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
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:
and many other psychic and spiritual phenomena actually exist.
Wilson in Cornwall, 1984
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View full-sizeDownload Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English existentialist philosopher-novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism" and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism".
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.
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.
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.
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View full-sizeDownload Brad Steiger (February 19, 1936 – May 6, 2018) was an American writer of fiction and non-fiction works on the paranormal, spirituality, UFOs, true crime and biographies. His books sold well to the public but were widely criticized by academics and skeptics for making far-fetched claims without scientific evidence.
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.
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View full-sizeDownload Ruth Shick Montgomery (June 11, 1912 – June 10, 2001) was a journalist with a long and distinguished career as a reporter, correspondent, and syndicated columnist in Washington, DC. Later in life she transitioned to a career as a psychic and authored a number of books on metaphysical and New Age subjects.
"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 Agechanneling 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
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 the other knowledge I had to learn before I could make the breakthrough.
