I made this
breakthrough not by learning facts about spiritual phenomena on the
intellectual level, but by achieving a state of awareness and
open-mindedness that enabled me to receive what my spirit guides
were actually trying to communicate to me, rather than what my
prejudiced and brainwashed conscious mind wanted to hear.
It may be difficult for the majority of people who read this book to
identify with the viewpoint from which I'm writing it. My psychic
experiences, beginning with my earliest memories from childhood, are
just as real and important to me as my experiences in the physical
world. I've been reading minds, communicating with spiritual beings,
and practicing psychic healing literally all my life.
I believe in
these things on exactly the same level as I believe in my ability to
speak the English language, so it's not easy for me to communicate
with people who do not instinctively realize that such things are
real.
Whenever I can, I give accounts of my personal psychic experiences
to explain why I formed particular spiritual beliefs. Some readers
of the preliminary version of this book, published in 1987 under the
title of Spiritual Revolution, dismissed these narratives as "lies
and garbage."
Others said things like,
"It has the ring of truth to
it, even though it contradicts almost every other spiritual book
I've ever read."
You'll just to have to make up your own mind. All
I'll say at this point is that War in Heaven contains no deliberate
lies, and I'm neither smart enough nor crazy enough to have
hallucinated it all.
I also want to make it clear that I really don't care if readers say
they accept or reject the theories in this book. My purpose is not
to gain followers for a narrow ideology, but to assist certain
people in making the same breakthrough I made If you are one of
these people, you may not even know it until long after you've
finished the book and the ideas in it have penetrated deep into your
subconscious.
However, I will also offer evidence to convince the reader's
conscious intellect that what I'm saying is scientifically true,
whenever I can do so without interfering with my primary purpose,
which is to present an extremely complex and revolutionary theory
about spirituality.
Let me start by explaining why I believe that
there is sufficient empirical evidence to convince any truly
open-minded person that telepathy, spirit-communication,
reincarnation, and many other psychic and spiritual phenomena
actually exist.
Colin Wilson, one of the most rational and pragmatic
of the twentieth-century philosophers, has come to a similar
conclusion, as shown by the following excerpt from his book
The
Occult (1971):
"It was not until two years ago, when I began the systematic
research for this book, that I realized the remarkable consistency
of the evidence for such matters as life after death,
out-of-the-body experiences (astral projection), reincarnation.
In a
basic sense, my attitude remains unchanged; I still regard
philosophy - the pursuit of reality through intuition aided by
intellect - as being more relevant, more important, than questions
of "the occult."
But the weighing of the evidence, in this
unsympathetic frame of mind, has convinced me that the basic claims
of "occultism" are true. It seems to me that the reality of life
after death has been established beyond all reasonable doubt.
I
sympathize with the philosophers and scientists who regard it as
emotional nonsense, because I am temperamentally on their side; but
I think they are closing their eyes to evidence that would convince
them if it concerned the mating habits of albino rats or the
behavior of alpha particles."
Let's use the evidence in support of reincarnation as a starting
point.
There are thousands of past-life memory cases on record,
described in hundreds of different books. Some of them are
undoubtedly hoaxes or have explanations other than reincarnation,
but many more seem to have been proven valid with physical evidence.
For example, young children have demonstrated the ability to speak a
foreign language that their parents are sure they have never even
heard in their present lifetime.
Other subjects traveled to places
where they said they had lived during a previous life, described
objects they had hidden, and then found them.
Colin Wilson's The Case for Reincarnation (1987) presents an
impressive amount of this type of evidence, and Reincarnation: A New
Horizon in Science, Religion, and Society (1984), edited by Sylvia
Cranston and Carey Williams, presents even more. In my opinion,
these two books, all by themselves, contain sufficient empirical
evidence to prove the validity of reincarnation beyond reasonable
doubt to anyone with a truly open mind.
On the basis of this kind of
published evidence alone, and leaving my personal past-life memories
out of it, I am as ready to argue with anyone who denies that
reincarnation is a scientifically proven fact as I am to dispute an
assertion that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Although I've never talked to anyone who was able to verify his or
her past-life memories with hard physical evidence comparable to
that described in the books, my conversations on this subject with
hundreds of different people have still yielded some valuable
information. I've talked to dozens whose past-life memory accounts
seem historically accurate.
Without exception, these people said
they had lived before in the quite recent past, and had possessed
conscious control over their psychic abilities. Some said they had
been American Indians with shamanic training; several had been
Hindus skilled in Yoga; and others recounted past lives as Chinese
or Japanese students of the martial arts.
The majority, however, had
been ordinary Americans with low-level occult training in the Rosicrucians, the Theosophists, the Spiritualist movement, etc.
The more I talked to some of these people, the more evidence I found
that their past-life memories were genuine. They had learned
difficult mechanical skills, complicated intellectual knowledge, or
even a whole foreign language, with an ease that mystified their
teachers.
Some of them also reported being criticized by their
instructors for instinctively doing things in a manner that is now
considered obsolete, but was standard practice fifty or seventy
years ago. No single case of this type is conclusive proof of
reincarnation by itself, but hearing dozens of such accounts
face-to-face is very impressive.
I also once had a psychic experience that I feel is excellent
first-hand evidence for reincarnation. It is especially valuable
because it does not involve past-life memories like most of the
other evidence, but direct psychic observation of the reincarnation
process.
Here is how I described it to one of my correspondents:
"I'll tell you why I personally believe in reincarnation absolutely
and completely. I have ‘seen' it happen. I have stood by the crib of
a newborn baby and psychically observed high-level spirit guides
approach and assist a soul in entering the infant's body.
Before, I
got the same vibes I get from an ape in the zoo, after, the vibes of
a human baby. It was a very clear-cut psychic experience, and
similar to a more common, but sadder, experience you may have had
yourselves: being at the bedside of a dying person and psychically
perceiving the soul depart from the body.
That's the real reason I
believe in reincarnation so strongly, and all the inferential
evidence in books is pale beside it."
Ironically, my own past-life memories aren't of much use in
providing proof of reincarnation.
They are extremely vivid and occur
to me frequently, both in dreams and as flashes of memory when I'm
awake; but there is no way to verify them with factual evidence,
because they are not memories of a past life on Earth. The people in
them, including me, are slightly different anatomically from Earth
people, and the setting seems to be an advanced technological
society much different from anything I've ever seen described in
science fiction.
The general impression is that the society lives underground or on a
space station of some kind, not on the surface of a planet. The
people seem to live entirely indoors in an endless series of
inter-connecting rooms, and the "doors" connecting them may be
teleportation devices.
There are almost no artifacts of any kind
visible in most of the scenes, not even furniture: people just sit
or recline in mid-air. Maybe it's done with anti-gravity devices.
All of the machines seem to be hidden away, and there are no
physical control panels. Apparently, everyone is hooked up
telepathically to an elaborate computer system, and people operate
the equipment just by thinking. However, when someone does this,
images of machines and control panels seem to appear in mid-air.
I still have vivid memories of dreaming about such things when I was
only three or four years old.
When I put the childish
picture-memories and emotions into adult words, they go something
like this:
"I dreamed that I was turning into a machine. No, not a
mechanical man. I was part of a big machine, like a factory, and it
kept getting bigger and bigger, and I knew I was supposed to control
it with my thoughts, but I just didn't know the right things to
think."
These flashes of memory have been very important to me all
of my life, because they often contain instructions for controlling
and using my psychic powers or other mental faculties that I have
trouble accessing with my conscious mind alone.
They are probably
the single most significant factor that helped prepare me for the
breakthrough in spiritual consciousness that led to the writing of
this book.
I've talked to a number of people who also seem to remember past
lives on other worlds, and read books on the subject by Brad
Steiger, Ruth Montgomery, and others.
Here's what George C. Andrews
had to say about it in Extra-Terrestrials Among Us (1986):
"The concept of reincarnation implies a latent ability to regress
back to former lives, and thus to restore the long-dormant far
memory of experience and information accumulated during previous
incarnations to conscious awareness.
A substantial number of those
who have worked on activating this latent ability find that their
past lives include incarnations as extra-terrestrials.
This occurs
so persistently that it has become a commonly accepted belief among
those engaged in such work that extra-terrestrials from many
different points of origin have incarnated on Earth during this
crucial all-or-nothing climax of human history.
Some of those who
remember previous existences as extraterrestrials also become aware
of specific missions they were born to carry out during the present
terrestrial incarnation."
Here's a summary of my beliefs about reincarnation prior to my
breakthrough in 1983.
First, most of the well-documented, really
plausible past-life memory accounts seem to involve a previous life
that ended fifty years or less before the person's present
incarnation. Some people claim they have lived dozens or hundreds of
lives over many centuries; but I've never seen an account of this
type that contained solid supporting evidence, such as intimate
knowledge of the language spoken during the past life.
My conclusion
from the available evidence about reincarnation was that very few
people remember more than the last of their past lives in enough
detail to be useful, and that spirits don't stay on the astral plane
for more than a few decades between earthly lives.
Second, the evidence also suggested that only people who were
practicing psychics in their last incarnation seem to have vivid,
conscious past-life memories in this one. Practically every
well-documented account of a past life that I've seen includes
descriptions of conscious psychic activity: telepathy, mediumship,
prophetic visions, faith healing, divination, etc. The psychic
activities may have been the result of deliberate training, or they
may have been spontaneous, but they are always there.
Third, reincarnation may not be as common as most reincarnationists
assume. The Eastern religions teach that all human beings
reincarnate after death except a few of the most spiritually
advanced, which pass to a higher plane of existence. Most Westerners
who believe in reincarnation at all have also accepted the idea that
it is a universal phenomenon.
In fact, I used to believe this idea myself, and sometimes used it
in arguments with Christians.
They would say,
"You only live once,
and then you are judged and consigned to Heaven or Hell for
eternity." I would reply, "No, we all live over and over again
through reincarnation.
When the soul reaches a high enough state of
development, it may pass to a higher plane, but everyone else just
keeps living life after life on Earth. This is a lot fairer than the
system you're describing, because people always get a second
chance."
However, the more I learned about reincarnation as described in the
strongest past-life memory accounts, the less I came to believe that
everybody who dies reincarnates.
The only thing the evidence
demonstrates clearly is that a few people, probably less than one
percent of the population, remember a past life well enough to prove
it. Many more, maybe a tenth to a quarter of the population, have
subconscious past-life memories that can be accessed by hypnotic
regression or other techniques. Some New Agers claim that everybody
can learn to remember past lives, but I've never felt they even come
close to proving it.
In the last few years before I made my breakthrough, I admitted to
myself that the available evidence wasn't adequate to determine what
percentage of the population reincarnates or what happens to the
souls of people who don't. I did sometimes speculate that having
conscious control over their psychic powers might help people
reincarnate, but I found this line of reasoning distasteful. In the
absence of real evidence, it seemed elitist and self-serving, so I
didn't pursue it.
However, having an open mind on the subject
prepared me to accept the truth when my spirit guides finally told
it to me.
Whether reincarnation is common or rare, accepting that it exists at
all obliges one to start looking for information about the soul, the
entity that transfers from one body to another to carry the
past-life memories. Like the nineteenth-century Spiritualists and
many other occultists, I postulated that the soul is composed of
specialized forms of matter and energy presently unknown to physical
science.
This hypothesis is quite vague, of course; but it lays a
foundation for finding out more about the nature of the soul by
scientific methods of investigation.
I will next discuss the evidence that some disembodied human souls
are active and conscious on the astral plane and can communicate
with the living by telepathy. There is even more evidence available
in published literature to support this hypothesis than there is to
support reincarnation.
The organized Spiritualist movement of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced enough
spirit-dictated books to fill a small library, and the modern
Channeling movement is generating still more. I admit that some of
these are either conscious hoaxes or creations of the author's own
imagination, but I am convinced that many are genuine communications
from spirits.
Because it's difficult to tell genuine channeled books from fakes
and products of self-delusion, I recommend works based on scientific
investigations of Spiritualist and Channeling movements. Such
investigations often employ methods similar to those used by the
reincarnation researchers mentioned earlier.
For example, a medium
will obtain information from the spirit of a deceased person that no
living person could know, and the investigator will try to verify it
with empirical evidence. Most public libraries contain a few books
of this type, and I've read several hundred that each contain
sufficient evidence to prove that the dead survive and communicate
with the living.
Cases where the spirit of a murder victim has passed enough
information to a medium to identify and convict the killer are
actually quite common. This information often includes detailed
instructions for locating physical evidence: weapons, clothing, and
especially the body itself.
Dozens of such cases are reported in the
newspapers every year, and hundreds more are known within the occult
community but kept quiet.
This is especially true in small towns and
rural areas, where psychics routinely help the police solve crimes,
and the cops quietly defend them from persecution by religious
fanatics. This fragile relationship depends on secrecy, so stories
with headlines like "Psychic Locates Murder Weapon" don't appear in
the papers as commonly as they should.
If you start looking for cases like these in books, magazines, or
newspaper files, you'll find the evidence extremely impressive.
The
same applies to cases where spirits told mediums the sites of
treasures buried by deceased people, hidden wills and other papers,
etc. I feel there is sufficient evidence in any large library or
bookstore to convince anyone who's reasonably unbiased of the
reality of contact between the living and the spirits of the dead.
If you do start reading to find such evidence, here's something else
to look for at the same time. The spirits who pass information to
mediums about events that happened while they were alive very often
seem so senile, childish, paranoid, or otherwise in distress, that
it is difficult and painful for the medium to communicate with them.
The authors of mediumistic literature often don't emphasize these
negative details, but they are there if you look for them.
Since the nineteenth century, Spiritualists and other occultists who
practice mediumship have deliberately concealed a lot of important
information about the spirit world when they write accounts of their
communications with the dead. This is done with the best of motives:
to keep from frightening the public, and to avoid giving support to
Fundamentalist charges that mediumship involves contact with demonic
forces.
Most of the literature still gives the reader a misleading
impression of what it's actually like to receive messages from the
spirit world at a séance, by automatic writing, or through
mechanical aids such as Ouija boards.
Did you ever wonder why practically all mediums communicate with the
majority of spirits indirectly?
Both the old-fashioned Spiritualist
mediums and the New Age channeling mediums have spirit guides who
assist them in finding and communicating with other spirits, but
very few are willing to tell you bluntly why they have to operate
this way. The reason is very simple: most spirits on the astral
plane are in mental states that we'd label as insane or
feeble-minded in a living person. They mumble in baby talk or rave
like schizophrenics.
Their thoughts ramble and get lost in time like
those of a person with Alzheimer's disease. They contradict
themselves as if their memories had been scrambled up with the
contents of someone else's mind. And above all, they act sick,
drunk, or drugged. Some say they are in severe pain; others are
frightened; still others are calm, but it's the sickly calm of a
person who has taken a heavy dose of morphine or Thorazine.
If you've experimented with Ouija boards, there's an excellent
chance you've spoken to spirits in this condition.
And though the
mediumistic literature does mention frequent contacts with "lost
souls," "earthbound spirits, "entities from the lower astral," etc.,
it rarely describes them in detail or reveals that the vast majority
of spirits the mediums contact are in this category. The plain truth
is that if you're going to accomplish anything at all as a medium,
you have to work through a spirit guide.
A spirit guide is simply a spirit on the astral plane with
sufficient mental stability and psychic powers to communicate easily
with a particular medium, and who is willing to form a personal
relationship.
Another thing to look for between the lines of the
literature:
this relationship is often overtly sexual.
A medium's
spirit guide often receives some of the energy raised during
physical sexual activity. Only the Eastern Tantric magicians and
Western students of sex magic write and talk openly about this, but
almost all mediums practice it.
Explanations of exactly what all this means will be given in Part
Two.
The rest of Part One will describe other knowledge I had to
learn before I could make the breakthrough.
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