Here is an excerpt from Mike Rhyner's review of War in Heaven in the February 1989 issue of Critique:
War in Heaven is based on messages channeled from a group of extraterrestrial disembodied spirits who call themselves the Invisible College.
They say that your soul is nourished on psychic energy generated during life, and when you ‘die,' it lives off the energy stored up during embodiment.
There are also spiritual beings that the Invisible College calls the Theocrats, the ‘bad guys,' who do not reincarnate but instead get the energy needed to sustain their souls by sucking the energy from other souls:
psychic vampirism and spiritual cannibalism.
The Theocrats are the creators of certain forms of organized religion, which claim that you will have eternal life in Heaven when you pass over.
They create an illusion of this Heaven in your mind by posing as gods, meanwhile giving you the after-death state that you expect, whether it is a Heaven or Hell or an eternal orgy.
For instance, if you expect to go to ‘Rock ‘n' Roll Heaven' and worship at the feet of Elvis Presley or Jimi Hendrix, they will create this illusion for you.
However, there are techniques you can use to avoid Theocratic entanglement after death, which are described in War in Heaven.
Before I read War in Heaven, the more I studied various spiritual systems, the more disillusioned I became.
My main paths had been Theosophy and its descendants, and the study of channeled messages of all kinds, particularly those from ‘Ascended Masters' and ‘Space Brothers'.
Each book I read in these fields claimed to teach the work of highly evolved beings, yet each contained glaring contradictions of the others.
Then I read War in Heaven and found out why these contradictions occur - the authors don't have an adequate theoretical frame of reference to correctly interpret the messages they channel, even though much of the raw information is perfectly valid.
War in Heaven contains a revolutionary yet completely logical cosmology which provides such a frame of reference and has answered questions that couldn't be answered by any other spiritual system that I studied.
Reading it did cause more questions to crop up in my mind, but most of them are answered by the time I finished the book.
The author says that the purpose of War in Heaven is to help readers make a major ‘Breakthrough in Consciousness,' and after reading it, I know what he means.
It may well be the most important book ever published."
The following is from a letter by Colin Wilson, dated 2/15/89:
War in Heaven arrived while I was in California last year, and when I got back, I had so many letters to write that I didn't have a chance to read it properly.
I have just done so and find it an absolutely absorbing and fascinating piece of work.
If I had received it fifteen years ago, not long after I'd written The Occult, I would have thought that it was all wildly imaginative.
But since then, I have learned a great deal more about this whole field of the paranormal, and a lot of what you say seems to me to make a great deal of sense.
Anyway, very many thanks indeed for your kindness in sending me this extraordinary piece of work.
Jay Kinney review
And here is an excerpt from a review by Jay Kinney that was included in the Preface of the first printing of WiH in 1988.
It originally appeared in Gnosis #6 and was written about the pre-publication edition of the book, which was circulated in 1987 under the title of Spiritual Revolution, but it describes War in Heaven equally well.
This self-published book is among the most fascinating, and most troubling, books I've read in some time.
It is fascinating because it consists of channeled (i.e. automatically written) material that is not only clear and pointed but also flies in the face almost all other channeled teachings.
And it's troubling because to take Spiritual Revolution (SR) seriously entails entering into a topsy-turvy worldview that most of us would normally consider to be highly paranoid.
Briefly put, the material in SR claims to emanate from a group of disembodied spirits informally called the ‘Invisible College.'
As one might guess from its name, this group says it was the force behind the development of groups such as the Freemasons and Rosicrucians.
More surprising, however, is its claim to also have influenced the rise of the civil rights movement, the spread of LSD, the anti-war movement, and even rock'n'roll.
So far so good:
if this were all, one could peg the ‘Invisible College' as the hippest bunch of inner plane guides around, whispering bright ideas in the ears of the unsuspecting.
However, there's more.
The group is apparently engaged in an ongoing struggle against another powerful conglomeration of inner plane spirits it calls ‘the Theocrats'.
These types are apparently the ones behind most world religions, and, in fact, hang around churches and other places of worship soaking up the psychic energy that devout believers beam their way in prayer.
These fiends are fond of meeting the newly deceased as they reach ‘the other side' and ushering them into an illusory Heaven where their souls are gobbled up by the top Theocrats.
In other words, according to SR, spiritual traditions, which teach love of God, and ultimately, union with the divine, are really scams run by the inner plane Theocrats to rip off psychic energy and souls.
SR spells all this out in far more detail than I have space for here.
Considering that most channeled messages sound like their spirit authors have been cribbing from each other's notes, SR's revelations about a "War in Heaven" stand out as decidedly unique… Spiritual Revolution is a startling book that makes one re-examine all of one's spiritual assumptions… Considering that SR's thesis undercuts the spiritual moorings of world civilization, there ought to be some heated discussions to come.
