The Voices at VanTassel's
Sub-Figura vel Liber Caeruleus
Excerpt from:
THE COSMIC PULSE OF LIFE
(c) 1976 Trevor J. Constable
Revised and Enlarged Edition:
(c) 1990 Trevor James Constable
Published through special arrangement with:
Merlin Press, Tustin, CA,
by Borderlands Research Science Foundation
PO Box 220, Bayside, CA 95524
(707) 825-7733
"The voices at Van Tassel's were like no others I have ever heard."
Dr. Ralph E. Lapp
THE COSMIC PULSE OF LIFE
Chapter 3: Finding a New Pathway
by Dr. Ralph E. Lapp
"...the scientific community has been corrupted or silenced by
military domination."
My introduction to UFOs came through Major Donald Keyhoe's books
"Flying Saucers Are Real," "Flying Saucers From Outer Space," and
"Flying Saucer Conspiracy," which rightly rank as UFO classics.
Major Keyhoe laid the basis for establishment-type ufology by
collecting verified data, recounting dependable sighting stories,
and endlessly chasing down evidence. This approach essentially
regards UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft, and has high confidence
in existing scientific theories and those who adhere to such
theories. Purely mechanistic speculations are made from this
seemingly safe base in reality. Personal experience forced me to
diverge from this approach, but I pay unreserved tribute to the
integrity, courage, and perseverance of Donald Keyhoe.
A professional U.S. Marine Corps officer and pioneer aviation
writer, Major Keyhoe, risked a sound reputation and his literary
career when he took up flying saucers. Through his books and labors
with NICAP, he has made large personal sacrifices to make the world
aware of alien visitation. He did this on the basis most likely to
find the widest acceptance, working diligently to keep the subject
respectable. Like all pioneers he had plenty of mud thrown in his
face.
Keyhoe had been treated shabbily by official Washington and
unchivalrously on many occasions by the broadcasting industry and
the press. I once saw the sound deliberately shut off while he was
speaking on TV. For years, he urged a formal UFO project by top
scientists with Federal backing. The Colorado University project
under Dr. Edward Condon nominally provided the elements for which
Keyhoe had long asked. Within a short time, he found that NICAP data
supplied to the Colorado project were not being properly utilized
and he withdrew NICAP support. Keyhoe has always deserved better
than he received from official sources. He is an idealist in
realist's clothing and this field would not have been as far along
as it is without him.
On the basis of the evidence Keyhoe presents in his book, a rational
person is compelled to accept the presence of UFOs, although not
necessarily to accept that they are spaceships and nothing else.
Keyhole's books and other classical UFO literature left me puzzled
by one element I found sharply anomalous. There has been no
communication between these alleged spacecraft and human beings.
Such a silence did not jib with my own personal experience of the
way our own world is run.
Practically all my life up to the time I learned about UFOs, I had
been a professional in communications, both in a technical sense and
in the realm of ideas. As a staff writer for radio programs in New
Zealand in my teens and also as a radio actor, I eagerly learned and
applied the art of communicating ideas from the written word via the
human voice. In a technical sense, I qualified myself as a
broadcasting engineer and as a shipboard radio officer.
In this latter capacity, under the flags of both New Zealand and
Great Britain, I traveled all over the world before I was 25. This
experience made me aware of the role played in civilization by
communications because of my daily involvement in this field. The
living standard of any country could be measured by its
communications development -- a criterion valid to this day. The
more refined the communications of a given country, the greater its
technical advancement and the higher its living standards.
Communications are an index of technological achievement and
material progress. The American people were able to see their
astronauts aloft and walking on the moon, and to broadcast the
spectacle simultaneously to the world. American communications are
un surpassed and there was no insuperable difficulty to
communication with earth from the moon.
To me it was logically untenable that a civilization capable of
building a spacecraft would not be capable of communicating
adequately. While I tended to accept Keyhoe's general view that
there had been no orthodox radio communications with humans by UFOs
, it seemed obvious that UFO designers and operators would be using
a different system of communication to earth man's radio, as far
beyond our methods as ours are beyond the tree trunk drum or Indian
smoke signals.
There seemed to me to be no rational dissent from such a view. The
propulsion methods employed by UFOs were generations in advance of
anything planned by our brightest minds. The vehicles traveled in
multiples of the best speeds attainable by mechanical aircraft.
Communications development must have proceeded synchronistically
with these technical advances. Earth life has taught us this lesson
in our own experience.
Our communications have progressed from the invention of the
wireless telegraph to modern television within the lifetime of human
beings who are still living. By the middle 1950s, under the stimulus
of the space program, scientific attention was already turning to
so-called extrasensory perception, or ESP, as a possible means of
space communications. By November, 1958, the august Westinghouse
Corporation, citadel of corporate and scientific orthodoxy, had set
up studies into mental telepathy as a means of long distance
communication, under the direction of Dr. Peter A. Castruccio. Other
corporations with pipelines to the Federal treasury have since
followed this lead.
Even a 10-watt mentality could project the likely results of 50
years of such work, since science has almost routinely achieved any
goal to which sufficient resources are applied. Blowing up the
entire planet or extinguishing its life, is achievable today because
men wanted this power. College educated killers by the thousands
have donated their lives to explosives and the slaughter of
children, and it seemed inconceivable that Lifepositive scientific
work aimed at the mastery of telepathy would not be just as
successful.
Scientific mastery of telepathy in 50 years seems reasonable.
Similarly reasonable is the proposition that entities utilizing
propulsion methods 50 years or more ahead of ours would have
communications 50 years ahead of ours. On the basis of what we on
earth have been driven to explore, therefore, we might expect the
aliens to be using telepathy. This expectation is reinforced by
their non-use of radio in any mode we are capable of detecting,
although UFO entities have at times communicated with pursuing USAF
pilots via their VHF radiotelephone receivers.
In an ever-broadening investigation of the UFO subject, with my
attention drawn to the communications anomaly, I became aware of the
contact stories. Involving encounters of various kinds between
alleged extraterrestrials and human beings, these stories a lready
made up a bulky literature by the middle 1950s. I tackled them to
see what I could find out about UFO communications. I began to hear
about psychic communications with which I entered a new and wholly
alien world.
Breaking down my structural resistance to such things was a primary
problem. Such resistance is present in all persons who have been
given either religious or scientific training. Religionists consider
such communications to be "of the devil." Scientists consider the
same area to be one of fantasy and illusion. I had been raised as a
Christian Scientist. In that benign and tolerant religious system,
the occult and psychic were deemed things better left alone.
The discs continued in the skies, and the communications problems
could not be ignored. Already I detected an unhealthy and irrational
fear, outwardly manifesting as ridicule, among the many trained
persons of my acquaintance to whom I broached my general theories
about communication with space entities. Friends in the aircraft
industry passed on rumors of a man living in the high desert of
Southern California who claimed to have telepathic contact with the
entities piloting the flying discs. Thus I came meet Mr. George Van
Tassel, a pioneer in such communications, who later died in 1978.
His distinction in this world was to obtain from his other-world
communicants, advanced technical information.
This technical information is impenetrable to conventional
scientific knowledge and to the mechanistic mind. Armed with the
revolutionary discovery of the orgone energy -- to which UFO
intelligences have extensively referred to as "Primary Energy" - Van
Tassel's early communications become a technical bonanza. Any
trained scientist whose thought processes have been functionalized
will be able to penetrate most of the early Van Tassel
communications, and conceivably could create instruments and devices
of a wholly new character.
At the time I went to see George Van Tassel at Giant Rock, he was
regarded by scientists as a crackpot. Most laymen who came in
contact tangentially with his writings undoubtedly regarded him as
just another flying saucer nut. History will probably have a
different verdict.
Investigators in this field must learn to participate -- to bore in
with the body, mind, and heart as a total human being -- if they are
to find their way to the truth. The old, onlooking, withdrawn, and
purportedly objective approaches have failed in this field. The case
of George Van Tassel, as I experienced his doings and as they
influenced me, is an example of how participation and the use of all
one's personal resources of experience can open doors in UFO
research. Sometimes the consequent problem of how to get some doors
closed again becomes critical but one must dare to do in order to
know.
Giant Rock derives its name from a colossal boulder that rests near
the end of a remote, dry-lake airstrip in the high desert of
Southern California. Around the Giant Rock, Van Tassel had created
through the years a small living complex including a restaurant and
his own home. He had also created the physical facilities for his
annual spacecraft convention.
In the days when I first visited Van Tassel's place, he used to
conduct communications with UFO intelligences from a chamber hewn
out of the ground beneath the Giant Rock. There was no technical
apparatus for this communication. Stumbling down the rough stairs in
semi-darkness, one was seized by the horrendous possibility that the
giant boulder might roll and crush the chamber, complete with
occupants. There were usually about sixty or seventy persons present
at these seance type gatherings, varying from college professors to
ordinary working people, and always including a sprinkling of
reputable and successful businessmen.
Van Tassel's preparations for contact consisted mainly of focusing
the minds of all present into an energetic unity. Songs were sung in
unison. Prayers and chants followed. Then came silence as Van Tassel
waited for contact. Singing, chanting, and prayers constituted the
"call" phase of communications, differentiating the group of people
with their common desire for contact with UFO intelligences, from
the random psychic racket of the ordinary world. The call phase is
intended to stand out above the psychic background noise as a strong
radio signal does above radio noise and weaker stations. Such a call
in radio receives the immediate attention of any skilled operator
monitoring the particular frequency in question. He reads the signal
if it is code and if the person signaling is calling him, he
answers.
Van Tassel in effect functioned as a psychic radio operator,
focusing the power of his transmitter -- the biological energies of
his gathering -- to attract the attention of someone with whom he
wished to communicate.
His calls were answered. Out of the darkness from Van Tassel's
direction would come booming the most dynamic and powerful voices I
have ever heard. For years as a youngster, I studied voice and
speech and as a young radio actor put these studies to practical
use. I was always around accomplished radio actors and announcers,
and on this account was extremely voice and speech conscious. I
understand fully the art and technique of changing one's voice so as
to act out an entire radio play doing two, three, or sometimes more,
separate voices.
The voices at Van Tassel's were like no others I have ever heard.
George Van Tassel was an ordinary man and not highly educated. He
spoke well but did not have an unusual vocabulary. He made
occasional grammatical errors like most people. The intelligences
that spoke through Van Tassel, utilizing his vocal apparatus as
though it were a physical amplifier or transducer for their own
thoughts, made no grammatical errors. The intelligences flowed in
strong, forceful language without a split second of hesitancy. The
effect was like having Orson Wells present, orating at the height of
his powers.
Several of these intelligences would speak, one after the other.
There was in each case a distinct change of the speech pattern,
pace, voice timbre, accent, and subject matter. No radio actor could
have done it. Van Tassel's vocal mechanism provided a sound carrier,
as it were, upon which all these other voices were impressed. There
was no doubt that they were speaking through Van Tassel, not only
because of these objective facts, but also because of something that
I experienced, and therefore learned, by actually being there.
I found that I could hear, in a new way to me, the thoughts of these
beings before they were transduced by Van Tassel's vocal apparatus.
The effect was akin to monitoring a tape recording, the broadcast of
which is briefly delayed. I knew what Van Tassel was going to say
before he got it out as audible sound. Prior to this time, I had no
psychic abilities or experience with any kind of psychic phenomena.
All of it had been to me a tightly closed book. Now it was opening.
Blundering in where angels might be terrorized, I asked Van Tassel
how he was able to develop his receptive ability. He gave me certain
routines to follow. Not aware at this time of any element other than
idealism in connection with UFOs, I followed Van Tassel's
indications with diligence and persistence. Once, at a later time, I
became for a brief minute, the " loudspeaker" used by these strange
intelligences.
There was no doubt that communication was being carried on by these
means, no matter what official science might think of it all. On one
occasion in my presence, and subsequent to their promise to do so,
luminous UFOs manifested in profusion above the nea rby desert until
dispersed by Marine aircraft from the 29 Palms base that were
scrambled on intercept. The troglodytic professor on the USAF
payroll may smile but he does not know. The New Knowledge is the
property of those who participate and I was unequ ivocally convinced
that the entities piloting the discs were quite capable of
communicating with human beings, without any need for radio
apparatus. My empirical work had begun with a little research
involving my own psycho-physical person.
With consuming interest I read the technical matter that these
intelligences had communicated to Van Tassel. My electronics
background was insufficient to penetrate this material but
everything about it seemed to throb with life, even though it was
beyond my comprehension. Reading the communications was an adventure
in itself. Worlds within worlds, densities within densities,
energies, polarities, ethers -- material with no seeming connection
to earthly concepts -- but all of it discussed with an overlay of
good humor and love. From this time on, I began to think that just
being an ordinary man might be an advantage in investigating this
subject. I had only a little junk to jettison before tackling this
New Knowledge.
The communications referred often to the primary energy in
connection with spacecraft propulsion, and I knew that there was at
this juncture no readily intelligible connection with earth science.
There was something missing -- something crucial -from the
ever-multiplying trivia of modern knowledge at human disposal.
Intuitively, I got on the trail of that missing something right
then. These intelligences were doing things differently than us, and
our men of science weren't trying to find out the answers. They were
trying to kill UFOs, and pouring their energies instead into the
rackety and uncertain fireworks at Cape Canaveral.
In "They Live In The Sky," I detailed my first psychic experiences
and will not, therefore, repeat them here. Suffice it to say, that
by persisting with the techniques learned at Giant Rock, I set the
stage for an eruption of the unseen worlds into a consciousness --
mine -- not prepared for such an impact. Becoming sensitive suddenly
to spectra of vibrations with which one is totally unfamiliar can be
an unhinging experience. In recent years, the so-called "psychedelic
revolution" has exposed untold thousands of persons to the
consequences of chemical tampering with consciousness. All such
forcing open of doors is destructive of orderly inner development,
no matter what the academic qualifications of its advocates.
There was in my case no visions of the unseen worlds or astral
phantasmagoria but I did develop extreme sensitivity to telepathic
impulses. I found that I could barely control the situation. In
daily business life in the aviation industry, I would hear a
sentence psychically before a client ever spoke the words
physically. When the telephone rang, I knew who was calling before I
picked up the instrument.
A constant struggle soon ensued for control of my physical vehicle
-- myself against unseen interlopers. I was fighting continually
against various forms of automatism. Anyone who doubts the reality
of occult things would have no doubt whatever concerning them were
they to endure an experience of this order. I emerged from it all
with a solid respect for the reality of the occult that I have never
subsequently lost.
My difficulties were extreme and I felt that I was slowly losing my
battle to retain my mastery of myself. I bitterly regretted having
ever meddled in UFO communications. The "intelligences," into whose
realm I had broken, poured confusing rubbish into me. There did not
seem to be anyone to whom I could talk about my difficulties without
already seeming to be "around the bend." All was not lost, however,
for a great man was at hand.
Dr. Franklin Thomas was a publisher of many small UFO books as the
owner of the New Age Publishing Company in Los Angeles. Many of
these books dealt with the things I had stumbled upon. He used to
give lectures in his Glendale Boulevard book shop on Friday evenings
and I resolved to attend.
Franklin Thomas was a diminutive, slight, sharp-featured man,
wrinkled of face and generally shabby. He seemed indifferent
concerning his physical person. His lectures were delivered in a
soft, low-pitched voice but with a lucidity that I found
enthralling. He could cover the esoteric aspects of widely divergent
subjects in such a way that he constantly wrought seemingly
unconnected things into a higher synthesis. I knew that he could
assist with my problem.
He was heavily burdened in his struggling business and his health
was failing. He knew he was dying and, at a period when he needed
all of his reserves of strength, he spent as little time as possible
after his lectures talking to those who pressed him wi th questions.
He listened carefully to me. There was an understanding nod and a
knowing glint came into his eye. I asked him help me. He agreed.
He was the most accomplished occultist I have ever known, an adept
and master teacher functioning as one of us in the workaday world,
but otherwise something much more. At a time of loose talk about the
occult and occultism, to have known and been taught by Franklin
Thomas was an occult experience in itself.
This shabby little man had conscious control of the hidden forces of
nature, and he wielded his powers in setting me free. I became, in a
short time, complete master in my own house again and the ability I
had forced on myself to function telepathically was brought under
control. This was the first step toward suppressing the faculty
entirely.
The essence of gaining control was to confine the receptions to a
given time of day and never to depart from this regimen. Then it
became every other day, every third day, and finally the spurious
door to the unseen was closed and sealed. Every student of esoteric
matters who wishes to make genuine progress in the development of
his inner life, will find the avoidance of psychism and psychic
phenomena -- as an involved party - absolutely essential.
During this period when I had these daily contacts and before all
such activity was halted, some information was passed to me
concerning the UFO mystery in many of its aspects. I had learned,
through Franklin Thomas, how to sort out the otherworld telepa ths.
Those intelligences which would seek to communicate without
controlling had what seemed to be the valid information.
Through Franklin Thomas and his gentle guidance, I began to discern
that the mystery required a sound working knowledge of occult
science for its overall comprehension. My knowledge of these things
was so limited that it was absurd to think that anything of great
value could be passed through me. I was an inadequate instrument for
any such purpose. Recognition of this fact by me accelerated my
phased withdrawal from psychic activity.
During these limited contacts, information was nevertheless passed
from the "other side" that went against many of the commonly
accepted conceptions of UFOs. Later publication of this material was
to make me a sort of pariah even in the wayout UFO field. The truth
is unwelcome in this world and it hurts because of its innate power
to disturb. The entities I contacted conveyed to me, in essence, the
following basic information:
1. UFOs are space ships but their vibratory makeup is not fixed in
the physical-material density. They are mutants.
2. UFOs have their main existence in a density that is invisible to
human beings of normal vision.
3. The intelligences behind the space ships are various orders of
etheric beings; that is, beings differently constituted to man and
normally invisible to him, yet capable of materializing at will when
necessary or required.
4. A war is in progress for the mind of man, a veritable battle of
the Earth that will determine the future course of evolution.
5. There are negative forces from beneath man seeking to drag him
down and positive forces assisting him to fulfill his destiny in
freedom.
6. There are normally-invisible living things in space that are not
space ships.
7. Space is filled with primary energy currents of which existing
earth science knows nothing.
8. Infrared film, exposed between dawn and sunrise in high, dry
locales will frequently objectify invisible objects of various kinds
living in and passing through the atmosphere.
This information permitted the formulation of a skeleton UFO theory
and also opened a pathway to obtain objective proof of the presence
of UFOs. The latter would come to hand only if the communicating
intelligences had told me the truth. I had work to do, both of a
theoretical and empirical nature.
At this point, Franklin Thomas had a serious talk with me. I pass on
now his fundamental wisdom.
"You have reached a point where you have a sort of assignment -- a
task to discharge. I cannot tell you where it will lead -- to
discovery or to disappointment -- but I can tell you with certainty
that success, if it is to come to you, demands that you cut off all
psychic activity and abandon it entirely. Everything for you,
henceforth, must be in the full light of consciousness, with no
communication of any kind with any unseen forces, no matter what
their purported wisdom. Contact must be with your own High Self --
Your Atma -- and nothing inferior to that."
This advice was followed. All psychic activity was terminated. My
experiences had convinced me that the disc occupants communicated by
means of thought transference -- telepathy in its many variants --
and that communication with earthlings would be unlik ely via any
other method. Communication seemed to require either that the human
being surrender in some way the function of his organism to beings
that he could not see or that new devices for manipulating the
primary energy of which these entities spoke would have to be
designed.
These new cosmic electronics would use biological energy. Experience
has already shown that such devices were quite different to, and
enormously advanced over, anything possessed by earth men. Later on,
my adventures would bring me to a remarkable personality who had
made revolutionary strides into cosmic electronics but, for the
moment, I did not know where to begin.
I did know, in a fashion that permitted of no contradiction, that if
ever UFOs were to be understood and comprehensive theoretical
approaches made to the subject, I would have to resign myself to
years of study and research. This endeavor would, by its very
nature, lie outside the boundaries of official science. Despite the
resources and facilities that they commanded, the official scientist
were getting nowhere in penetrating the UFO mystery, and my brushing
personal involvement with the technology behind UFOs taught me why
they failed and would continue to fail: humans were looking in the
wrong places for their answers, and they were looking in the wrong
way.
Man, to their mode of cognition, was $2.98 worth of chemicals
organized in a complex way. Complexity of organization was held to
be the only difference between man and the chair on which he sat. I
was already interested in the energy that propelled me acr oss the
room. When I asked learned physicians about this energy and what it
was, I found that they became angry. Already I was beginning to
think that there might be a functional identity between my personal
power source -- the biological energy that drove me across the room
-- and the energy that drove the discs across our skies. Learned,
able men with the highest academic qualifications were evading
confrontation with both.
Franklin Thomas continued to tutor me in his quiet way. Everything
he taught me concerning occult knowledge was given to me in such a
way that I could dovetail it with something I could personally
observe in the outer world. When I reported having noticed something
different about a common feature of our environment -- thereby
illustrating that I had dynamically understood and applied his
teachings -- he would give me something more.
He steered me to the work of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian
philosopher, scientist and founder of the Anthroposophical Society.
The scope and sweep of this universal genius was staggering. As I
plunged into Anthroposophy, I realized that I was in contact with a
body of New Knowledge and a methodology for penetrating the unseen
worlds that was wholly healthy and demanded the best that was in me
for its pursuit and application. My whole life began to change.
Gone forever was the craven search for "messages" from spacemen. Dr.
Steiner had presented in modern scientific form, for modern
consciousness, the necessary cosmo-conception and valid indications
for the renewal of human life and culture along functional lines.
His work was not confined to things normally deemed of the spirit.
He went deep into such seemingly compartmentalized realms of thought
as medicine and economics, pedagogy and biology, pharmacology and
zoology, drama, philosophy, and agriculture. Everything he touched,
he renewed and revivified.
Jules Saurwein, the Paris savant who had known all the great
thinkers of the times, deemed Steiner the most impressive figure in
European cultural life in the 20th century. With my mounting
suspicion of orthodox conceptions, I contrasted the two or three
lines devoted to Steiner in the encyclopedias with the overwhelming,
massive literature he left his fellow humans. I could not square the
incomprehension and the sequestration of Steiner's genius with the
inflated biographies in the same encyclopedias out lining the lives
of the life-killing developers of nuclear weaponry.
Franklin Thomas presented me with a monumental book entitled " Man
or Matter" by Ernst Lehrs, Ph.D., one of Steiner's own students. An
electrical engineer and mathematician, Dr. Lehrs presented in this
book not only the history of man's cognitive impasse -- out of which
has sprung the Great Impasse of ufology - but also the method of
surmounting these difficulties. All of it was presented in a healthy
and modern way on the bedrock laid by Goethe and later modernized
and expanded by Steiner.
Lehrs spread himself out over such seemingly unrelated disciplines
as optics, biology, meteorology, geology, botany, and mechanics,
unifying these diverse fields in a functional approach so that one
could see the inner connections they all bore to each ot her. This
book had a decisive influence on me. I had already begun field
research in UFO photography. I was putting to the test the
fundamental suggestion for photographing invisible presences in the
atmosphere of the earth that had been given to me during the final
phases of my experiments with psychic communication.
"Man or Matter" acquainted me with the Goethean approach to optics,
light, and color; and, the more I experimented, the more Goethean I
became. Lehrs also dealt in detail with the visual ray or eye beam
-- a ray of biological energy by which consciousness is carried
outside the body to objects in space. Armed with this knowledge,
some simple occult exercises, and conventional cameras with
conventional infrared film, I began the practical field work. The
knowledge involved and methods employed will now be described.
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