Most of my writing in Part One has described intellectual research:
how I read this and studied that, and how the conclusions I drew from what I learned affected my understanding of spiritual reality.
If you read between the lines, you can also perceive the influence of the Invisible College guiding my working hypotheses along certain lines and leading me in directions my conscious will would never take because of prejudices and preconceptions.
However, the most important single factor that helped me to make the breakthrough in consciousness that led to the writing of War in Heaven has received little direct mention in the pages you've read so far, because it's very difficult to describe in words.
This is my development as a psychic and my relationship with my spirit guides.
Before I could write this book, I had to undergo years of hard work and personal ordeals to develop my psychic skills.
The final phase of my preparation for the breakthrough began in 1982, when I started fighting major psychic battles with the spiritual beings I now call "Theocrats."
At the time, I had no idea what I was fighting:
my spirit guides just told me to go to certain places and perform specific acts of ritual magic which would prepare me to take another step forward in my personal psychic development.
I'd undergone similar ordeals once or twice a year since the early Sixties, but this time the series of psychic battles lasted almost six months and brought me to the brink of insanity many times.
When the psychic battles with external spiritual forces stopped for a while in the fall of 1982, I was severely shaken and burned out, and I rested for a few months.
In late March of 1983, my spirit guides told me it was time to take the next step in my development as a psychic.
I started working sex and ritual magic for hours every day, grateful that the goal was personal development, not battles with evil spirits.
Within a couple of months, I had forged a much stronger magical working relationship with my spirit guides, which allowed me to receive channeled messages more clearly than ever before.
I also resumed my intellectual research into the nature of spiritual reality, and by July started to make a major breakthrough in consciousness.
One of the first things the Invisible College told me when I started receiving their messages was that I should write a book based on this material.
I started a first draft almost immediately and worked on it whenever I wasn't in trance getting more information.
Two years later, I had completed five different typewritten versions of the book, each about 100,000 words long.
Each was essentially a new first draft rather than a close rewrite of the previous one, because of the large amounts of new material I was constantly receiving from the spirits.
All these drafts were chaotically organized and very difficult to read.
The text itself was a mixture of spirit-dictated passages and material I wrote in a normal state of consciousness to elaborate the spirit-dictation with background information and supportive evidence.
My worst problem at this time was the poor literary quality of the material that I had received by automatic writing.
Much of it resembled an over-literal translation into English from a foreign language with a very different syntax.
I was amazed at how sophisticated and explicit the raw information was, but I had to rewrite each passage extensively to make it comprehensible to others.
In the fall of 1985, I started a sixth draft, which wasn't intended to include much new spirit-dictated material.
Instead, I tried to extract all the valuable information from the previous drafts and reorganize it into a coherent book.
The general plan of organization was the same as the one in this book:
Part One described the evolution of my own spiritual knowledge during the years preceding the breakthrough and provided the reader with background information to make the spirit-dictated material in the rest of the book easier to understand.
By June of 1986, I'd completed Part One in roughly the same form as the version you've just read, using a personal computer I'd just acquired.
At that time, my spirit guides said they didn't want me to rewrite Part Two by extracting the essential elements of spirit-dictated information from the earlier versions and putting it into my own words.
Instead, they wanted to dictate the whole thing again, from beginning to end.
This time, the material I received by automatic writing came through in reasonably good English:
working directly on a computer keyboard seemed to bring in the telepathic signals much more clearly than working on a typewriter.
I recorded the channeled messages as a dialog with my spirit guides, but this format is slightly deceptive: the spirits actually telepathically dictated virtually every word of both the questions and the answers.
Trance work of this type is grueling labor, and it took until November 1986 to complete Part Two.
I spent the next few months revising and polishing what I'd written up to that point.
On January 23rd, 1987, I received an extremely coherent piece of spirit dictation that I used as the Foreword when I published the book under the title of Spiritual Revolution a couple of months later.
My spirit guides have since dictated a slightly different version of this, which I insert here:
This is a message to the people of Earth, from spirits now residing on your astral plane.
We have spent our past lives on worlds with technological civilizations much more advanced than yours.
Hundreds of thousands of us have been sent here deliberately by our governments to assist you in fighting a war to liberate yourselves from Theocracy, a form of oppression and exploitation that has existed throughout your history.
When we are on Earth's astral plane, we work with a political organization of spirits that some of your occult literature calls the Invisible College.
After spending a few years as disembodied spirits, we are forced to incarnate on your planet and lose most of the memories we brought with us.
Most of us retain some vestigial memories of our past lives on other worlds through our first few physical lives on Earth, but these memories are gradually lost through repeated reincarnations.
Our incarnated agents, and many native Earth people as well, can learn to communicate with us telepathically on a completely conscious level if they receive proper psychic training.
And any human being can receive telepathic messages from us subconsciously.
We want to state right at the beginning that we are ordinary people, not fundamentally different from you.
Some of us have lived on other worlds in bodies much like your own, others in bodies that would appear very alien in external appearance, though based on the same basic genetic code.
In all cases, our souls are capable of incarnating in human bodies; we couldn't survive here for long if they weren't.
We are not innately superior to Earth people in intelligence, morality, or any other quality.
However, our knowledge and behavior may give this illusion because they were learned in cultures that are far superior to yours.
Some of us who come to your planet possess advanced knowledge in many different fields:
ethics
politics
economics
as well as natural science and physical technology.
These phenomena are no more "supernatural" than the purely physical phenomena your scientists are beginning to understand quite well.
The civilizations we come from, know as much or more about the composition and behavior of the soul and other spiritual phenomena as you know about the atomic theory that forms the basis for your sciences of physics and chemistry.
Advanced societies generate psychic energy mechanically as you generate various forms of electromagnetic energy and can produce changes in "astral matter" as you can produce physical and chemical changes in ordinary matter.
This technology was used to send us here; but we come only as disembodied spirits and are not able to bring with us any of the physical equipment we normally use to generate and control psychic energy or shape astral matter.
When your civilization first started to develop rapidly toward a high level of physical technology, we came to a political decision to intervene, for our sake as well as yours.
This happened back in the late Medieval Era, and there has been an Invisible College manipulating the development of human civilization on Earth ever since, operating under our leadership and guidance.
Our motives in doing this are both altruistic and selfish.
If we had not intervened, the human race on Earth would have evolved in directions that posed a serious threat to our own worlds and space colonies.
So, we are fighting a "preventive war" in our own behalf, but we also feel the overwhelming majority of Earth people will support our cause once we are able to explain the situation fully.
Until the last few decades, we have been fighting the Theocrats mostly by indirect means, using our superior social and political knowledge to raise the level of civilization on Earth in constructive ways.
Practically everything that's commonly considered good about modern Western civilization is the product of our clandestine manipulations.
How do we operate?
Mostly by influencing the subconscious minds of Earth people telepathically.
We also work through people with conscious control of their telepathic powers when we want to communicate large amounts of explicit information, but the majority of our work has always been done without the conscious knowledge or consent of the people involved.
Now, it will be very easy for you to say this is unethical.
On one level, we agree.
On another, well, we are the ones who taught you philosophical concepts like:
"The greatest good for the greatest number,"
and
"The end often justifies the means."
We're at war here, and we're fighting on your behalf as well as our own.
Concepts such as:
"Human dignity and rights"
"Individual sovereignty"
"Social justice"
"The consent of the governed"
and
"Equality of opportunity"
aren't just philosophical abstractions to us:
we come from civilizations that actually practice them.
We have no choice, because we possess a physical and psychic technology that would totally eliminate individuality if we didn't also have sufficient social, political, and ethical knowledge to keep the technology under control.
Our societies are forced to live with this threat, as yours must presently live with the threat of nuclear war; and as your own technological level increases, you will have to learn to live with it, too.
However, this is not the greatest danger you face in the next few decades.
Theocracy and your exploding population are going to cause a spiritual cataclysm that will destroy the human race as it now exists and threaten our own civilizations if it goes unchecked.
We will probably be able to avert catastrophe and guide these upheavals in constructive directions, but the fate of many Earth people will still depend on their own actions.
These messages about the War in Heaven are intended to help you prepare yourselves.
First, we will give you the basic facts about Theocracy, then we will describe the spiritual upheavals to come.
At the time I received this message, the Invisible College urged me to rush the book to completion and to get a self-published edition into circulation immediately to get reader feedback.
I started circulating Spiritual Revolution in March of 1987, advertising it mostly in publications read by people already familiar with some of the material covered in the book:
occultists
Pagans
New Agers
unexplained-phenomena and conspiracy researchers, and members of the musical and literary underground.
A few hundred of these people read the book, and about half wrote letters of comment.
My original intention was to use the readers' criticism of the pre-publication edition to correct minor errors and omissions in the text, and then put the first edition on the market while I worked on a sequel.
Simultaneously, I intended to publish selections from the letters of comment and my replies in a separate book or magazine, in hopes of starting a subgroup of the underground press devoted to discussing Spiritual Revolutionary subjects.
However, the reader' reaction to SR made me change my mind.
I needed to rewrite the book completely, because most readers with inside knowledge of the subject realized that I wasn't telling all I knew.
Here is a summary in my own words of the average reaction of insiders to Spiritual Revolution:
Your thesis is probably true as far as it goes, but I can't personally accept the narrow mechanistic concept of the nature of spiritual reality that underlies it.
I believe there is evidence that superhuman spiritual beings, both good ones and evil ones, actually exist, and that your description of the astral plane is not all there is to the spirit world.
You deal quite adequately with religious mind control and the effects of religious and occult conspiracies on the course of history, but these are not the only forces that affect human destiny.
What about mind control through the electronic media?
What about the concept that human beings have a god-like higher self?
What about the Gaea hypothesis, which says the Earth is a living, intelligent entity?
What about the conflict between physical technology, which you seem to support wholeheartedly, and ecological concern for the Earth's biosphere, which is already being seriously threatened by our present industrial civilization?
What about the fact that Western civilization is a privileged elite, surrounded by a Third World that's just a ticking population bomb, ready to explode?
"Your book is valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.
It's bad enough that you contradict every traditional occult and religious cosmology, every major book on spiritual subjects, and most of the other channeled messages now being received; but at least your mechanistic, non-mystical cosmology is logical and there seems to be some evidence to support it.
However, you've left major questions unanswered, and the book as a whole, falls short of your stated goal of providing the key to understanding the nature of spiritual reality."
The plain truth is that I had already been fully aware that Spiritual Revolution was incomplete and over-simplified.
When had I prepared the manuscript for publication, I had removed the answers to many of the questions and objections cited above, simply because my Spirit Guides had asked me to.
They thought at the time that oversimplifying the book's thesis would make it easier for people to understand and accept.
The Invisible College also wanted to find out how many people with reasonably high-level psychic skills and spiritual knowledge would use the over-simplification to make the same breakthrough I have made, and if they did, how they would react.
And especially, the extraterrestrial spirits wanted to "draw fire" from the enemy.
And in fact, Theocratic spirits did mount direct psychic attacks against my spirits guides, but they managed to survive.
Part Two describes the basic facts about Theocracy, building on the material discussed in Part One.
Part Three will carry the story even further, presenting cosmological information not even hinted at in Spiritual Revolution.
