War in Heaven - Chapter 12: Religious Mind Control
Q. Exactly how does religious mind control work?
A. It involves what modern psychologists call "operant conditioning": altering behavior and mental programming by positive and negative reinforcement on the physical and sensory level.
The Theocrats strengthen this conditioning on the physical level by transmitting ideas and emotions directly into people's subconscious minds by telepathy.
Religious mind-control techniques are easier to understand if you realize that the Theocrats use people's own psychic powers to control other members of the congregation.
Q. I've attended enough religious services of many different kinds to know that they frequently put believers into an altered state of consciousness and that they often generate quite a bit of psychic power. Is this what you're talking about?
A. The key to the whole religious mind-control technique is putting people into a state of consciousness best called the "religious trance."
It is essentially a mild hypnotic trance in which the conscious will is awake but passive, as opposed to deep trances, in which it is completely inactive.
People in a religious trance are completely aware of what is going on around them and are recording these events in their memories exactly as they would in a normal waking state.
People in a religious trance are completely aware of what is going on around them and are recording these events in their memories exactly as they would in a normal waking state.
They are also capable of thinking and acting voluntarily but can only do so within certain very definite limits without breaking out of the religious trance and assuming normal consciousness.
Q. How do people enter the religious trance?
A. People fall into a state very similar to the religious trance when they read, listen to music, watch television or a movie, listen intently to a lecture or radio broadcast, etc.
The passive state that the will assumes during these activities is often called identification with the sensory intake, as in "reader identification" or "audience identification."
Identifying with what is being read, seen, or heard, actually means accepting the sensory intake uncreatively and uncritically on both the intellectual and emotional levels.
Identifying with what is being read, seen, or heard, actually means accepting the sensory intake uncreatively and uncritically on both the intellectual and emotional levels.
It also means agreeing with the ideas being presented and feeling the same emotions being described in the song, story, play, etc.
Q. It's fairly common to describe someone who's concentrating intently on reading, listening to music, or watching television, as "hypnotized." You're saying that this is literally true?
A. Yes, but remember, it's a rather light trance.
If the material being presented begins to contradict the person's existing opinions or knowledge, identification breaks down.
He or she assumes full normal consciousness and thinks,
He or she assumes full normal consciousness and thinks,
"I don't agree with this."
or
"I don't understand this."
or
"This is wrong."
However, identification with sensory input can make people accept things they would reject if they were fully conscious, as long as the input isn't controversial or unfamiliar enough to break their concentration.
Identification with sensory input is just the first step in entering the religious trance state.
Once the conscious will becomes passive, the flow of character, assuming a level closer to that during sleep than that during normal wakefulness.
In a person fully trained to enter the religious trance, electrical activity in the physical nervous system becomes stable at exactly the right level to allow an equal flow of energy into and out of the astral soul.
This allows the astral will to awaken partially, and creates a direct, two-way link between the physical mind and the astral mind.
This allows the astral will to awaken partially, and creates a direct, two-way link between the physical mind and the astral mind.
As long as the religious trance lasts, information can pass reasonably freely between the physical mind and the astral mind and vice versa.
Also, the physical mind can receive impressions from the psychic senses of the astral soul more or less directly.
Q. How does this compare to the trance state I'm in to receive this communication? Is it the same?
A. No. You are in a "psychic trance," which is not the same as a "religious trance."
It's a much less passive state of consciousness and involves much larger flows of energy into and out of the astral soul.
The psychic trance is controlled by both the physical will and the astral will acting in concert.
The psychic trance is controlled by both the physical will and the astral will acting in concert.
The religious trance is controlled by outside sensory input into both the physical and astral minds.
The psychic trance is an active state of consciousness that leaves you free to ask questions and make comments using your full creative powers.
The psychic trance is an active state of consciousness that leaves you free to ask questions and make comments using your full creative powers.
The religious trance is a passive state used to control and brainwash people.
The purpose of a psychic trance is for an individual to take conscious control of his/her psychic powers and use them to receive messages by telepathy or perform some other psychic working.
What happens during the religious trance is not quite the same.
Once people are completely in the religious trance, they are able to receive telepathic messages from everyone around them and from any disembodied spirits present; but the process is not nearly as conscious as what you're doing right now in a psychic trance.
When religious believers say they "feel the presence of God" at church services, they are referring to telepathic communication without even realizing it.
Since the individual will is passive during the religious trance, the members of a religious congregation cannot use their psychic powers deliberately, under conscious control, as people in a psychic trance do.
They simply identify with what is sent to them, both intellectually and emotionally.
Most of the telepathic intake received by an individual at a religious service comes from other members of the congregation; this is usually a more powerful influence than anything sent by spirits.
Most of the telepathic intake received by an individual at a religious service comes from other members of the congregation; this is usually a more powerful influence than anything sent by spirits.
The actual religious mind-control process, the technique that provides telepathic emotional reinforcement to help program people's minds, is a sort of "psychic chain-reaction" that occurs while a group of people are in the religious trance together.
In other words, the telepathic messages sent out by every member of the congregation influence the emotions and thinking of every other member, like a box of matches catching fire or an atomic chain reaction.
This process creates a "religious group mind":
the telepathic transmissions of the entire congregation mutually reinforce one another until everyone present is thinking and feeling the same thing very, very strongly.
People in such a state can feel extremely strong emotions, as strong as those that accompany the most powerful physical sensations such as sexual orgasm or extreme pain.
But this is done without much sensory stimulation - usually just:
- preaching
- hymn singing
- praying
- because the reinforcement is coming from the psychic chain-reaction.
Q. I've heard this described as "religious ecstasy," but thought it was caused mostly by the sensory stimulation of the ritual itself combined with people's own desires to be deeply moved emotionally.
I knew that psychic activity often occurred simultaneously, but never realized it was the key motivating factor for the whole thing.
A. The most important thing about this state of group religious ecstasy is that it generates large amounts of psychic energy.
Part of that energy may be directly absorbed by any Theocratic spirits present, but most of it is diverted back into the physical minds of the members of the congregation to indoctrinate them with whatever the Theocrats want them to believe or feel or do.
This is the essence of religious mind control.
In other words, a Theocratic spirit sends a telepathic message into the minds of people in such a state of religious ecstasy, and they generate powerful surges of telepathically transmitted emotion that program them to believe and act on the messages they receive.
For example, the idea "Abortion is murder" might generate powerful feelings of hate, whereas "All Christians shall be as brethren" might generate feelings of familial love among all the members of the congregation.
Within certain limitations, this is an extremely powerful method for controlling people's motivations and future behavior.
One of its worst features is that the people being controlled enjoy it more than anything else in life.
You might call it the ultimate "high."
And it's more addictive than any chemical drug.
Q. This means that the Jesus Freaks in the Sixties were speaking quite literally when they talked about "getting high on Jesus."
At first thought, it is rather ironic that the Fundamentalists, who say they hate recreational drugs so much, are literally "Jesus junkies."
But once the thought sinks in, it's really tragic, like everything else I've heard so far about Theocracy.
A. Yes.
And the Theocrats deliberately make the religious mind-control process as addictive as possible to enslave believers.
The whole vicious circle of sin, guilt, and forgiveness was deliberately designed to create a cycle of addiction that is almost impossible to break.
Q. The religious mind-control process resembles some of the direct electronic mind control described in anti-utopian fiction.
George Orwell exaggerated when he thought the state described in his novel 1984 would arise out of modern Democracy and Socialism, but he missed something much more important.
His totalitarian state with its mind-control has always existed.
It's as close as your local Fundamentalist church.
A. That's one of the most important things we're trying to tell you.
People have always been "property" and "cattle" just as Charles Fort speculated, but it's not on the physical level.
What has been enslaved is the mind during life and the soul after death.
Q. This is what Lovecraft was really hinting at in his Cthulhu mythos, isn't it?
And it also explains Shaver's Deros and hundreds of other references in fiction and serious speculation.
A. Very few of the people who wrote these references knew much about Theocracy as we're describing it here.
All that really happened is that we were able to transmit a few words or some visual images to them telepathically.
Sometimes these were received in conscious "flashes" of vision or inspiration; but more often they sank directly into the subconscious, and were later called up and considered original creations of the imagination.
Q. One example that comes to mind is the material about the Devil eating souls in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.
He must have picked up a glimpse of the truth about Theocracy, but he was so deeply brainwashed that it didn't liberate him.
His conscious intellect just twisted the information around to support his Christian belief system.
Let's get back to the cycle of sin and forgiveness.
I consider this one of the weakest points of Christian doctrine, because it seems to grant forgiveness without doing anything concrete to punish "sin."
Even the token penance of saying prayers, etc., that Catholic priests hand out during confession doesn't seem like a realistic form of negative reinforcement to extinguish unwanted behavior patterns.
A. This is quite true.
The last thing the Theocrats want is for religious believers to stop sinning.
That is why they made sexual pleasure a sin, and why Christianity and most other organized religions teach the obvious fallacy that women are inferior to men.
That is why they made sexual pleasure a sin, and why Christianity and most other organized religions teach the obvious fallacy that women are inferior to men.
Q. In other words, when the Theocrats made up religious doctrine, they included deliberate lies in it so that people would never be able to be completely virtuous.
A. No.
It's worse than that.
Fallible human beings can never be completely virtuous in the sense of being able to obey the absolute letter of any rigid ethical code.
However, falling short of perfection in obeying most ethical codes provides reinforcement for modifying behavior in positive ways: the more people are punished for disobedience or rewarded for obedience, the closer their average behavior gets to the code.
However, falling short of perfection in obeying most ethical codes provides reinforcement for modifying behavior in positive ways: the more people are punished for disobedience or rewarded for obedience, the closer their average behavior gets to the code.
The "better" they behave, the more positive reinforcement and less negative reinforcement they get. Even though they never reach perfection, they tend to feel the code is constructive because progress is rewarded, and retrogression is punished.
Q. This is easy enough to understand, but how does it apply to a moral code that says sex is sinful?
A. That's the point we're trying to make.
This kind of logic doesn't apply to such a code.
Sexual desire originates on the biochemical level and cannot be extinguished by manipulating the programming of the mind.
People can be conditioned to hate and fear their sexual feelings and to avoid sexual behavior, but this doesn't stop the feelings themselves.
Sexual desire originates on the biochemical level and cannot be extinguished by manipulating the programming of the mind.
People can be conditioned to hate and fear their sexual feelings and to avoid sexual behavior, but this doesn't stop the feelings themselves.
They don't originate in the mind, so they can't be gotten rid of no matter how the mind is reprogrammed.
In this context, we are defining "mind" as "The information stored in the brain, plus the software for retrieving and processing that information."
Do you now understand the full magnitude of the problem that a completely false item of religious doctrine causes people?
It's an inherently frustrating situation.
The subjugation of women makes life much less pleasant for both genders.
It turns women into slaves, forever unable to live full lives.
And it does just as much harm to men when it turns them into oppressors and exploiters.
It turns women into slaves, forever unable to live full lives.
And it does just as much harm to men when it turns them into oppressors and exploiters.
This creates a no-win situation, because Fundamentalists still receive negative reinforcement even if they obey their moral code perfectly.
For example, trying to live up to Christian ideals of chastity is always going to create guilt feelings and internal conflict, because believing that sexual feelings are wrong does not extinguish them, even though it might repress or sublimate them.
And living within a sexist family structure always creates interpersonal conflicts.
Q. I see now why you say this process is similar to drug addiction.
The Fundamentalist moral code contains elements that can't help making people feel frustrated or guilty, which creates an artificial need for "divine forgiveness of sins."
A. There's a significant difference between a humanistic ethical code and the moral codes of Theocratic religion.
The former are designed to meet people's needs, the latter to meet the Theocrats' needs.
Even though most humanistic ethical codes are too idealistic to follow rigidly, "human nature" itself regulates reinforcement in response to them in ways that prevent excessive guilt and frustration.
Even though most humanistic ethical codes are too idealistic to follow rigidly, "human nature" itself regulates reinforcement in response to them in ways that prevent excessive guilt and frustration.
In other words, committing murder or assault is severely punished, cursing and screaming at people less so, but the social environment of most societies does not punish people for merely feeling anger but not expressing it in word or deed.
However, the negative emotions themselves are a form of negative reinforcement.
Notice that this process is self-limiting:
serious offenses receive severe punishment, whereas minor ones receive light punishment.
This is not true of violations of religious morality based on absolutes.
You and your readers should also be constantly aware that the Theocrats do not confine their activities to religion and occultism, but corrupt and control human beings through all activities that produce certain states of altered consciousness.
For example, when people use the electronic media for passive recreational purposes - listening to popular music over the radio or on recordings, watching televised sports events and game shows, and playing the simpler computer games - they often enter a trance state that renders them vulnerable to telepathic mind-control by Theocratic spirits.
We will discuss this electronic mind control in a later chapter; we must first give more background information about the nature of spiritual beings and psychic powers in general.