Chapter 5: Religion and Revolution

Until I made the breakthrough in 1983, my attitude toward Christianity and the other major organized religions was ambiguous. On one level, it’s quite natural for occultists to feel apprehension toward all religious establishments. Our whole traditional literature is full of accounts of witch-burning and other persecution. I’ve always been aware that such things could happen right here in Twentieth-century America if the New Right and other political factions controlled by Fundamentalists ever achieved control of the government, or even if the majority of American Christians again became Fundamentalists, as they were in past centuries.

That fear has been in the back of my mind all my life, but it was never really a rational fear.

In reality, the majority of Americans have become progressively more tolerant of occultism and alternative religious systems over the last twenty years. A Fundamentalist minority still preaches against us, but when they attempt active persecution, even the clergy of the largest Christian sects – Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, etc. – are usually quick to condemn the persecutors as a lunatic fringe and to defend people’s First-Amendment rights to be non-Christians.

A number of my friends in the Sixties movement considered themselves devout Christians or Jews. They simply dropped those aspects of the traditional doctrine they found incompatible with their beliefs as members of the counterculture, and incorporated the rest into their new lifestyle. For example, they’d quote verses from the New Testament that supported the peace and love doctrine of the counterculture, and make statements like “Jesus was the original hippy.” (Jews in this category sometimes expressed regret that Jesus had been persecuted by the Jewish establishment of his day instead of being recognized as a divinely appointed prophet and reformer.)

Many of the leaders of the civil rights movement have been members of the Christian clergy, from Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson right on down to the community level, including whites as well as blacks. The same has been true of leaders of the peace and anti-nuclear movement. Most of these people assert that their religious beliefs are what motivate them into political activism, and quote scripture to support their ideologies.

Another cause of my ambiguous attitude toward religion is the lack of a clear-cut boundary between organized religion and occultism. Many Spiritualists consider themselves members of the Christian community, even though I myself feel that their actual beliefs and practices make them part of occultism. The same applies to a lot of people who call themselves Gnostics, Magdalenian Christians, Christian Magicians, Cabalists, etc. I’ve always got along as easily with people in this category as with occultists, Pagans, Witches, and New Agers.

However, I took an instant dislike to the “Jesus Freaks” in the Sixties. At first, I couldn’t identify exactly what turned me off about these longhaired Christians who proselytized from storefront churches in counterculture areas. Then a few of my Christian friends in the counterculture became Jesus Freaks. They went from saying “Jesus was a hippy. He drank wine, so why should he mind if I smoke dope?” to “Get high on Jesus instead of pot.” As a psychic, I had to admit that spiritual experiences are just as efficient at altering consciousness as drugs are; but the longer my friends stayed in the Jesus Movement, the less they seemed to act high at all. They also started arguing with me and preaching to me. Eventually, they all either dropped out of the Jesus Movement or stopped speaking to people like me.

And the ones who remained Jesus Freaks gradually dropped out of the counterculture. It all came clear one night when I saw some the movement’s leaders interviewed on a television evangelist’s program. One said, “We’re basically a rescue mission. We go onto Satan’s territory up there in the Height and try to rescue sinners.” Then the guy shook his shoulder-length hair and fingered his paisley shirt and continued, “And if we have to wear Satan’s uniform while we do it, then that’s what we’ll do. Praise the Lord!”

I was frightened of black militants who preached a fanatical Islamic doctrine that included anti-Semitism, and of Palestinian Arabs who condoned terrorism. However, I was just as disturbed that some militant Zionists condemned all Palestinians for the acts of a few, or asserted that Moslems did not deserve the full rights of Israeli citizenship. And even though I had spent several years studying Vedanta, I felt an instinctive dislike for the Hare Krishnas as well. When people asked me why, I’d say,

“They’re Vedantic Puritans. The people I worked with were Shivites who smoked ganja, practiced sex magic, and had vibes more like occultists.”

I didn’t realize till I’d made the breakthrough that all these people (Jesus Freaks, Zionists, and Hare Krishnas) had one thing in common. For now, I’ll call it Fundamentalism, but I’ll have another name for it in Part Two.

The principal difference between Fundamentalists and other believers within a given religion is not just conservatism in the sense of unwillingness to make changes in traditional religious doctrine or custom to avoid conflict with the religion’s external environment. Instead, the Fundamentalists take social and political action to convert the whole society to their views, whether the rest of the population wants to change or not.

It’s ironic that modern American Fundamentalists call themselves religious and political conservatives. Their philosophy is really radical or revolutionary, because they desire sweeping changes in social and political institutions, and they try to impose these changes with vigorous action, sometimes including force. However, they call this right-wing radical ideology “conservative” to project a respectable public image.

The Fundamentalist-backed New Right claims to be a conservative movement that advocates “a return to the traditional American values.” This is a blatant lie. Even the most casual look at American history shows that this country’s traditional values are actually quite liberal. Politicians all over the world have used the U.S. Constitution with its Bill of Rights as a model for designing liberal, democratic institutions. The Founding Fathers included some of the most famous liberal political philosophers of all time: Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others.

History also shows that American social and political institutions have been moving steadily toward the left during the country’s whole history.

After I made the breakthrough and learned exactly what the Fundamentalist ideology is and where it comes from, it became obvious why people are so willing to think of it as “traditional” even though it has always been a minority viewpoint in the United States. It’s an extremely ancient and powerful ideological system based on a profound knowledge of human psychology and the nature of psychic and spiritual reality; it’s also the source of most of the evil in this world, as I will describe in Part Two.

My attitude towards Christianity and all other organized religion became increasingly ambiguous during the last ten years before I made the breakthrough. On one hand, I saw many examples of cooperation, tolerance, and openness. For example, a number of occult, Pagan, and New Age groups in the San Francisco Bay Area have rented space and held their meetings in various non-Fundamentalist Christian churches since the Sixties and enjoyed friendly relations with their clergy and congregations. Leaders of some of these Aquarian Age groups have even belonged to local Councils of Churches and participated in their charitable and public service work. This has also occurred in other large cities all over the country.

Yet at the same time, Fundamentalist-controlled religious radio and TV stations frequently broadcast outrageous slanders of the Aquarian movement. “All non-Christian religious activity is Devil worship, and everyone who participates in it is possessed by demons.” Fundamentalist propaganda also frequently made the news with claims that rock musicians brainwash young people with subliminal messages about Satanism. Even the ultimate lie about occultists and Pagans was mentioned occasionally: that they practice human sacrifice, especially of babies. And the harassment wasn’t all verbal: several groves in Bay Area regional parks where Pagans hold outdoor services were routinely vandalized with crosses carved on trees and “Jesus Saves” painted on rocks.

During this same period, Fundamentalists in religions besides Christianity were causing major political problems all over the world. Most readers will be familiar with the trouble Islamic Fundamentalists have caused over the last twenty years. The kidnapping of American diplomats by Iranian revolutionaries was partly responsible for Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was assassinated by Moslem Fundamentalists because he had made a serious effort to work with Israel and bring peace to the Middle East. Perhaps the most glaring example has been the virtual destruction of Lebanon, which used to be one of the most advanced and progressive countries in the Islamic world.

There are many other examples of serious political problems caused by Fundamentalist movements, both in Christianity and in other major religions that most Americans may not identify as such.

For example, some of the groups that the press in this country calls “right-wing death squads” in South America are actually Catholic Fundamentalist secret societies, and are merely a highly visible part of a Fundamentalist movement within the Catholic Church in that part of the world. This movement is quite small and confined mostly to the upper and middle social classes, but it has been a significant factor for years in moving South American governments to the right, toward fascist dictatorship. This movement has received much less publicity in the United States than the various left-wing Catholic movements that have formed in reaction to it among the impoverished majority of the population in the same countries, but it is definitely a significant political force in South America right now.

The “Moonie” Cult in the United States has attracted major publicity for misrepresenting itself when proselytizing, holding some of its members against their will under conditions of near starvation and hard labor, etc.; and Rev. Moon himself has been in and out of jail on tax charges. All of this has caused minor problems for the Aquarian spiritual movement in this country, because too many Americans don’t realize the Moonies have nothing to do with this movement at all.

The doctrine of Moon’s Unification Church is a mixture of Fundamentalist Christianity with elements from Buddhism and other Eastern religions, and is the direct antithesis to everything the Aquarian movement stands for. The main reason why this import from South Korea hasn’t done more harm in this country is that we already have our own Christian Fundamentalist movement, which fits into our culture better and appears less bizarre. However, the Moonies and several similar Fundamentalist groups have a major influence on South Korean politics and are one reason why that country has swung so far to the totalitarian right.

Religious Fundamentalism among both the Sikhs and Hindus was a cause of the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the bloody religious warfare between those two groups that’s been going on ever since. I’m certain we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. One of the basic causes of Apartheid in South Africa is that large numbers of the Afrikaners are Fundamentalist Protestants. Fundamentalism is responsible for much of the repression and totalitarianism in the Black African nations; Islam, Christianity, Vedanta, and various tribal religions are all involved. There’s also a Fundamentalist movement within Judaism, which pressures the Israeli government into aggressive military and expansionist policies and makes achieving peace in the Middle East just that much more difficult.

These are just a few examples of how Fundamentalist religious movements all over the world seem to be working to sabotage the progress of human civilization. The most significant thing about them is that it is very difficult to see how their activities could serve anyone’s self-interest. Until I made my breakthrough, I attributed such activity to a form of insanity: religious fanatics become so obsessed with “pleasing God” in hopes of achieving “eternal bliss” or some other benefit after death that they completely lose contact with earthly reality. However, I was never able to determine why religious fanaticism should do this to people.

The puritanical, reactionary philosophy of the Fundamentalists has always put them in conflict with religious as well as political liberals. Since the late Seventies, as the New Right has been trying to achieve political power, I have noticed an increasing liberal backlash within the Christian religion it self. Until recently, only the Fundamentalist wing of Christianity seemed truly vigorous and fanatical. The majority of Christians in this country were liberal or moderate in both their political and religious views, but they were also rather conservative about trying to convert others.

Also, for most of this century, the Fundamentalists were the only American Christians who made full use of the psychic power inherent in all organized religion. When most Americans see terms like “charismatic preachers, “religious ecstasy,” “faith healing,” or “miracles,” they associate them only with the Fundamentalists. The liberal wing of the Christian Church has traditionally been more concerned with social and political issues than with spiritual power.

This situation has recently started to change. There are now urban Protestant congregations that raise just as much psychic power as the Fundamentalists do, but are definitely liberal. The same churches often have female clergy and racially mixed congregations. Many make an effort to proselytize among homosexuals, feminists, psychedelic drug-users, political radicals, and other types of people whom the Fundamentalists bar from membership in their churches unless they first agree to totally change their philosophy and life-style.

Because of the information I learned through my breakthrough, my present opinion of this revolutionary movement within Christianity is still quite ambiguous. I like the political and social ideologies involved, but these people are still doing some dangerous things on the purely psychic and spiritual level.

They mean well, but the spiritual forces they are openly opposing are, for the time being at least, still much stronger than they are. Worse yet, they have entered into this conflict with a completely erroneous idea of what they are fighting. I’ll follow up on this in Part Two.

Before I made the breakthrough, my personal beliefs about deities were just as ambiguous as my attitude towards organized religion. I usually described myself as a Pagan, because I felt vague psychic perceptions that there are beings on the astral plane that seem to be superior to the spirits of ordinary deceased humans. I assumed that these are what all the organized religions have called “gods” and “devils,” and that they’ve had a significant effect on the course of human history by communicating telepathically with living people.

However, I wasn’t willing to commit myself to devout belief in any particular Pagan sect, because I also had an intuitive dislike of deism in any form, monotheistic or polytheistic. I acknowledged that god-like beings do exist, but I didn’t have much to do with them. They’re too capricious and egotistical. Instead, when I communicated telepathically with the astral plane, I concentrated on forming working relationships with spirits who say they are not deities, but ordinary people in a discorporate state between earthly lives. Some of the entities I’ve had as spirit guides have told me that their previous incarnations were on worlds other than Earth, but they still say they are people, not gods.

My relationship with my spirit guides has been extremely important to me since I first started becoming aware of it in childhood, but it’s very different from the relationship between deists and their gods. What I have is a friendship between equals that doesn’t violate my individual sovereignty. It’s based mostly on the mutual exchange of information, and on working to achieve shared political or ethical goals, and I’ve never believed my spirit guides would or could do any harm to me for disagreeing with them.

The relationship between deists and gods is more like slavery than friendship: the gods dictate and the worshippers obey. Even worse, deism is based on the postulate that the nature and motives of the gods are beyond human understanding. I don’t like totalitarianism or paternalism on Earth, and I don’t like them any better in relationships with spiritual beings.
Another major area where I disagree with the basic doctrines of all the major religions concerns life after death. A strong belief in reincarnation is one of the foundations of my whole concept of spiritual reality.

This automatically puts me in disagreement with Judeo-Christian doctrine, which is based on the concept that people live only one life on Earth and then spend eternity in Heaven or Hell. (Some individual Christians and Jews believe in reincarnation, and a few minor sects of both religions have worked it into their doctrines, but it still contradicts the mainstream of Judeo-Christian belief.)

From this, it might appear that I would agree with the doctrines of the major Eastern religions – Vedanta, Buddhism, etc. – since they include reincarnation; but this is not the case. After studying these religions closely over a period of years, I came to the conclusion that their traditional, mainstream cosmology about the afterlife is operationally identical to the Judeo-Christian view, and that the apparent differences are insignificant.

The actual mainstream belief of the Eastern religions derived from ancient Vedanta (including hundreds of modern Hindu and Buddhist sects, Jainism, Sikhism, and a number of others – a billion or more believers in all) is centered on moral judgment of the soul by deities and salvation by divine grace just as much as Judeo-Christianity is. Many Westerners fail to realize this because their knowledge of the Eastern religions is based on books that confuse Eastern occultism with the mainstream of Eastern religious doctrine itself.

Eastern occultism is very highly developed and has never been formally disavowed by the leaders of the mainstream religions as has happened in the West. However, it is a mistake to equate the two; they are very different belief systems practiced by entirely different types of people. Eastern occultists, like their counterparts in the West, have always been a small minority alienated from the majority of the population. In the West, occultists were persecuted quite openly and their activities made illegal by governments. This did not happen to nearly the same extent in the East; in fact, the leaders of many Eastern religious sects often preach that monks and nuns who specialize in practices that many Westerners would call occultism are especially devout and worthy of veneration.

However, even though Eastern occult masters – Yogis, Tantrists, Taoists Zen Masters, etc. – are often publicly venerated as being holy and spiritually advanced, few of the people who honor them actually imitate their beliefs and practices. Both Eastern and Western occultists are seeking spiritual development, whereas mainstream believers in both parts of the world look forward to divine salvation. Such disciplines as Yoga, Tantra, Zen Meditation, etc., are intended to strengthen and enlighten the soul, much as a person gains strength and learns motor skills through physical training and exercise. Traditional Western occultism teaches exactly the same things under different names: i.e. divination, spiritual healing, ritual magic, alchemy, etc.

The key to understanding all these practices is that they are things people do on the purely physical, intellectual, or emotional level, under control of the conscious will. They are intended to have a beneficial effect on the soul allowing the person to use various psychic senses and powers to learn about the nature of spiritual reality. In other words, the basic postulate is that an individual can become an adept or saint by his or her own efforts, as one would learn athletic or professional skills. This is a purely humanistic concept: the application of the “doctrine of human perfectibility” to spiritual and psychic development.

The viewpoint of both the Eastern and Western mainstream religious system is exactly the opposite of that: people are innately inferior spiritually, and the only way they can make progress is by pleasing the gods enough to receive their “grace.” Exactly what people must do to receive this favor varies from sect to sect in both East and West, but it usually involves attending religious services regularly and performing various ritual acts.

The next three chapters will describe some of the ideas I was exposed to just before I made the breakthrough.
 

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Chapter 6: Passport to Paranoia

During the early Eighties, I made a serious effort to identify the spiritual forces that seemed to be having an ever-increasing effect on society. When I started systematically reading the literature on this subject, both fiction and non-fiction, I found several consistent patterns in it. The most obvious was what people in the Sixties Movement called “paranoia.” This is not the mental disease described in psychology texts, which involves uncontrollable emotions of fear over imaginary dangers, but the intellectual conclusion that something you dislike is about to happen, even though you can’t actually prove it.

Most “paranoia” of this type in the Sixties Movement was focused on harassment of the counterculture by the government or private individuals; the “paranoid” ideas discussed in this chapter focus mostly on the concept that unknown forces are manipulating the course of human history in directions that seem sinister and frightening.

One of my starting points was to re-examine the work of Charles Fort, the founder of modern research into unexplained phenomena. Starting with Book of the Damned in 1918, he was the first to publish many of the simplest and most obvious explanations for a number of strange occurrences. For example, he proposed that the inhabitants of other worlds might be visiting the Earth in space ships long before the terms “flying saucer” and “UFO” were invented, and he also speculated that we might be receiving visitations from the future or from other dimensions.

Fort didn’t assume, as did most of the UFO researchers in the Fifties, that these visitations represented mere scientific exploration, but speculated that the visitors had selfish reasons for coming to Earth. He said that “certain esoteric ones” throughout history have received “messages from elsewhere,” and hinted that these have helped shape modern civilization. I assumed he was talking about the Invisible College and the Eighteenth-century Freemasons and Rosicrucians, but his mentions of this subject are all quite vague.

However, Fort’s negative speculations were more numerous than his positive ones. He is widely quoted as saying, “I think we are property. Someone owns us,” and for his further speculations that these “proprietors” have always had willing collaborators on Earth, “a cult or order, members of which function as bellwethers to the rest of us...” At his most morbid, he compares us not to “property,” but to “cattle.” – a dark hint that the mysterious outsiders might slaughter Earth people for food or “diabolical experiments.”

I found the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote at about the same time as Fort, to be both more interesting and more disturbing. His horror tales make utterly grotesque monsters seem entirely real to the reader, as if the author himself believed what he was writing. The basic theme of most of Lovecraft’s stories is the persecution of his characters by evil, superhuman beings called the “Great Old Ones.” Sometimes they are described as physical beings with octopus-like bodies, but in other stories they seem to be non-corporeal. Lovecraft frequently describes them with phrases such as “Dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.”

The human characters in his stories are scientists or occultists who deliberately or accidentally release some of the Great Old Ones from captivity, often by reciting magic spells from a fictional occult text called the Necronomicon, which means “book of the names of the dead.” Once released, Cthulhu and his cohorts often devour both the body and the soul of the unfortunate magician; and if they remain on Earth very long, they cause children in the area to be born as deformed monsters.

One of the things that make Lovecraft’s stories more terrifying than most horror fiction is that they have little heroism and very few happy endings. There is no exorcist to drive out the Devil, no Dr. Van Helsing to drive a stake through the vampire’s heart. Instead, the story ends when the protagonist dies or is driven mad, leaving the reader to wonder if the Great Old Ones are still loose, and whether they’ll eventually destroy the world if they are.

What do these morbid horror stories have to do with spiritual knowledge and occult secrets? In terms of the plots of the stories themselves, nothing. However, anyone with sufficient conscious mediumistic powers to receive messages from the spirit-world with any regularity finds certain details in Lovecraft’s horror tales disturbingly familiar. Some of the “evil spirits” commonly contacted on the astral plane express many of the same thoughts as Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, and numerous “Lost Souls” – spirits at a low level of development who seem to be having trouble adjusting to life after death – sound just like the hapless victims in the stories. My conclusion from this was simply that Lovecraft, like Shaver, channeled a lot of the details in his stories from the spirit-world.

Of course, the most important question still remained: exactly who originates the telepathic messages that frighten people like Lovecraft and Shaver into writing fantastic fiction? I couldn’t find real answers from the details in Lovecraft’s stories any more than I could from Shaver’s, because I had no theoretical frame of reference to fit the information into. Nothing theorized by Fort, Shaver, Lovecraft, or anyone else was helpful in interpreting this kind of data.

The work of a more recent imaginative writer, William S. Burroughs, proved to be of greater use. Even though Burroughs’ name is synonymous in the public mind with chaotic avant-garde writing and with “the author as junkie and madman,” his work is easier to read and contains more useful knowledge about the spiritual conspiracies I was looking for than that of Lovecraft or Shaver. One of the major themes that run through his books is that mysterious “agents” are working to manipulate the course of human history. Burroughs assumes that not all agents are on the same side, though he never clearly reveals how many different factions are involved or what their ideologies are. He does hint from time to time that some of the agents are extraterrestrials, or perhaps beings from other dimensions.

He also makes it clear that one of their chief duties involves reprogramming the minds of individual Earth people, manipulating their emotions and thoughts along desired lines. In most of his books, Burroughs describes this as being done on a strictly physical level: through violence, intimidation, bribery, or just plain “hard sell” persuasion. Both psychedelics like LSD and hard drugs like heroin are also widely used by the agents to alter people’s consciousness in connection with other means of manipulation. There is frequent mention of telepathy and other psychic powers, but they are usually described in vague terms.

One idea of his that seemed to resolve some of the paradoxes and contradictions in the body of information available about conspiracies and telepathic mind-control was the concept of “conscious” and “unconscious” agents. I found the idea that agents can vary in consciousness to be very useful. A simple example of how the “consciousness of agents” operates can be drawn from real-world espionage. For example, take a low-level CIA agent whose immediate superior and control is a double agent. Now, the second agent’s role is complex enough; he’s playing both sides, and perhaps actually favoring one of them over the other. But the first agent’s role is in a totally different category: he or she is functioning as a double agent without knowing it. A lie-detector test would affirm this agent’s loyalty to the CIA, yet the person’s actual work could all be against the interests of that organization.

Burroughs uses this kind of power structure in a much more complex form to describe the conspiracies that are trying to alter the course of human history in various directions. Most of his agents are unconscious, in the sense that they don’t know who is giving them orders or even what they’re trying to accomplish. They simply do what they’re told, for pay, out of fear, or for less explicable reasons.

On the other hand, many of the agents in the Burroughs stories are conscious in the sense that they believe they’re working for some definite organization or cause. However, the conscious agents very often seem to be in the same mess as the unfortunate spy we mentioned earlier. The reader is given reason to doubt that the organization the agent is working for is actually what it purports to be.

In itself, this concept does not sound very important, but I made a lot more progress after I started using it. When most people look for conspiracies, they assume that the conspirators know what they’re doing and approve. This, in turn, means that conspiracies have to make at least rough sense in terms of motivation and self-interest. And I hadn’t found out much during all my years of looking for negative conspiracies that furthered the interests of the people in them.

Here are a couple of quotations to illustrate Burroughs’s style and some of his major themes. I will begin with one from his first published book, Naked Lunch (1959):

“Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book ... How-to extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall... Doors that only open in Silence into vast, other planet landscapes ... Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse .... There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.... I am a recording instrument .... The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth ....This is Revelation and Prophecy of what I can pick up without FM ....Chicago calling...come in please.

 

A mighty wet place, reader .... Possession they call it... The Answering Service... Wrong! I am never here .... Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill advised moves ... Patrolling is, in fact, my principal occupation ... ‘What Are You Doing Here? Who Are You? ... You were not there for the Beginning. You will not be there for The End...Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative’...most of them don’t want to know...and you can’t tell them anything...”

Next, here are some excerpts from one of his latest books, The Place of Dead Roads (1983):

“Kim Carsons does he exist? His existence, like any existence, is inferential... the traces he leaves behind him... fossils... fading violet photos, old newspaper clippings shredding to yellow dust...And this book. He exists in these pages as Lord Jim, the Great Gatsby, Comus Bassington, live and breathe in a writer’s prose, in the care, love, and dedication that evoke them: the flawed, doomed, but undefeated, radiant heroes who attempted the impossible, stormed the citadels of heaven, took the last chance on the last and greatest of human dreams, the punch-drunk fighter who comes up off the floor to win by a knock-out, the horse that comes from last to win in the stretch, assassins of Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins, agents of Humwawa, Lord of Abominations, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, of Pan, God of Panic, of the Black Hole, where no physical laws apply, agents of a singularity.

 

Those who are ready to leave the whole human comedy behind and walk into the unknown with no commitments. Those who have not from birth sniffed such embers, what have they to do with us? Only those who are ready to leave behind everything and everybody they have ever known need apply. No one who applies will be disqualified. No one CAN apply unless he is ready. Over the hills and far away to the Western lands. Anybody gets in your way, KILL. You will have to kill on the way out because this planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave. Kill all the guards and walk…

Ghostwritten by William Hall, punch-drunk fighter, a shadowy figure to win in the answer, Master of Assassins, Death for his credentials, Lord of “Quien Es?” Who is it? Kim, ka of Pan, God of Panic. Greatest of human dreams, Quien Es? The horse that comes from there, who is it? Lord of the future son, does he exist? Inferential agents of a singularity, the fossils fading leave the whole human comedy shredding to yellow dust... Unknown with no commitments from birth. No one can apply unless he breathes in a writer’s prose hills and faraway Western Lands .... Radiant heroes, storm the citadel... Kill the last guards and walk.

 

Guns glint in the sun, powder smoke drifts from the pages as the Old West goes into a penny-ante peep show, false fronts, a phantom buckboard... The Lords have lived here since time began. To go on living one must do things that you Earth people call ‘evil.’ It is the price of immortality... I cannot save your companions... they are already dead... Worse than dead. They are already eaten: body and soul.

John Keel is another writer whose theories seem quite paranoid on the surface but proved very helpful to me in making the breakthrough. He is the Ufologist who claimed back in the Sixties that mysterious “Men in Black” often pose as government agents and harass people who have seen UFOs to keep them from talking about their experiences. A major theme in all of his books is that the U.S. Government, and other governments all over the world, deliberately interfere with independent UFO investigations and make a major effort to cover up the truth about UFOs.

I agree that there have been cover-ups and interference with private Ufologists, but I don’t accept Keel’s conclusion that they are proof that governments have hard evidence that physical UFOs and aliens exist. I’ve come to the opposite conclusion from the same evidence, because my long experience as a political radical has taught me that modern Western governments are just as afraid of the people as the people are of them. I think the cover-ups conceal ignorance, not knowledge.

I also agree with Keel that government and military officials have often lied to the public by claiming that all official UFO investigations have been discontinued for lack of evidence that the phenomenon is real. The government’s own records document quite clearly that the military, as well as various police and intelligence agencies, has been investigating UFOs very seriously since 1948, and that these investigations continue right down to the present. What has all this expensive bureaucratic investigation learned about UFOs? I suspect that the government files contain roughly the same type of information, as do the private UFO investigators’ files, except that there’s more of it and it’s written in different jargon.

I believe that if the government had definitive information about the nature of UFOs, someone would have leaked it long ago, as Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers. However, I do believe that government investigators are able to find enough information to keep them convinced that there is something real and important behind the phenomenon. So the investigations continue, and the government covers up their magnitude to prevent public criticism for spending so much tax money without discovering any real answers to the UFO mystery.

In The Eighth Tower (1975), Keel concluded that UFO contact reports had a common origin with certain very intense religious and occult experiences, such as visitations from gods, angels, or demons. He postulated that the cause of all these events is a natural phenomenon, which he names the “Superspectrum.” Keel’s Superspectrum seems to be based loosely on Jung’s concept that the human race possesses a “collective unconscious,” but he carries the idea much further than Jung did. Jung had conceived of the collective unconscious only as a body of information stored in the subconscious minds of many different individuals that causes all of them to think or behave in similar ways.

Keel carries this concept much further, and postulates that the Superspectrum involves specialized forms of matter and energy unknown to present-day science. He borrows concepts from occultism and coins scientific-sounding new terms to describe them. His Superspectrum simply seems to be another way of saying “influence by spiritual beings and psychic powers.” However, he doesn’t conclude that the Superspectrum is a being or group of beings, as the occultists usually do with their concepts of gods, demons, and spirits. Instead, it is simply a kind of natural phenomenon with a “computer-like intelligence.” The next writer I discuss has researched this same line of reasoning even further.

In one sense, it’s an insult to Jacques Vallee to discuss his works in a chapter called “Passport to Paranoia,” because his approach to Ufology has always been as rational and scientific as that of anyone in the field; but his books from the Sixties and Seventies show a pattern that fits right into what I’ve been describing here. When Vallee started his investigations in the Sixties, his working hypothesis assumed that UFOs were a physical phenomenon: either extraterrestrial spaceships or advanced flying machines built on Earth.

However, in 1969 Vallee published Passport to Magonia, in which he reluctantly admits that many accounts of UFO sightings and “close encounters” with their occupants resemble religious and mystical experiences more than they do observations of physical events. He obviously didn’t want to do this, but he really had no choice if he wanted to remain truly scientific and empirical in his methods, because that’s where the information he was gathering led him.

After investigating hundreds of such cases, Vallee concluded that the early Ufologists had not been truly scientific when they dismissed UFO contact stories as hoaxes or hallucinations. Professional psychologists have tested many contactees with polygraphs, hypnosis, “truth” drugs, and a wide variety of psychoanalytic techniques, and have concluded that they are neither lying nor showing recognizable symptoms of psychotic delusion. Vallee also learned that contactees all over the world, regardless of their background knowledge of the subject or their personality type, received similar information from the “space people” and underwent similar personality changes afterwards. This lead him to believe that “close encounters” with UFOs are not a purely subjective psychological phenomenon, but have an objective cause.

However, he didn’t find the “close encounter” stories consistent enough in their details to allow him to simply take them literally and conclude that the contactees had indeed met extraterrestrials face-to-face or been inside physical space ships. Instead, much of the evidence concerning UFO-encounters resembled descriptions of psychic and spiritual phenomena in occult literature. This introduced a further complication; Jacques Vallee is one of the world’s best-known computer experts, and he did not want to jeopardize his reputation with the scientific establishment by using terms drawn from occultism or religion to describe the phenomena he was studying. So instead of talking openly about telepathy, spirits, etc., he invented a jargon of his own to describe the same concepts.

As Vallee’s investigations went further, he gradually formed the opinion that the contactee phenomenon represents interference in human affairs by essentially benign forces. In 1975, he published The Invisible College, in which he recounts further cases of mental reprogramming through UFO encounters and cites evidence that similar encounters with “mysterious visitors” have been occurring for hundreds of years. He mentions that secret conspiracies may have influenced the development of modern science and political theory while working through the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries.

The name of the book is derived from the use of the term “Invisible College” to describe some of these secret societies, but Vallee doesn’t emphasize that most writers who’ve used it were occultists and have assumed that the Invisible College indoctrinated people using psychic powers and occult rituals. Instead, he postulates that the Invisible College employed methods similar to those used by modern behavioral psychologists, based entirely on operant conditioning by physical means.

The Invisible College also contains some interesting speculation about the purpose of the mental reprogramming received by UFO contactees. For example, the majority crone away from their experience believing that a higher power had chosen them to play a special role in advancing human civilization. They seemed filled with hope, optimism, and creative energy, expressing the belief that contactees are going to help the “Space Brothers” lead the human race into a New Age in which Earth will take its place among the advanced civilizations of the universe.

The specific elements of ideology advocated by the contactees were completely familiar to me: world peace, universal brotherhood, and social justice. They also talked about the general concept that the Sixties counterculture called “consciousness expansion,” especially forms of it achieved without using psychedelic drugs, but they usually expressed it in terms that wouldn’t directly identify them with the controversy over drugs and hippies. It was immediately obvious to me that this was just another form of the “Aquarian Age Message,” phrased in terms of space-traveling aliens and galactic civilizations instead of the terminology of the counterculture.

However, by 1979, when Vallee published Messengers of Deception, he apparently had changed his opinions on UFOs to something approaching those John Keel had expressed in The Eighth Tower. Vallee had become extremely disillusioned with the whole concept of mysterious conspiracies that meddled in earthly affairs and tried to change the course of history by reprogramming the minds of individuals. He was more convinced than ever that such conspiracies existed, but had gone from considering them beneficial to condemning them as evil.

He described how some of the UFO contactees had founded cults that resembled “high-demand religion”. Some leaders of contact cults were saying “democracy is obsolete,” and becoming despots over their groups. A few had taken reactionary stands on social and political issues that resembled the views traditionally held by Fundamentalist churches. Others reminded him of the Nazis by saying that contactees are a “master race” with extraterrestrial blood in their veins. Above all, he was disturbed to see contact-cult members running their lives according to messages passed to the leaders from “space people” instead of thinking for themselves.

Messengers of Deception contains a possible explanation for the whole UFO and contact-cult phenomenon that is very similar to Keel’s Superspectrum.

“I believe there is a system around us that transcends time as it transcends space. I remain confident that human knowledge is capable of understanding this larger reality. I suspect that some humans have already understood it, and are showing their hand in several aspects of the UFO encounters.”

Vallee isn’t certain who these people are, only that they don’t seem to be physical extraterrestrials or supermen. He speculates they might be government intelligence agents, especially of the CIA and KGB, or perhaps members of extra-governmental conspiracies like the hypothetical “Illuminati.” Whoever they may be, he doesn’t like them.

However, Vallee seems to have changed his mind again during the Eighties and decided that there are several different factions of secret manipulators, some good, some evil. The main reason for this change is apparently that he has started working with Robert Anton Wilson, who has held the “good guys and bad guys” view of the whole thing for years, as I describe in the next chapter.

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