Although much of the material that helped prepare me for the breakthrough was directly devoted to occult or unexplained-phenomena themes, the books most valuable to me in the last year or so before I made it were works on,
Some of these were standard works in their field, whereas others were more speculative, such as Colin Wilson's history of astronomy, Star Seekers, and Jeffrey Goodman's book on human evolution, The Genesis Mystery.
One of the questions I kept asking during my reading was,
"Since I find it obvious that there is sufficient empirical evidence to prove that reincarnation and other spiritual phenomena are real, why haven't more scientists come to this same conclusion?"
I already knew that most materialistic scientists would answer that my methods of investigation, and those of everyone else who has drawn similar conclusions, simply aren't scientific.
However, the more I studied the history and methods of science, the more convinced I became that there really is a materialistic bias in science:
a literal closing of people's minds to factual evidence if it concerns spirituality.
Colin Wilson's Star Seekers (1980) is an excellent starting point for readers who want to duplicate some of my research along these lines.
He provides the evidence to support all the major points of my conclusions, though he did not actually make them himself.
The materialistic bias in science seems to have originated no earlier than the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, simultaneously with the Protestant Reformation in Christianity, the beginning of the Age of Discovery, the rise of the modern nation-states, etc.
All these changes in Western civilization mark the transition between the Medieval Era and the Modern Era and can be attributed directly or indirectly to a sudden increase in the general level of technology.
Most of these technological innovations were small in themselves, and many were made by ordinary people - farmers, sailors, artisans, etc. - rather than by intellectuals.
They were things with immediate practical use, like better:
plows
harness
wagons
water mills
spinning and weaving devices
sails and rigging-plans for ships
etc.
They included gunpowder, the eyeglass lenses that led to the telescope and microscope, better methods of preserving food, and many other things.
Taken together, they produced profound demographic, economic, and political changes in European society.
A full description of the sudden progress of European society at that time is beyond the scope of this book.
The change that interests us here is the shift in the balance of power from the Catholic Church to secular institutions of all types.
When the northern half of Europe became Protestant, organized religion in that region lost direct control over:
government
the economy
education
science
and most other important social institutions.
The Protestant churches still exerted a major influence over society in Northern Europe, but they didn't control the crowning of kings, the running of schools and universities, the certification of doctors and lawyers, the writing and circulation of books, etc., to nearly the extent that the Catholic Church had dominated them in the Medieval times.
In the southern part of Europe, which remained Catholic, the beginning of the Modern Era also weakened the control of the Church over secular institutions, but the process was more gradual.
The efforts of the Church to retain its control over social and political institutions in Catholic countries are plainly described in history books, but the actual motivations of the Popes and other Catholic leaders are not so obvious.
The series of events that I call the Copernican Compromise, which created the materialistic bias in Western science, is an example: it is easy enough to see what happened, but harder to figure out why.
Portrait c. 1640
2.37 MB
View full-sizeDownload Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei (/ˌɡælɪˈleɪoʊ ˌɡælɪˈleɪ/, US also /ˌɡælɪˈliːoʊ -/; Italian: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛːi]) or mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian (Florentine)[a] astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. He was born in the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence and present-day Italy. Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy, modern-era classical physics, the scientific method, and modern science.
Until the first half of the Seventeenth century, when Galileo was prosecuted by Pope Urban VIII for supporting the Copernican astronomical theory, European scientists had not yet been put in a category separate from other intellectuals doing research into the nature of the universe.
Portrait by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, c. 1631–1632
3.37 MB
View full-sizeDownload Pope Urban VIII (Latin: Urbanus VIII; Italian: Urbano VIII; baptised 5 April 1568 – 29 July 1644), born Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 6 August 1623 to his death, in July 1644. As pope, he expanded the papal territory by force of arms and advantageous politicking, and was also a prominent patron of the arts, commissioning works from artists like Bernini and a reformer of Church missions. His papacy also covered 21 years of the Thirty Years' War.
They were all called simply "philosophers," and one person might do research in many different fields:
Individual philosophers were sometimes persecuted, even put to death, for publishing or teaching ideas that displeased the Church authorities, but there was no generalized prohibition of research into what is now called occultism.
Philosophers could study the "natural" and "supernatural" aspects of the universe with equal freedom as long as they remained good Catholics and didn't challenge the:
doctrines
customs
political structure
of the Church.
Most astronomers were also astrologers.
Physicians dispensed as many healing prayers as they did pills and practiced "laying on of hands" as freely as they set broken bones or bandaged wounds.
The books written by the medieval alchemists show they experimented with sex magic and psychedelic drugs to develop their psychic powers as well as doing primitive experiments in chemistry.
Much of this research did not involve scientific experimental techniques in the modern sense; but when such methods were employed, they were just as commonly applied to studying spiritual and psychic phenomena as to studying purely physical phenomena.
In 1600, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy.
Portrait from Opere di Giordano Bruno, published in 1830
1.74 MB
View full-sizeDownload Giordano Bruno (/dʒɔːrˈdɑːnoʊ ˈbruːnoʊ/; Italian: [dʒorˈdaːno ˈbruːno]; Latin: Iordanus Brunus Nolanus; born Filippo Bruno, January or February 1548 – 17 February 1600) was an Italian philosopher, poet, alchemist, astronomer, cosmological theorist, and esotericist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He practiced Hermeticism and gave a mystical stance to exploring the universe. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets), and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.
It's widely believed that the reason for his immolation was his support of the Copernican theory, but this was not mentioned in the charges against him.
It is true he was a Copernican; but what the Church executed him for was not his scientific views, but applying empirical methods of research to occult and religious subjects.
He wrote treatises on Hermetic Magic and general philosophical works that challenged both the infallibility of the Pope and the omnipotence of God.
The persecution of Galileo a couple of decades later is widely regarded today as a victory for science, not for the Church, and this same attitude was expressed by many intellectuals at the time.
The Pope made Galileo recant formally; but that actually helped popularize his ideas, not suppress them.
However, one of the first steps in making my personal breakthrough was to realize that Galileo's victory was a hollow one.
Galileo was not only one of the founders of modern science because of his contributions to physics and astronomy, he was also one of the instigators of the materialistic bias that has plagued science ever since.
Ironically, his writings about himself show him not as an atheist, but as a reasonably devout Catholic who kept his religious life and his scientific life completely separate.
He confined his scientific research to studies of physical phenomena, and his writings recognize Papal Infallibility in matters of religious doctrine and practice.
The only reason why Galileo refused to back down when Pope Urban objected to his acceptance of the Copernican model of the solar system was that he felt the Pope was overstepping the bounds of his spiritual authority by getting involved in matters that were purely physical.
Galileo never tried to challenge the Pope's right to interpret the Bible on spiritual matters, but felt that he, as a natural philosopher, shouldn't be over-ruled from the Papal Throne on enquiries into phenomena that are physical rather than spiritual.
The whole debate over the Copernican Theory hinges on the interpretation of a single Biblical passage, Joshua 10:13, which describes a miracle by Jehovah in the middle of a battle:
"And the Sun stood still."
Since the time of Saint Augustine, this had been interpreted by the Catholic Church as proof that the Sun moves around the Earth.
Saint Augustin by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645
3.18 MB
View full-sizeDownload Augustine of Hippo (/ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/ aw-GUST-in, US also /ˈɔːɡəstiːn/ AW-gə-steen; Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church in the Patristic Period. His many important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and Confessions.
Augustine himself had been a bishop in Egypt not long after Ptolemy, another Egyptian, had published his astronomy texts endorsing a geocentric model of the Solar System.
However, it was obvious to Galileo that the original passage in the Bible could just as easily refer to a subjective description of the Sun as to an objective one.
In other words, observers saw the sun appear to stop moving in the sky and simply said,
"The Sun stood still."
This effect could just as easily happen because a spinning Earth stopped as because a moving Sun stopped.
Above all, he never argued that the passage was false because it involved a miracle.
Miracles were part of the supernatural, and not the business of a natural philosopher.
All Galileo asserted was that careful observations of the apparent motions of the planets among the fixed stars provide evidence that the Sun, not the Earth, is the point around which they revolve.
On the surface, Pope Urban won the debate by forcing Galileo to recant publicly, sentencing him to perpetual house arrest, and forbidding him to publish any more scientific books.
In reality, Galileo, who was an old man at the time and died a few years later, simply went home to his comfortable suburban estate and continued his research and writing.
His next book was smuggled out of Italy by French diplomats and published in Holland, and the opinion of intellectuals all over Europe was in his favor.
Star Seekers states that Pope Urban was afraid to execute Galileo, as his predecessor had Bruno, because he knew that such an outrage would seriously damage his reputation and undermine his power.
I think Wilson missed a more important point here.
Pope Urban could probably have had Galileo closely watched and prevented him from publishing any more books without suffering serious political harm.
He'd already withstood the opposition raised by passing the sentence, and the public outcry over enforcing it would probably have been weaker, provided that Galileo was not harmed physically.
The fact that the Pope didn't carry through and effectively silence Galileo is evidence he didn't consider the debate over the Copernican theory important in itself.
He was punishing Galileo for openly challenging his political and spiritual authority, not for doing scientific research.
The Pope was sending a very clear message to all of the early scientists without saying it in so many words:
"If you confine your scientific research to the physical world, the Church will leave you alone."
The earlier immolation of Bruno had already sent the negative half of this message:
"Scientists who do research into the nature of psychic phenomena or publish theories that challenge the official position of the Church on cosmological matters will be severely punished."
I call this unspoken, unwritten agreement "The Copernican Compromise," and believe it's the origin of the whole materialistic bias in Western science.
The Copernican Compromise was never openly discussed by either the scientists or the Catholic hierarchy, and it is likely that both sides simply drifted into it without being consciously aware that the Church was still actively persecuting scientific occultists while becoming increasingly tolerant towards scientists who avoided research into psychic and spiritual phenomena, especially those who claimed such research was impossible.
Even though their motivations were mostly subconscious, more and more scientists adopted a materialistic bias during the 16th and 17th centuries; and if they also were involved in occultism or other spiritual research, they hid their activities in secret societies.
If there were only this one example of the Copernican Compromise, the anomalies might be explained by personality differences involving the two Popes and the two scientists, but I'm talking in more general terms here.
The Copernican Compromise came about because of an unspoken attitude on the part of many Catholic leaders over a long period of time, interacting with hundreds of different scientists and philosophers.
One of the last books I read before I started making the breakthrough was Jeffrey Goodman's The Genesis Mystery, published early in 1983.
It's fitting that my old conception of spiritual reality should be brought to the breaking point by the work of a scientist who has been virtually ostracized by the academic community for blatantly breaking the Copernican Compromise.
Goodman has impressive formal credentials as an anthropologist, and has published three reasonably popular books:
His scholarship seems perfectly sound, but his books have mostly been ignored or dismissed as pseudoscience by other professionals in his field because he includes psychic powers, reincarnation, and disembodied spiritual beings in some of his scientific hypotheses.
This might be too far out for the scientific establishment, but it was exactly the push I needed to make my breakthrough.
The Genesis Mystery points out that the evolutionary theory commonly called "Darwinism" is not rigorously scientific, nor has it ever been accepted by the majority of the experts in the pertinent fields or by most of the general public.
Instead, it's always been a propaganda weapon for atheists and materialists to use against religion and other belief-systems that teach that spiritual agencies were involved in the creation of human and other life on Earth.
Wallace in 1895
1.64 MB
View full-sizeDownload Alfred Russel Wallace OM FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.
Goodman shows that Alfred Russel Wallace, co-author of The Origin of Species along with Charles Darwin (and believed by many scientific historians to be responsible for most of the theories presented in the book), was never a true "Darwinist" in the sense of believing that evolutionary process was guided entirely by a series of accidents.
Wallace called himself a practicing Christian, though his beliefs seem to have been what we would call "Liberal Christianity" today.
He was also one of the scientists who investigated the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement and decided there was empirical evidence that the spirits of the dead really do sometimes communicate with the living.
Even though he contributed at least as much as Darwin himself to the basic Darwinian Theory of Evolution, Wallace's personal opinions on the matter were that spiritual forces were involved along with the random mutation and natural selection described in the theory itself.
Goodman, like Wallace before him, calls this concept "Interventionism."
Interventionists believe that, although random mutations account for most evolutionary change, some parts of the evolutionary process - especially the creation of human beings out of pre-human stock - were directed by a conscious outside agency.
Wallace called this agency "God," and so do many liberal Christians today, but occultists and New-Agers talk about "spirits" and "cosmic intelligences."
The majority of people in the modern Western world who aren't strict materialists have traditionally taken a similar view of evolution, and this group includes scientists as well as non-scientists.
Most American Christians, except for the staunch Fundamentalists, see no real conflict between their religious cosmology and the scientific theory of evolution.
They simply say that the evolutionary process was the means their God used to create people and other species of animals and plants, and that the materialistic Darwinists are wrong only in asserting that the process is random rather than guided by an outside intelligence.
The Genesis Mystery also points out that there is considerable evidence to contradict the Darwinian claim that the creation and evolution of life on this planet could have happened by pure chance.
Whenever statisticians try to calculate the mathematical probabilities involved, the figures look very negative.
Evolution by chance simply appears too improbable to have happened during the time period the geological and paleontological evidence marks out.
All the materialists can say is,
"Well, life exists and had to come from somewhere, so the low probabilities for random evolution have to be in error.
They're sure to increase as more information becomes available."
However, as new information is discovered in every scientific field related to evolution - biochemistry, genetics, paleontology, etc. - the evidence against traditional, materialistic Darwinism gets stronger, not weaker.
This is especially true of the appearance of modern human beings on Earth:
recent fossil evidence shows that human beings may have evolved almost simultaneously from different pre-human species in different parts of the world.
The probabilities of that happening by chance are almost zero, yet the paleontological evidence showing that it did happen grows stronger every year.
Most of The Genesis Mystery is devoted to a detailed presentation of the material sketched out above:
Goodman's own conclusions about Interventionist Evolution are confined to a few pages at the end.
He mentions three possible sources for this intervention:
"God"
"spacemen"
"hitch-hiking spirits"
I was already familiar with everything Goodman had to say about the first two concepts, but I found the third original and extremely thought provoking.
Here is Goodman's "hitch-hiking spirits" hypothesis in his own words:
"Finally, some take the interventors to have been spirits from other realities visiting earth to experience its unique properties.
As this theory goes, these visiting spirits hitched a ride within existing hominids to enjoy the physical pleasures of wine, women, and song.
After many nights of too much reveling, they soon found themselves stuck within their physical vehicles.
The only release was through death, but once addicted, many insisted on returning through reincarnation for just one, and then another, and yet another ride.
Realizing that there was no way out of this vicious circle, some of the spirits set to work altering their hominid hosts to create better physical vehicles through which they could eventually escape the seductive pull of earthly pursuits.
This may explain why modern man with all his advantages still seems torn between the two realities."
The concept that certain human souls are not native to Earth, that they came here from another world or plane of existence, is mentioned in many different religious mythologies and occult theories, though most of the references are cryptic and hard to understand.
Authors seem reluctant to discuss such a wild idea openly, but I've always found it plausible because of my past-life memories and numerous telepathic contacts with spirits who say that they were extraterrestrials in former lives.
Reading Goodman's speculations about "hitch-hiking spirits" was one of the principal factors that helped me start making my personal breakthrough about the nature of spiritual reality.
When he said in so many words that the first human souls might have come to Earth from elsewhere, started incarnating in pre-human bodies, and assisted in the creation of the human race as a fully intelligent species, my immediate reaction was to say,
"Yes.
This is one of the answers I've been looking for all my life."
This was a purely instinctive reaction.
The idea just seemed true and obvious when I read it at that particular time in my life.
However, when I began thinking analytically about the subject, I realized that modern occult and psychic research provides a lot more evidence to support Goodman's speculations than he presents in his book.
The idea that spirits could cause genetic mutations in pre-humans that would help them evolve into true human beings is not nearly as implausible as it appears on the surface.
During the last thirty years, many different occultists and parapsychologists have speculated that human beings might be able to manipulate genetic material psychokinetically at the sub-molecular level.
For example, this hypothesis has been in use for a number of years to explain those cases of psychic healing that involve regeneration of tissue and conversion of cancerous tissue back to normality.
Enough cases of this type of psychic healing have been documented by medical experts to serve as proof beyond reasonable doubt for me and many other people.
The idea that the mechanism involved in psychic healing might be psychokinetic manipulation of the DNA had occurred to me long before, and I tended to accept it even though I couldn't think of a way to prove it with evidence.
It is very easy to extend this concept to include genetic engineering by psychic means.
If the DNA of cancerous cells can be manipulated by psychokinesis to turn them back into normal cells, then there is no reason why something similar can't be done to germ cells to produce controlled mutations in the organism's offspring.
How people could do this without being consciously aware of it was not yet clear to me; but I had no doubt that psychic healing occurs, and I was aware that there is also evidence from other sources that psychic genetic manipulation exists.
There is evidence that domestic plants and animals undergo genetic mutation much more rapidly than wild stock, and that many of the new forms are those desired by the people who raise them.
Materialistic scientists don't want to speculate about why this is true, but their own literature makes it quite clear that it is.
They keep on saying that the genetic diversity in domestic plants and animals was already present in the ancestral stock, and that all present forms were produced by selective breeding to bring out desired traits, or by hybridization between different species.
They insist that actual mutations in domestic plants and animals are extremely rare and due to pure chance, but they also record the data to disprove this conclusion.
Just as there are major genetic differences between human beings and the most closely related lower primates, so also many common domestic plants are far different from their closest wild relatives.
Some geneticists have admitted that the chromosome-structures of cotton, corn, and a number of other domestic plants have an artificial look to them, as if these important food crops had been created out of the wild stock by modern gene-splicing techniques.
When UFO investigators asserted that this is evidence that ancient astronauts visited Earth, these same scientists answered with a theory that's actually no more probable.
They postulated that this gene-splicing might have been caused when genetic material was transferred from one organism to another by viruses.
Now, evidence has recently been discovered to support this idea on the mechanistic level, but the theory still doesn't explain why a useless weed would turn into a corn plant useful for human food.
Natural selection doesn't account for it, because domestic corn isn't even viable in the wild state:
even the most primitive forms cultivated by the Amerindians have to be pollinated by hand.
My conclusion was that psychokinetic genetic manipulation might account for these and numerous other bodies of observed data that defy explanation by the materialistic scientists.
Does a wolf, with its two-inch erect ears, carry the genes for the six-inch drooping ears of a hound dog?
Geneticists say it does, but they can't offer proof.
Personally, I think a mutation was involved.
In fact, I think mutations caused by psychokinetic genetic manipulation have occurred on a large scale right in my own lifetime.
They involve domestic animals with short life cycles:
cats
rats
mice
hamsters
rabbits
and many different species of birds.
These species produce many generations of offspring in a comparatively short period of time and can be observed changing quite radically.
The hairless cats now appearing in cat shows are an example.
So are flop-eared rabbits and common rats in sizes and colors never observed in the wild.
Again, the geneticists say the potential to produce all these new forms was present in the original stock, and again I doubt it very strongly.
Literally thousands of new varieties of:
vegetables
grains
flowers
trees
and other plants are developed in nurseries every year, and hundreds are put on the market.
Many of these are so different from typical plants of their particular species that if botanists found them in the wild, they would be classified as new species.
However, when the same botanists know that such plants were bred under cultivation from familiar stock, they insist that no genetic mutation was involved.
It was extrapolating from the ideas in the Wilson and Goodman books that brought me to the "Breaking point" in my understanding of spiritual reality.
I started making the actual breakthrough by going into mediumistic trances and asking my spirit guides to clarify the half-formed ideas I'd been speculating about:
the motivations behind the Copernican Compromise, the full story behind Goodman's Interventionist theory of evolution, etc.
It quickly became obvious that the spirit-dictated answers I was receiving were part of a coherent whole of amazing complexity; but I had no idea at the start just how long it would take to receive the information, or just how controversial it would be.
Actually, I'm sure I still haven't received all of it, but Parts Two and Three of War in Heaven describe what I've learned so far.
