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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Chapter 2: The Shaver Mystery

I’ve been involved in the movement investigating UFOs and other unexplained phenomena since I was a teenager back in the Fifties, but from the viewpoint of an occultist, not that of a materialist. For example, I’ve always felt that most of the evidence concerning visits to Earth by ancient astronauts can be accounted for by postulating telepathic contact with beings from advanced extraterrestrial societies, and that many close encounters with UFOs involve psychic contact with spiritual beings.
 

In the Fifties and Sixties, the occultists in the movement were regarded as credulous and unscientific for putting a psychic and spiritual interpretation on much of the evidence; but as the years have passed, more and more investigators of unexplained phenomena have begun to draw similar conclusions from the available data.

However, I myself have always remained part of the “lunatic fringe,” because my favorite theory in the whole field is the Shaver Mystery, which has never gained respectability. Even today, almost everyone in the Ufology and occult communities treats people who believe in it as fools or paranoids. I am neither, but I still take it very seriously, because many of the details in Shaver’s writings match my dreams and visions of what seem to be past lives on other worlds.

During World War Two, Ray Palmer, editor of the science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories, received several short novels from an amateur writer named Richard S. Shaver. The stories were rather poorly written, but the idea content so impressed Palmer that he and various ghostwriters polished them up for publication.

When the Shaver stories started appearing in Amazing, the magazine’s circulation increased dramatically; some versions of the story say it doubled or tripled. Shaver’s writing was a highly complex and imaginative new treatment of a theme that had long been common in science fiction: the concept that we share this planet with the descendants of ancient astronauts who always remain hidden from us, but who use their advanced scientific technology to manipulate us.

Because most of Shaver’s literary output – millions of words over more than twenty years – was chaotically organized and was rewritten by many different hands to make it suitable for publication, very few people today have an over-all understanding of his cosmology. Many occult and unexplained phenomena writers have borrowed from it, usually without identifying it as their source, but no one has yet bothered to publish a coherent synopsis of Shaver’s theories in any detail.
 

Here is a brief summary. Thousands of years ago, extraterrestrial space travelers visited Earth and established huge underground colonies here.

They couldn’t live on the surface because solar radiation shortened their lifespan, which was normally measured in centuries. Eventually, the civilization that had planted the colonies became moribund, and contact with the parent worlds became less and less frequent. Because the underground colonies were cut off from outside supplies, some of the colonists were forced to live permanently on the surface to grow food and obtain the raw materials necessary to sustain life in the underground cities.

Over a long period of time, the “detrimental radiation” of the sun caused the minds of the surface dwellers to degenerate, and eventually they reverted to complete barbarism. However, they did retain enough intelligence to start progressing again, finally achieving human civilization as we read about it in our history books.

During this whole period, the many inhabitants of the underground colonies, which Shaver simply calls “Caves,” survived and retained a significant amount of the original knowledge and technology. However, the population of Cave dwellers gradually decreased because of constant shortages of supplies from the surface. After the surface people forgot completely about the origin and nature of the underground cities, the Cave dwellers started posing as gods and other supernatural beings to coerce surface people into providing them food and other necessities. The Cave people possess machines for generating “Rays” that give them certain kinds of power over surface dwellers.

Some types of Rays can kill or wound people, but others can be used to heal sickness or injury or to slow down the aging process. The Rays can also be used for telepathic communication and to control the thoughts and emotions of others at a distance. They seem to be most effective at close range, but some are powerful enough to have a significant effect on surface people.

The Cave dwellers have used their Ray technology to manipulate surface society throughout history, especially to obtain food and other supplies without the majority of people on Earth being aware of it. A few surface people were in on the plot and acted as agents of the Cave dwellers; these included members of such diverse groups as political rulers, religious leaders, wealthy merchants and traders, smugglers, and pirates.

However, the population in the Caves has decreased steadily over the ages because of continual shortages of raw materials. Shaver described the current situation in the underground cities as grim and desperate, with the political and social structure in almost complete collapse. Starvation and cannibalism are commonplace, and many of the inhabitants have turned themselves into literal monsters through improper use of the Rays. These “Deros” have become insane tyrants, and most have deformed their bodies as well, by trying to use the life prolonging Rays to achieve physical immortality.

Because “detrimental radiation from the Sun penetrates even into the Caves”, and because many of the Ray machines themselves have deteriorated through ages of constant use and makeshift repairs, the Deros resemble the living dead of legend. The Rays alone aren’t enough: to survive, they also have to eat human flesh like ghouls, and drink human blood like vampires.

However, some of the Cave dwellers are still normal: they call themselves “Teros,” and often use their Rays to help people on the surface, especially to combat the evil being done by the Deros. However, they aren’t militarily strong enough to conquer and destroy the Deros, and the only reason they survive at all is that they sometimes receive help from extraterrestrials who arrive in spaceships.

Unfortunately, these modern space travelers are also incapable of defeating the Deros. According to Shaver, they’ve been trying for centuries to get some government or other elsewhere in the galaxy to “send in the Marines and clean up Earth,” but so far it hasn’t happened. Earth is just one small planet in a remote backwater of the universe, and no advanced interstellar civilization has bothered to come here and fight a war to liberate us from the Deros.

Some of Shaver’s stories assert that such civilizations still exist, and that “help from the stars” might arrive at any time. Others are pessimistic and say they all fell long ago. The stories saying that some worlds have retained sufficient technology to permit interstellar travel also make it plain that such cultures are degenerate remnants of once-great civilizations, now fallen into decay. In either case, the Teros fight on, barely holding their own. They use their Rays to communicate with people like Shaver, hoping that eventually civilization on the surface will develop technologically to the point where we will be able to help them defeat the Deros, but they make it clear this point is far in the future.

The Deros lack the technical knowledge necessary to keep their Ray machines in good repair, so they are no longer able to keep political control of surface society or prevent technological progress. However, the machines they have inherited from ancient times are still far too advanced for our present scientists to duplicate, and they continue to have a great deal of power to manipulate both surface society as a whole and the minds of individuals.

Here is a sample of Shaver’s actual writing: an excerpt from Mandark, a two-hundred-thousand word novel, serialized in 1947 and ‘48 in his own mimeographed publication, Shaver Mystery Magazine. As far as I know, this was not edited or revised by anyone else.

“To all you young idealists there will come a time when all those things you think of Life with your bright, trusting and believing eyes will become dust and slime. A time when you will understand the terrible and stupid horror that life may be, in reality.

“To each of you will come at last an apparition, wearing like Scrooge, his chains, a mask of terror that hides a deep basic stupidity – a dumbness that is deeper than human...

“They have life, those things, just as you have life: but they are not understood and are so terribly feared that men will neither speak of them or write of them openly...

“Always, I too, feared the evil ones, the ignorant, degenerate and cannibalistic ray people who catch and kill us when they can. But they did not catch many of us, for we had some old ray women from the Deep Schools with us, and we were not easy to catch...

“We need men like you to aid us in our constant struggle with the living devils that inhabit much of these underground warrens. But when we try to approach men for this purpose, they fear the whole thing as madness or ghosts or whatever they have been taught...

“Almost immediately upon the visi-screen a scene of utter horror became visible... It was a Hell, with its Devils at work... ‘Do you see them, those things that should not live?’

“I looked in horror upon the things that moved as men move upon the screen of life. They were a thing that could not possibly live except for the protection of the hidden caverns, and the support of the great beneficial rays keeping their degenerate and evil carcasses in motion.

“Dead they must have been but for the supply of super-energy which the ancient generators poured through their bodies forever. These evil people must live on long after they would normally die, to become as undead as they were. It seems to be this fact that contributes to their evil nature, for the slow decay of their brains is energized by the synthetic electric life-force, and their resultant thought is but the reflection of life upon the stagnating brain tissues...”

As Shaver describes it, only a few people on the surface know about the Caves at all, and they are mostly agents of the Deros. Some are conscious, willing agents seeking wealth and power; others are mere slaves, whose minds are completely controlled by the Deros’ Rays. The only surface people who know the whole truth about the “Hidden World” and are willing to fight the Deros instead of collaborating with them are Shaver and a few of his friends.

When presented as fiction, these ideas aroused only mild interest among the readers of Amazing Stories. However, when Palmer printed letters from Shaver and various readers stating that the theories expounded in the Mystery were literally true, the Shaver Mystery started receiving major attention from the science-fiction community, almost all of it unfavorable.

However, the publicity attracted large numbers of new readers: probably the same people who supported the UFO movement, which started a few years later.

The increased circulation did not prevent the publishers of Amazing from firing Palmer after he admitted that he himself accepted the Mystery as fact. They felt that the long-term success of their magazine depended on support from people who read science fiction regularly, a group that reacted very negatively to claims that the Shaver Mystery was true.

Shaver continued to get his work into print by publishing his own amateur magazine, and quickly attracted what would now be called a “cult following.” After Palmer was fired from Amazing, he went into business for himself, publishing books and magazines in the unexplained-phenomena and occult fields. His magazines included Flying Saucers, Search, and Mystic, which gave some coverage to the Shaver Mystery, and The Hidden World, which was devoted almost entirely to it. They weren’t spectacularly successful in attracting readers, but one or another of the titles appeared on newsstands almost continuously until about 1975.

I read Palmer’s publications during this period, but rarely discussed them with my friends in the unexplained-phenomena or occult communities. I had assumed from my first contact with the Mystery that Shaver was a medium that received messages from the spirit world, but also a materialist who rationalized his psychic experiences as a physical phenomenon. I interpreted his Teros and Deros as good and evil spirits and his Rays as the psychic powers of both living people and disembodied spirits used to work magic.

Such an interpretation was unacceptable to most UFO investigators, and even to the majority of Shaver’s own followers, because they were strict materialists. However, occultists didn’t like the Shaver Mystery either; they called it negative and paranoid. People in both groups dismissed Shaver and his supporters as “nuts and crackpots who give all the rest of us a bad reputation.”

However, I noticed from the late Sixties on that more and more of Palmer and Shaver’s ideas were appearing in books on occultism, conspiracies, and unexplained phenomena. All too often the authors didn’t even credit these men as the source. Recently, years after his death, Palmer has finally begun to get some of the recognition he deserves as a creative, courageous pioneer in all three fields; but Shaver’s name is rarely mentioned, except by a few members of his original following in their own small-circulation publications.

I reread much of the Shaver Mystery material during the early Eighties when I was consciously trying to make my breakthrough, and I found that his basic cosmology seemed to fit the total available evidence about the nature of spiritual reality better than any of the traditional cosmologies in religious and occult literature. It’s quite grim and paranoid, but then so is a lot of the raw spiritual evidence that psychics have channeled over the course of history.

Books on Spiritualism and other forms of traditional Western occultism usually portray the astral plane as a rather benign and orderly place, presided over by benevolent deities or advanced human spirits, just as the major religions do. The wicked may be punished there, but the just are rewarded; and above all, the life after death takes place in a stable environment with law and order.

However, many of the spirits I’ve communicated with over years of mediumistic practice describe the astral plane as an environment almost as harsh as Shaver’s Caves. As I said in the last chapter, spirits often appear to be insane, feeble-minded, or child-like; and even those who seem normally intelligent and mature sometimes become mysteriously incoherent during the course of a telepathic conversation, as if something were attacking them or jamming the communication process.
 

If, as all the religious and occult mythologies claim, the astral plane is really governed by benign gods or other highly-evolved spiritual beings, they do not seem to be doing a very efficient job of helping the dead find stability or happiness there. In fact, the messages that supposedly come from the spiritual entities in charge on the astral plane are among the most confusing and frightening communications that mediums receive. Many times, I’ve made contact with entities that say, “I am God,” and then go on into ravings as immoral as Hitler’s and as incoherent as something you’d expect to hear coming out of a padded cell.

Of course, both the occultists and the religious believers claim that such messages are from demons and other evil or insane spirits, but that doesn’t answer the most important question. If the astral plane is under the control of benign forces, why does so much of the observed evidence portray existence there as extremely harsh and unpleasant?

Most of the occultists I discussed this with over the years before I made the breakthrough were not interested in doing serious research into this. Many put the blame on me:

“You’re too political and too concerned with the Earth plane, and this puts you in contact only with the lowest levels of the astral plane. If you’ll stop trying to play scientist, and simply submit your will to the spiritual forces that run the Universe, your mediumistic experiences will become calm and serene and you’ll start contacting the really advanced spirits and deities.”

My reply usually went something like this:

“Maybe I really am at a lower stage of spiritual development than you are, but if so, then I’ve got a lot of company. My personal communications with spirits tell me that the vast majority of the human race is not composed of high-level occultists capable of avoiding the evil spirits on the lower astral and going on to a higher plane of existence. Instead, when they die, it’s very likely they’ll join the lost souls calling for help. My sympathies are with them, and I’d like to learn how to help them.”

My actual opinion was that both traditional and New Age occultists, and all the believers in organized religion as well, were deluding themselves with false optimism because they were afraid to recognize and fight evil. However, I rarely said this openly because doing so would only be destructive criticism. I had no alternative to offer; just the vague feeling that there is something terrible going on in the spirit world.

When I finally made the breakthrough, I found out that it is a literal “War in Heaven,” a struggle to the death between two political factions of disembodied spirits; and that spirits from one of these factions had telepathically inspired my life-long fascination with the Shaver Mystery. My new knowledge also confirmed my rejection of Shaver’s physical, science-fiction-oriented interpretation of the Mystery. The Caves, the space people, and even the Ray machines do exist, but on the spiritual plane, not the physical plane. Shaver was simply an unconscious medium that received important messages about the nature of spiritual reality from the same group of spirits who are helping me with this book.

And since the Sixties, these spirits have had an ever-increasing subconscious influence on many Ufologists and conspiracy theorists, leading them into hypotheses similar to the Shaver Mystery. For example, during the Seventies, Jacques Vallee and several other respected UFO researchers virtually stopped searching for evidence that flying saucers were physical objects, and concentrated on studying the effects of the UFO phenomenon on individuals and on society as a whole. However, treating UFOs as a psychological and sociological phenomenon didn’t really explain anything, because the investigators kept finding evidence that UFOs had objective existence. Most cases could be explained as hoaxes, hallucinations, mass-suggestion, or media hype, but not all of them.

Investigators like Vallee kept talking to people who had experienced “close encounters” with UFOs and undergone profound psychological changes as a result. When I and other occultists read these accounts, we saw their similarity to descriptions in our own literature of encounters with spiritual beings, psychic attacks, illumination experiences, etc. Eventually, Vallee and other well-known UFO writers grudgingly began to admit that the UFOs were “real but nonphysical.” This concept will be discussed further in a later chapter.

They also found that their investigations of the effects of UFO encounters on people forced them to consider seriously the idea that unseen forces manipulate the course of human history. In the Fifties, the mainstream of the UFO investigation movement had ostracized Palmer and Shaver for talking about mind control and secret conspiracies. Twenty years later, many of these same investigators found that they were being drawn down the same path, the one marked “This way lies paranoia.”

The next chapter will give some general background information on conspiracy theories. I will return to the role of the UFO investigators later.

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Chapter 3: Conspiracies

Although the general public and the scientific investigators of unexplained phenomena started showing a major interest in conspiracy theories only after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, conspiracies have been a major theme in occult literature for centuries. Many of these stories are merely warnings about conspiracies to persecute occultists, or answers to accusations that occult organizations have conspired to overthrow religious and political establishments; but the ones that interested me are much more positive in tone. They’re the sort of thing that I read and hope is true, such as the rumors about secret societies of high-level “Masters” who conspire to use their advanced knowledge and formidable psychic powers for benign causes, especially the advancement of human civilization in every area: spiritual, cultural, political, and technological.

I felt instinctively from an early age that such positive conspiracies have in fact existed at various times during the past five or six centuries and have been significant in building our modern society. One of my major goals for a long time was to find such a group, if any had survived to the present, both to learn whatever they would teach me and to help them with what they were doing. In a sense, I found it when I made my breakthrough, but it wasn’t a conspiracy of living people at all. However, it’s still worthwhile to tell of my efforts to trace down the source of the rumors about benign conspiracies of advanced occultists who contribute to the progress of Western civilization.

One of the chief focal points for such rumors is the Masonic Order of the eighteenth century, so that’s where I’ll begin. Detailed histories of some of these lodges and relatively complete descriptions of their doctrines are now in general circulation. They’re supposed to be secret, but they really never have been – see William Heckethorn’s Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries, first published in 1875 and available in many public libraries. However, there’s very little in these books to help researchers find hidden occult conspiracies within the secret societies

For example, many historians admit that a large number of the men who made major breakthroughs in many different fields during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment – Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and dozens of others – belonged to such lodges. And one of the modern Rosicrucian groups acts as if this is proof that the lodges had access to important occult knowledge: “What secret did these men possess?” Actually, it’s just as proper to answer with another question:

“With men of that caliber in them, what need did the lodges have of secret occult knowledge to make an impact on the course of history?”

Studying the basic philosophical and ethical teachings of the eighteenth century Freemasons and Rosicrucians doesn’t directly reveal the existence of a secret occult conspiracy either. There is no doubt that ideas like “consent of the governed” and “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property” and “the only God we can know is Reason” were widely discussed and taught within the lodges, and considered extremely radical; but there was nothing really new or secret about them even then.

They had been published and openly discussed by intellectuals for centuries, and the only unique thing about the Age of Enlightenment is that these theoretical concepts finally began to be put into practice on a large enough scale to affect the evolution of human society.

Also, the “secret” histories of the Masonic lodges reveal that they have always been very similar to what they are today: social organizations devoted to mutual aid among members, charitable works in the community, and a philosophy most of us would call “Basic American values.” The members underwent initiations into various “degrees” and regularly attended quasi-religious rituals, but the histories make it clear that most lodge brothers considered them mere dramas to stir the emotions and create a mood. The exact details of these rituals are virtually the only things about such lodges that aren’t readily available to the public.

However, some members of modern occult groups that trace their descent back to certain Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges have put important elements of these traditional rituals into their writings for the general public. The writings of Aleister Crowley and the other Golden Dawn members are the best-known examples. And when one studies these rituals, evidence to support the existence of an occult conspiracy finally begins to emerge. Many of them are directly derived from the rituals of advanced medieval occultism, and there’s no doubt that performing them puts the participants in profoundly altered states of consciousness.

The OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis- Order of Eastern Templars) and other modern occult groups that use these rituals are among the most advanced magical lodges in existence. (And yes, some people in these groups have very bad reputations for misusing magic. But this reflects only on their morals, not on their knowledge or skills.)

The fact that advanced magical techniques were used in the rituals without being openly explained to all of the members is evidence that the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges may have been front organizations for a “secret society within a secret society”, which manipulated the other members for its own purposes. Many occultists have postulated the existence of such a group, and named it the “Invisible College.”

According to this theory, the Invisible College was a group of men with advanced knowledge of medieval occultism, derived from the Knights Templar or other secret societies of the late Middle Ages. They infiltrated Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians around the beginning of the eighteenth century. Once they had assumed leadership, they started teaching the rational, humanistic doctrine that most people today associate with Masonry, which is also the political and ethical philosophy that forms the basis for modern Western civilization.

The Invisible College designed rituals (based on medieval occultism) that would have a hypnotic effect on the initiates so their resistance to the radical doctrine would be lowered. The emotional power of the rituals also positively reinforced acceptance of the doctrine. The term “operant conditioning” wasn’t added to the vocabulary of science until the Twentieth century, but occultists have practiced the technique for hundreds of years. And it worked very well, resulting in the birth of modern political democracy and liberalism, the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, the rapid advancement of Science, and the decline of Puritanism and other forms of Fundamentalist Christianity that opposed material progress.

This particular conspiracy was large enough and effective enough to leave obvious traces in history, but it’s much more difficult to trace the operations of similar conspiracies since. Most of the modern books labeled as “conspiracy theories” have been of little use to me in finding occult conspiracies, because they deal only with politics and economics on a completely materialistic level. However, certain well-known mundane conspiracy theories have elements within them that do interest me. An example is the body of rumors about the “Bavarian Illuminati” that received a lot of publicity during the McCarthy-era controversy over Communist conspiracies back in the Fifties.

The rumors I’m talking about were published quite openly by members of the “lunatic fringe” of the anti-Communist movement, and some of them had the same “too wild to be untrue” quality as the Shaver Mystery did. They seemed to show a glimpse into another reality, as if the authors, like Shaver, were receiving messages from the spirit world that their conscious minds were totally incapable of interpreting.

For example, some of their accusations against the “Illuminati” made no sense at all back in the Fifties when the rumors were published, but when I reread this material in the Seventies and early Eighties, I found that several of their charges had been amazingly prophetic. For example, these particular propagandists had joined the crusade against the fluoridation of public water supplies by claiming that it was part of a wider Illuminati plot to put “drugs and chemicals that weaken the will” into food and water all over America so that people would become more vulnerable to Communist brainwashing.

Even the majority within the anti-fluoridation movement – who merely considered fluoridation of water supplies a potential health hazard and a violation of individual rights by the government – thought the charges about “will destroying drugs and chemicals” were totally paranoid. However, when I reread them years later, I suspected that the authors might have had psychic forewarnings about the massive impact of mind-altering drugs on society that started in the Sixties. And I’m not talking only about recreational drug use or LSD as an aid to consciousness-expansion here, but about something much more fundamental: the use of massive doses of powerful tranquilizers on people in prisons and mental hospitals, the frequent use of milder tranquilizers and sedatives by a large part of the population, the ever-increasing use of cocaine and amphetamines, etc.

Some of the other rumors started by these same “right-wing kooks” didn’t make any sense until after I had made my breakthrough and started writing this book. One of them was that the conspiracies they were trying to expose were a set of Chinese Boxes. On the outer layer were the majority of Americans, who were being brainwashed with false promises of peace and plenty from liberal politicians. The liberals themselves were being duped by Communist agents. Chief among these agents were Josef Stalin and his successors in the Kremlin, but they were not really sovereign over the “world-wide Communist conspiracy.” Most of their foreign propaganda and subversion was financed by cliques of Jewish bankers and other wealthy capitalists whose leaders were all members of the Bavarian Illuminati. And at the very center, the Illuminati themselves were accused of being under the control of the “Snake People,” who were either “aliens from outer space,” or “demons of Satan sent from Hell.”

The strangest thing about this scenario is that it makes perfect sense if interpreted in terms of some of the information in Part Two of this book. Before I made the breakthrough, I wasn’t able to understand what was behind these weird writings; I just felt the authors had received information from “somewhere else.” And this information seemed to support the idea that a mysterious conspiracy was doing things the conservatives and reactionaries didn’t like. The most interesting thing about it was that telepathy seemed to be involved, which would imply a conspiracy of psychics.

There are some ideas almost as wild in Morning of the Magicians (1960), by Louis Pouwells and Jacques Bergier. Among many other things, the book gives evidence that a number of German Nazi leaders were involved with occultism and various pseudo-scientific belief systems closely related to it. Some of this material led me to conclude that the government of Axis Germany may have been infiltrated and manipulated by the same sort of occultists who worked through the old Masonic lodges.

Most occultists are reluctant to consider speculation of this kind, because they jump to the conclusion that if “Secret Masters” manipulated the Nazis, they must have done so to help them. Since it’s natural to reject the idea that anyone with really advanced occult knowledge and psychic powers could be sympathetic to men as evil as Hitler and his followers, they usually conclude that Nazi occultism was on a rather low level.

After closely studying the available evidence, I came to a somewhat different conclusion. I found reason to believe that something similar to the old “Invisible College” influenced both sides in World War II, and that this manipulation was intended to ensure an Allied victory. Since many of the Nazi leaders had been involved with occult organizations from an early age, I concluded that the Invisible College probably had started out trying to control this movement and use it to rebuild Germany after World War I. They obviously failed, though I wasn’t sure why.

To explain evidence like this, many occultists and conspiracy researchers have postulated that there are two opposing factions of secret manipulators that contend for control of human society. Before I made the breakthrough, I found this concept of “the forces of good versus the forces of evil” too simplistic and unsophisticated to accept very easily, even though I kept discovering evidence to support it.

One thing is certain about World War II: whether or not high-level occult conspiracies were involved in such strategic events as the rise of the Nazis to power, occultism and psychic activities had a major impact on the course of the war. History records quite clearly that Hitler and other Nazi leaders believed in occultism enough to listen to advice from psychics, and that much of it was harmful to the Axis cause. For example, Hitler’s psychic advisors told him to stop trying to develop an atomic bomb. They also encouraged him to invade the Soviet Union.

There is also evidence that Allied leaders received and acted on advice from psychics over the course of World War II, but this does not mean that people like Roosevelt and Churchill believed in occultism in quite the same way that some of the German leaders did. In many cases, professional psychics passed useful military information to people in the regular Allied intelligence community who then passed it up the chain of command along with information gathered by conventional means.
 

If this was all there was to the evidence, there would be no reason to conclude that an important, high-level occult conspiracy was involved. Once it is assumed that psychic powers like telepathy exist, it’s logical to make the further assumption that psychically talented individuals are going to use their powers to help whichever side they support in a war. In this context, it makes perfect sense that psychics who were reasonably ethical people would give bad advice to the Nazis and good advice to the Allies.

However, now that World War II is long over and most of the major figures involved are dead, some extremely interesting evidence has started to surface. A number of the intelligence agents and low-ranking military officers who passed psychic advice to the Allied leaders are starting to admit that they lied when they said they got the information from professional occultists. That was just a cover story to deceive their colleagues in the intelligence community, who knew they couldn’t have gotten such material through their usual sources of information.

How did these people really get the information? No one told it to them: they got it through psychic experiences of their own, and in many cases never had a similar experience before or since. Some of the stories they’re now telling occult researchers are simply incredible unless you know something about mediumship. If you do, they’re quite familiar.

Many of them describe getting information from the ghost of a dead comrade, usually in a dream or while falling asleep. Others heard it on the radio: the station the person was listening to would fade out, and the signal that replaced it would convey a few sentences of useful intelligence information. Hundreds of such accounts have now been reported. I’ll admit there’s no hard evidence to prove most of them true, but they still impressed me, because they appear to be descriptions of mediumistic experiences by people who lack the knowledge to fake such a thing.

In addition to this, some of the conspiracy evidence I encountered through my own personal experience mystified and frightened me even more. The Kennedy assassination fits into that category. If my only source of information about it had been the facts available in newspapers and history books, I would have assumed President Kennedy had been murdered for mundane political reasons, such as his liberal stand on civil rights, his equivocal handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, his declaration of a “war on organized crime”, or one of his other controversial policies. However, I had some psychic experiences in 1962 and 1963 that strongly indicated that spiritual conspiracies were involved in the assassination.

I started having these experiences in late 1962. I would be in a trance state trying to read somebody’s mind or contact spirits, and I’d get extremely hateful and threatening feelings about the President – feelings that I was sure didn’t originate in my own mind. (Kennedy wasn’t a hero to me, as he was to so many Americans at that time, but I didn’t hate him, either. For example, I felt his strong stand on civil rights was merely what any decent person would take under the circumstances.) These alien thoughts were just raw emotions, not messages expressed in words or mental pictures, but they were very strong.

This might have made sense if I’d been living in a place like Alabama, surrounded by the sort of people who later cheered when they heard that Kennedy had been killed; but I was in the middle of New York City, where he was extremely popular. So where were the negative messages coming from?

My personal experiences with telepathy at that time indicated that it was mainly a short-range phenomenon. Whenever I could identify the source of the thoughts and emotions I picked up telepathically, it was usually someone within a few miles of me. The literature is full of accounts of long-range telepathy, but I’d only experienced this a few times in my life. So who was sending all the telepathic poison against Kennedy?

My guess was that a secret lodge of occultists with extreme right-wing political views was operating somewhere in New York. I knew vaguely that there were several “black lodges” in the area whose members claimed to be both powerful magicians and fascists. And I felt strongly that if people like that were sending out those telepathic hate messages, then the rest of the occult community should try to do something about it.

In the summer of 1963, when I first discussed this with various friends, all occultists about my own age, they talked me out of it. After all, we were working to end the censorship that had banned some of the best contemporary literature as pornography, so why should we even consider practicing “psychic censorship”? And what harm could the messages do anyway? So a few psychics kept hearing “Kill Kennedy, kill Kennedy.” So what? Weren’t Presidents of the United States guarded with all the latest technology and virtually impossible to assassinate? (Yes, I really was this naive. So were most Americans in 1963.)

However, as November of 1963 approached, I could perceive the anti-Kennedy messages growing stronger and more frequent, and people with less and less conscious psychic ability were reporting receiving them. Often, they were getting warnings, not threats: flashes that “Kennedy is in danger, something is going to happen to him.” So many people had experiences like this and talked or wrote about them, that the authorities investigating the assassination after it happened filled whole files with them. However, these psychic messages were far too vague to give information about the identity of the actual assassins.

In September of 1963, I began to get some information from my own spirit guides about the telepathic hate campaign against Kennedy. At that time, it was extremely difficult for me to receive coherent channeled messages, because my mediumistic powers were not yet highly developed. However, I did manage to get some answers to my questions after weeks of strenuous effort, and they weren’t at all what I’d been expecting.

Since I knew my spirit guides staunchly supported the Civil Rights movement and other liberal causes, I expected them to say they were trying to protect the President against psychic attacks from black magicians or evil spirits. Instead, they said that they and all the other good spirits on the astral plane were responsible for the anti-Kennedy campaign. They said Kennedy was mentally unstable enough to start a nuclear war, and it was necessary to either disgrace him or kill him before he could do so.

The process of receiving this information in garbled bits and pieces took many days, but by the time it was done, I was convinced the anti-Kennedy messages really did come from good spirits, not reactionary magicians. Also, when I reread the news accounts of Kennedy’s conduct during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they seemed to support the spirits’ contention that he might start a world war. There was evidence (though not the clear proof that’s surfaced since) that the President’s initial reaction had been to favor a nuclear first strike or massive invasion of Cuba, and that he’d compromised on a blockade only under heavy pressure from his advisors.

Because of this personal experience, I took a serious interest in the conspiracy theories that became a fad after the assassination. I also kept on trying very hard to develop my psychic powers and use them to look for evidence that telepathy was being used to guide the evolution of human society. The resurgence of the counterculture and radical politics in the Sixties, which began to receive major publicity soon after the Kennedy assassination, proved to be an excellent source of such evidence, as we shall see in the next chapter.
 

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Chapter 4: The Sixties

As the Fifties ended, the media were saying that the Beat Movement was dying, but I found out when I moved to New York at the end of 1959 that these rumors were completely misleading. The general public was losing interest in reading about the Beats, but the bohemian counterculture itself was still alive and growing. By 1962, the counterculture in New York had outgrown Greenwich Village and so many young bohemian-types were living in the Lower East Side that it was being called the East Village. The same thing happened in San Francisco: as the population of the counterculture outgrew the space available in the old bohemian area of North Beach, it spread to a residential neighborhood called the Haight-Ashbury.

This happened without attracting much media publicity, and well before the beginning of the events commonly described as the causes of the Sixties movement. For example, it predated widespread campus radicalism by several years. I’m certain of this because I was among the “outside agitators” who tried to interest college students in the anti-draft, anti-war, free speech, and civil rights issues before many of them were willing to listen to these messages.

I also know that people like Timothy Leary didn’t start the psychedelic drug movement, because college students were already starting to “Turn on, Tune in, and Drop out” years before Leary coined the phrase. They were turning on to the “weed and wine” popularized in the Beat literature, because LSD had not yet become widely available; they were tuning in to the Zen-influenced philosophy of Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others; and they were dropping out and trying to join a movement they really didn’t fit into very well.

The original Beatniks had been typical American bohemians, little different from those who had lived in Greenwich Village and similar bohemian colonies for over a hundred years. Most of them were well above average in both intelligence and education, and had a serious interest in at least one creative activity: art, literature, music, drama, social or political reform, etc. As an occultist and political radical, I felt comfortable in the Beat movement; but many of the recent dropouts didn’t.
 

The majority of people entering the counterculture from the early Sixties on didn’t have the customary personality profile for bohemians. They didn’t have a consuming passion for specific intellectual, artistic, or political endeavors, but had interests that were more personal and low-key. This is not to say they were less intelligent or creative than the traditional bohemians; they just had different goals. By the mid-Sixties, they had started their own segment of the underground press and were putting these goals into words, talking about “alternative life-styles” and “doing your own thing.”

My experiences with overhearing psychic messages regarding the Kennedy assassination made me start looking for evidence that someone was telepathically influencing large numbers of ordinary young people to take drugs, drop out, and join the counterculture. And yes, when I started asking people, they said they had first started using marijuana or LSD because they’d had dreams, visions, or simply “hunches” that they ought to, and that these “feelings” predated any intellectual knowledge about psychedelics.

Many of the people I talked to had first learned about LSD and the other powerful psychedelics through reading accounts of the scientific experiments with them in popular magazines. These accounts described only the psychedelics experiments conducted by professional researchers working within the medical establishment; there was not one word in them to encourage widespread use of the drugs by the public. However, when these young people read the accounts, they felt very strong desires to use psychedelics. In many cases, the principal reason they’d joined the counterculture was to meet people who could get them peyote, mescaline, or LSD.

I also started doing formal rituals to listen for telepathic messages urging people to use psychedelics, and found them quite common. However, I was never able to tell exactly who was sending them. Sometimes it seemed to be spirits, sometimes groups of living people; but my psychic powers were not yet developed enough for me to isolate the source.

Even more significant, I found that someone was sending out powerful telepathic messages supporting not just personal experimentation with psychedelics, but all the other major ideological elements of the counterculture movement of the mid and late Sixties as well. There were messages about peace, sexual freedom, equality for women and minorities, occultism and experimentation with non-Christian religious systems, general hostility toward the Establishment, etc.

The emotional tone of many of these telepathic messages was extremely militant, often bordering on what most people would call paranoia and delusions of grandeur, as if someone were trying to turn people into fanatics. My impression of this was that someone was literally trying to start a social revolution on a very deep level, one that would completely transform Western civilization if it succeeded. Some of these telepathic messages even suggested that we call ourselves “Spiritual Revolutionaries.”

Even though I often received the messages themselves quite clearly, I still didn’t know who was sending them. The commonest rumor within the counterculture said the collective unconscious of the human race was responsible. Other rumors attributed the messages to the Bavarian Illuminati, space people, or a wide variety of deities. When I tried sending telepathic questions asking the identity of whoever was sending the messages, I found out the source of all these apparently conflicting rumors was that mysterious “Invisible College” I’d been speculating about for a long time.

• Sometimes I’d ask, “Are you the Illuminati?” and be told, “Yes, we are the Invisible College.”

• But when I’d ask “Are you living people?” I’d get the reply, “No, we are dead people.”

• Then I’d ask them, “Are you the Ascended Masters the occultists talk about?,” and the spirits would answer, “No, we are the enemies of the Masters.”

• I’d ask “Are you from outer space?” and be told, “Yes. But so are you. So are many people on this planet.”

• If I asked “Are you gods?” I’d get one of two replies: either “No, we are people, just like you,” or “No, we are the enemies of the gods.”

I sent these questions many different times and always received versions of the same answers. The replies were always short and cryptic, and they really left me no wiser than before. Now that I’ve made the breakthrough, they make perfect sense; but they meant little to me in the Sixties and early Seventies.

Sometime in 1966, I started calling myself a Spiritual Revolutionary and dropped out of regular political activism, concentrating instead on assuming a minor leadership role in the psychedelic-drug movement and the new occult movement that was growing out of it. I felt my psychic powers were far from fully developed, but as long as I knew more than the people I was teaching, I could be of help. The next eight years are full of chaotic memories of guiding LSD trips, leading various rituals, teaching sex magic and mediumship, and writing all sorts of things for the underground press. I still wasn’t sure what was going on, but it was obvious what needed doing from one day to the next.

One of the things that mystified me the most about the Sixties Movement was the way it seemed to make rapid progress without leadership in the usual sense. Oh, there were plenty of people who said they were leading the movement. The press made media heroes of them as if they were movie stars or sports champions, and the government frequently threw them in jail even if it had to bend the law and the Constitution to do so. However, very few of these people were actually providing leadership as it is usually defined. They issued very few direct orders, and when they did, not many members of the counterculture obeyed them.

The psychedelic drug movement is an excellent example of this. Timothy Leary was acknowledged as the leader of this movement by both the general public and the acidheads themselves, but he was just a figurehead. Leary lectured and held quasi-religious rituals as the “High Priest of LSD,” but the people in the psychedelics movement treated him more like a statue of a god in a temple than like an actual priest. A priest preaches, and members of his religious congregation are expected to put his teachings into practice; but this simply didn’t happen in the Sixties psychedelic movement.

Very few of the hundreds of thousands of people experimenting with LSD and other psychedelics were taking advice or instruction from anyone. Books on psychedelics by Leary and many other people sold very well, but my own experiences as a low-level leader of the drug movement showed me that not many acidheads took the books seriously or tried to learn from them. Nor did they practice the much simpler instructions of the “How To Be Your Own Trip Guide" type that people like me wrote for the underground press. They were simply buying acid on the black market and stuffing it down their throats, with very little regard for the consequences. Once they’d survived a few acid trips, they figured their personal experience qualified them as trip guides, and they started giving LSD to all their friends.

People just worked out their own methods of controlling their own LSD trips by personal experimentation. Often, they said they were using Leary’s instructions as a guideline, but I could see little resemblance most of the time. The general attitude was:

“Who wants to fast and meditate to prepare for a trip? And why bother to recite a bunch of mumbo-jumbo when I can just groove on the Stones?”

At first, I was quite hostile to this attitude. I’d learned the use of psychedelics by studying Western occultism and Amerindian shamanism, which teach that the drugs should be taken under very structured conditions involving elaborate ritual. However, when I was persuaded to try the less controlled approach that everyone around me was using, I found it both safe and effective. By this time, I had enough conscious control over my psychic powers to perceive directly that an outside agency was telepathically communicating with people who took LSD and was reprogramming their minds.

My explanation for the phenomenon at the time was that the collective telepathic emanations from hundreds or thousands of people taking LSD simultaneously sent messages to everyone else and guided their trips. I also found that I could receive these psychic messages even when I wasn’t on drugs, just by assuming the right kind of trance state. The content of the telepathic messages was the usual ideology of the Sixties movement as reported in the underground press: “Peace now,” “Love everybody, even the pigs,” “Expand your consciousness,” etc. There were also hundreds of phrases from popular song lyrics by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Donovan, Tim Buckley, Simon and Garfunkel, and many more. Often, I’d receive a phrase telepathically months before I heard it in a song, and speculate that the songwriter had gotten it by the same means and from the same source.

Many people in the counterculture believed that some of these people, especially Bob Dylan, were fully conscious of what was going on and had a complete understanding of what all these cryptic phrases meant, but my own telepathic experiences made me doubt this. I was reasonably certain they received the same tantalizing fragments of telepathic information I received, and had no more understanding of them than I did. Numerous passages in the song lyrics themselves could be interpreted as saying this.

If what I was overhearing was really just a consensus of the thoughts of the people on LSD at that time, the messages were exactly what I expected they would be, in a general sense; but there was also something rather odd about them. I naturally expected the random thoughts of “a bunch of stoned hippies” to be extremely diverse and incoherent and to contain a wide variety of different emotions and images. Instead, what I received seemed quite simple, clear, and well controlled.

I had no idea who was sending those telepathic messages, but whoever they were, they were extremely anarchistic. They urged people not to follow leaders at all, but to learn everything by personal experimentation and become masters of their own fate. Even though I’ve always lived my own life by this philosophy, I felt uneasy receiving these messages, because there were so many immature and irresponsible people in the Sixties movement. I was afraid that the policy of “Do your own thing” and “Don’t follow leaders, become a leader yourself” would keep the movement from developing enough political organization to make significant reforms in society.

However, the unseen forces who were influencing minds by telepathy seemed to oppose completely the idea of injecting formal political structure into the movement. People kept saying “We’ve got to get it together,” but this proved completely impossible. The telepathic manipulators countered by sending “We don’t need to get it together. It already is together.” No one could figure out exactly what this was supposed to mean, but it sounded reassuring. Besides, by the time this message was sent, the movement was dying out anyway, and few people were expecting immediate revolution, political or spiritual, any more.

After the Vietnam War ended and the counterculture stopped receiving major publicity, I stayed in the new wing of the occult community for a few years, then gradually drifted out of it and concentrated all my efforts on my personal psychic development. I felt I was no longer needed, because by this time the Neo Pagan, Human Potentials, and New Age movements were well under way, training their own leaders and designing their own operating techniques. And I was looking further into the future, believing that both the “alternative lifestyles” of the Sixties and the “spiritual alternatives” of the Seventies were just precursors of the real beginning of a “New Age,” which was still to come. By the early Eighties, just before I made my personal breakthrough, I was able to look back on the Sixties Movement and realize just how successful it had been in preparing American society for the overt Spiritual Revolution of the Eighties and Nineties.

During the late Sixties and early Seventies, many people outside the movement kept saying,

“This is just some sort of weird fad, and eventually it will pass and things will return to normal – unless, of course, those damn Hippies stir up so much trouble that the political center collapses and the country goes Communist or Fascist.”

At the same time, most of us within the movement itself who hadn’t become complete fanatics expecting an instant Utopia kept saying,

“This can’t be happening. Most Americans are still quite conservative, anti-intellectual, graspingly materialistic, and somewhat bigoted. The Establishment is growing stronger, not weaker, and the totalitarian policies of the Communist countries are undermining the foundation of the peace and anti-imperialist movements.

 

The drug movement is getting so corrupted with real drug abuse – heavy use of the opiates, the amphetamines, cocaine, barbiturates, etc. – that the legalization and controlled use of the psychedelics is beginning to appear impossible.”

Because of this, I believed all through the Sixties that the Establishment would eventually suppress the counterculture by force. All the “superstar” leaders would go into jail or exile, most of the rank-and-file members of the movement would be scared away from it, and the rest of us – those deeply committed but not conspicuous enough to be identified and persecuted – would carry on our activities underground until the heat died down and we could surface again.

That’s what my knowledge of history told me was most likely, but it didn’t happen. The Sixties movement neither challenged the Establishment nor was challenged by it, but simply kept getting larger and more diffuse until it faded away into the background. By the late Seventies, I realized that this had been the plan of the unseen forces behind the movement all along, and that it had proven extremely successful.

What happened was that the essential philosophy of the Sixties counter-culture spread very widely within the general population while the organized parts of the movement died out. Many of the beliefs and opinions of the “Silent Majority” changed without the people involved being consciously aware of it. Most Americans continued to say they disliked hippies and the hippy philosophy, while at the same time their personal opinions on many important issues were moving closer and closer to those the counterculture had actually lived by.

The most important of these changed attitudes was simply an increased tolerance for people with opinions or behavior different from their own. This has happened so gradually and smoothly all over the country during the Seventies and into the Eighties that it has never received much attention, but there’s no doubt the change is real and significant.

The course that American society has actually taken from the end of the Sixties movement to the late Eighties has been quite different from what either insiders or outsiders had been predicting. The overt phase of the movement withered away without making too many political changes. Psychedelics remained illegal. The nuclear arms race and American imperialism still existed even though we did finally pull out of Vietnam.

Every President from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan has been either conservative or moderate, and the very term “liberal” remained in bad repute. Above all, the extreme optimism about the future that was one of the hallmarks of the Sixties movement gave way to alternate waves of militant pessimism (such as predictions of imminent ecological catastrophe or economic collapse) and self-indulgent indifference (the philosophy of the “yuppies” and many New Age groups).

However, these surface appearances are misleading. Western society in the 1980’s is significantly different from the way it was in 1960, and many of the changes have been those advocated by the Sixties movement. There is still racial bigotry and ghetto poverty, for example, but the present generation of black Americans lives in a much less racist social environment than did previous generations.

Millions of blacks have now achieved effective equality with whites: in education, in housing, in small-business ownership, in professional and executive-level employment, and to an increasing extent in labor unions and well-paid blue-collar jobs. Although the civil rights movement is correct when it says there is still a need for even more reforms before our society achieves complete racial equality, there is absolutely no doubt that enormous strides have already been made. When I first started supporting the concept of equal rights for minorities, I never thought I’d live to see this much real progress.

Also, even the most speculative radical writings of the early Sixties didn’t come close to predicting the achievements of the present feminist movement. During the last twenty years, women have achieved even more progress towards social and economic equality than blacks. Again, there’s still a long way to go and an ongoing movement fighting for further progress, but there’s no doubt a young girl today will live in a better world than her mother did when it comes to opportunities for women. And the progress is not just in having women in high political office or positions of business leadership; changes for the better in male-female relations within the family itself can be observed all around us.

There has also been a significant increase in sophistication in this country since the Sixties. Europeans used to consider Americans relatively uncultured compared to themselves. Before the last decade or two, the majority of artistic and social innovations and fads started in Europe and spread to the rest of the world. Now many of them start in the United States.
 

The most striking thing about all these changes is that they reverse the historical pattern for social evolution. Typically, a change in the society’s political or economic structure occurs first, then a change in individual opinions and behavior. For example, it took more than a century after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights for the majority of Americans to realize that it is impossible to have government by, for, and of the people without political equality for women and racial minorities.

The social changes of the last few decades have reversed this pattern: they first occur as changes in individual opinions and behavior – the popular term for it is “raised consciousness” – which then force changes in the political system and other organized social institutions. The American Revolution was the work of a small political elite who forced modern democracy on a population who really hadn’t asked for it and weren’t prepared to make full use of it, and many of the social changes since the Sixties have been caused by a series of spontaneous, grass-roots movements without strong leadership that forced reforms on the Establishment.

The next chapter continues describing the social and political changes that have been occurring as our civilization enters a New Age, but from a different perspective. It discusses the role that organized religion is playing in all these events.
 

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