Q. Let us begin this final summary of the political implications of
the War in Heaven by updating the dialog from Spiritual Revolution
concerning the resurgence of Fundamentalism in the Seventies and
early Eighties.
Since SR was published, that whole movement seems to
be disintegrating into chaos. Several of the TV Evangelists whom I
considered servants of the Theocrats fell into disgrace over
personal or financial scandals in 1987 and ‘88, and it is now
becoming fashionable for average Americans to think of the more
rabid Fundamentalist sects as cults, little different from the
Moonies.
A. Well, we said a couple of years ago:
"Those movements backed by
the Invisible College are actually doing better than those
controlled by the Theocrats, but a surface analysis of public
opinion makes the opposite seem true.
For example, the present
resurgence of Fundamentalist Christianity is not nearly as
successful as claimed by either its own propaganda or that of
various groups openly opposed to it."
Q. I had felt this to be true for a long time, since several years
before I began to make the breakthrough in 1983 but many of my
friends in the occult and radical political communities disagreed
completely.
They were afraid the Fundamentalists would force the
government to repeal most of the liberal legislation passed since
the Fifties, and to adopt a militant foreign policy that would cause
more wars like Vietnam and might even lead to nuclear war. I never
felt that this danger was severe or immediate, because the
Fundamentalist movement simply wasn't big enough in either sheer
numbers or political clout.
A. That's correct.
Ironically, several of the American
politico-economic system's worst faults are its best defense against
a take-over by the Fundamentalists or any similar group. We refer to
economic class structure and political power-brokerage.
A relatively
small minority of people with a high resistance to fundamentalist
religion controls most of the real political and economic power in
this country: the owners and managers of the large corporations,
government bureaucrats, and professional people in general.
Most of them are politically conservative, but it's the conservatism
of the Old Right, not the New Right. They range from extremely
wealthy to merely well off, and are almost all college graduates,
which means they represent the social class that produces the fewest
people with the correct personality structures to embrace
Fundamentalist religion.
Their primary concern is retaining the
wealth and power they now enjoy, and they fear the New Right just as
much as the left does, though they realize it's not in their
interest to say so publicly. The New Right has always been
essentially a working-class and rural movement; if it ever got into
power, it would eventually try to replace the existing power elites
with people who took a populist stand on political and economic
issues.
If you look closely at the history of the conservative wing of
American politics during the Seventies and Eighties, you'll see that
the Old Right was solidly in control the whole time, even when the
New Right was getting maximum publicity.
The traditional
conservative establishment got votes from the Fundamentalists at
virtually every election by using some of the rhetoric of the New
Right, but it was very slow in putting any of the New Right's
ideological principles into action.
President Reagan's attitude toward legalized abortion is a good
example: he repeatedly said he opposed it, but he never used the
full power-brokerage potential of his office to try to manipulate
other politicians into repealing abortion laws. On the other hand,
he was quite willing to resort to extreme measures - such as those
that caused the Irangate scandal - to support policies he believed
were really important, such as supplying arms to right-wing
terrorists in Central America.
This proves that his support for New
Right policies was just campaign rhetoric.
We'd rather that the wealth and power were more evenly distributed
within the total population, but in this case power elites and
power-brokerage are working to our advantage. The political
manipulations of the Invisible College are often extremely subtle,
as we're about to describe.
First, we've already said that members of the present power elites
are less likely to become Fundamentalists than most people within
the whole population. However, they are more receptive than the
average to New Age spiritual teachings, which is another reason for
not wanting radical changes in the class system right now.
Remember, we are not doctrinaire leftists. In general, we work for
"the greatest good for the greatest number," but we don't have to
worry about our public image the way living politicians do. If we
can get significant numbers of the present ruling class under our
influence, then we'll work through them to benefit the rest of the
population.
Of course, we'll also use this influence over the
existing elites to work for a more equitable distribution of wealth
and power as a long-term goal.
Q. Wasn't this exactly what you did in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries when you worked through the Masonic and Rosicrucian
Lodges: using an existing power elite to work toward political
liberalism and other reforms to benefit the whole society?
A. Yes. We try to be both idealists and pragmatists at the same
time; the two concepts are not really in opposition.
Q. I wish that more leftists and counterculture people realized
this.
A. Another reason why we're not concentrating on immediate,
surface-level political and economic reforms right now as much as we
were a few years ago is simply that most of our energy is going into
two different battles with the Theocrats over control of spiritual
institutions. We're attacking them directly both inside and outside
of organized religion, and of course they have never ceased
attacking us.
Every time they start using any organization on Earth
to enslave people for their own ends, we try to stop them, and they
do exactly the same to every project we undertake to liberate
people.
Q. You've already discussed some of this in other contexts,
especially your attempts to turn Theocratic Christian congregations
into more liberal groups. You're not completely opposed to
Christianity and other organized religions, are you?
A. This is a subject that needs clarification for your readers.
We
can ask you to say, "War in Heaven is not intended to be an
anti-religious book," but that doesn't mean the Invisible College
favors religion as the term is usually defined:
"belief in and
worship of deities or other supernatural powers."
It should be obvious that we have to oppose any belief system that
accepts the supernatural.
Psychic and spiritual phenomena are part
of the natural world, and they have profound effects on human
civilization on this planet. They should be studied scientifically
and put to use improving the quality of human life, not relegated to
the subjective limbo of the supernatural, where one person's opinion
is as good as another's because there are no hard criteria for
making value judgments.
Many of us come from advanced civilizations where the study of the
soul and other spiritual phenomena are as much of a part of natural
science as physics or biology, and this is the only approach we
recommend. Any person who believes in or worships supernatural
deities is out of contact with reality.
The form of deism that many
religious believers practice is literally a psychosis involving
paranoia and delusions of grandeur.
Psychologists and
psychotherapists have known this since the time of Freud, though
they've found this form of mental illness one of the most difficult
to treat because they didn't know about the Theocrats or religious
mind control.
Q. Yet you still make use of deistic religion when it serves your
political ends. Is that why you told me to say this book is not
intended as a blanket attack on all organized religion?
A. Yes. We are philosophically opposed to all religions that believe
in the existence of superhuman gods; however, at this stage in
history, the majority of people on Earth are not capable of directly
replacing their present deistic beliefs with a rational view of
spiritual phenomena.
Rather than just write such people off, we feel
that the most ethical course of action is to deal with them within a
deistic frame of reference and try to keep the Theocrats from
controlling them. In other words, we're willing to pose as gods
ourselves if that's the only way we can keep people from being
enslaved in Theocratic Bands after death.
And while we do consider it important to save individuals from
destruction by their "gods," we put a higher priority on the
political aspects of organized religion on Earth. The larger and
more powerful are the liberal Christian churches in the United
States right now, the less danger there is of the Fundamentalists
doing major political or social harm.
We like to see liberal and
radical Christians out there proselytizing in direct competition to
the Fundamentalists: doing all sorts of charitable work, using the
mass media, and generally trying to be a visible force in the
community.
However, we don't recommend that people who accept what we're saying
in this book go out and join liberal or radical Christian groups.
There are better alternatives for anyone who accepts even part of
the concepts described in War in Heaven. The anti-Theocratic
Christian groups are intended strictly for people who are already
Christians.
In fact, we would rather that agnostics and the
nominally religious not join them. Such individuals would be better
off in one of the New Age, Pagan, or occult groups.
There's also a negative aspect to radical Christianity; trying to
fight Theocracy on its own home ground with its own religious
mind-control weapons is actually quite dangerous. For example, the
infamous
Peoples Temple of the Seventies was an early attempt to
start such a group, one that failed disastrously; and the same thing
could happen again, though it's much less likely today because that
experience taught us a lot.
The Theocrats are angered more by our attacking them frontally on
their own ground than they are by almost anything else we do. They
often attack radical Christian churches, especially those that were
formerly Fundamentalist groups, with all the force they can muster.
If the Theocrats can't control the group mind of the congregation
and subvert it back into Fundamentalism, they'll settle for turning
the group into a cult that drives its members insane, as happened to
the People's Temple.
The Theocrats also try to do the same to occult and New Age groups,
and will turn them into new Theocratic religious sects if they can.
Theocrats don't care what name people call the deity by, as long as
members practice religious mind control during services and believe
a doctrine that's based on the general Theocratic philosophy.
There
are Satanist groups that are controlled by exactly the same
Theocrats who control Fundamentalist churches in the same
neighborhood, for example. The same holds true for some of the Black
Lodges on the fringes of the occult community.
Many of these are not
self-destructive cults that make the headlines when members die or
commit crimes, but something worse: stable organizations doing the
work of the Theocrats.
Q. How can readers of this book recognize an occult group controlled
by the Theocrats?
A. It's not always easy, because some Theocratic occult groups have
an outer circle that's fairly innocuous.
There are two major things
to look for: one is financial and/or sexual exploitation of the
members, and the other is vindictiveness against people who try to
leave the group or reveal its secrets.
Not all occult and New Age
groups that fail this test are under the control of the Theocrats at
the moment; but merely possessing these elements makes them
vulnerable to a Theocratic take-over. And there is no reason to join
a group if you find any of its practices or beliefs ethically wrong:
no one has a monopoly on psychic training techniques or spiritual
knowledge.
We are not going to make this book even more controversial than it
already is by giving you a list of occult groups that Spiritual
Revolutionaries should avoid.
The status of groups changes
constantly, so anything you wrote down now wouldn't remain accurate
very long. Even more important, we want the people who read this
book to learn how to use their own intellects and psychic powers to
observe groups for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
If
people are going to be Spiritual Revolutionaries, they have to learn
to make this kind of value judgment for themselves rather than
relying on anyone else to make it for them.
Q. While you are discussing how the Theocrats take over religious
and occult groups and make them into cults, we'd like you to clarify
one point. why doesn't this lead to violence more often than it
does?
A lot of readers are going to wonder why, if the Theocrats can
turn a left-wing Christian church like the People's Temple into a
totally murderous and self-destructive cult, they don't do this on a
large scale and physically attack the counter-culture, the occult
community, the New Age movement and similar works of the Invisible
College?
A. This is a difficult question to answer precisely, because it
involves detailed descriptions of how
religious mind control works
that are hard to put into English words.
Almost all the conspiracy
literature exaggerates the power that "unseen manipulators" have to
control people's behavior on an acute, short-term basis.
Religious
mind control is actually quite subtle: it gradually reprograms
people's long-term opinions and behavior, but it cannot be used
simply to take over control of a person's will completely and
operate him or her like a remote-controlled robot.
Q. In other words, if the Theocrats wanted an act of violence
performed, say the assassination of a political or religious leader
who was actively working for the Invisible College, they couldn't
just tell some average member of a Fundamentalist church to go and
commit murder.
A. Absolutely not. This is another very important point.
It's easy
for them to manipulate a Fundamentalist into saying,
"So-and-so is
an enemy of God and is doing the Devil's work. He ought to be shot!"
However, almost all Fundamentalists, despite their extreme and
irrational religious beliefs, are technically sane, in the sense
that their behavior doesn't usually violate their society's laws and
customs so seriously that they have to be locked up.
And sane
people, by definition, don't commit murder or other violent crimes
for political reasons. They can become violent under extreme
personal stress - remember, most murders involve family members,
lovers, or close friends - but this is not the same as committing a
similar act for political reasons.
Proof of this is the elaborate indoctrination that average people
are subjected to before they are sent off to war. The most important
purpose of military boot camps is not to teach recruits how to kill
the enemy, but rather to make them emotionally capable of doing so.
Notice, too, that significant numbers of war veterans commit violent
crimes after they return to civilian life, simply because
governments spend a lot of time and money to reprogram ordinary
citizens into soldiers capable of killing the enemy, but almost
invariably fail to reverse this process when the troops are
demobilized.
Psychologists working for the military point out that
it takes as long or longer to extinguish a given behavior pattern as
it took to condition it in the first place, but generals and
politicians rarely listen.
However, military training is not nearly so destructive to people as
being trained to become violent religious fanatics. Using religious
mind control to program people for violence is essentially an
irreversible process. It's possible to turn ordinary religious
people into killers; but once it's done, their whole personality
structure has been changed and they can no longer live peacefully in
normal society most of the time.
The Theocrats can turn members of a Theocratic religious group into
people like the followers of Jim Jones or Charles Manson, but once
they've done so, they've changed them into criminal maniacs who
aren't going to survive very long.
Even more important: the
intensive mental reprogramming necessary to turn ordinary people
into psychopathic killers can be done only by creating a very
specialized environment. Notice that both of the groups created a
"cult environment," a totalitarian perversion of communal living,
which subjected members to religious mind control over long periods
of time without respite.
It is also important to realize that reprogramming people to commit
cold-blooded acts of violence within their normal social environment
is much more difficult than turning them into soldiers willing to
kill an armed and aggressive enemy on the battlefield.
The element
of "kill or be killed" and the fact that wars are usually fought in
an unfamiliar social and physical environment are what make the
difference.
Q. What you're saying, then, is that the Theocrats don't dare
program large numbers of their followers to become violent, because
that would probably destroy human society itself, rather than just
eliminating the human enemies of Theocracy. However, other things
you've said give us the impression that the Theocrats want to see
civilization destroyed.
A. Again, this is a difficult concept to explain.
Modem Western
civilization serves the interests of the Invisible College better
than it does those of the Theocrats, and is essentially our
creation, not theirs. However, the total destruction of
civilization, through nuclear war or internal collapse caused by
violent insanity on a large scale, would harm the Theocrats as much
as it would us.
More, actually, since our contact with civilizations
on other worlds would allow us to rebuild society if the physical
environment were still capable of supporting human life.
Of course, the War in Heaven is now beginning to extend to the
battle between the Invisible College and the Theocrats to control
the formation of new gods out of elemental spirits.
We will discuss
this further in the next chapter, starting with a message from
spirits who specialize in such work.