A. In addition to helping people make the breakthrough on an individual level, the Invisible College is also trying to start an overt Spiritual Revolutionary movement.
We do not desire this to be a highly organized movement with recognized leaders and a narrowly defined ideology, but a merely a name for all the people who have made the breakthrough and share the general viewpoint on spiritual reality presented in this book.
The Feminist, Environmentalist, and Civil Rights movements are examples of the type of organization we're talking about:
in order to belong to the group and use the name, people need only believe in its general principles.
Of course, individual members of such a general movement often get together and organize action groups to further the cause.
These may need to have a formal political structure and a fixed ideology in order to perform their activities efficiently.
If Spiritual Revolutionaries do ever form such action groups, the members of each one should remain aware that we don't want it to try to control or speak for the movement as a whole.
Instead, they should concentrate on accomplishing some specific purpose, studying and writing about the breakthrough information, publishing a magazine, working on personal psychic development, etc.
Q. The S/R Press is an example of such an action group.
It is registered as a sole proprietorship and is technically a profit-making business (to avoid bureaucratic hassles over non-profit status).
I organized it this way only so that I can assume all the financial and editorial responsibility myself, not so that I can make money from it.
(So far, I've gone out of pocket on the project every month it's been in operation.
If income ever does exceed expenses, I'll just reduce cover prices, give away more free copies of the publications, or increase the advertising.
Should it ever become possible, I'll start paying myself average wages for my labor; but I never intend to make an actual profit.)
However, on another level the S/R Press is an anarchist collective.
Other Spiritual Revolutionaries help me with my writing and publishing projects on a strictly voluntary basis, and we decide matters of policy and economics as they come up.
Sometimes I can pay for this help, but more often people just agree to donate it.
I've also received a few monetary contributions and a lot of good advice on both business and editorial matters.
This kind of collective is immune to most of the political compulsions of socialism and the economic compulsions of capitalism, because it's just a loosely organized group people working together to further a common cause.
This kind of organization doesn't sound like much from a verbal description, but it's more effective than it seems.
Theoretically, I have complete control of the enterprise and also complete responsibility for whatever is done.
In practice, the other people involved share a significant part of the total labor and take a major role in making decisions.
The job is too big for me to do all by myself, and I refuse to either hire people or lead a formal organization, so everything is voluntarily.
However, the others are motivated to become involved because they believe that what I'm publishing is important, and I'm willing to give them a say in making decisions for exactly the same reason.
A. This is one example of how a Spiritual Revolutionary action group can be run.
It's an anarchist model because you and most of your friends are anarchists or libertarians, but we expect that other groups may want to pick other organizational structures, depending on the members' opinions about politics and economics.
As long as people remain aware that their particular group does not officially represent the movement as a whole, any organizational structure the members are comfortable with is OK with us, as long it doesn't generate a negative public image.
Q. Several of the people who commented on Spiritual Revolution asked why you want to give the movement a name at all.
Why should people bother to call themselves Spiritual Revolutionaries if there's no concrete belief system or formal organization behind the name?
A. We want people who support the theories and opinions in this book to call themselves Spiritual Revolutionaries openly, even though different individuals may hold different personal interpretations of what this material means and what they should do as a result of accepting it.
If they share a name in common, then the activities of each one will generate publicity for the movement as a whole.
We also want to avoid a mistake we made back in the Sixties. Instead of encouraging the people we communicated with telepathically to use a single appropriate name for the movement, we tried to let it remain nameless.
Of course, it acquired a name anyway when a gossip columnist coined the term "Hippy."
Q. I always hated that word.
It's linguistically suitable only as a term of derision.
But I still had to admit grudgingly I was a Hippy for a few years.
It wouldn't have been honest to say I wasn't one, because I definitely belonged to the general movement labeled with that name.
I did say that I wasn't one of the Flower Children or Dropouts, because I found it easier to work than to live on the streets, and I needed a certain amount of property in order to write, teach magic, and spread my ideas.
But I still had to admit that the ugly name for the movement included me. I'm really glad to see that you yourselves are picking a name for the movement this time.
Actually, though, I think the name "Spiritual Revolutionary" may be a little too long and formal sounding.
Someone may still coin a short, snappy name and get it into common use, and it may be another monster like "Hippy."
A. The worst that could happen is that there would be two names in use, as, for example, the anti-Theocratic church that calls itself the Society of Friends is much better known as the Quakers.
Quaker started out as a term of derision, but now even the church members themselves use it quite commonly.
However, those that don't like it have the official name to fall back on.
If the same thing happens here, members will always be able to use the name Spiritual Revolutionary if they don't like the other name.
We are also suggesting a graphic symbol for the movement, a five-pointed star with a Roman C inside it, which you can describe in more detail in an appendix to the book.
Another appendix should present a suggested code of conduct for Spiritual Revolutionaries, and we'll discuss this concept a little more right here.
The code of conduct is just a set of general common-sense rules, which shouldn't interfere with individual self-expression or creativity, but which will allow Spiritual Revolutionaries to easily disassociate themselves from Theocratic provocateurs, self-centered exploiters, and plain crazies.
Q. In other words, Spiritual Revolutionaries will be able to "quote chapter and verse" to the public if we face major problems like the Manson Family or some of the professional criminals who joined the Sixties counterculture and made fortunes dealing drugs, or minor annoyances like the "crazies" who got a lot of media attention for saying "Kill your parents" and "burn all books."
We can say,
"These people are violating the code of conduct recommended by the Invisible College, so they really aren't Spiritual Revolutionaries at all."
A. In addition to a list of "don'ts", we also have a number of more general suggestions for things we would like to see overt Spiritual Revolutionaries do.
We are purposely keeping these things rather vague, because we want people to be as independent and creative as possible.
One thing we'd like to see happen is the growth of an information network around this book.
For example, everyone who reads War in Heaven and agrees with the basic theory ought to start writing letters to newspapers and magazines describing it.
We urge anyone who publishes an amateur magazine or newspaper of any kind - an occult or Pagan publication, a rock fanzine, a political or conspiracy newsletter, or anything else - to start discussing the Spiritual Revolution in it.
This is going to result in almost as many different theories as there are people writing about them, and that is exactly what we want.
The resulting diversity of opinion will keep the movement as a whole from developing a narrow, fixed ideological viewpoint.
We also feel that any group that alters consciousness through:
or any other means should not program people with the full information about the War in Heaven presented in this book.
Q. Does this mean that conscious Spiritual Revolutionaries shouldn't use magical rituals and other forms of group psychic practice to help people make the breakthrough?
A. We encourage you to use such methods to teach people how to reprogram their minds so they can make value judgments about spiritual matters rationally, but not to indoctrinate them to accept political or cosmological theories on faith.
Spiritual Revolutionaries should not attempt to reprogram people with the complete set of theories in War in Heaven, because none of you yet have a complete understanding of the material yourselves.
The people you will be teaching have just as much to contribute to reaching such an understanding as you do.
For this reason, all you should teach is rational spiritual thinking, not rigid ideology or doctrine.
Q. What relationship do you intend conscious Spiritual Revolutionaries to have with the New Age movement?
I should point out that I don't have a very high opinion of many of the groups that label themselves as part of the New Age movement.
Most of them seem to be either commercial enterprises or social clubs first, and schools for teaching spiritual knowledge or psychic development second.
Now I'm not saying it's wrong for the leaders of such a group to be paid for their work in running it, or for its activities to provide members with recreation and social contact as well as spiritual training.
What I object to in many of the New Age groups is simply their system of priorities.
For example, I remarked a couple of years ago that I kept getting fliers from New Age groups that were charging as much for a single weekend seminar as it cost me to promote and advertise Spiritual Revolution for a whole year.
I spent over five years working on that book, yet I felt somewhat embarrassed to have to charge fifteen dollars for it.
A lot of New Agers were charging the same price or more for a slender pamphlet or a thirty-minute cassette tape that was probably produced in five days or less of actual work.
In my opinion, the same is still true today: very little New Age literature or teaching is worth the price charged for it.
This makes it easy for hostile outsiders to label the whole movement as a commercial rip-off or an expensive hobby for Yuppies.
And such smears always rub off on the other new spiritual movements as well:
I also get very negative telepathic impressions when I meet some New Agers in person.
I perceive that the leaders of some groups don't really take the system they're teaching seriously.
Inside their own minds, they laugh at people who take their teachings literally, and they feel that any benefits students get from practicing the system are caused by nothing more than "the power of suggestion."
Now, that sort of attitude disgusts me.
If these people think their system is actually just a placebo, then they ought to either dispense with the fiction that they have a system at all or find one that really works.
I also dislike the preoccupation of many New Age groups with fads that have little or nothing to do with spirituality, especially some of the health and nutritional fads.
Many of these are based on pure pseudo-science, and some are cold-blooded commercial rip-offs. It's often quite ironic:
the leaders of a New Age spiritual group think of themselves privately as charlatans taking advantage of the people they teach, yet they are being exploited by another group of charlatans peddling phony theories about food, exercise, and physical health in general.
A significant number of people have died or become seriously ill because of health fads; this is bad enough in itself, but the negative publicity generated by such incidents has an even worse effect.
It gives the Theocratic enemies of the New Age movement a legitimate excuse to label members as:
gullible
irresponsible
immature
A. Everything you say is true, but you're missing the point because you have trouble realizing what it's like to be a beginner in the psychic development field.
In many New Age groups, the teachers are just as much beginners as the students, and you're quite right that most of the progress they make is simply by the power of suggestion.
You don't seem to realize that this alone is enough to teach many people the rudiments of mental self-reprogramming.
Almost any system, no matter how arbitrary or fanciful you may consider it, is usually sufficient to put people into a state of altered consciousness that serves as a limited "command mode" for beginning mental reprogramming.
Q. OK.
I stand corrected, but it is still difficult for me to communicate with people who take fads and pseudo-scientific theories so seriously.
On one level, these people are re-inventing Western occultism, without realizing that everything they've "discovered," both the valid elements and the errors, has been familiar to the regular occult community for a long time.
In many cases, all they're doing is inventing new jargon, or borrowing jargon from psychology and other disciplines, to describe spiritual concepts or psychic development techniques that ought to be taught to children in grammar school.
A. But these things are not taught in American grammar schools.
That's the point.
Unless people grow up in a family of occultists or join the occult community at an early age, they're simply not going to learn basic psychic skills.
The New Age groups invent their own jargon or re-interpret technical psychological terms instead of using standard occult terminology simply because such terms are more readily understood by the people they're working with, who come to the groups as adults with an average general education and vocabulary.
Q. I see what you mean.
On the elementary level, practically any system works as long as the people employing it put serious effort into what they're doing.
I'll accept this.
A. We also encourage cynical, self-serving leadership and obsession with fads and pseudo-science:
it keeps people from getting stuck in a particular group long after its limited knowledge and training system are capable of helping them make progress in their personal spiritual development.
Even if they don't consciously realize that they've outgrown their group, they may get tired of egotistical, exploitative leadership or silly fads, and start looking for a new one.
Once they've started this "shopping," they may look at training systems objectively enough to pick one that's advanced enough to meet their present needs.
Q. It never ceases to amaze me how subtle the manipulations of both the Theocrats and the Invisible College often are.
In most cases, what look like errors or oversights are actually deliberate plans to maneuver people into doing what was desired all along.
I didn't figure out that the total anarchy of the Sixties Counterculture was a deliberate policy of the Invisible College, for example, until long after the movement was over.
And I didn't discover for myself what you've just told me about the New Age Movement.
However, now that the overt phase of the Spiritual Revolution is beginning, I'd like to see you replace the present New Age movement with something less diverse and more efficient, led by people on the highest levels of Western occultism.
I'm quite aware that every single individual tradition within Western occultism has its faults, especially in accepting major fallacies about spiritual reality, but many of the New Age groups are even worse in this respect.
There simply hasn't been time for practical experience to force them to give up some of their more ridiculous fads, fallacies, and errors.
The traditions of mainstream occultism contain numerous errors, but centuries of practical experience have taught occultists enough common sense to avoid a lot of the sillier mistakes that the New Age people are making.
A. Most of the millions of people now involved in the New Age and related movements aren't ready for such a program.
We intend to allow the New Age movement to exist in its present form for quite some time into the future.
It is doing its job of elementary psychic training very well, and its continued existence will not interfere with the development of other, more advanced movements growing out of present high-level occultism.
The official opinion of the Invisible College is that you conscious Spiritual Revolutionaries should not consider yourselves enemies of the New Age movement just because you don't like the actions of specific groups or individuals within it.
Instead, you should encourage the public to identify your own groups as part of the New Age movement.
The movement itself is so large and so diffuse in structure that no one can stop you, and it has a reasonably good reputation except among the two extreme edges of the spiritual political spectrum: the radicals like you, and the servants of the Theocrats.
Q. You mean I should describe War in Heaven as a New Age book?
A. Why not?
You have as much right to use the name as anyone.
There's no reason why the New Age movement can't have a radical left wing whose members also call themselves Spiritual Revolutionaries.
If the commercial rip-off artists and the teachers of pious banalities try to throw you out, it'll just give you a lot of free publicity.
Q. Now that you've explained the idea, I like it.
And I remember doing similar things back in the Sixties.
I thought it was stupid for anti-war demonstrators to burn the American flag, while people who supported the Vietnam War acted as if the flag was their exclusive property while they called us traitors and themselves patriots.
I frequently said that the anti-war protesters and other radicals should also wave the flag and say 'WE are the real patriots! It's these militarists who are violating the traditional American values.
After all, didn't George Washington speak out very strongly against getting involved in foreign wars?"
A. Your idea was a good one, and the inspiration for it came from us.
If enough radicals had followed this suggestion, it would have weakened support for the rightists by depriving them of a monopoly over people's subconscious emotions of patriotism and respect for the flag.
Unfortunately, we were never able to make the idea catch on with the majority of Sixties radicals.
Most of them were too serious about their protests to make fun of their enemies by making fun of themselves at the same time, as was so common in the rest of the counterculture.
Humor is one very important weapon against Theocracy, you know. It's a positive human trait that they can't counterfeit very convincingly.
In fact, the New Age movement has a lot of optimism and warm human qualities that we hope Spiritual Revolutionaries will adopt.
Some New Age groups carry optimism and positive thinking to excess by ignoring the grimmer aspects of spiritual reality, but no one who has made the breakthrough can possibly do this.
You need to make a conscious effort to adopt some of the positive thinking of the New Agers to keep from becoming doomsayers and rabid militants as many political radicals have done.
After all, we are convinced that our side is going to win the War in Heaven.
The next chapter will describe some the recent battles in this war, and their political and social implications.
