17 WiH Chapter 17: Satan and Buddha

1 A. The whole mythology of Satan and the Rebellion of the Angels was the creation of spirits fighting Theocracy long ago, and the original teachings of the Buddha contain similar elements.

2 Q. Why does the Invisible College deliberately use terms like "Satan"? Doesn't your use of this kind of terminology make it easier for Theocratic propaganda to accuse all of your friends on Earth of being "devil-worshippers"?

3 A. Somewhere in this book we're going to have to deal with accusations of this sort, so we might as well do it here. We have good reason to use terms that encourage people to take a closer look at the Biblical myths about Satan, which we'll describe later in this chapter. For now, we'll just refute the charge that the Invisible College advocates worship of Satan, because we totally reject the concept of "worship" as the term is usually defined: "Absolute, unquestioning belief in and obedience to a spiritual being or a body of doctrine."

4 Individual sovereignty is the most fundamental postulate of the philosophy of the Invisible College. Each person must assume full responsibility for making value judgments on ethical and political matters. We never advocate absolute obedience to any authority, even our own. We urge people to resist orders from leaders if they disagree with them, and to use laws, customs, and ideologies only as guides for making their own decisions on specific issues. Assuming personal responsibility for running their own lives makes people wiser and stronger, because they are usually rewarded for their successes and punished for their mistakes. Unquestioning obedience to orders or fixed doctrine only makes them increasingly dependent and powerless.

5 To get back to our discussion of the devil, the concepts that Satan is a "God of Evil" who demands the same kind of worship as Jehovah or other Theocratic conceptions of deity, and that he tempts people to do exactly the reverse of all the individual ethical principles in the Judeo-Christian moral code, are both Theocratic propaganda incorporated into religious doctrine to keep people from understanding our original and constructive purpose in creating the myth about Satan and getting it incorporated in the Bible.

6 Q. This is obvious once you point it out. Satan has a much more favorable image in literature and folk-tradition in all the Judeo-Christian cultures than you'd expect him to have if he was really the archetype of reversed Biblical morality that religious doctrine claims he is.

7 A. Quite true. Look at all the folk tales in which the Devil simply opposes the puritanical, "bluenose" aspects of Christian morality that say that sex and other sensual pleasures are intrinsically evil. We've already pointed out the role these puritanical doctrines play in the religious mind-control process.

8 The Theocrats want religious believers to feel guilty every time they feel sexual desire or enjoy any "pleasures of the flesh." The guilt literally addicts them to attending church services that subject them to religious mind control. When the Devil of folk tradition says that sensual pleasure is not immoral in itself, then he is actually advocating an ethical code superior to the Judeo-Christian one.

9 Q. Satan, in other words, often preaches a perfectly valid, humanistic morality, rather than the inversion of Judeo-Christian morality that religious doctrine attributes to him. I've certainly seen examples of this in literature from many different countries and eras.

10 A. In ancient Hebrew, the word "satan" simply meant "adversary" or "enemy." We communicated the myth about the "temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent" to some of the prophets who wrote the Old Testament just to ensure that people who read Judeo-Christian scripture would realize that Jehovah has enemies. We are also responsible for other elements in that myth: that disobeying Jehovah by eating the "forbidden fruit" enabled human beings to discern good from evil, and that there was another secret, that of the tree of life" that would give people eternal life without involvement with Jehovah or other Theocrats.

11 Q. Now that you point it out, the whole myth of the "Fall of Man" doesn't seem to belong with the rest of the creation myth in Genesis.

12 A. The material in the book of Genesis, even though it pertains to the Creation and the earliest history of the Hebrews and the Jewish religion, was mostly dictated to Jewish prophets after the Exodus. Judaism started to adopt important elements of fourth-stage Theocratic religion during the Egyptian Captivity, not long after Ikhnaton tried to change Egyptian Paganism into a fourth-stage religion and failed. Fourth-stage Theocratic religions all have a creation myth that includes the concept of Original Sin.

13 Q. I had formed the impression that Christianity was a fourth-stage religion from its beginning but that Judaism was still in the third stage at the time it was founded. My understanding is that the practice of animal sacrifice is the primary distinguishing characteristic of a third-stage Theocratic religion. First-century Judaism still practiced animal sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem.

14 A. No, Judaism was almost entirely into the fourth stage itself when Christianity broke away from it. It started becoming a fourth-stage religion at the time of Moses, though the process was gradual rather than sudden. Survival of limited amounts of animal sacrifice was just an atavism. The core of Jewish doctrine from the time of Moses down to the present has been that Jehovah is both an angry, judgmental deity who condemns people for Original Sin, and a loving god who forgives their sins after various acts of faith and ritual atonement. All the Christians did was assign separate names to these two different aspects of the one deity: Jehovah, or God the Father, to the judgmental aspect, and Jesus, or God the Son, to the forgiving aspect.

15 Q. OK. I understand this part well enough. Please continue explaining the creation myth in Genesis and the origin of the concepts of Satan and the War in Heaven.

16 A. First of all, a fourth-stage Theocratic religion has no need for a god of evil to tempt people into sin: the concept of Original Sin itself makes any sort of Devil superfluous. However, if such a concept survives as an atavism from an earlier stage of the religion's development, it does no harm, any more than did the token sacrifices of doves by the Jews at Jerusalem, as described in the New Testament. Judaism had originally been a polytheistic religion. Most of the angels with names ending "iel" had originally been "god of..."; for example, "Barakiel -- God of Lightning." Therefore Judaism already had a concept of "Satan" similar to the "adversary" or "trickster" gods in other third-stage religions. It was quite natural to incorporate Satan into the creation myth to tempt people into Original Sin.

17 Q. Was the Hebrew Pagan deity Satan originally a god in serpentine form like Damballa and some of the other African trickster deities?

18 A. Possibly. We really don't know. What we're telling you here is mostly derived from our knowledge of modern religious and occult works, supplemented to some extent by rumors that have circulated on the astral plane for thousands of years. We have no exact historical details on any of this, just educated guesses. However, the choice of a serpent image for the deity that tempted people into disobeying Jehovah is obvious if you realize that it was enemies of Theocracy who dictated the myth in the form in which we know it.

19 The serpent was intended as a symbol of reincarnation, because snakes shed their skins, leaving behind a casting that resembles a dead snake to a casual glance, while the animal crawls on about its business with a shiny, new, young-looking skin. The Theocrats who called themselves "Jehovah" did not want people to believe in reincarnation, even though the fourth-stage religious concept of "dwelling in the House of the Lord forever" was probably not known to the Jews at the time the creation myth was first dictated.

20 Q. Many scholars today don't think the concept of reincarnation was even known to the Jews at that time. Was it?

21 A. As we said before, we have no exact historical knowledge of the time, just age-old rumor and inference from literature on Earth. However, our best guess is that every human culture throughout history and back into prehistory has had at least rudimentary knowledge of reincarnation. There are references to it in literature from every culture we know about, including those in the ancient Near East contemporary with the people who wrote Genesis, so we assume the concept was known to them. More important, a small number of people in every culture have always possessed enough conscious past-life memories to circulate persistent rumors about reincarnation, even though a Theocratic religion does its best to suppress them.

22 Q. An aside. I've gotten the impression from what you've told me so far that the Invisible College has only been in existence for a few centuries, that it started around the end of the Middle Ages or after. If so, who was opposing Theocracy at the time of Moses, or whenever the myth concerning Adam and Eve and the serpent was written?

23 A. Exact names for the forces opposing Theocracy are actually arbitrary and unimportant. We prefer to reserve the term "Invisible College" to refer to the highly organized opposition to Theocracy that started when large numbers of spirits from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations started coming to Earth voluntarily about six or seven hundred years ago. However, small numbers of such spirits have been accidentally transported to Earth's astral plane throughout history and far back into prehistoric times, and many of them have tried to fight Theocracy as best they could. One spirit with advanced knowledge could have been responsible for the creation myth we're describing here. You already understand how the Theocrats dictate "Holy writ" to religious believers, don't you?

24 Q. Well, I assume from reading about Mohammed and the Koran and similar cases that the process is almost identical to what we're doing here to produce this book: some form of automatic writing or other mediumistic reception of data from spirits on the astral plane. The only difference is that the spirits involved are Theocrats instead of members of the Invisible College.

25 A. You're right. However, it's extremely difficult for the mediums themselves to tell exactly who in the spirit world is dictating to them at a given time. That's why we always review everything you receive from us several times and leave you to be the final judge as to whether what you've received is really from us or is Theocratic deception.

26 Q. I realize that I have to be responsible for that, to ensure that what I receive is internally consistent and agrees with my own rational judgment based on the evidence available in my memory. I suspect that the Invisible College finds it easier to send anti-Theocratic messages to the prophets of Theocratic religions, who don't normally question divine revelations, than its for Theocrats to deceive conscious Spiritual Revolutionaries like me.

27 A. Yes. And this is exactly what happened with the myth about the serpent and the Fall. A spirit hostile to Theocracy managed to dictate the story to one of the Hebrew prophets, and somehow it survived long enough in folk tradition to be written into the Old Testament. And we're glad it did, because it reveals some important spiritual truths to anyone capable of understanding them.

28 One is that Jehovah has an enemy who communicates with people and urges them to rebel. Another is that these messages of rebellion are involved with ethics and morality. Jehovah says, "Right and wrong are only what I tell you they are, and they are absolute values that never vary." Satan, on the other hand, says, "Use your intellect to determine what is right and wrong in a given situation, because such value judgments are highly dependent on the environment you're in at a given time." Since the latter statement is rational and the former irrational, people are put into conflict with Theocratic religious doctrine every time they use their intellect to make rational value judgments.

29 Q. Most organized religions seem rather proud of the fact that people have to accept their doctrine on faith simply because it isn't rational.

30 A. They do, because they have no choice. And this religious myth is one of the reasons why. The Theocrats don't want people to become consciously aware of the basically illogical nature of absolute moral doctrine, but there is nothing they can do about it. The more highly developed a person's rational intellect, the less likely he or she is to accept religious doctrine on "blind faith."

31 The serpent myth is only a minor detail in Judeo-Christian mythology, but it has been very important over the centuries in the fight against Theocracy. And it's also obvious why the Judeo-Christian Theocrats countered it with further mythology about Satan as the Father of Lies who goes around telling people it's good to kill and steal and otherwise do the opposite of the religious moral code.

32 The Theocrats tried to obscure the information about using the intellect to make ethical decisions on a rational basis. They added many extraneous details to the mythology about Satan. For example, they included the idea that telepathy, mediumship, and other human psychic powers are either "works of God" or "works of the Devil." This allows them to forbid religious believers to communicate with spirits hostile to Theocracy without revealing various facts about spiritual reality that the Theocrats wish to conceal.

33 And then there's all the propaganda about demonic possession. As we discussed earlier, the irony of the whole concept of "possession" is that the Theocrats themselves practice something rather similar to it when they program people into becoming willing slaves through religious mind control.

34 The important thing to remember whenever possession is mentioned is simply this: no spirit, Theocrat or otherwise, can actually force living people to do things contrary to their conscious will and their customary ideas of right and wrong. Even religious mind control can only reprogram a person's opinions and beliefs one small step at a time: it's a slow, gradual process, not a sudden, dramatic takeover. It's very important for the reader to realize this.

35 However, we do have to point out that even gradual reprogramming can produce some extremely evil and violent people if it continues over a whole lifetime. There are plenty of people in this country right now who are emotionally and morally capable of "killing a Commie for Christ" or acting on the literal meaning of the Biblical passage, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." However, this has nothing to do with the sudden, violent "possession by evil spirits" that Fundamentalist propaganda spreads around so freely, and that many serious occultists also accept. That, fortunately, is a myth.

36 Q. You haven't covered the Tree of Life yet. What was that supposed to represent?

37 A. As the serpent myth represents the concept that people have the right to determine good and evil for themselves through the free exercise of the conscious intellect, the Tree of Life represents certain essential details of the breakthrough information - the concepts that people can only achieve immortality through reincarnation and that the "eternal life in heaven" offered by deities is a delusion. However, you must remember that the Tree of Life is mentioned only so the Theocrats can gloat that they prevented people fromgaining this knowledge.

38 Q The myth states that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and learned to distinguish right from wrong with the rational intellect, but they were expelled from the Garden of Eden before they could "eat also of the fruit of the Tree of Life, that is also in the Garden, and become like unto us." Many occultists and Biblical scholars have been intrigued by that passage, not just for the tantalizing references to a secret of immortality, but because it s one of the only passages in the whole Bible in which Jehovah uses the first-person plural, "us" instead of "me".

39 A. The secret referred to in this passage is not just immortality, but the complete knowledge that Theocratic spirits have about the nature of the soul, reincarnation, psychic powers, etc. Apparently the spirit who dictated these passages tried to communicate the whole breakthrough and failed.

40 The beginning of Buddhism is a similar case in which enemies of Theocracy tried to help people to make the breakthrough but didn't quite succeed. After the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he made some statements that seemed self-contradictory, at least on the surface. He attributed his spiritual progress to his own efforts, not to a "gift" from omnipotent deities. He also stated in so many words that ordinary people could achieve enlightenment through practicing the proper psychic development techniques. But at the same time, his statements about reincarnation appeared paradoxical. He said that achieving enlightenment meant that he no longer needed to reincarnate, but he also said that he would continue to do so to help other people achieve enlightenment.

41 Q. This seems to be a major contradiction, because if enlightenment had made him a sort of "super-god," superior to the Vedantic gods, then he wouldn't need to incarnate to assist people in spiritual development. He could do it as a disembodied spirit, remaining on the astral plane and using his enormous psychic powers to communicate whatever information people needed.

42 A. Once people make the breakthrough, it becomes obvious that there is no contradiction in any of these statements about the Buddha. What the Buddha called his enlightenment is actually a version of this breakthrough. He became consciously aware of exactly what the Vedantic gods really are and how they operate, even though the words in which his followers wrote down his knowledge are somewhat confusing.

43 They understood the most important part of his message quite clearly: the path to enlightenment is the disciplined practice of various psychic development techniques. Notice too that the Buddha himself didn't limit his followers in which specific techniques they used, because part of his knowledge must have been that different techniques work better for a given individual than others. He was quite vague on this, and Buddhists ever since have practiced a wide variety of techniques drawn from Yoga, Tantra, and other sources within Vedanta.

44 However, the basic teachings of Buddha are anti-deistic whereas those of Vedanta were highly deistic. Many modern Buddhists believe that if they personally achieve enlightenment, their souls will merge with the soul of Buddha into Nirvana, a "state of blissful nothingness." Vedantic doctrine in the time of the Buddha already taught that enlightened souls would merge with Brahma or some other god. This doctrine was grafted onto the Buddha's teachings after his death, when Buddhism was taken over by the Vedantic Theocrats.

45 Q. You're saying that Buddhism was originally founded to fight Theocracy?

46 A. Yes. So were Gnosticism and some forms of early Christianity. But to get back to Buddhism, the Buddha implied by his own example that the enlightened were capable of transcending reincarnation but deliberately chose not to do so in order to be of service to the human race. The Buddha realized he could become a Theocrat and remain on the astral plane indefinitely, but he refused to do so for ethical reasons. This interpretation of the early Buddhist teaching is possible for people who have already made the breakthrough from some other source, but it is not stated clearly enough in the writings themselves to make finding and understanding it very easy.

47 Even though he founded a major religion, the enlightenment the Buddha achieved was still only a partial breakthrough. Much of what he learned from the Invisible College was on a subconscious level; it is reflected indirectly in his various teachings and practices as described by his followers after his death when they wrote the early literature, but much of it never came out in so many words in his actual teachings.

48 Q. In other words, he didn't actually say that the Vedantic gods are evil beings who eat souls, or that enlightened souls need to reincarnate for their own good as well as that of living people.

49 A. This vital information is implied, but never directly stated. For example, the Buddha did teach that animal sacrifices and "austere practices" - by which he meant self-torture, starvation, etc. - are not mandatory for onto achieve enlightenment; but he didn't antagonize the Vedantic majority around him, or their gods, by saying that "The gods are evil." However, after his death, the legends portrayed the Vedantic gods as "worshipping" the enlightened Buddha, implying at the least that they had no power over him.

50 It is also important to remember that the Buddha was preaching to an audience with far different religious beliefs from those of modern Westerners, or of modern Buddhists, for that matter. The Vedanta of his time was a third-stage Pagan religion based on large-scale animal sacrifice and orgiastic rituals, but its doctrine also included many atavistic myths surviving from the first stage. As well as being the priests of third-stage Vedanta, the Brahmins also functioned as first-stage shamans who insured that various spiritual beings were "fed" to keep them from eating human souls after death. Direct references to the gods as "Eaters of Souls" occur in Vedantic hymns used in the Soma ritual.

51 Q. I've also noticed another seeming incongruity about the teachings of Buddha. He stresses that enlightenment is achieved only through psychic development practices, but most of his actual sermons or lectures seemed to be on ethics. Buddhist ethics are very similar to the traditional Vedantic ethics of the culture he lived in. He stressed certain elements more than others - for example, total non-violence against both people and animals - but these were already present in the Vedantic doctrines, which contained many inconsistencies.

52 A. Yes, he preached a version of the Vedantic ethical code and religious customs stripped of some of the worst self-contradictions, like the concept of non-violence co-existing with animal sacrifice and with various forms of violence against oneself in the name of religious practice. However, it is easy to misunderstand what he was actually doing, which was to separate ethics from the process of achieving enlightenment.

53 Q. In other words, he said living ethically was important, but not directly related to the psychic development that causes enlightenment. Again, this interpretation is possible from reading the Buddhist literature, but the point is not made clearly enough for most people to understand it. Certainly most modern Buddhists don't.

54 A. Modern Buddhism, except for a few occult groups associated with it, is a Theocratic religion. Buddhists feel that their ethical conduct as well as their psychic development practices will earn them enlightenment by pleasing various incarnations of the Buddha, all of which are imagined to co-exist as gods similar to the Vedantic gods. This is not what Buddha taught at all.

55 Q. Certain Zen masters, whom I class with the occult minority within Buddhism, have said things like, "There are no gods; there are no Buddhas."

56 A. When they do this, they are fighting against the tendency of the majority of Buddhists to worship the Buddha as a god, instead of seeking enlightenment through their own efforts and practicing ethical conduct for humanistic reasons - to serve their own interests and that of other people - instead of to earn divine favor. Zen masters have even told students who were drifting into deism, "Contemplate the Buddha as a piece of dried shit."

57 Q. Before I made the breakthrough, I put a pantheistic interpretation on passages like this: "The Buddha is everywhere, including in the desiccated turd." Now I see that this is an attempt to answer the Theocratic tendencies in Buddhism by trying to extinguish the believer's tendencies to fall into deism.

58 A. This anti-deistic, anti-Theocratic teaching is even more evident in the doctrines of some of the Eastern occult secret societies involved with the martial arts. These secret societies have often worked under the direction of the Invisible College to fight against the control of both religion and politics in China and Japan by the Theocrats. That's why they sometimes tell initiates, "we are devils," because they are literally fighting against the "gods," in the sense of fighting deism and defending the idea that people can achieve enlightenment through their own efforts. However, you have to be careful when you read about secret societies of this type, because many of them have fought for the Theocrats at one time and against them at other times, depending on the personalities and beliefs of the members.

59 At this point, we'll leave the adversaries of Theocracy within religion and go back to discussing the work of the Invisible College in building modern Western civilization.