Q. Let us begin this final summary of the political implications of the War in Heaven by updating the dialog from Spiritual Revolution concerning the resurgence of Fundamentalism in the Seventies and early Eighties.
Since SR was published, that whole movement seems to be disintegrating into chaos.
Several of the TV Evangelists whom I considered servants of the Theocrats fell into disgrace over personal or financial scandals in 1987 and ‘88, and it is now becoming fashionable for average Americans to think of the more rabid Fundamentalist sects as cults, little different from the Moonies.
A. Well, we said a couple of years ago:
"Those movements backed by the Invisible College are actually doing better than those controlled by the Theocrats, but a surface analysis of public opinion makes the opposite seem true. For example, the present resurgence of Fundamentalist Christianity is not nearly as successful as claimed by either its own propaganda or that of various groups openly opposed to it."
Q. I had felt this to be true for a long time, since several years before I began to make the breakthrough in 1983 but many of my friends in the occult and radical political communities disagreed completely.
They were afraid the Fundamentalists would force the government to repeal most of the liberal legislation passed since the Fifties, and to adopt a militant foreign policy that would cause more wars like Vietnam and might even lead to nuclear war.
I never felt that this danger was severe or immediate, because the Fundamentalist movement simply wasn't big enough in either sheer numbers or political clout.
A. That's correct.
Ironically, several of the American politico-economic system's worst faults are its best defense against a take-over by the Fundamentalists or any similar group.
We refer to economic class structure and political power-brokerage.
A relatively small minority of people with a high resistance to fundamentalist religion controls most of the real political and economic power in this country:
the owners and managers of the large corporations, government bureaucrats, and professional people in general.
Most of them are politically conservative, but it's the conservatism of the Old Right, not the New Right.
They range from extremely wealthy to merely well off, and are almost all college graduates, which means they represent the social class that produces the fewest people with the correct personality structures to embrace Fundamentalist religion.
Their primary concern is retaining the wealth and power they now enjoy, and they fear the New Right just as much as the left does, though they realize it's not in their interest to say so publicly.
The New Right has always been essentially a working-class and rural movement; if it ever got into power, it would eventually try to replace the existing power elites with people who took a populist stand on political and economic issues.
If you look closely at the history of the conservative wing of American politics during the Seventies and Eighties, you'll see that the Old Right was solidly in control the whole time, even when the New Right was getting maximum publicity.
The traditional conservative establishment got votes from the Fundamentalists at virtually every election by using some of the rhetoric of the New Right, but it was very slow in putting any of the New Right's ideological principles into action.
President Reagan's attitude toward legalized abortion is a good example:
he repeatedly said he opposed it, but he never used the full power-brokerage potential of his office to try to manipulate other politicians into repealing abortion laws.
On the other hand, he was quite willing to resort to extreme measures - such as those that caused the Iran gate scandal - to support policies he believed were really important, such as supplying arms to right-wing terrorists in Central America.
This proves that his support for New Right policies was just campaign rhetoric.
We'd rather that the wealth and power were more evenly distributed within the total population, but in this case power elites and power-brokerage are working to our advantage.
The political manipulations of the Invisible College are often extremely subtle, as we're about to describe.
First, we've already said that members of the present power elites are less likely to become Fundamentalists than most people within the whole population.
However, they are more receptive than the average to New Age spiritual teachings, which is another reason for not wanting radical changes in the class system right now.
Remember, we are not doctrinaire leftists.
In general, we work for "the greatest good for the greatest number," but we don't have to worry about our public image the way living politicians do.
If we can get significant numbers of the present ruling class under our influence, then we'll work through them to benefit the rest of the population.
Of course, we'll also use this influence over the existing elites to work for a more equitable distribution of wealth and power as a long-term goal.
Q. Wasn't this exactly what you did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when you worked through the Masonic and Rosicrucian Lodges:
using an existing power elite to work toward political liberalism and other reforms to benefit the whole society?
A. Yes.
We try to be both idealists and pragmatists at the same time; the two concepts are not really in opposition.
Q. I wish that more leftists and counterculture people realized this.
A. Another reason why we're not concentrating on immediate, surface-level political and economic reforms right now as much as we were a few years ago is simply that most of our energy is going into two different battles with the Theocrats over control of spiritual institutions.
We're attacking them directly both inside and outside of organized religion, and of course they have never ceased attacking us.
Every time they start using any organization on Earth to enslave people for their own ends, we try to stop them, and they do exactly the same to every project we undertake to liberate people.
Q. You've already discussed some of this in other contexts, especially your attempts to turn Theocratic Christian congregations into more liberal groups.
You're not completely opposed to Christianity and other organized religions, are you?
A. This is a subject that needs clarification for your readers.
We can ask you to say,
"War in Heaven is not intended to be an anti-religious book,"
but that doesn't mean the Invisible College favors religion as the term is usually defined:
"Belief in and worship of deities or other supernatural powers."
It should be obvious that we have to oppose any belief system that accepts the supernatural.
Psychic and spiritual phenomena are part of the natural world, and they have profound effects on human civilization on this planet.
They should be studied scientifically and put to use improving the quality of human life, not relegated to the subjective limbo of the supernatural, where one person's opinion is as good as another's because there are no hard criteria for making value judgments.
Many of us come from advanced civilizations where the study of the soul and other spiritual phenomena is as much of a part of natural science as physics or biology, and this is the only approach we recommend.
Any person who believes in or worships supernatural deities is out of contact with reality.
The form of deism that many religious believers practice is literally a psychosis involving paranoia and delusions of grandeur.
Psychologists and psychotherapists have known this since the time of Freud, though they've found this form of mental illness one of the most difficult to treat because they didn't know about the Theocrats or religious mind control.
Q. Yet you still make use of deistic religion when it serves your political ends.
Is that why you told me to say this book is not intended as a blanket attack on all organized religion?
A. Yes.
We are philosophically opposed to all religions that believe in the existence of superhuman gods; however, at this stage in history, the majority of people on Earth are not capable of directly replacing their present deistic beliefs with a rational view of spiritual phenomena.
Rather than just write such people off, we feel that the most ethical course of action is to deal with them within a deistic frame of reference and try to keep the Theocrats from controlling them.
In other words, we're willing to pose as gods ourselves if that's the only way we can keep people from being enslaved in Theocratic Bands after death.
And while we do consider it important to save individuals from destruction by their "gods," we put a higher priority on the political aspects of organized religion on Earth.
The larger and more powerful are the liberal Christian churches in the United States right now, the less danger there is of the Fundamentalists doing major political or social harm.
We like to see liberal and radical Christians out there proselytizing in direct competition to the Fundamentalists:
doing all sorts of charitable work, using the mass media, and generally trying to be a visible force in the community.
However, we don't recommend that people who accept what we're saying in this book go out and join liberal or radical Christian groups.
There are better alternatives for anyone who accepts even part of the concepts described in War in Heaven.
The anti-Theocratic Christian groups are intended strictly for people who are already Christians.
In fact, we would rather that agnostics and the nominally religious not join them.
Such individuals would be better off in one of the New Age, Pagan, or occult groups.
There's also a negative aspect to radical Christianity; trying to fight Theocracy on its own home ground with its own religious mind-control weapons is actually quite dangerous.
For example, the infamous Peoples Temple of the Seventies was an early attempt to start such a group, one that failed disastrously; and the same thing could happen again, though it's much less likely today because that experience taught us a lot.
The Theocrats are angered more by our attacking them frontally on their own ground than they are by almost anything else we do.
They often attack radical Christian churches, especially those that were formerly Fundamentalist groups, with all the force they can muster.
If the Theocrats can't control the group mind of the congregation and subvert it back into Fundamentalism, they'll settle for turning the group into a cult that drives its members insane, as happened to the People's Temple.
The Theocrats also try to do the same to occult and New Age groups and will turn them into new Theocratic religious sects if they can.
Theocrats don't care what name people call the deity by, as long as members practice religious mind control during services and believe a doctrine that's based on the general Theocratic philosophy.
There are Satanist groups that are controlled by exactly the same Theocrats who control Fundamentalist churches in the same neighborhood, for example.
The same holds true for some of the Black Lodges on the fringes of the occult community.
Many of these are not self-destructive cults that make the headlines when members die or commit crimes, but something worse:
stable organizations doing the work of the Theocrats.
Q. How can readers of this book recognize an occult group controlled by the Theocrats?
A. It's not always easy, because some Theocratic occult groups have an outer circle that's fairly innocuous.
There are two major things to look for: one is financial and/or sexual exploitation of the members, and the other is vindictiveness against people who try to leave the group or reveal its secrets.
Not all occult and New Age groups that fail this test are under the control of the Theocrats at the moment; but merely possessing these elements makes them vulnerable to a Theocratic take-over.
And there is no reason to join a group if you find any of its practices or beliefs ethically wrong: no one has a monopoly on psychic training techniques or spiritual knowledge.
We are not going to make this book even more controversial than it already is by giving you a list of occult groups that Spiritual Revolutionaries should avoid.
The status of groups changes constantly, so anything you wrote down now wouldn't remain accurate very long.
Even more important, we want the people who read this book to learn how to use their own intellects and psychic powers to observe groups for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
If people are going to be Spiritual Revolutionaries, they have to learn to make this kind of value judgment for themselves rather than relying on anyone else to make it for them.
Q. While you are discussing how the Theocrats take over religious and occult groups and make them into cults, we'd like you to clarify one point.
Why doesn't this lead to violence more often than it does?
A lot of readers are going to wonder why, if the Theocrats can turn a left-wing Christian church like the People's Temple into a totally murderous and self-destructive cult, they don't do this on a large scale and physically attack the counterculture, the occult community, the New Age movement and similar works of the Invisible College?
A. This is a difficult question to answer precisely, because it involves detailed descriptions of how religious mind control works that are hard to put into English words.
Almost all the conspiracy literature exaggerates the power that "unseen manipulators" have to control people's behavior on an acute, short-term basis.
Religious mind control is actually quite subtle: it gradually reprograms people's long-term opinions and behavior, but it cannot be used simply to take over control of a person's will completely and operate him or her like a remote-controlled robot.
Q. In other words, if the Theocrats wanted an act of violence performed, say the assassination of a political or religious leader who was actively working for the Invisible College, they couldn't just tell some average member of a Fundamentalist church to go and commit murder.
A. Absolutely not.
This is another very important point.
It's easy for them to manipulate a Fundamentalist into saying,
"So-and-so is an enemy of God and is doing the Devil's work.
He ought to be shot!"
However, almost all Fundamentalists, despite their extreme and irrational religious beliefs, are technically sane, in the sense that their behavior doesn't usually violate their society's laws and customs so seriously that they have to be locked up.
And sane people, by definition, don't commit murder or other violent crimes for political reasons.
They can become violent under extreme personal stress - remember, most murders involve family members, lovers, or close friends - but this is not the same as committing a similar act for political reasons.
Proof of this is the elaborate indoctrination that average people are subjected to before they are sent off to war.
The most important purpose of military boot camps is not to teach recruits how to kill the enemy, but rather to make them emotionally capable of doing so.
Notice, too, that significant numbers of war veterans commit violent crimes after they return to civilian life, simply because governments spend a lot of time and money to reprogram ordinary citizens into soldiers capable of killing the enemy, but almost invariably fail to reverse this process when the troops are demobilized.
Psychologists working for the military point out that it takes as long or longer to extinguish a given behavior pattern as it took to condition it in the first place, but generals and politicians rarely listen.
However, military training is not nearly so destructive to people as being trained to become violent religious fanatics.
Using religious mind control to program people for violence is essentially an irreversible process. It's possible to turn ordinary religious people into killers; but once it's done, their whole personality structure has been changed and they can no longer live peacefully in normal society most of the time.
The Theocrats can turn members of a Theocratic religious group into people like the followers of Jim Jones or Charles Manson, but once they've done so, they've changed them into criminal maniacs who aren't going to survive very long.
Even more important: the intensive mental reprogramming necessary to turn ordinary people into psychopathic killers can be done only by creating a very specialized environment.
Notice that both of the groups created a "cult environment," a totalitarian perversion of communal living, which subjected members to religious mind control over long periods of time without respite.
It is also important to realize that reprogramming people to commit cold-blooded acts of violence within their normal social environment is much more difficult than turning them into soldiers willing to kill an armed and aggressive enemy on the battlefield.
The element of "kill or be killed" and the fact that wars are usually fought in an unfamiliar social and physical environment are what make the difference.
Q. What you're saying, then, is that the Theocrats don't dare program large numbers of their followers to become violent, because that would probably destroy human society itself, rather than just eliminating the human enemies of Theocracy.
However, other things you've said give us the impression that the Theocrats want to see civilization destroyed.
A. Again, this is a difficult concept to explain.
Modem Western civilization serves the interests of the Invisible College better than it does those of the Theocrats, and is essentially our creation, not theirs.
However, the total destruction of civilization, through nuclear war or internal collapse caused by violent insanity on a large scale, would harm the Theocrats as much as it would us.
More, actually, since our contact with civilizations on other worlds would allow us to rebuild society if the physical environment were still capable of supporting human life.
Of course, the War in Heaven is now beginning to extend to the battle between the Invisible College and the Theocrats to control the formation of new gods out of elemental spirits.
We will discuss this further in the next chapter, starting with a message from spirits who specialize in such work.
