18 WiH Chapter 18: The Age of Reason

1 Q. When you refer to the Age of Reason, are you describing what went on in the old Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges several hundred years ago, when these organizations had so much influence over the development of modern civilization?

2 A. Yes. We wanted initiates on the lower levels to be reprogrammed to accept what's now called the "Philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment. This included the form of political liberalism sketched out in the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, support of capitalism and industrial technology, a progressive attitude towards innovation in science and the arts, reliance on rational pragmatic decision-making over dependence on tradition, and a general attitude toward life that was constructive, optimistic, and tolerant. We realized it wasn't possible to turn most of these people into high-level psychics or magicians or to teach them much about the true nature of Theocracy; we just wanted to turn them into "good average citizens" as that term is defined in the United States today.

3 You've already figured out some of the things we did to accomplish this, and we will now explain the whole subject more clearly. Two types of consciousness-raising programs were used within the lodges: one trained initiates in the lower degrees to become rational atheists and political liberals; the other, more advanced, program, taught high-level occult knowledge and conscious control over the psychic powers.

4 The first of these programs always had many more members than the second. Initiates who learned to accept the Masonic philosophy often became immune to falling into a religious trance during the rituals. This is an example of the difference between the way we reprogram people's minds and the way the Theocrats do. We keep planting information in the subconscious that says, "Think for yourself. Don't accept anything without evidence. Do what you feel is best under the circumstances rather then just accepting what someone tells you. You can become a better person if you only learn how to do so. Judge yourself realistically: you are neither a self-righteous saint nor a miserable sinner, but simply an ordinary human being with free will and control over your own destiny."

5 Q. This is almost the opposite of what the Theocrats program in during Fundamentalist Christian services. They want worshippers to say "Thy will be done," and submit completely to the telepathic influences they receive, as well as to obey religious doctrine to the letter. It's easy to see how your method tends eventually to liberate initiates from the influence of religious mind control: the more that people are affected by the reprogramming process, the less motivation they have to enter the religious trance, which involves voluntarily allowing the conscious will to lose control.

6 A. This is correct. The more people become accustomed to making decisions rationally and forming an accurate appraisal of their self-worth, the less likely they are to fall into a religious trance during rituals. When individuals in one of the old lodges reached this stage of being in a normal state of consciousness during the rituals most of the time, they automatically progressed to one of the "higher" degrees and assumed one of the numerous positions of subordinate leadership. Initiates on this level were expected to study the lodge's traditions, mythology, and doctrine intensely on a strictly intellectual level. This wasn't done at rituals that employed the religious trance, but through ordinary reading and tutorial study, exactly as if the initiates were learning history or mathematics.

7 This is the level that tried to replace Christian faith with "worship of the Goddess of Reason," and then went into a philosophy that would be called "scientific materialism" and "rational humanism" today. This middle level of initiation was intended to produce a personality-type similar to one very common in American society today - the millions of people who are not very interested in spiritual matters of any kind, but are chiefly concerned with their personal survival and happiness here on Earth. Some of them call themselves atheists or agnostics, but just as many profess nominal belief in Christianity or some other religious or occult system. However, regardless of what they say they believe, spirituality has very little emotional impact on their daily life. People like this are still either a slight majority or a very large minority in American society.

8 When we started this process several centuries ago, the influence of Theocratic religion was still so strong that it was easier to turn people into atheists or agnostics than to teach them directly about spiritual reality. We taught people to relate positively to the material world, and to the advanced civilization that was beginning to develop around them, as more than just "a vale of tears to pass through on the way to Heaven." We wanted the relationship between people and their earthly environment to become more important than their relationship with "God" and religion. We had to proceed step by step and use the methods of behavioral psychology, which are based on knowledge of how the human mind is actually programmed. States of consciousness and environmental reinforcement are the most important factors to consider here.

9 Q. Can you clarify this? When you say "states of consciousness," are you talking about the religious trance?

10 A. Yes. We had to proceed step by step. First, we took people who had been raised within Theocratic religion and had been entering the religious trance during church services all their lives, and we manipulated them into attending the rituals of the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges. These rituals also employed the religious trance and, on the lower levels of initiation, taught a doctrine that was not so alien to the average lodge member's existing Christian beliefs that it broke the trance.

11 During these rituals, members were gradually reprogrammed to become more rational in their thinking and more materialistic in their emotional goals for their lives. The social environment of the lodge increased their self-esteem, so they no longer thought of themselves as "miserable sinners in need of salvation" but as "free men under God," and eventually as "free members of a brotherhood of equals.

12 Lodge members received positive reinforcement through religious mind control during lodge rituals. This made the members feel good while they learned various philosophical principles quite different from those at the core of Fundamentalist Christianity even though phrased in many of the same terms. One very important thing to realize here is that the basic ethical philosophy of the eighteenth-century Freemasons was very, very similar to the moral codes of the various Theocratic Christian sects of the day. At least ninety-five percent of the individual precepts were the same.

13 Q. That's hard to accept.

14 A. Nevertheless, if you think about it without bias, you'll realize it's true. In fact, there is only one fundamental difference between the two codes of conduct, which affects a small number of separate ethical precepts.

15 Christian doctrine says, 'Your first duty is to obey the will of God as you perceive it during church services and in private prayer and meditation; your second is to obey religious doctrine and tradition as you learn it on the intellectual level; and your third is to follow the dictates of your conscience and intellectual will." By contrast, the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment says, "Your first duty is to follow the dictates of reason as applied to the knowledge you learn from your environment; your second is to work for your own survival and happiness as long as you don't harm other individuals or society in general by so doing; and your third is to work for 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' which sometimes involves greater or lesser degrees of self-sacrifice."

16 These statements are diametrically opposed in theory, but in the routine circumstances of life in a reasonably stable society, they produce behavior that is almost identical. In other words, both the Christian and the Freemason valued a work ethic, tried to avoid harmful excesses of all kinds, etc. The difference is not in what people did in the way of detailed, routine ethical behavior, but in the long-term effects that the two radically different philosophical codes had on total personality development.

17 The Christian code took people deeper into bondage to the Theocrats; the Masonic code liberated them from that bondage without substituting any other master for "God." What's most important here is that the Masonic initiates were taught to receive increasing amounts of positive reinforcement from their material and social environment, and decreasing amounts from religious mind control.

18 Now you can understand what we mean by "states of consciousness" and "environmental reinforcement" in this context. We were using the significant increase in the quality of individual life resulting from technological advances to extinguish the influence of religious mind control over people's emotional life and personality development.

19 Eventually, a great many members of the lodges became immune to religious mind control and remained in a normal state of waking consciousness during the rituals. More important, they taught these same principles to their children of both genders, so the all-male lodges eventually changed the average personality structure of the whole society.

20 Q. Is this one of the reasons why Fundamentalist propaganda claims that, "Secular Humanism is a religion"?

21 A. Yes. From the Theocrats' point of view, religion is just a tool for programming the minds of living people. By this same definition, all humanistic institutions are technically religions, because they also program the human mind - whether they do it directly through religious mind control, or indirectly through operant conditioning from the social and physical environment. Over the last five centuries, we have improved the quality of earthly life for so many people that the "vale of tears" concept has lost much of its appeal.

22 The idea that people can significantly improve the quality of life on Earth by their own efforts is one of the most important strategies that the Invisible College uses in fighting Theocracy. Its strongest point is that we don't need to use subconscious emotional manipulation or intellectual persuasion to get people to accept it. Just living and working within a modern technological society proves the basic validity of a humanistic philosophy by direct environmental conditioning. On the conscious level, people may think about the problems modern society has not yet solved and yearn for "the good old days"; but on a deeper level, they know they are as well off, on the average, as human beings on this planet have ever been. Theocratic propaganda and religious mind control have great difficulty extinguishing this intuitive feeling, because its cause is environmental conditioning rooted in physical reality.

23 Q. I speculated in Part One that the lodges you're talking about were controlled by a small, secret conspiracy of advanced occultists who had at least a rough conscious idea of what they were doing. Is this true?

24 A. Not really. We actually had to do most of the work ourselves. In fact, the chain of cause-and-effect was almost exactly the opposite of what you speculated about in Part One. We, meaning disembodied spirits in the Invisible College, telepathically manipulated the subconscious minds of leaders in the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges to design their rituals and doctrines in certain ways. Many of the individual elements of these rituals and doctrines were drawn from the writings and practices of previous occult groups, including some that you would consider quite advanced in both spiritual knowledge and psychic training techniques.

25 However, the vast majority of the men who actually incorporated these elements into Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had only a vague idea of what they were doing. They read various occult works, talked to members of many different occult organizations, and incorporated those ideas that "felt right" into the lodges they were founding or re-organizing. Of course, it was our subconscious telepathic influence that guided this process.

26 Q. Are you saying that the pre-existing knowledge gathered by advanced occultists over many centuries was useful to you in founding lodges and manipulating them into the form you desired, but that there was no conscious human conspiracy involved?

27 A. This is not true either. There were many different conscious conspiracies of advanced occultists, in the seventeenth century and later, which realized that various lodges of the Freemason and Rosicrucians were beginning to have a major influence on the progress of Western society and tried to manipulate their activities in ways that would produce what we now call "Modern Western Civilization."

28 Practically every advanced occultist in Europe joined one or more of these lodges at this time. And once they'd joined, they tried to teach their particular school of knowledge to their lodge-brothers and to influence the development of the lodge's doctrines and rituals to conform to their particular preconceptions. These occultists included Cabalists, Gnostics, Alchemists, Hermetics; and influences from all these spiritual systems are still visible today in the Masonic and Rosicrucian doctrines.

29 There are spiritual knowledge and psychic-training techniques brought from China and India by the Islamic Sufi sect and taught to the medieval Knights Templar. There's knowledge inherited from the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and Babylonians, taught to the Masons and Rosicrucians by Cabalists, Gnostics, and Astrologers. One very important source of psychic training techniques came from the ancient Greeks by way of the medieval Alchemists: a system of homosexual sex magic. This is one reason why so many high-level occult lodges were exclusively male for so long - they knew homosexual sex magic techniques but not heterosexual ones. There has always been some heterosexual sex magic in the Western occult tradition as well, from both Middle Eastern and European Pagan sources; but it's only been in the last century or so, after direct contact was established with the Orient, that the two began to become equally common.

30 The important thing to remember about all this is that the individual elements of advanced occult knowledge and the people who brought them into the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges of the Age of Enlightenment were not the "secret, conscious, guiding conspiracy" that you speculated they were in Part One.

31 Q. This is obvious now. You were the conscious guiding force, and the advanced occultists were actually being subconsciously manipulated along with the rest of the people involved.

32 A. Well, many of the occultists had some conscious knowledge of what we were doing, and were actively co-operating. Unfortunately, some of them actively opposed us by trying to turn their lodge into a Theocratic Cult. Possessing advanced occult knowledge doesn't automatically make a person morally virtuous. Even today, some of the advanced occult lodges derived from the Masonic-Rosicrucian tradition are "Black Lodges" (lodges under the control of the Theocrats).

33 It's extremely important for your readers to realize that Theocratic enslavement and psychic vampirism are not things that happen only to disembodied spirits after death. Living people can do virtually the same things to other living people. Black magicians can't literally devour other people's souls the way the disembodied Theocrats do to other spirits, but they can still deprive people of all free will and self-esteem, and eventually drive them into insanity or suicide.

34 This can be done in a Christian context, as Jim Jones did with the People's Temple, or in the context of almost any other religious or occult group. Many of the modern cults are also examples of this Theocracy on Earth. the Moonies, the Rajneesh Cult, etc. However, such groups aren't always openly identified as religious or occult organizations. The Symbionese Liberation Army was such a group, and so was the Manson Family. So are many terrorist groups, especially those in the service of Islamic Fundamentalists.

35 A number of present-day rock groups are actually bands of living Theocrats, enslaving their fans and draining energy from them at concerts. This last type of living Theocrat is especially dangerous right now, because such people can influence a large number of people who listen to their music on records or over the radio, using electronic mind control techniques that we will describe later. One of the worst things about this movement is that some of these people have made the breakthrough. They know what they are doing, and they still do it.

36 Q. In other words, a person can find out the truth about Theocracy and say, "Fine. I'm going to found a cult based on religious mind control while I'm alive; then, after I die, I'm going to control it from the astral plane and become a Theocrat."

37 A. Yes, and this attitude is becoming more and more common as more people make the breakthrough and become consciously aware of the existence of Theocracy. This is another main reason why we are having you write this book: to warn potential victims of this new type of mind control and teach them how to avoid it. We'll tell more about this fifth stage of Theocracy later.

38 It is important to remember that people have been making the breakthrough for centuries, in the sense of realizing that the "gods" behind many religious groups are simply the spirits of ordinary deceased human beings playing politics and trying to remain in positions of power on the astral plane for long periods of time. However, this knowledge, in itself, doesn't automatically make people hostile to Theocracy.

39 Where so many advanced occultists have made a fatal error is in not realizing that Theocracy is what you might call a disease or abnormal state. Remaining on the astral plane for long periods of time and absorbing vital energy from other spirits is not a natural or healthy condition for a human spirit. All Theocrats eventually become degenerate and insane. Now, we've always told this to anyone capable of holding conscious telepathic conversations with us, but we haven't always been believed. The illusion of achieving immortality for the ego is a very powerful corrupting influence. You can see why many occultists wouldn't want to listen.

40 The quality and completeness of a person's breakthrough knowledge are very important. Until very recently, communicating many of the individual details that constitute the breakthrough has been extremely difficult. Notice that when you write about it, you employ many terms and concepts from recent scientific discoveries: computer science, behavioral psychology, modern physics, etc. Think how much harder it would be to understand Theocracy without this background.

41 Q. I understand. Please amplify what you said about the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges being a cause more than an effect of advanced occult conspiracies during the last three or four centuries.

42 A. It's very simple, really. The presence of the lodges in Western society increased the number of advanced occultists enormously, because they served as a visible training ground for people who otherwise might never have had access to psychic training and spiritual knowledge outside organized religion. The rituals and jargon of the lodges were secret, but everyone knew approximately what went on inside them - or at least, anyone with the potential to become an advanced occultist could guess. This meant that fewer people who had possessed occult training in a past life would spend a "wasted" incarnation in which they had no access to formal training.

43 Q. This makes sense, and also seems relevant to the basic theme of this whole book, the War in Heaven. You're describing what the struggle between the Theocrats and the Invisible College is really like. It resembles an ordinary political conflict on Earth: fights to recruit new members, to build institutions that serve the ideological cause, etc.

44 A. Correct. It's not a war between "God and Satan" at all, in the sense of a conflict between absolutes of good and evil. It is completely a matter of politics, and neither side is completely good or bad. Of course, we are convinced that the side of the Invisible College is better than the side of the Theocrats by any reasonable ethical standard.

45 To sum up what we've said in this chapter, the Age of Reason was a major step in the progress of Western civilization and a significant victory for the Invisible College over the Theocrats in the War in Heaven. During the period from about 1700 to the 1960's, there was just as much improvement in the average level of individual human consciousness as there was in physical technology, scientific knowledge, and the design of social and political institutions. Our goal was to break the hold of religious mind-control over the majority of people in the First World, and we accomplished it reasonably well. Large numbers of people are still enslaved to Theocratic religion, of course, but such belief-systems no longer dominate the collective consciousness of the society to the extent they once did.

46 Today, even the majority of people in the advanced Western countries who consider themselves devout religious believers actually put reason above faith, and humanistic concerns before blind obedience to traditional doctrine. Do you see why we used the quasi-religious rituals of the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges to accomplish this?

47 Q. Well, it looks as if you used a form of religious mind control to raise the consciousness of the majority of people you worked with, because they had started out as religious believers and were used to such techniques. However, you taught more advanced psychic training techniques such as sex magic to the minority who were ready for it.

48 A. The important thing to recognize here is that even the most advanced magical lodges based on the Masonic/Rosicrucian tradition still train their members with rituals that employ the religious trance.

49 Q. I've noticed that most advanced traditional occult organizations still practice such rituals: for example, they teach people to enter a true psychic trance by first entering a religious trance. Now that I've made the breakthrough, I realize that is why I've also felt uncomfortable trying to participate in the magical workings of such lodges: I know how to assume a psychic trance directly, and feel an instinctive revulsion during rituals that attempt to put me into a religious trance.

50 A. This is correct, and it's the main reason why we've been spreading the word telepathically that the Age of Reason is ending and a new age is beginning. Its starting point is another major revolution in consciousness, as we will discuss in the next chapter.