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Atheism or God?-a scientific and philosophic look at various phenomena
A document proving the possible existence of God and magnetic energies(or supernatural) energies of good and evil which shape man's ultimate destiny through the agency of freewill. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- No religion higher than truth? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank members of the Edinburgh Theosophical Society and the Dundee Theosophical Society for three years on interesting discussions of the various wisdoms and religions from around the world.
He assigned to man two spirits with which he should walk. They are the spirits of truth and falsehood, truth born out of the spring of Light, falsehood from the well of darkness. The dominion of all the children of truth is in the hands of the Angels of Light so that they walk in the ways of Light. The spirits of truth and falsehood struggle within the hearts of man, behaving with wisdom and folly. And according as a man inherits the truth so will he avoid darkness. Blessings on all the have cast their lot with the Law, that walk truthfully in all their ways. May the Law bless them with all good and keep them from all evil and illumine their hearts with insight into the things of life and grace them with knowledge of things eternal.
INDEX
1 Introduction to Myself, Theosophy and Spiritualism
2 An Investigation and Some Conclusions of the Spiritualist Church
3 An Occultic Analysis of the Buddhist Belief System 3.1 Hypnotic Regression 3.2 Astral Light
4 Out-of-Body Experiences
5 Near-Death-Experiences 5.1 Components of the Near Death Experience 5.1.1 A Sense of being Dead 5.1.2 Peace and Painlessness 5.1.3 Out-of-the-Body experience 5.1.4 The Tunnel Journey 5.1.5 The Life Review
6 Poltergeists 6.1 The Enfield Case 6.2 A Mischievous Phenomenon? 6.3 Poltergeists and Life After Death
7 The Aura 7.1 Kirlian Photography 7.2 Kilner Screens 7.3 Bioplasmic Energy 7.4 Phantom Leaf 7.5 Aura or Ionization
8 Appiritional Experiences 8.1 Phenomenological characteristics of apparitional experiences
9 Christianity 9.1 Christianity and Evolution 9.2 The Alpha and the Omega 9.3 The Future
10 The Realms of Evil 10.1 The Laws of Death(Hermes Trismegistus) 10.2 Descent into the Abyss
11 Consequences of the Enlightenment
12 The British Labour Party
13 Theosophical Society(Search for the Divine Wisdom)
14 On Scotland
15 Commentary on the Moment
16 The Islamic religion
17 On UFO's
18.The Term Occultic Knowledge
19 Magicians 19.1 Abra-Melin 19.2 Aleister Crowley 19.3 Israel Regardie
20.Psychiatry
21.Communism
22 Final Commentary
23. The Knights Templar and the Holy Grail
24. A Brief History of John Knox-the reformer
1 Introduction
I would like to introduce myself and tell you of my journey to find the divine wisdom. I was a Christian from 1993-1996 and became disillusioned and my spiritual quest took me to the Edinburgh Theosophical Society in 1997. Later to the Dundee Theosophical Society in 1999. The Theosophical Society is full of many interesting characters and wisdoms. Some of them profess to be Knights Templar, others Buddhists, Seiks, Followers of Rudolph Steiner, Orientalism(taoism,tai chi etc etc),freemasons, confused new-agers. It has been an incredible journey. After a long period of confusion and started to take an atheistic path but that changed and my persistence paid off as I felt as though I was making progress to the divine wisdom. Much of the literature of the occult can be extremely confusing at first and it can take some years to find the right combination of books which give you a divine revelation. Above all - "Seek and ye shall find". What follows is a document unfolding the spiritual nature and its proofs to a sceptical person about the powers of God and the soul or spirit latent in man.
2.Evidence for the Supernatural
2.1 Spiritualism
The curious case of Helen Duncan(famous spiritualist medium from Edinburgh(ISBN 1898680191) being tried in 1944 near the end of the war for witchcraft always struck as being a very curious case. She seemed to spark controversy as being a materialistic medium who could manifest the souls of the dead. When she was in Portsmouth giving a demonstration of her gift to an audience. She made manifest a soul of the dead son of a mother who was present who had just drowned by the ship he was on being sunk by the nazi's. The woman fainted. It was sometime before high command received notice of the sunken ship. Her powers were remarkable but what influenced certain people to do some sort of deal to lock her away for many years?
Being a Theosophist who held an atheistic position. I decided to investigate spiritualism for myself. I have attended the Progressive Spiritualist church in Dundee. After the first service the medium would communicate messages from the dead. I wasn't particularly impressed during this sitting. So I went to the tea room at the break. There I stood next to a medium who was able to see an apparition next to me who said "I had Irish ancestors". Also another apparition was next to me of a woman who died of cancer. When I went back into the second service in the main hall. A different medium started her work and she described the same two spirits. The man calling Irish ancestors would be my grandmother's side. The woman described would be a close aunt. But as an initial sceptic probably expecting my belief in atheism to be reinforced. I then had to radically alter my present outlook to account for this gift of mediumship. This encounter and others like it would lead me to seek further clarity in the occultic wisdom and from what I know.
HP Blavatsky was herself a medium and believed she was in touch with Indian Masters through mediumship and wrote down her thoughts on various subjects. After reading it I believe she was onto something but never really quite getting there.
Annie Bessant was a member of the Fabian Society and was a convinced atheist she donated much effort and time to theosophy and probably saw the future of Theosophy as a melting point of atheistic analysis but ultimately no meaningful God could be derived from millennia of mystical philosophers and seekers after God. Later she was to be misled into the Theosophical Buddhist circle.
Rudolph Steiner was keen on developing Christian ideas and his teaching methods are widely commended. He subsequently formed the anthroposophical society. He believed he was in communication with spirits from the 'other side'.
Krishnamurti, C W leadbeater, Colonel Olcott and Annie Bessant formed and inner circle in the Theosophical Society trying to promote a form of Theosophical Buddhism. But it seemed to sound the death knell to interesting and challenging spiritual philosophy. This path was meant to be supported by spiritual masters from the 'other side'.
Another interesting member of the Theosophical Society(Edinburgh) is Athur Conan Doyle(writer of Sherlock Holmes). He had an intense interest in the spiritualist and powers of healing and mediumship. Over a period of years, Arthur Conan Doyle had developed the philosophy that in the afterlife there was a levelling out of age. Those who had died old became young again, and those who had been young at the time of death grew up. Everyone was around twenty-five years old. Why physical age should matter in the afterlife is not clear, although the concept is accepted by a great many mediums. Most mediums believe that spirits grow up. Babies, for example, evolve from babyhood to about twenty at an accelerated rate. It may take them only a year or two to do this.
Arthur Conan Doyle, a supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution, carried this logic on to the paraphysical level. He developed a theory of spiritual evolution. In the afterlife there existed a series of grades, or spheres, that the deceased inhabited according to their behaviour on Earth. Once graded it was possible to aspire to other, higher spheres. This is all too reminiscent of the fundamental beliefs held in other religions. Indeed, it is plain to see that Spiritualism, despite its scientific, or, as some have said, 'pseudo-scientific' pretensions, was developing as a religion from its inception.
Most Spiritualists abide by the these Seven Principles: 1 The fatherhood of God. 2 The brotherhood of man. 3 The communion of spirits and the ministry of angels. 4 The continuous existence of the human soul 5 Personal responsibility 6 Compensation and retribution for all the good and evil deeds done on Earth 7 Eternal progress open to every human soul
You have to be very careful here when you consult the 'spirits' from the other side about the meaning of existence when so much contradictory and different information is given.
Isaiah 8:19 "When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people enquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward will curse their king and their God. Then they will look towards the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom and they will be thrust into utter darkness."
I personally consulted the spirits and was told that I could not be given all the answers. Disappointed I then tried to understand this with my knowledge of the occultic wisdom. I believe people are deliberately misled into darkness. The writer of Les Misarables consulted mediums and produced a vast volume of so called philosophical answers to the meaning of existence such as communications with ET's from Jupiter, reincarnation philosophy including reincarnation into inanimate objects. We know that ET's do not come from Jupiter so let us next analyze Buddhism.
The concept of a spiritualist God was a changeable energy with no foundations of philosophical belief or understanding of the phenomena. It may be true from the Isaiah passage that contact with the 'otherworld' can still lead to the soul perishing. I found a great deal of confusion among some of the people who attend the Spiritualist church and a great deal of ignorance. The people who have these powers of healing and mediumship are not the brainiest people of our society. As from Isaiah they will not necessarily achieve salvation through these gifts. I believe it is only a wake up call to the powers of the paranormal and the 'otherworld'. I think we still need to make that leap of faith(like Indiana Jones) to enter the light and the divine wisdom. We can slowly move towards the divine wisdom bit by bit but the penny should drop eventually. But some fall pray to devilish delusions. The people with these gifts are not necessarily put right with God. Therefore I would adopt a Calvinist stance if I were careful. I will explain further the approach to the divine wisdom bit by bit through the occult philosophy. . If you want to move to the occultic good start with a vast library. Occultic evil is the deliberate neglect of the faculty of the intelligence which is capable of raising us above the animal. Other mystics and sages seeking God develop psychic powers and navigate the astral realms, but they can become victims ending up in lunatic asylums. Others Christian hermits succeed but keep the knowledge and power guarded because of God's eternal decree. They become obedient to God
3 An occultic analysis of the Buddhist belief system
"Karma is the law of consequences - of merit and demerit," say the Buddhists. "It is the force which moulds our physical destiny in the world and regulates our period of misery or happiness in the world to come." We are also told, "Karma is the cold, inflexible justice which metes out to each individual the exact same measure of good and evil at his next physical rebirth that he measured to his fellow men in this." This Karma at death remains somewhere down upon the Astral planes of the planet, like an avenging demon, waiting anxiously for the period of Devachanic happiness to come to an end. Then it will reproject the poor unfortunate Soul once more into the magnetic vortices of material incarnation. There, with its load of bad Karma hanging like a millstone round its neck, it will in all probability generate a still greater load of this theological dogma. Consequently, at each rebirth it will sink deeper and deeper, unless the Spiritual Self can bring it to some consciousness of its fearful sinful state. How this transpires is not satisfactorily explained.
If the human Soul only received punishment for the sins and wrongs it inflicted upon others during a previous life, the Soul when it first became incarnated must have started on its human journey without any Karma to suffer for. One is naturally led to ask, "How did it first begin to commit sin?" We are distinctly told that what we now suffer at the hands of others is only just repayment for our own past sins. If we had no past sins, we should be perfectly free from trouble. We are distinctly taught that the first or preadamite men, those of the Golden Age, were perfect. How did this abominable Karma get a start in the world? The question must be fully explained.
We have a general idea of the Karma of Theosophical Buddhism. Before discussing the origin of the Oriental delusion, we will present the Hermetic doctrine of Karma:
1.Karma is not an active principle;but, on the contrary, it is a crystallized force. It is the picture gallery or cosmic play of Nature. 2.Karma constitutes the scenery, essence, and mental imagery of a person's total past existence. 3. The Karmic spheres of an individual's existence exists as Astral life currents along which the soul travelled and which actions and motives which prompted them. Therefore, our past Karma constitutes the Soul's past history in the Astral light. It can be deciphered by the properly trained Lucid, and even by some mediumistic clairvoyants. 4.Karma is the offspring of everything, or everything that possess pictorial records of its past evolution. It is by means of this Karma that the psychometric sensitive can read the unwritten past. Without Karma, the powers of Psychometry would be totally uselss. However, they can only deal with small Karma. On a grander scale, the Karma of moons, planets, suns, and systems exists. Races of men, species of animals, and classes of plants also evolve special racial Karmas which constitute their Astral world. 5.The harmonics and discords of Cosmic evolution generate their special Karma just as thoughts and discords of Cosmic evolution generates their special Karma just as thoughts and emotions do. 6. Karma is absolutely confined to the realms of the Astral light, and consequently is always subjective. Karma can only exist as long as the Soul which generates it is attached to the same planet. When the Soul leaves the planet, the Karma disintegrates. A Soul cannot carry its Karma around the Universe with it, since Astral light differs in quality and degree upon each orb. 7.When the Soul enters the spiritual states of the Soul world (which the Buddhists term Devachan), the power of its earthly Karma can never reattract it to earth. Its influence over the Soul is lost forever. The lower can never control the higher! To assert that the past fossilised Karma can reattract the soul from the realms of spiritual happiness and reproject it into the mire of the earth is to exalt matter to the throne of Deity. This degrades pure Spirit to the level of a passive brute substance.
From the above seven statements, Hermetic initiates assert that Karma is not the primary law of consequences and destiny. It is not an active principle always at work readjusting Nature's ridiculous mistakes. Nature has never yet made a mistake!
On the contrary, Karma is a result- the subjective outcome of innumerable laws and forces-and in this life it is utterly powerless to effect either good or evil. But upon, the interior plane, upon or within the Astral sphere of the disembodied Soul world, this Karma becomes the Book of Life from which all our actions in this material life are judged. At death we are surrounded by and compelled to exist within our own Karma. We are forced by the laws of magnetic affinity to work out our own redemption, ever face-to-face with the grim idols of our earthly past. The foul, unlovely pictures of every unclean imagination will haunt us, and we set our very souls aflame with the consciousness of every injustice and wrong committed.
The only redeeming feature will be the good Karma, the kind unselfish thoughts and noble aspirations we have evolved. All our true, unselfish love for our fellow creatures will spring up like flowers at our feet, and help to aid and brighten our path upward and onward through the spheres of purification and purgatory. At last we shall enter the sphere of immortal life, where those whom er have loved below may be waiting to greet us.
We have asserted that Karma is utterly powerless to effect either good or evil so far as the material destiny is concerned. While this is true within certain limits, seeing Karma is but the Astral record of the past, yet this statement requires more explanation. It is not the actions we commit which can, in themselves, bring happiness, misery, benefits, or misfortune. It is the effect which our actions have upon others that really produces immediate material results. The precise effect which any action will have will depend entirely upon the peculiar mental states surrounding us at the time.
For instance, in one age it may be considered a meritorious action to roast a poor, helpless medium under the name of witch; but at another period in history, such an action may be followed by an indignant spirit of public resentment. Then a terrible penalty will be imposed by the law of the state to satisfy the public sense of justice. The praiseworthy actions of one age become the criminal ones of another. We see that the results on any action upon the material plane depend upon the physical, moral, mental, cultural, and spiritual development of mankind. This is not the case, however, within the Astral Soul world. There, absolute justice is the universal law. The mighty hero of a thousand fights, who dies surrounded by all the pomp and vanity of public worship, comes face to face with the fearful reality that he is a bloodstained murderer. As such, he must work out his own salvation amid trial and suffering.
His purgatorial state will depend on his motives and the consciousness of his earthly actions. If he was a true patriot, who fought simply for the love and liberty of his country against the cruel oppression, his conscience will deal lightly with him. But if love of fame and martial glory were his chief motives, and constituted the greater part of his Karma, then the worst will happen to him.
In the Hermetic definitions of Karma, the Soul when working out its past iniquities is perfectly conscious of its task. It knows the true why and wherefore of its suffering. It also has the certain hope of final emancipation, however, not until, as the parable says,"thou hast paid the uttermost farthing." This is the truth and justice of nature's laws revealed.
But in the definition of Buddhism, the justice is absolutely wanting. In their outrageous scheme of esoteric philosophy, the millions of Souls upon the earth are perfectly ignorant of what they are suffering for. They are ushered into the world for the purpose of undergoing the fiery torments of their old, fossilised Karma. They are completely ignorant of the facts. How can the average mortal work off his bad Karma when he does not know he has any? How can he work when he does not know what he is working and suffering for?
If we cruelly abuse a dog when it is full-grown for some offence or other committed when a puppy, it would be considered outrageous cruelty. The dog would be perfectly ignorant of what the punishment was for. The same may be said of inflicting punishment upon the material man for some forgotten offence of his infancy. Remember, no punishment is just when one punished is ignorant of the cause. Punishment under such circumstances not only ceases to be just, but becomes diabolical injustice. Since the common justice of human nature condemns this, how much more severe must be the condemnation of that justice which is Divine?
If human suffering is not the result of previous Karma, you may ask, what is the real cause of so much misery in the world? Human suffering is the result of innumerable laws, which is their action and reaction which produce discord at intervals in the scale of human development. For all practical purposes they may be classed as primary and secondary. The primary cause is racial evolution. Each round and each race of the round requires different external conditions in order to evolve its chief attributes. Each period generation becomes the special means by which a certain one of the Soul attributes is rounded out.
Let us explain. The first or primal race was that of the Golden Age. They were a purely ethereal race of beings and cannot be strictly classified with humanity; nor were they really incarnated in gross matter. For this reason, their penetrative power was very small. Thus, though highly spiritual, they were correspondingly simple. They lived an ideal life amid semispiritual surroundings.
The second race, that of the Silver Age, penetrated deeper into matter than their forefathers of the Golden Age. Their bodies consequently became more dense and material. Toward the termination of this race, and at the beginning of the third or Copper Age, the equator of our arc was reached on the descending scale. Here it was that the first murmurings of a mental storm began to manifest themselves. Emigrations and partings took place between what were previously a united people, and consequently, separate national interests began to evolve. When our earth reached the equinoctial points of the year, storms and tempest resulted. It is the same with the progress of man around the cycle of the highest planes. With the copper race, a still further descent took place and a still greater increase of self-interest was evolved. Kings ascended thrones and sacerdotal systems were formulated. The strong began to assert their greater forces. The weak gradually sank into subjection.
A still further descent occurred, and we came to the fourth race, the bottom rung on the cyclic ladder, fittingly known as the Iron Age. This was the turning point of the seven races, wherein the Soul attains its greatest penetrating power. Spirit can descend no lower!Kings and their priestly councillors became true despots. The masses became helpless and oppressed. Next comes a higher cycle of evolution. The fifth race, beginning at the end of the fourth, reaches up the equinoctial line of the metal arc on the ascending scale. Consequently another stormy period commences. All is strife and turmoil. It is the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor. It is not the gentle mental storm of the Silver equinox. A spirit period of light preceded that era. It is the storm of war and bloodshed-of a fierce democracy battling for the rights of man against usurped authority. It happened because the Iron Age oppression preceded it.
We are at the present time passing through this fearful equinoctial period. The fifth race is coming to a close. Already forerunners of the sixth race are among the people, aiding in the spread of glorious truth. No wonder, then, the signs of the times are so significant. A real interest in mental and spiritual science is rapidly reawakening within the minds of humanity.
The secondary causes are man's ignorance and his animal nature. Man makes the conditions which are necessary for his progress by alternately struggling with and yielding to his basic animal desires. Yet, Nature, the experience the Soul gains thereby, and material incarnation might be dispensed with. The state of suffering depends upon the race, but the effects of that suffering are in exact fulfilment of Nature's requirements.
Might-causes produce might-effects. This law is absolute! Every spiritual atom of life is the direct result of a cause. These atoms differ in power and potency, as the Stars differ in their magnitude. Nature's aim is not equality. In spite of the apparent fact that all the forces are ever striving for equilibrium, her grand goal is diversity.
Nature's end, then, is the very opposite of equality; for the grand ultimate aim of every force is the production of variety. The only real difference in any of her infinite number of parts is that of polarity. The only difference between the Hottentot and the intellectual genius of modern civilised society is their Souls' respective polarity. It is simply a question of personal opinion as to which of the two is best and wisest.
The civilised shams and personal adornments of society may more than counterbalance the crude decorations of the savage. Ignorance alone limits human possibilities, for it is man's place in nature to sway the mighty pendulum of force between the higher and lower states of life. The supermundane and submundane realms of being are his mission, which consists of evolving the attributes of the Soul. If suffering is necessary to enable Man to accomplish this then he will suffer.
But the causes and consequences be what they may in this life, what the soul suffers from discord it will be justly compensated for by the sum total of the results when the cycle of its purification is over. Then the past can be measured at its true worth.
We have presented as concisely as possible, the Hermetic explanation of Karma, and have shown that it is not the all-ruling force Buddhism would make it.
We will now expose this Oriental delusion and reveal its priestly origin. We must carefully bear in mind a few all-important facts regarding the esoteric philosophy of the dreamy Orient. The basic truths of all religions, especially those relating to the Soul, its nature, incarnation, and Karma, were rigidly concealed form the people by a jealous Oriental priesthood. In the place of truth, fiction was substituted. The real truth was veiled, and the appearances of truth taught instead. In order to obtain absolute power, it became necessary to formulate a dogma. Their high priest, the pontiff or hierophant, as he was called, was made a direct incarnation of the Deity or a reincarnation of that Being.
In the process of time, the priests themselves became corrupt and worldly; consequently, their spiritual perception sank into mental reflection. They not only lost the secrets of their religion and mythology, which were never committed to writing, but also became the dupes of their own theology. They accepted their formulated husks as Divine Truth.
The, history of the rise and fall of nations, and the research of all genuine Occultists, will support the above. In face, Isis Unveiled(Blavatsky) teems with facts corroborating our statements. Hermetic initiates assert emphatically that both doctrines, reincarnation and Karma, are nothing more than theological dogma of an interested sacerdotal system.
The teachings based upon these doctrines by the Buddhists and other religious systems are false. The real facts of reincarnation and Karma were originally concealed and then forgotten in the lapse of time. It is very easy indeed to prove that the accepted theories of the Theosophical Buddhists are nothing but the popular external dogmas taught to the ignorant masses of ten thousand years ago.
The oldest records we possess prove human reincarnation and Karma were popular doctrines of the masses; consequently, they were only appearances. they were untrue because the real truth was always concealed form the general public. This doctrine of Karma is one of the most interesting features of all Buddhist philosophy. There has been no secret about it at any time. Certainly, this is exactly what all true Hermetic initiates claim. It is a dogma of the Buddhist church, and was never concealed because it was not worth concealing.
On the contrary it was always taught to the suffering masses, groaning beneath despotic rule. It was exceedingly potent as a means of making the people submit quietly to the authority of the Church and the tyranny of the King. The masses were taught that by submitting to the yoke, they were thus working off previous bad Karma. This was very convenient doctrine, we must all admit.
The chief Hierophant of Buddhism and the Tibetan adepts is the Taley Lama of Lhassa. Every Lama is subject to the grand Taley Lama, the Buddhist Pope of Tibet, who holds his residence at Lhassa and is said to be a reincarnation of Buddha. Buddhists would have us really believe Buddha continues to incarnate and reincarnate age after age. We can say that no soul that has passed through trials of material incarnation and fires of spiritual purification would submit to continually exist and re-exist within a material organism. Thus it would endure from age to age-the hell of the Grand Lama's life. The formulae, ceremonies, and usages of a religious potentate are indeed a hell to the pure at heart.
The false assertions that with very high adepts and other exalted souls these things are different, that Nature's laws are either reversed or transcended, are told as facts. To this we say that such statements are false!
Nature is no respecter of persons, and neither Buddha nor any other Soul can continue to reincarnate form age to age. The most such a dominant mind may do would be to obsess and mould an unborn fetus to suit its purposes. Then, by virtue of such obsession, partially inhabit the material body. Under these circumstances the physical body is but the helpless machine of a dominant foreign mind. We scarcely need say that no purified Soul would sink to such a plane of existence.
To reincarnate constantly collecting an ever inceasing baggage of sin is thoroughly ridiculous. Perhaps when one becomes reincarnated as a compassionate donkey we may have learned something. Better luck next time!
3.1 Hypnotic Regression
This is often promoted by Buddhist circles as evidence for reincarnation. Advanced psychics know it as the Akashic records and as part of the Astral plane and as a form of psychometry. Mental impressions are left in the surroundings and there are many cases of people gaining impressions of other lives which lived in particular surroundings. Some advanced psychics can extract information at will from any particular time period from any life. The degree of psychic power using this power of astral vision is better than some than others. But it is a gift from God. Some of these advanced psychic can help the FBI. Many people possess the astral vision to degree and occasional flashes of it might persist. Many "feel" the Astral vibrations rather than seeing with the Astral vision. Others gain a degree of Astral Vision by means of crystal gazing. The psychic power which is frequently referred to as "Psychic sight," or "Psychic sensing" is a form of Astral Visioning or sensing. Psychism is bound up with Astral phenomena, in all cases. To say that we were that person in a previous life is completely untrue we are only accessing the memories.
3.2 The Astral Light
Changing vibrations, we find ourselves entering a strange region, the nature of which at first one fails to discern. After the Astral vision becomes attuned to the peculiar vibrations of this region, you find you are becoming aware of what may be called an immense picture gallery, spreading out in all directions.
At first it is difficult to decipher the meaning of this great array of pictures. They are arranged not one after the other in sequence on a flat plane, but rather in sequence, one after another in a peculiar order which may be called the order of "Oneness in space." It is neither one of length, breadth, or depth. It is practically the order of the fourth dimension, which cannot be described in terms of ordinary spatial dimensions.
Upon closely examining the pictures one sees they are very minute(microscopic) and require the use of the peculiar magnifying power of Astral Vision to bring them to a size capable of being recognised.
The Astral Vision, when developed,is capable of magnifying any object,material or Astral, to an enormous degree. The trained Occultist is able to perceive the whirling atoms and corpuscles of physical matter, by means of this peculiarity of the Astral Vision. Likewise one is able to plainly perceive many vibrations of light. The Astral Light which pervades this region is due to the power of the Astral Vision to receive and register these vibrations of light.
By bringing the power of magnification into operation, you will see each of the little points and details of the great world pictures is really a complete scene of a certain place on Earth, and at a definite period in the history of the Earth. It is fixed and not in motion and yet we can move forward along the fourth dimension, and thus obtain a moving picture of the history of any point on the surface of the earth. One can even combine the various points into a larger moving picture.
For a moment we will travel back in time along the series of these Astral records, for they travel back to the beginning of the history of the Earth. Looking around, you perceive the pictures representation of strange scenes filled with persons wearing peculiar garbs. But all is still, no life, no motion!
Let us move forward in time, at a much higher rate than that in which these Astral views were registered. You see before you the great movement of Life on a point of space in a far distant past. From birth to death you see the life of these people, all in the space of a few moments. Great battles are fought, and cities rise before your eyes. All in a great moving picture flying by at a tremendous speed.
Now let us move backward in time, still gazing at the picture. You see everything moving backward. Cities are crumbling into nothingness, men are rising from their graves, and growing younger each second, everything is moving backward in time.
You can witness any great historical event, or follow the career of any great personage from birth to death. You will notice everything is semitransparent, and you can see the picture of what is going on inside of the buildings as well. Nothing escapes the Astral Light Records. Nothing can be concealed from it.
You gazed at the great World Picture in the Records of Astral Light(the great Akashic records). In these records are found pictures of every single event, without exception, that has ever happened in the history of the Earth.
By travelling to a point in time, on the fourth dimension, you may begin at that point, and see a moving picture of the history of any part of the Earth from that time on to the present. You may even reverse the sequence by travelling backward. You may also travel on the Astral Plane, on ordinary space dimensions, and see what happened simultaneously all over the Earth, at any moment of time.
As a matter of Truth, however, I must inform you the real records of the past, the great Akashic records, really exist on a much higher plane than the Astral Plane. What you have witnessed is but a reflection of the original records.
It requires a high degree of Occult development in order to perceive even this reflection in the Astral Light. An ordinary Clairvoyant is often able to catch occasional glimpses of these Astral pictures. He may thus describe fairly accurately the happenings of the past. In the same way, the Psychometrist, given any object, may be able to give the past history of the object, including a description of the persons associated with it.
On certain planes of the Astral, there exist certain entities or living beings, which never were human, and never will be. They belong to an entirely different order of Nature.
These strange entities are ordinary invisible to human beings, but under certain conditions they may be sensed by Astral Vision. Strictly speaking, these strange entities do not affect the advanced mage.
4 Out-of-Body Experiences
Surveys show that the OOBE is both a remarkably common experience and a pretty consistent one. This might imply a fundamental reality.
Sue Blackmore has compared four separate surveys which produced almost eight hundred people who claim to have had OOBEs. If we look at an average of their results, they suggest that somewhere in the region of 15 percent of the population have had what they believe was an OOBE at some point in their lives, making this one of the most common psychic experiences.
In most cases (60 per cent) this was a one-off experience. As many as 80 per cent on average saw their own 'real' body from a different vantage point, but very few experienced the actual point of separation from the physical self. There is a common Spiritualist claim that a 'sliver cord', like a mystical umbilical cord, links the astral 'body' with the physical one. However, only a tiny percentage (about 4 percent) actually reported seeing it during an OOBE.
A number of researchers have attempted to test people who claim to have OOBEs by getting them to go 'out of the body' and 'see' a target that would not be visible unless they drifted up away from their body towards the ceiling. There have been some positive (if controversial) results.
Dr Charles Tart, in California, made one of the earliest attempts by asking a woman to read a random number written on a sheet of paper and placed on a shelf. As she was wired to a machine she could not physically move without disconnecting these wires. The wires monitored her brain waves, and any disconnection would show up on the resulting graph. The woman was correct in one out of four trials-the only one where she claimed she was able to drift up and read the number. However, on another of the trials, whilst unable to see the paper, she did read a clock that was not visible form her body position. The moment when she read the time coincided with changes in the brain wave pattern consistent with an altered state of consciousness- but with disconnection of the wires.
American parapsychologist Dr Karlis Osis tried an interesting twist on this idea, in which a series of symbols in a box were set up via a complex optical system. This meant that you could only see a pattern form as a kind of kaleidoscopic illusion if you were in a disembodied state up in the air and looking through the hole into the box. From any other location you would observe something different.
Osis claims that his experiment worked and that a subject would successfully describe the scene. This implied he really was looking at it from an out-of-the-body state located somewhere in front of the opening to the box. However, there was criticism of Osis's methods. It was pointed out, for example, that he decided he had scored a hit if any part of the picture was correctly noted.
Perhaps the most sophisticated ideas was a 'black box' developed by British engineer Professor Arthur Ellison. He explained to us how this worked.
A random number was generated out of sight around the back of the machine. Nobody ever saw this. The person attempting to read it in an OOBE state would tap in a number, which he or she believed to be the same, via buttons on the front of the box. The computer in the machine would automatically check this 'claim', generate the next number round the back, and move on. At the end of the trial it would record how many times the number that had been 'seen' and tapped into the machine matched the number that had been 'seen' and tapped into the machine matched the number that had been generated out of sight around the back. Significantly, since neither the experimenter nor his subject ever knew any of the numbers that the machine produced, this theoretically ruled out all obvious forms of ESP-suggesting a real OOBE.
Sadly, results with this black box have been very limited-nothing like as positive as the other tests. Possibly this is because it creates an artificial situation. In order to operate the machine, the subject of the experiment is clearly not in the sort of OOBE state that most spontaneous witnesses report. Perhaps Professor Ellison's clever device is a test of clairvoyance rather than of the OOBE state.
4.1 I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW
There are some remarkable claims of evidential success in a spontaneous OOBE state. Biologist Dr Lyall Watson told us about the time in Africa when he was in a bus that overturned. For a time he found himself out of his body, able to look down at the wreckage where a young boy was trapped. The bus was perilously close to toppling over and crushing the child. When Watson snapped back into his body he was able to escape relatively unscathed from the vehicle and help rescuers release the boy. He really was trapped in the exact position that Watson had seen-a location not visible to him in his position on the bus.
In 1992 Dr Keith Hearne conducted a survey of psychic experiences in Britain. One case was of a woman who, after surgery, had an OOBE in her bed and drifted above the doctor and nurse attending her. In his disembodied state she went to another room and floated over a nightdress. The garment still had its price tag on, and later-when conscience-she astonished its owner by 'predicting' how much it had cost!
Such stories are anecdotal, but they also illustrate the way in which the OOBE commonly occurs in a crisis situation. It is in fact recognised as the first phase of the near death experience.
5 NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE
Dr Raymond Moody in his ground-breaking book Life after Life, published in November 1975. Moody's research led to scientific respectability for what was up to then had been little more than a ragbag of bizarre anecdotes related by embarrassed people who had been brought back by fortune or medical skill from the brink of death. It encouraged many other individuals in the medical and mental health professions to take up the challenge and involve themselves in carrying out their own research into what were formerly known as 'death bed visions'. One of these was Margot Grey, a British clinical psychologist, who succinctly summed up the essential meaning of the term.
'Many people who nearly die, whether in an accident, during surgery or in other traumatic circumstances, subsequently report a remarkable experience while physically unconscious. This event brings with it a profound and permanent alteration of their understanding of the nature of reality. There are many elements, recounted independently by thousands of people, common to all those accounts. These frequently involve an encounter with a compassionate being of light, and feelings of inexpressible beauty, peace and transcendence, a greatly increased sense of life's purpose and a more loving attitude.'
Dr Raymond Moody identified the main components of NDE, which are presented here in a modified form.
5.1 THE COMPONENTS OF THE NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE
5.1.1 A Sense of Being Dead
Initially, subjects do not realise that they are 'dead'. They find themselves floating above the body, looking down on the frantic attempts at resuscitation. When they do recognise the body as their own, fear momentarily takes hold followed by understanding and heightened awareness of what is going on. They can recount in detail medical procedures and whole lines of conversation and other unusual observations. At this point they attempt to intervene physically, by touching or speaking, but his inevitably fails.
5.1.2 Peace and Painlessness
Prior to the experience, people are often in severe discomfort. Once they are released form the body; however, pain is left behind and a genuine sense of spiritual peace pervades.
5.1.3 Out-of-the-Body-Experience
The out-of-the-body experience, or OOBE, is a phenomenon which can occur away from life-threatening situations, spontaneously, or in some cases by conscious will. This is also true of the tunnel journey and subsequent meetings with other-world beings. However, these are, with some exceptions, mandatory components of the NDE.
At the point when the subject hears the doctor's pronouncement of death, he becomes aware of himself as an entity separate from the body. Yet to himself he still has form, although it is not necessarily an ethereal copy of his physical self. It has been described as composed of energy or light patterns. While in this out-of-the-body state, the subject can move through walls merely by an act of will, and accurately observe things which are happening elsewhere.
5.1.4 The Tunnel Journey
Now that the subject realises he is dead, far from feeling depressed, he is filled but a sense of exhilaration at what lies ahead. He now enters a dark tunnel, sometimes described as a deep valley, at the end of which is a bright light. Occasionally the subject is accompanied by a being, often perceived as an angel, who guides him towards the light. More rarely, the journey is not via the imagery of a tunnel; instead, the subject floats upwards towards 'Heaven'. The subject then meets the supreme being of light identified from the various religions as God, Allah or Buddha.
5.1.5 The Life Review
Before returning to his earthly body, the subject is confronted with his/her Akashic record-the whole of the person's life is presented before them; every act, every deed-good and bad. But this is not a passive observation. The percipient see the results.
6 POLTERGEISTS
The term 'poltergeist' is German, and means 'noisy spirit'. Some of the earliest recorded cases, not surprisingly, are German. In AD 858, for instance, falls of stones, loud noises and knockings were reported near the town of Bingen on the Rhine. But it was not a uniquely German phe (Sorry about a few lines of missing text)
m usual hauntings, because poltergeist phenomena are not confined to a certain locality but seem to be drawn to a particular individual. The effects can be mischievous or malicious and terrifying. An intense variety of unexplained events can occur during a finite timespan of weeks or months, but not usually more than a year. The degree of intensity varies, as does the number of components in each case. These characteristics consists basically of the following: 1 Auditory effects such as rappings, rustlings and knocking sounds. 2 Movement of objects from one room to another, observed and unobserved. 3 Disappearance of objects, such as jewellery and other personal effects, which usually turn up weeks or months later. 4 Materialisation 'from thin air' of 'apports'-small items ranging from coins to rusty nails, for example-which do not 'belong' to the location. 5 Appearance of writing by an unknown hand, sometimes on walls 6 Vandalisation-for instance, where drawers are emptied and their contents are scattered about. 7 Destruction of objects by smashing (such as crockery) or by fire 8 Rearrangement of things in neat, child-like patterns 9 Very occasionally, the slaughter of animals 10 Effects directly associated with a supernatural entity, such as footsteps, voices and the appearance of human and non-human-looking apparitions. 11 The throwing of stones at a building 12 Violence against the individual-where a person is pushed by an invisible force, for instance
Each case exhibits some of the above, but rarely all of them at once. Binbrook Farm, near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, suffered various phenomena for two months early in 1905. They included the movement of objects, items thrown about rooms, things bursting into flames and the killing of animals.
The fires were easily put out, but one of them terribly injured a serving girl who was in the kitchen. According to the farmer, Mr White, the fire in the grate was very small and in any case protected by a guard. He came across the girl standing in the middle of the kitchen, sweeping the floor, apparently unaware that her back was ablaze! Her employer put out the flames with wet sacks and she was taken to Louth Hospital.
White was just as concerned about who-or what-was killing his chickens. By the end of the manifestations, out of 250 birds only 24 remained alive. They were all slaughtered in the same bizarre fashion. The skin around the neck, from head to breast, had been pulled off, and the wind-pipe tugged from its place and snapped. Even when Mr White kept an all-night vigil outside the henhouse, by morning another four or five birds were discovered dead. And no one ever heard a thing.
6.1 THE ENFIELD CASE
One of the most famous contemporary cases occurred in Enfield, north London, during 1977. The events revolved around the Harper family, comprising four children and their mother, who was separated from their father. It all began on the evening of 30 August when the beds of two of the children began to shake. The following night the same children and their mother heard a sound like someone shuffling across the carpet in slippers. This was followed by four loud knocks and the observation of a heavy chest of drawers moving across the room. A neighbour searched the building, and when more knocks sounded the police were called. They could, ofcourse, do nothing.
The following evening marbles and Lego bricks were thrown about the house by an invisible agency. One of the marbles was found to be burning hot. The Daily Mirror became involved, and through them the Society for Psychical Research. An investigation by Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair ensued.
There were many witnesses to the movement of furniture and appearance of apports. At one stage, the disturbed spirit of a little girl who had been suffocated by her father in a nearby house was suspected. Some of the furniture from that place had been brought to the Harpers' house, but it was discarded when the disturbances began. A medium was brought in, who contacted several entities allegedly responsible for the haunting. The medium said they were feeding off negative energy leaked by one of the children-Janet aged eleven-and her mother, who admitted feeling very bitter towards her estranged husband.
The activities stopped for a few weeks, then began again in October. The investigators recorded an amazing four hundred incidents, including the appearance of a pool of water on the kitchen floor in the shape of a person. As with most poltergeist cases, the incidents ranged from the mundane to the potentially dangerous. An iron grille landed near one of the children; then the gas fire itself was torn off the wall where it was cemented. As the poltergeist got into its stride apparitions were sighted, and messages were left on pieces of paper and on the walls after a visit by Mathew Manning.
More phenomena became centred around Janet, who went into convulsions and was on one occasion hurled out of bed. She went into trances and produced a drawing of a woman with blood pouring from her throat, underneath which she wrote the name 'Watson'. Apparently the Watsons had been the previous tenants of the house, and Mrs Watson died of throat cancer. It was not clear whether Janet could have known this or not. In December a strange voice began communicating, claiming it was Joe Watson. The voice sounded masculine and electronic, producing each word with difficulty. Later it claimed to be various other people, including an old man buried in a nearby graveyard.
Some members of the SPR were convinced that the children were involved in a
fraud-a conclusion that the two investigators did not agree with. It is very difficult to see how they could have been responsible for more than a fraction of the incidents. The haunting died out during the summer of 1978.
6.2 A MISCHIEVOUS PHENOMENON?
A recent case which demonstrates the child-like attributes of the phenomenon occurred near Manchester during 1990 and 1991. The manifestations actually began at a house owned by a couple named Farris, who had bought a corner shop and were busy renovating it. When they moved out of the house to live over the shop, the poltergeist activity really hotted up.
Some of the things were sinister, such as several cigarettes which were discovered burned in their unmarked pack, even though there was no obvious source of ignition. Mrs Farris kept visualising a little girl aged about eight, dressed in Victorian clothing, and some of the things which subsequently occurred could be put down to the tricks of the child.
On several mornings the couple, who have no children living with them, got up to find that things had been interfered with in the shop. Several rolls of Polo mints were taken from their display box and laid on the counter in a neat row-with labels uppermost. Half a dozen small coffee cups were also found in a neat line, with handles all facing the same way. Something had removed several cans of soft drinks, and similarly lined them up on the floor. At that time there was a further incident,which amused rather than frightened Mrs Farris.
'Terry had gone to work, and I shut the shop for twenty minutes while I went out on business. When I returned, I couldn't believe my eyes. There, on the kitchen floor, were all my saucepans. They were in a line from the smallest to the largest, their handles all pointing in the same direction like a line of soldiers on parade. At the head of them all, standing like a sergeant major, was my wok!'
When a fire broke out in the adjoining Chinese take-away, some men out in the street thought they saw the faces of two children peering from the first-floor window above the corner shop. The men were so convinced that they tried to break the shop door down, thinking the children were in danger from the fire spreading. But the only people in the building were Mr and Mrs Farris, asleep on the floor above. Nevertheless, the noise woke the couple up, saving them for potential danger. Was this intended?
As early as 1930, parapsychologist Hereward Carrington wrote:'An energy seems to be radiated from the body....when the sexual energies are blossoming into maturity...it would almost seem as is these energies instead of taking the normal course...find this curious means of externalisation.' Most modern researchers conjecture that the poltergeist is a physical manifestation of inward emotional energy.
Proponents of this theory believe that in the majority of cases there is an obvious focus, which invariably turns out to be a young woman at the onset of puberty. While we believe this is two sweeping a statement, it does sometimes seem to be true. A case in point was investigated by Professor George Owen in 1961.
During the autumn of 1960, an eleven-year-old child called Virginia went to live with her elder brother and his wife at Sauchie in central Scotland. After going to bed on Tuesday 22 November, she was disturbed by a 'thunking' noise reminiscent of a bouncing ball. Virginia went downstairs to complain, and the curious sound followed her into the living room. During the tea the following day, her relatives were amazed to see the sideboard move several inches from the wall, then back again.
A local clergyman, the Reverend Lund, was called to the house at midnight on the Wednesday. Virginia was in bed but awake. He heard violent knocking coming from the headboard, and saw a linen chest rise slightly off the floor and travel eighteen inches before returning. With both phenomena, the Reverend Lund detected vibrations emanating from the affected objects. When Virginia slept, nothing occurred. A Dr Nisbet was there the next evening and heard knocking and sawing noises. He also observed a curious rippling pass across the girl's pillow, where it twisted to one side.
The phenomenon even followed the girl to school. Miss Stewart, her teacher, noticed that Virginia seemed to be pressing down unusually hard on her desk. When she released the pressure, the lid opened of its own accord. This happened three times. Later, a vacant desk close by lifted slightly into the air. Miss Stewart investigated at once, and found no evidence of trickery. Investigator Malcolm Robinson recently interviewed one of Virginia's former classmates, who attested to the levitations.
When the phenomenon showed no signs of abating. Virginia was transferred to ant aunt living nearby. But the rappings and agitated knockings followed her there, too.
Once more back in Sauchie, things quietened down until 1 December, when all the usual happenings resumed. Although attempted filming of these effects met with failure, a tape recording was successfully made of knocking and harsh rasping noises. Afterwards, prayers of intercession were made, and eventually the phenomenon died out altogether.
6.3 POLTERGEISTS AND LIFE AFTER DEATH
Are poltergeists evidence for survival of death? Although they are considered to be different phenomena, there does seem to be a link with ghostly apparitions. Certainly when entities communicate, as in the Enfield case, they appear to be low-life spirits hanging on between this world and the next. Ghost hunter Terence Whitaker told us of his investigations into the eerie Hobstones Farm at Foulridge near Colne in Lancashire.
It seems that the name derives from a long tradition that elves and hobgoblins played on the stones. Local children's songs handed down through the ages refer to this.
During the seventeenth-century Civil War a battle occurred on the ridge when the land was owned by a fanatical Royalist sympathiser. This violent event seems to have left its mark and, as Whitaker discovered:'A phantom cavalier in various states of undress has been seen in one of the bedrooms.' Also a troop of roundheads have been reported marching across the moors.
Has the specialness of this area trapped images from the past, or the actual surviving souls of slaughtered soldiers? The possibility is enhanced by the fact that another ghostly presence has been witnessed. It was first reported in 1950, when the farmer who then owned the building was in his outside brick toilet. Terence Whitaker reported:'Suddenly the door burst open and there stood a little monk holding his own amputated arm. It cured the farmer's constipation!' Although the farmer initially thought this was a practical joke, the monk was later seen again inside the house. The farmer soon sold up and moved away.
During the 1970s the new owners saw nothing, but experienced many other phenomena. It was as if the ghostly apparition had transformed its energy into poltergeist activity. More than twenty windows were wrecked in a peculiar way. The evidence showed that they had been pushed outwards from inside the building-so they could not have been smashed by vandals.
One day the owner's wife went upstairs to make the beds and was suddenly deluged by boulders and rocks apparently falling from nowhere. There have also been occasions when rocks have been thrown against the outside of the house, making a terrible noise. This is an interesting 'coincidence', given that the farm's name links 'hobs' (or playful demons) with 'stones'. Perhaps the most unusual poltergeist incident at Hobstones Farm occurred when a washing machine was thrown across the kitchen by an unseen force. Terence Whitaker reports:'On top of the machine was a tray of eggs with white eggs and brown eggs. All the white eggs were smashed but the brown eggs were left in the tray in the shape of a cross.'
After this, the local vicar brought in an exorcist and the activity died down. Nothing has occurred for a long time; the present owners will not allow any investigations of the property, and appear to have seen nothing unusual.
THE MENACE OF BERKELEY SQUARE
London's elegant Berkeley Square is today as calm and peaceful as any such place in the middle of a bustling capital can be. Office workers spend the summer lunchtimes relaxing on its lawns, while after dark gamblers and revellers flock to is clubs and casinos. And traffic speeding through this fashionable area of Mayfair makes it hard for tourists to hear the nightingale immortalised in a wartime hit song.
But less than a century ago, Berkeley square was the most feared place in Britain. For the house of No 50, today a bookshop, was the home of the deadliest spectral killer of all time. Even now, no one is sure exactly what caused the deaths that alarmed Victorian England, for few who saw the killer lived to tell the tale. Those who survived generally became incoherent with sheer terror.
The house was already the talk of the town when Sir Robert Warboys accepted a foolhardy challenge at his club, White's. The handsome adventurer scoffed when friends discussed the possible causes of the disasters at No 50, and vowed to spend a night there to prove that talk of supernatural happenings was nonsense.
The owner of the house, a man called Benson, was reluctant to allow the experiment, but Sir Robert would not be dissuaded. He agreed, under pressure, to take a gun with him. And Benson insisted that Sir Robert's friends and himself stand guard on the floor below the bedroom where he would spend the night. If anything strange happened, the young aristocrat was to pull a cord which rang a bell in a room on the first floor.
Sir Robert retired at 11.15pm after a good dinner. Just 45 minutes later, the bell began to jangle. As the rescue party raced upstairs, they heard a shot. They burst into the room to find Sir Robert slumped across the bed, his head dangling over the side.
He was dead-but not from a bullet wound. His eyes bulged with terror, his lips were curled hideously above clenched teeth. He had died of fright.
Intrigued by this and other stories about the deadly house in Berkeley Square, Lord Lyttleton resolved to investigate the mystery and arranged to spend a night in the room where Sir Robert had died.
He took along two guns, one filled with shot, the other with silver sixpenny pieces-charms to ward off evil spirits. During the night, he fired the barrel of coins at a shape that leapt at him. In 1879, he published the full details of his ordeal in the book, Notes and Queries. He concluded that the room was "supernaturally fatal to body and mind".
Lyttleton's researches included the discovery that a girl who had stayed at the house as a guest had been driven mad by terror. A man who had slept one night in the haunted room had been found dead the next morning. And the maid of a family renting the place had died in hospital after being found crumpled on the floor whimpering,"Don't let it touch me."
Not surprisingly, few people were anxious to move into the house. For years it stood empty, its paintwork peeling, its secret undisturbed. Then, in December 1887, the frigate Penelope docked in Portsmouth, and its crew went ashore to head for home.
Two sailors, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, arrived in London on Christmas Eve with little money and no lodgings for the night. They wandered the streets for a while before finding themselves in Berkeley Square. They soon discovered the To Let signs outside No 50. There was no doubt that the house was vacant and the men decided to spend the night there.
They wandered through the neglected rooms,, arriving at last in a second-floor bedroom which seemed in better order than the others. Martin was soon asleep but his shipmate was nervous. As he tossed and turned, Blunden heard strange footsteps scratching along the corridor outside their door. he woke Martin,, and the two watched, hearts racing,, as the door slowly opened and something large, dark and shapeless entered the room.
Blunden darted towards the fireplace to try to grab something he could use as a weapon. As the intruder went after the terrified sailor, Martin seized the chance to escape through the open door. He raced down the stairs and ran for help. In nearby Piccadily, he blurted his story to a police constable and the two men hurried back to the house.
They were too late. The shattered body of Blunden, his neck broken, his face fixed in a grimace of unimaginable terror, was sprawled on the basement steps.
The famous film 'The Exorcist' is based on a true case in a priests diary and the book entitled 'Poltergeist' can be obtained from most libraries.
It's not all bad. If you have watched "Strange, but True?" on British television there are many accounts of God intervening to save people. A man peeled a door of a car like a tin of sardines to rescue his friend. The sudden endowment with supernatural strength was remarkable. A diver rescued his trapped friend by moving a large boulder away as if it didn't way anything. Later, when he tried it he could not move it an inch. People up mountains have been transported from dangerous peaks down to the bottom. Another woman followed apparitional signposts which showed her down to the bottom when she was lost.
7. The Aura
7.1 Kirlian Photography A Russian scientist, Semyon Kirlian, believed that he had developed a method of photographing auras. A tip of a leaf was removed seconds before a photograph was taken and a white "halo" was observed after that part of the physical leaf was removed. In time this "halo" will fade away from the missing leaf section, and the aura will adjust to the new shape.
Some occultists assert that each living thing, whether it be a tree, cat or a human being, has an aura. By "aura" they are referring to an emanation of the subtle, non-physical energies that are held to be the invisible blueprints of the physical bodies of all living creatures. Since the early nineteenth century, it has been claimed that psychics can discern the auras of others by using a sense analogous to, but not identical with, ordinary vision.
C.W. Leadbeater and other occultists claimed that they could not only perceive the auras of others but do so in such detail that they were able to accurately diagnose the spiritual condition of those they observed. the changing colours of the aura can, say psychics reveal much about the personality and physical condition of an individual. Some psychics claim that they can actually see halos around young children and certain adults.
7.2 KILNER SCREENS
In the early part of the twentieth century for Kilner, a physician at St. Thomas's hospital in London, who claimed to have the ability to discern the human aura as a faint glow believed that he had discovered a method by which most non-psychics could also perceive aura. Dr Kilner believed that as auras were a form of radiant energy, the eyes could be sensitive to see this energy. He saw three distinct layers in an individual's aura; these layers extended for about a third of a metre (1 ft) from the human body. Dr Kilner believed that the aura was an effective indicator of the state of the individual's vitality; he was determined to find some means of making such valuable information available to men and women who were not psychic.
Kilner's method involved the use of sealed glass panels, rather like present day double-glazing units, but with the space between the sheets of glass containing a solution of dicyanl a blue dye. A number of experimenters asserted that they were able to perceive auras through the "Kilner screens". Both screen and goggles are still manufactured and sold. The general consensus of opinion, however, is that the "auras" seen with the aid of Kilner's devices are no more than optical illusions.
7.3 BIOPLASMIC ENERGY
No one, however, has had the temerity to claim that the extraordinary pictures of energy fields produced by the process known as Kirlian photography are illusory. Kirlian photography is the photographing of something through which a very high voltage is passed. It was accidentally discovered in 1939 by a Soviet electrical engineer Semyon Kirlian, who found that when he placed his own hand behind a piece of film, and passed a large voltage through it, he got a photograph not just of his hand but of what seemed to be streams of energy radiating from it.
Kirlian devoted the next 40 years to refining and developing this technique of high voltage photography which, so he, his assistants, and his admirers claimed, showed that all living things were surrounded by what they termed "biological plasma". Many photographs taken using Kirlian's method are both impressive and beautiful. Not only do they seem to show energy fields of a type which has led many occultists to identify them with the auras of psychic theory, but they seem to show that these fields survive after the living tissues with which they are associated have been destroyed.
7.4 PHANTOM LEAF The supposed evidence for this is provided by what is called the "phantom leaf effect"; when a leaf from which part has been cut is immediately photographed the missing section is still recorded on the photograph.
While the phantom leaf effect is one which staggers the observer, it has been explained by more than one competent electrical engineer in terms of physical science - for example, on the hypothesis that the electrodes used have not been properly cleaned. While some of those who have made this latter suggestion have been scientists of distinction, it is only fair to add that an unorthodox therapist Harry Oldfield
7.5 AURA OR IONIZATION
Perhaps the most devastating critique of occult claim that Kirlian photography makes visible the aura of "etheric body", was made by A.J. Ellison, for many years Professor of Electronic and Electronic and Electrical Engineering at London's City University. For Professor Ellison had a sympathetic attitude towards occult concepts; not only was he a one-time President of the Society for Psychical Research but, as a member of the Theosophical Society, he had devoted years to study of etheric and astral energies, and took a particular interest in Kirlian photography and the recorded "auras".
Professor Ellison's critique is too long for a full summary of it to be given here. In brief, however, he came to the conclusion that what is recorded on Kirlian photographs is in no way supernormal or inexplicable; it is simply the effect of intermittent ionization of the air around the object being photographed. These effects are known as "Lichtenburg figures" after Jiri Lichtenburg, who discovered them. Today many scientists accept this as an explanation of Kirlian photography.
8 Apparitional Experiences
Tales of ghosts, wraiths and other apparitions have been recorded in virtually all cultures. In the context of parapsychology these phenomena are so clearly germane to the survival hypothesis that they were accorded special significance from the earliest years of the Society for Psychical Research.
It is difficult to define the terms "appartition" without introducing some theoretical assumption about the nature of the phenomena encompassed by that term. In essence an apparition is encountered in a perceptual-like experience and relates to a person or animal that is not physically present, with physical means of communication being ruled out. Note that apparitions are not defined in terms of a "spirit form"; such an approach would incorporate a particular theoretical interpretation of an apparitional experience and this is best avoided in formulating a definition. On the other hand many parapsychologists, while not committing themselves to the authenticity of apparitions, maintain that these phenomena must be defined to be objective or at least semiobjective. We know that people have apparitional experiences but it is held to be pointless to speak of "apparitions" unless we mean this term to refer to the hypothesis of an objective entity. Having defined the term thus, it is up to parapsychologists to ascertain if these hypothesized objective entities actually exist.
A comparable argument may be raised against any definition of the apparition as an hallucination. To the extent that the person represented by the apparition, the so-called referent person, is not present in the experient's immediate environment it could be said the apparition is hallucinatory. But this too entails an implicit interpretation of the phenomenon because at least in the view of some researchers the apparition itself could have some manner of objective existence independent of the referent person and thereby be "perceptible" through normal sensory channels. The definition adopted above rightly does not preclude nor presume any theoretical possibility.
The conceptualization of an apparition either as objective or as hallucinatory has been a dominant issue in the past century of parapsychologists' research into these phenomena but as Osis points out, this focus has proved hopelessly inconclusive and might even have blinkered investigators to pursue the hypotheses along inappropriately narrow paths. In recent years there has been a growing appreciation that we need to study not the apparition per se by rather the appiritional experience; that is, it might be best to adopt a phenomenological approach in this field of study. In this context the apparition's seemingly objective features and its seemingly hallucinatory features all are documented simply as aspects of the experience's phenomenology. Thus these featural categories are not deemed a priori to be mutually contradictory, nor need they divert research from the determination of other phenomenological dimensions of the apparitional experience. The foregoing definition can readily be reformulated to suit this shift in orientation; thus. the apparitional experience is perceptual-like and relates to a person or an animal that is not physically present, with physical means of communication being rules out.
While an apparitional experience may prove to be hallucinatory it nevertheless should in principle be distinguishable from mirages and perceptual illusions (in which physical means of communication can be ascertained), and rather more problematically, from hallucinations associated with drug states and mental illness. Admittedly it may be difficult in practice to decide whether a given report describes another hallucination or is a prima facie case of an apparitional experience, but there are criteria which may help in some instances.
An apparitional experience may convey veridical information of which the experient previously was unaware; this generally is lacking in psychotic and drug-induced hallucinations of another person. An apparitional experience can be related clearly to an identifiable person (or animal); hallucinatory figures typically are anonymous or known to be nonexistent. Finally, an apparition may be experienced by more than one person, whereas a psychotic may be experienced by more than one person, whereas a psychotic or drug-related hallucination cannot be shared.
By way of illustration the following collective case of an apparition was researched by the Society for Psychical Research(Gurney et al., 1886, Vol.2 pp.617-618). Two brothers sharing a cabin in old naval ship suddenly were awakened to see the figure of their father standing between their bunks. As one of the brothers sat up the form vanished. The father had died about the time of the incident. ( It must be acknowledged that in some collective cases the various accounts of the same experience do show discrepancies; of course, eyewitnesses' reports of objective events also can differ in substantial respects.)
8.1 PHENOMENOLGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF APPARITIONAL EXPERIENCES Data on the phenomenology of apparitional experience necessarily come from collections of spontaneous cases and anecdotes. Many cases presented to societies for psychical research have been investigated carefully by society members for their evidential reliability, although the usual problems with spontaneous case material apply(Gauld, 1977,p.604).
Two additional sources of bias spring from the popularity of ghost stories in fiction. First, some supposedly real-life cases initially may have been devised as a good story but then presented as authentic in the hope of enhancing their commercial potential. Second, fictional ghost stories(and folklore too) promote a particular stereotype of an apparitional experience are distorted to conform to these popular expectations. Parapsychologists therefore must be a little wary of accepting consistencies in spontaneous case accounts as indications of the nature of apparitions; in part these consistencies may reveal only the fictional conception of apparitions. One way of minimizing this problem is to give greater credence to consistencies that are not feature of the popular stereotype, but if taken to an extreme there is a danger here of throwing out the metaphorical baby with the bathwater: some aspects of the financial stereotype may well be drawn from authentic experiences.
Ignoring fictional anthologies (especially those labelled "true life ghost stories") there are few case collections testifying to the phenomenology of apparitional experiences. One of the earliest sizeable collections was the SPR's "Census of Hallucinations"(Sidgwick et al.,1984); this was concerned with apparitions of people occurring about the time of death. Tyrrell's (1942/1963) book Apparitions was based on a smaller number of cases intensively investigated by the SPR and is classic in its field. A difficulty with these corroborated cases, however, is that the SPR researchers insisted there can be evidence that the experience was more than a mere hallucination.
A simple report of an appartional figure was insufficient; the figure had to communicate information of which the experient could be shown to have been unaware, or the experience had to coincide temporally with an unexpected significant event involving the referent person. These cases' representatives of all apparitional experiences, therefore, is uncertain. One of the few modern studies is Celia Green and Charles McCreery's(1975)Apparitions; this surveys univestigated experiences. More recently, Haraldsson (1991a) conducted an extensive study of uninvestigated experiences of apparitions of the dead among Icelanders. Apart from these there have been a few surveys of parapsychological experiences that have included items on apparitional experiences(Haraldsson et al,1997;Palmer 1979). The major phenomenological findings of these investigations now will be summarized.
The experience of an apparition is not as uncommon as one might think. In Palmer's (1979) survey of Charlottesville, Virginia, residents and students 17 percent had had an impression of an apparition, and of these about three quarters acknowledged more than one such experience. Twenty percent of a sample of Australian university students reported apparitional experiences(Irwin,1985). A poll of Icelandic adults by Haraldsson et al(1977) put the incidence even higher:31 percent had witnessed an apparition of a deceased person and 11 percent reported an apparition of a living person. In Canada Persinger(1974) found 32 percent of survey respondents to acknowledge an apparition of a person or an animal. A large sector of the population therefore has had at least one of these experiences. The duration of the apparitional experience is variable. In Green and McCreery's(1975) survey about half of the respondents considered their experience to have lasted less than one minute, although 20 percent estimated its duration to exceed five minutes.
Apparitional experiences tend to be restricted to one or two sensory modalities. Green and McCreery(1975)report that of their cases 61 percent were in one modality only, with a further 25 percent limited to two senses. Most apparitional experiences are visual, 84 percent according to Green and McCreery (Haraldsson,1991;Sidgwick,1894). About a third of cases nevertheless have an auditory component, with 14 percent being a wholly auditory experience. On the other hand the dominance of visual apparitional experiences is not found in every survey(Palmer,1979). The reported modality of the apparitional imagery may be in a sensory system that is impaired in the given experient; for example, one "totally deaf" man described hearing the rustle of an apparitional figure's dress (Green & McCreery,1975)
A small number of cases are asensory, comprising the intuitive impression of a "presence" nearby. These instances of a sense of a presence represented only 8 percent of Green and McCreery's(1975) cases, although there was a rather higher incidence in Haraldsson's(1985). Icelandic sample and in a sample of Australian university students I surveyed on behalf of Andrew MacKenzie. One of the my students reported the experience of strolling along a deserted beach and feeling there was someone walking beside her; although she did not see nor hear anything to indicate there was something there, the sense of a presence was very strong and she felt very comfortable with it.
In some cases apparitions are said to have been witnessed by several people at the same time; Green and McCreery(1975) report up to eight people simultaneously experiencing an apparition. About a quarter of experients present their case as having been collective (Haraldsson,1991;Palmer,1979). Not all members of a group necessarily will perceive the apparitional figure. In cases with more than one person present approximately one-third of the apparitions seem to have been collectively experienced(Sidgwick,1894;Tyrrel,1942/1963).
Most apparitional figures are experienced to be within 10 feet (3 metres) of the subject (Green & McCreery, 1975). In the majority of cases, however, the figure is not recognized by the experient (Green & McCreery,1975). About 70 percent of recognized apparitions are of people whom the experient knew to be dead (Green & McCreery,1975;Haraldsson,1985). This may vary with the age of the individual or more precisely, with the number of deceased persons the individual knew. Thus in Palmer's (1979) survey about 60 percent of apparitions witnessed by the older sample of townspeople were of the dead, but for student sample only 30 percent were of this type.
9 Christianity
9.1 Christianity and Evolution
Many of the evolutionists who keep banging the drum of evolution and claiming there is no God are in fact more blinkered than the so called 'fundamentalist'. How could life have started life by a few random molecules bumping together? Why are there so many observable laws in the Universe from a so-called meaningless big-bang fart? I myself take hold of the Christian mystery and believe in a type of evolution. Cro-magnon man(modern man) is a unique species with incredible powers (physical and spiritual). I am not going to nit pick about a few fragments out of the old testament as a basis for rejecting the whole lot. This type of argument is again blinkered extremism by the evolutionists. From Adam to Christ must have represented a very long time scale. The time scale of the prescence of modern man as we know him.. Cro-Magnon is a little below the angels. Neanderthal is a little above the apes. The huge gulf in difference is striking and many evolutionists are puzzled by this. Also Cro-Magnon suddenly appeared about 40000BC and then proceeded to wipe out Neanderthal who co-existed at the same time. The idea that they inter-bred is pure rubbish. Neanderthal had little powers mentally and spiritually and were not God's chosen vehicle. But moving further away from the evolutionary question we must ask can a half-way-house exist? A lizard runs and bird flies, but a beast with stunted evolving wings would capable of neither. How did feathers develop? A bird is a perfectly engineered vehicle for flight. Did random mutations create this? A few adaptations with bugs to various food sources and environments is obvious. But in the case of the birds we have to admit that God is the ultimate magus. Also a spider's web is also rather mysterious as a partially evolved or mutated web wouldn't be any use. Every scientific law revolves around one key central principle:"Justification via faith in God(Jesus Christ)".
When dealing with life, I prefer to use the word 'transformation' as opposed to 'evolution'. Transformation implies the interaction of the ultimate arch-magus 'God' to shape and bend life. This implies that a human being is not just another mutation but is special. He definitely has the ability to transformed spiritually like a caterpillar to a butterfly by those who are pure in heart, seek good and are ultimately led to Christ. Free will does play a part here. Those who deliberately choose evil after evil go further and further away from God and from the realm of angels into the realm of beasts.
9.2 The Alpha and the Omega
When Paul went to Athens to meet the great men of learning. He found the usual confusion of the mind with such a wide array of ideas and Gods. The leaders couldn't satisfy all the Gods so they even had a statue to the 'unknown' God. They also liked to make a mockery of just about everything in their theatre houses(a bit like today perhaps). Despite claiming the light. They were in darkness but Paul showed them the way.
In Rome, Paul came to that civilization based on such cruelty. People being ripped to bits for entertainment. Bestiality and brutality and great evil. But Paul began to spread the light amongst this darkness.
When the Columban monks came to Scotland they would go to the Picts and others. The Picts were obsessed with the mystery of death and would move bones around endlessly-such darkness. The fishing villagers of Broughty Ferry had its first encounter with these missionaries. Totally unconcerned by the big questions in life. They would talk endlessly about trivial things that didn't really matter such as the weather etc. Yet when converted the very first hospitals and travellers hostels were set up for anyone to come to.
9.3 The Future
I have a tendancy towards Calvinism myself. But I am impressed by the faith and work of many Catholics. I am all for co-operation. But I must stress that it needs to have independent accounting mechanisms and independent bodies in all the various countries. The money raised by the local communities should be poured back into projects by those communities or to another area of their choice. This would break the stranglehold of P2 Lodge Freemasonry(In God's Name by David Yallop) which runs the Vatican's finances. For centuries, the Vatican has received large sums of money and it has become a place of such beauty. However, the people and places where it really mattered have suffered. No man on this earth is above God. We must be careful that the Pope is not elevating himself above God by giving decrees and dictates which are not within scripture. He can be a spiritual representative by all means. More independence for Catholics would create new life in the communities. Co-operation with others to fight this war against evil is also on the cards. I hope Christians of the future must be well-informed of the events going on around a world with both a TV and radio. Just switch them off if the contents or what is being presented is rubbish in God's sight. But the news is absolutely invaluable. We can learn from other cultures and be prepared to argue our case intellectually with them for the spread of the truth. The day of rest should be an opportunity to enjoy ourselves(not debauchery!) not live in misery. One highly detailed intellectual sermon in the morning is enough for me. I spend the rest of the day reading widely and gaining an appreciation of the outside world. Supplementing Christianity with Theosophy can lead to huge leap of enlightenment. By using the discernment of the divine for that which is good you will undoubtedly grow stronger. That which is evil can be cast off. To seal oneself off from the world and not tackling the problems that others face who are still in darkness must be overcome. Be concerned about others and know what is going on in their minds and their culture and why. We must argue intellectually for the light and love of the living God. works that way.
There is no doubt that Elizabeth I of England and Queen Victoria took hold of the Protestant tradition and elevated the culture to its most progressive and creative form. I believe that Protestant Christianity is the main force behind creating the highest,noblest and most progressive form of civilization where people can get to use their creative abilities. A country with endless monasteries and nunneries suffers from these men and women not being able to fully manifest their creative potentialities. I think monasteries are special places. You can feel the presence of God and the joy of the soul but I believe that Calvinism is a more modern and superior from of Christianity on which to build a civilization. Two or three monasteries in various parts would not do much harm.
Although I am a modern Calvinist I do have to criticise fundamentalism of the type which does not allow you to have an artistic and creative culture. Cromwell's regime prevented the expression of creative and artistic culture and was one reason why people were prompted to remove it. People should be able to go to the cinema, watch the news and radio etc. The manifestation of creative abilities should be encouraged absolutleyie. music, arts, sciences. Materialistic love cannot go beyond the sex obsession. The love of God and God for man is far more potent and becomes immortal. Transformed form the base elements(or lower nature)to a new creature.
There is no doubt that psychologists do not understand the concept of evil although books by M Scott Peck are quite good. Evil is linked to the lower animal nature. When we approach a dog we are sometimes worried it becomes 'irrational' and bites our leg. This is similar to its nature in the human. We need to be transformed form the base elements(or lower nature)to a new creature. Today in society evil has its propenisty to multiply on and on.
The bottom 20% of the population have been forgotten about. The drugs, poverty, pain, and ultimately death is ignored. The bottom 20% of the population have been swept under the carpet as if they do not exist. Instead we are presented Third Reich propaganda - the selected 'good' bits. The success stories: the young upstarts crawling to their (benign?) masters, the pop stars and others. This is to give us a picture in our minds of Tony Blair's paradise on earth that they claim they will create. The gross excesses of the top 20% of the population is quite sickening. Night after night on television we seem them gloating over their their gross materialistic excesses and depravity. One day they will be called to judgement and will confront divine justice.
Evolution as a faith system makes the assumption that Cro-Magnon man was able to evolve from a primitive Neanderthal type in the space of 400,000 years. It is best to look at things in the form of a spiritual evolution. That the Universe has certain laws. we are beings that can be 'transformed' supernaturally by God. Instead of evolution use transformation.
Freemasonry like Theosphists are on the quest for truth or knowledge. It may be perhaps true that evolution was not invented by Darwin but was a secret kept hidden for secret initaites. The concept of evolution may have been develeped surprisingly as far back as the first civlizations as freemasonry may go back this far(see document apes and ages). You are allowed to develop you own path here and thought process. It is becoming more open which is good. Do they possess the ultimate answer or secrets at the 33rd level?-"Knowledge is Power"
Truth exists, God exits. God is the combined forces of goodness, love and peace. The forces of evil are generated by man when he doesn't find the true God but wanders elsewhere. Christ represents love, peace, ultimate truth and wisdom. Christ is a powerful occultic archetype and is impervious to the assaults made by 'big brother' brainwashing which is causing people not to use their minds and worship the animal.from primary school up to University but this is slowly being eroded by being starved of cash which is forcing people away from higher education. The poor once again are hammered most.
10 The Realms of Evil
It is from this which formulates the Spirit of Lies, murder, and frauds and this was well known to the initiates of the greater Hermetic mysteries. We find the idea very clearly defined in the mystical language of the ancients. The following extract from one of the supposed lost magical works of Hermes Trimegistus shows this clearly. He was speaking of the magical rulers of the realms of evil as they sit in council, creating all delusions, when he wrote: "So they called forth a form From the Deep dark abyss To embody their evil desires. Obedient it came From the realms of the dead, Arrayed in its magical attire. As it passed o'er the earth The fair flowers fell dead, From its breath of poisonous fire." Indeed, so thoroughly has this poisonous fire of self-interest permeated the world, the fair flowers of disinterestedness are an almost entirely extinct species. Should the real state of unselfish unworldliness of the true Mystic become known, he would be either regarded with pity as "non compos mentis" or else looked upon with suspicion as acting from motives much more subtle than those which govern the ordinary mortal.
The manner in which the dark magnetic energy is projected to earth is inversive. The rulers and magical hierophants make use of this inversive force to distort and corrupt truth in every form as it struggles to become manifest upon the Earth. The powers and influences attributed to certain races of the Astrals, belong in reality to the rulers and principalities of the realms of evil. They mercilessly distort every arcane truth into error, thus causing it to assume to the human mind the delusive form of the externals of truth and logic. And their true ability to reason has become clouded. Remember the famous phrase "Reason is dead!". But the delusive form of truth is, after all, only a very flimsy sophistry when subjected to the keen searching eye of the soul. Consequently, it is always those who are not informed who continually fall into the snare.
Just as the realms of evil was at its perihelion, these inversive brethern achieved the greatest theological and metaphysical success by the relaunching forth throughout the world of the doctrines of "Reincarnation","Karma" and "Disembodied Shells". These were formulated and taught by the decaying priesthoods of the dreamy Orient. Viewed in its true light this gigantic movement of the inversive brethern were aimed as a death blow to the rapidly spreading Spiritualism of the Occident.
Such a movement, however, was doomed to ultimate failure as there were certain absolute Truths connected with this Spiritualism. This Truth was there notwithstanding the ignorance of its expounders and the many errors and gross impostures. These truths were neither to be suppressed by inversive magic, nor smothered by any oriental theory.
These truths were well expressed in the Book Yetzirah, which stated: God is the matter and form of the universe. Everything exists in Him: He is at the bottom of all things and beings, which carry the symbols of His intelligence. The Whole, God and the universe, is a perfect unity. The uniting bond in creation are the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and first ten numbers(expressed by the first ten letters) These two types of signs are called the thirty-two marvellous ways of wisdom, upon which God has founded His name. They are identified with thought rendered visible, and they are superior to bodies and substances. God's breath is in the Hebrew letters. They are equally of man and of God.
The ten numbers are the essential form of all that is; the number ten is the basis of the world plan. Through them intelligence perceives the world's existence and the divine action. These numbers are called the Sefirot.
Their names are: Kether, Crown, the ideal principle of all entities, and which in itself embraces all other beings;Chochma, Wisdom, the principle of everything that has understanding; Chesed, Goodness, the model of grace; Geburah, Power, the principle of the distribution of reward or punishment; Tiferet, Glory, the principle toward which converges all that is beautiful and perfect;Nisah, Victory, to which conforms the permanent and the lasting; Hod, Honor, the principle of all that flows down to inferior beings; Malchut, Kingdom, the link which transmits all things from the superior to the inferior, and which helps the inferior to assimilate itself to the superior.
At this point the question naturally arises: "Of what personal or selfish benefit is the propagation of error to the inhabitants of the realms of evil?" The answer is simply this, it furnishes them with the means of prolonging their external existence while on Earth. It also supplies them with an additional lease of life in the world to come, as will be made manifest from the Hermetic laws of death as given below.
According to these laws, death is now what is known as physical dissolution, but is a failure on the part of the human being to polarise the atoms which constitute the Soul and thus realise immortality. It is a falling from the human to the animal plane, where conscious existence may be prolonged indefinitely.
10.1 The Laws of Death(Hermes Trismegistus)
1. As it is below, so it is above; as on the earth, so in the sky. 2. There are two states of being: one is mortal; the other Immortal 3. That which is mortal is dissolvable, and dissolvable bodies pass away like a mist in the morning. 4. An immortal body is an essence which is eternal and incorruptible. 5. But the twain, the mortal and the Immortal, cannot exist together forever, but each returneth to the place from whence it came. 6. The mortal body is sensible, but the Immortal is reasonable. 7. The former contains nothing that is perfect, the later nothing that is imperfect; for the one is the essence of the Spirit, the other the essence of matter, and man, the microcosm, hold the balance of the twain.. 8. And there is a fierce warfare for the Victory, between the upper and the lower, as they both desire to obtain the body as their prize; for the state of man is envied by the lower and glorified as a noble state by the higher. 9. Now as man inclines toward the lower Nature which is mortal, he thereby aids the lower imperfect powers to oppose the higher which is Immortal, and must suffer the pains of slavery for his disobedience to the workman his maker. But if he inclines to the higher, then he is truly wise and blest. 10. Should man, after being attracted by the vanities of the world and then after obtaining a knowledge of the things that really are, return to the vanities of the world, he will be punished with torments in the darkest states of disembodied Souls. 11. Should a man, after knowing the things that are, become rebellious of restraint to that part which is Immortal, and returns to the vanities of the world, the higher essence will straightway depart form him, and he will become the slave of the lower essence which will seize upon him and drive him to all sorts of wicked and evil ways. 12. When man has thus impiously disobeyed nature and returned his face away from that which is Immortal, behold he is then disinherited from his birthright, and is no longer counted among the children of Nature because he has become an evil, perverse thing, possessing only those things which are mortal, and he is punished with death. 13. And so death is meted out to all those who rebel against Nature impiuosly. But to those foolish souls who are ignorant, and who have not knowingly rejected Nature, behold, they are purified after much suffering and are sent to the world again.
The teachings of this philosopher is the great Truth that some of the Greeks possessed which is in many ways spot on with Christian teachings. The teachings in the above laws are so clear, so simple, and so divinely inspired and just, that to attempt in any way to explain or annotate them would only sow the first seeds of error and misunderstanding. We will keep them from the turbulent faculty of reason of mental bias of the mortal being. Zoraster, another mystic philosopher developed similar ideas which seem to be spot on with basic Christian concepts. The Essenes also developed similar ideas on the nature of man's spiritual condition.
Man alone, possess the elements of both life and death. The laws of life have been fully elucidated, and the Soul which imperfectly obeys them will, "After it has been purified by much suffering." ultimately reap the reward of eternal conscious existence. Consequently, the great majority of those Souls who are really human beings, will inherit Immortality as the natural consequence of their humanity.
But there are exceptions, which though few in number, require special notice. These exceptions may, for sake of convenience, be divided into three distinct classes. The first and most numerous consists of imperfectly organized, sensitive, weak-natured individuals, with little or no mental bias, but who possess strong mediumstic magnetisms. Individuals of this class, though perfectly human to begin with, soon lose the actual control of the external organism, and in consequence the body becomes the obedient instrument for any and every class of disembodied earth bound spirits. But what is still worse, it may become the slave of some vicious elementary.
In this case, there was no real or true individuality, therefore, no one can assert truthfully he was actually acquainted with the true personage. The real Soul had departed in the very early infancy of the organism's physical existence. Just how, or when, or where, none but the trained seer can tell. In every individual case the Astral causes which produced the Soul's abortion widely differ.
There are those who fall victims to premeditated obsession, and are by no means so numerous as the first class. In this case the organism is very fine as far as the magnetic temperament is concerned, but the Soul is utterly wanting in Spiritual volition or will. The magnetic polarity of the soul is of such a nature the spiritual will of the soul is almost powerless to act. The absence of this essential element of human life may be the result of the mental conditioning of the powers that be.
When such an obsession transpires, it is generally found that some potent external mind of an evil mage or sorceress requires the organism for the purpose of prolonging their own personal world existence. The evil mage needs to be taught nothing. When a suitable mediumistic body is found, they bring the whole of their powerful magnetic will to bear upon the almost will-less brain of their victim. Slowly but surely they eject the rightful occupant, and then by virtue of their Occult powers and magic arts, inhabit the organism themselves. The evil mage or sorceress rejects God and is his/her beginning of the departure to the realms of evil and his new host teaches everything he needs to know about anti-Christianity. The will and seeking after that for which is good grows colder and colder and he is given more help and wisdom by his new welcoming host of the netherworld. He will have incredible powers for the forces of evil occult and he doesn't need to read any books to gain it. His mind is completely fogged and is totally possessed and becomes a catalyst for evil and the death of the soul. Hitler and Stalin murdered 30 million souls during their time on earth. It is generally found that some potent external mind requires the organism for the purpose of prolonging their own personal world existence.
The near friends and relatives of the victim are often surprised at the remarkable change which they notice has taken place in the temperament and the disposition of their friend. They seldom if ever suspect the terrible truth which with a change implies. They can never be brought to fully understand the individual moving among them as usual has nothing whatever in common with their silently departed recent friend.
Another type of person, are those born into the world under strangely conflicting conditions. Possessing all the essential essential elements of manhood, they also possess a powerful current of the most potent and concentrated form of selfishness and pride. In addition to this undesirable acquisition, they express the highest form of intellect combined with a powerful will and mediumistic temperament. These dominating conditions predispose them to the study of psychology and Occultism, hence they fall an easy prey to the members of the black magic and their inversive astral brethern.
Their selfishness, combined with their unbounded ambition and desire for power, precipitate them headlong into the most frightful practices, where, surrounded by the infernal rites of their diabolical seducers, they become helpless to the very powers they sought to control. Henceforward they are lost!
As the Hermetic law states: "They are punished with death." They know it and consequently are compelled, for their own safety, to remain faithful to the order which entrapped them. Their only motto is Self, their only desire is to live, and this they will do at any cost. For their own lives they would sacrifice the entire balance of creation, if such a thing were possible. Death to them is death in reality.
In the first and second classes of so-called lost Souls, the true individual does not become lost; he is the foolish, ignorant soul. He simply loses his physical organism! This personality, along with the animal and Astral portion of it, becomes a lifeless shadow at death, and slowly disintegrates within the magnetic spaces of the Astral light. It is a misty form, incapable of personating its original owner, or of being "galvanized into temporary life".
While the counterfeiting, obsessing forces, after running the cycle of the magnetic existence within the electrovoidal spaces of the planet, become attached to the eighth sphere; or realms of the netherworld. This attraction is brought into force by virtue of their affinity with realms of elemental being. They have sunk beneath the plane of humanity and are no longer human. When once they become enclosed within the fatal magnetic whirl of death, they lose the polarity over the feeble atoms which constitute their only being, and gradually dissolve, atom by atom, like poisonous miasmatic mists before the rising sun.
There are Hermetic philosophers today who understand the "Leap of Faith" required to reach God. All science and philosophy burls around this fact of man's spiritual nature. He needs to be Justified Via Faith in God or Christ. Some hermetics have a very close relationship with God and understand his eternal decree and are very guarded about the types of powers he has. Only God can command him in the use of these advanced powers. If everyone was able to form an anti-third-reich where we could be as one mind channelling love energy to God then that would be something.
10.2 Descent into the Abyss
The term "afterlife" is often used synonymously with "heaven" or "paradise" to denote some sort of pleasant, enjoyable, exciting extradimensional realm. In other words, when a person dies, he or she moves automatically into some sort of union with God or Ultimate Reality or Ground of Being. Any other state of continuing existence is unthinkable for many people.
But just as there is good and evil on earth, so the nagging suspicion persists that some aspects of the afterlife, for whatever reason, may not be so nice. To put it in the crassest terms, what about the abyss, the inferno, the eternal death or estrangement from God-what about hell?
As might be expected, hell is not a very popular concept among the general public. One indication of this fact is that a significantly smaller number of people, both in this country and abroad, say they believe in hell than heaven. In 1952, 1965 and 1981, we asked a national sampling of American adults this same question: "Do you think there is a Hell, to which people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally damned?"
The results were quite consistent: In 1952, 58 percent replied "yes" they believed in hell. In 1965, 54 percent said "yes" they believed in hell. In 1965, 54 percent said "yes". And in 1980, 53 percent replied in the affirmative. These figures are considerably lower than the consistent seven out of ten who said they believed in heaven in those years.
Another interesting fact that emerged from our special survey for this book concerns the backgrounds of those who do or don't believe in hell. Those from Southern United States tend to have the strongest beliefs in hell, with 72 percent saying "yes" they definitely believe. This figure goes up and even in the Deep South, with 81 percent responding in the affirmative. In the West, on the other hand, belief in hell dips to 36 percent of the population; and in the East, with 41 percent as believers, convictions about the existence of hell aren't much higher.
As is the case with beliefs in heaven, the higher the educational level of the person, the less likely he is to believe in hell. The proportions of those believing in hell climb from 47 percent for those with a college education to 63 percent for those with only a grade school background. Also, significantly more Protestants(61 percent) believe in hell than Catholics(48 percent).
The disbelief in hell gets even more dramatic when you examine attitudes in other countries. In 1968, for example, we asked people in this country and also in eight foreign countries the simple question, "Do you believe in hell?"
The positive response in the United States, at 65 percent, was higher than in other years, probably because the question was posed with fewer qualifications than in other surveys. Bit the level of belief in most other countries, with Greece being the only exception, was considerably lower than in the US. Here is a summary of our findings: Question: "Do you believe in hell?" YES NO NO OPINION % % % United States 65 29 6 Greece 62 25 13 Norway 36 45 19 Finland 29 49 22 Netherlands 28 61 11 Austria 26 68 6 Switzerland 25 67 8 West Germany 25 62 13 Great Britain 23 58 19 France 22 70 8 Sweden 17 71 12
This tendency of a large proportion of the public in many foreign nations not to believe in hell stands in stark contrast to the traditional teachings of Christianity, which is the major organized religion in these countries. The New Testament, of course, takes the clear position that there is a hell where, Jesus puts it, "men will weep and gnash their teeth"(Mathew 8:12)
There have been numerous reasons offered as to why so many people believe in heaven than in hell. One rather provocative reponses we've heard is, "Hell is like death-people try not to think about it." There are also popular arguments against hell that go like this:"I believe that God is basically good and loving, and I can't imagine such a deity would send anybody off to eternal punishment."
Whatever the arguments, pro and con, many among the general public in the so-called Christian nations have elected to depart from traditional scriptural doctrines. Interestingly enough, this tendency to downplay hell is reflected even more dramatically in our surveys of those who report near-death experiences.
First of all, even though 53 percent of the general populations in the United States believe in hell, only about 47 percent of those with near-death experiences believe. This disparity might indicate that the verge-of-death encounter was, for most people, sufficiently positive that they felt they had less reason to fear negative consequences in the afterlife.
In a major survey we did on those with near-death experiences, 15 percent of all adult Americans, or about 23 million people, said they had had a close brush with death. But only slightly more than 30 percent of those people related anything positive about their experiences. The others either just described the horror and pain of their accident or illness, or had something else negative to say.
Also, in a follow-up survey, which included many in-depth questions about these experiences, we asked everyone, "Do you feel that you actually had a glimpse of an afterlife or Heaven, or not?"
A total of 18 percent responded "yes, definitely," that they had glimpsed heaven or the afterlife; and another 11 percent said "yes, maybe" they had-for a total positive response of 29 percent. But a solid 28 percent gave a definite "no," they hadn't glimpsed heaven or the afterlife; 17 percent said they couldn't say; and the final 26 percent gave no response a close brush with death, less than a third saw the experience as even possibly related to heaven; and only 18 percent seemed certain they had been in contact with a heavenly realm.
There was a similar breakdown when those with a near-death encounter were asked,"Did you feel that you were in the presence of God or Jesus Christ, or not?" A total of 21 percent said "yes, definitely"; 8 percent said "yes,maybe";25 percent said "no";15 percent said they couldn't say' and 31 percent gave no response.
There are several possible inferences we can draw from these responses. First of all, people are quite careful about making the claim that they've had a direct encounter with heaven or with God. In fact, one of the elements that stood out in our studies was the precision of the responses. Very few of the answers smacked of the rote, doctrinate kind of attitude. Most people tried to describe exactly what had happened to them, and they seemed to want to let the reader draw his or her own conclusions from the facts that were presented. In other words, they weren't particulary interested in grinding any favorite axes.
But what about the fact that such a relatively large number indicated that they either hadn't experienced heaven or couldn't say one way or the other?
Of course, it wouldn't be appropriate to conclude automatically that just because a person didn't sense the presence of God or heaven, he must therefore have been involved with hell. But it does seem clear that many of these people had either a neutral or negative experience that caused them to exclude the presence of God or some heavenly dimension in their evaluations of the incident. At any rate, they were reluctant to interpret their experience in positive terms.
To understand this point better, let's look more closely at several near-death experiences that contain some negative elements and attempt to determine what they may mean for our study.
In one report we received, a 30-year-old Maryland investor said, "I had an operation-four-and-a-half hours. I was under, and I felt I was dying. I felt I was being tricked into death. In my mind, I was fighting with faces unknown to me, and I felt I had to have all my wits about me, to keep from dying. I continued to fight for some time. but as in a dream, which can seem hours, it might have been only seconds.
"I remember not breathing, and strange colors, lights and designs took shape in my brain. Later, I felt relieved and woke up in the recovery room. I had stopped breathing on the operating table and was revived, I was told. I knew I had stopped breathing, and I knew I was near death, even though I had been under."
This experience was clearly quite negative, and the man who was involved explicitly recognized this fact. When asked if he felt he had a glimpse of heaven or of God, he responded with a resounding "no!"
His perceptions while he was going through his close brush with death are susceptible to a number of possible interpretations. First of all, one might immediately say that the unknown faces around them were merely vague perceptions of the medical personnel surrounding him during the operation. Similarly, the strange colors and designs might have been due to the lack of oxygen to his brain when he stopped breathing.
The problem with this explanation is that it presupposes a fuzzy, semiconscious state, yet this man recalls being quite lucid as he battled with whoever or whatever was trying to trick him into death. With great clarity and concentration, he fought and used his wits to keep from dying.
A more likely interpretation would seem to be that he found himself on the verge of extinction; there was some sort of volitional and personal quality in the evil that he was facing; and he realized instinctively that he had to marshal all his inner resources to fight back, to keep going over the edge.
There's a certain primeval quality about this perception of death as a seductive adversary-and the need to battle against it all costs to survive. Since the earliest times, for example, people in cold climates have been warned that if they find themselves getting sleepy whileout trudging through a snowstorm, it's important to fight ferociously against feelings of relaxation, well-being and sleepiness-because those can be the first signs of freezing and death.
The Apostle Paul made no bones about his own position when he wrote,"The last enemy to be destroyed is death"(1 Cor 15:26) And the biblical prince of death and destruction, Satan, is described elsewhere in the Scriptures as "the deceiver of the whole world"-an interesting tie-in with the Maryland investor's feeling that he was being tricked. Let's turn next to a middle-aged Illinois housewife who was very ill with double pnuemonia; "My fever was 104 degrees-this was about seven years ago, and here in my own home. I slept most of the time for about the first three days with the fever. The only time I was awake was when my husband would bother me and change sheets on my bed.
"Other than that, I would see huge things coming toward me, like animals with baseball bats. Then, I'd be in this blue-green water, and out in front of me was this huge white, marblelike rock. At the top of the rock was this bright light, and as I got closer to the rock, I saw an image of a person standing on top of it in white clothing-like a robe. But I couldn't tell if it was male or female-I couldn't see the face at all."
This woman said she couldn't say whether this experience involved heaven or God. And from the sound of it, with huge animals with baseball bats running toward her, it appears to have been anything but enjoyable or pleasant. The bright light and figure on the rock are relatively neutral, neither good nor bad. But the faceless quality of the robed being she encountered seems typical of some negative near-death experiences.
In a similar vein, a young prelaw student in his early twenties reported, "We were on our way to North Dakota for Christmas. My fiancee was in the car, and her sister was driving. We hit some ice and went over a 230-foot embankment. My fiancee and I were thrown from the car, and she miraculously only suffered a broken rib. Her sister was killed.
"As for me, I had been sleeping on the passenger side of the car in the front seat when the car began to skid. My fiancee's sister screamed, but I was never really completely awake. I was aroused, startled, and my main reaction, as I recall it, was just a relaxed feeling. I sat back and didn't even get tense or put my hands up. I took the collision without trying to protect myself.
"Evidently, I took a good crack on my head because I wasn't myself for about forty-eight hours. During that time, I remember coming to and walking around in the canyon where we had landed. But I couldn't remember getting engaged the night before. I do recall looking up toward the road, about 200 feet above us, where I saw a lot of blinking lights.
"My first thought was, 'I must be dead. This is what death must be.' But it certainly wasn't blissful. Just nothingness. I felt like a piece of protoplasm floating out on the sea. I thought, 'maybe, I'm lost, maybe I'm not going to heaven'" Later, after this student was taken to the hospital, he said,"Everything was shadowed over-figures seemed to be moving around me, but I couldn't see facial expressions, only forms. It was so weird. I still thought I must be dead."
Another rather negative report after a near-death incident involved a middle-aged Ohio woman, who said she "collapsed with an asthma attack. I was out six hours and something (would have to be God) said, 'You're dying' When I came to, I could understand why people were so scared."
In this case, the woman believed that the supernatural presence that communicated to her was God, but the message wasn't all that comforting. Being told she was on the verge of death obviously didn't reassure her at all, and fear rather than joy was the primary emotion that gripped her.
An experience of a kind of void accompanied by mildly unpleasant physical sensations was the main sensation that enveloped one elderly Illinois man after a serious accident:"I died for three minutes. It began with the end of my tongue. I quit breathing. The last thing I remember was numbness in my throat. There was no suffering or ill feeling. But nothing existed, that's all."
It would be hard to argue that this sort of experience is a hell in the conventional sense of the term because there is no gnashing of teeth or searing flames. But at the same time, there is no suggestion that this man's encounter had anything to do with heaven. He seems to have entered a neutral kind of near-death region which was slightly more negative than positive. So if this was some sort of supernatural realm, it may be that what he had a taste of was a vestibule that stood at the entrance to a more intensely negative dimension of reality.
This mildly negative kind of report is also echoed in other near-death accounts we received.
A 35-year old Ohio man with an appendix problem told us,"I had gangrene and peritonitis. The poison may have been affecting my mind. I awoke seeing a presence in robes. It had no face. It was not threatening. Much like what one hears of in guardian angles. I even tried to look away, but it stayed.
"The day after this occurrence, the figure appeared again. But this time, I was heavily sedated for pain. This time, it was only there for a few seconds. After my surgery nine days later, I was being wheeled to X-ray after I had a relapse (the bowel kinked off where appendix was removed). I felt every small bump and crack as the cart was wheeled along.
"I felt like I was in a great black vacuum. All I could see was my arms hanging onto a set of parallel bars. I knew if I relaxed, my grip on life would cease. It was a complete sense of knowing that life had to clung to. I knew without any question if I let go, I would die. The feeling of agony of hanging on only lasted a brief while."
This man, a Methodist, told us that "maybe" he had a glimpse of heaven or the afterlife in this experience, but that he definitely didn't feel he was in the presence of God or Jesus Chirst. His experience seems, on balance, to be more bad than good because even the nonthreatening faceless being, which he thought might be a guardian angel, was, at best, a neutral presence. This being offered him no clear-cut aid as he was trying to cling to life by what the man perceived as some sort of parallel bars. The man had to use his own power to hang onto his life. As you can see, the behaviour of this being was quite different from the comforting beings other people have encountered who offered advice and encouragement.
In some cases, the negative near-death experiences also includes a strong feeling of fear. For example, a young supermarket cashier from Mississippi tells this story: "I was at work, and I got upset and began to cry-until I just stopped breathing. I really could not get any air. I felt I was dying off. I passed out-and I know the Lord was warning me. It was something. He was showing me. But it just was not my time to go.
"They rushed me to the hospital. I don't remember going there. But I felt I came close to close to dying. For a moment, everyone around me thought I had died. Death was only a step away, but the Lord brought me out of the Darkness. And I thank Him for that because if it was not for the Lord, I would still be out of breath. When I stopped breathing, in my mind the only thing I knew was, 'Lord please save me!' I really felt death."
Sometimes, instead of this sense if raw fear, there may be confusion or puzzlement. An elderly California accountant gave this third-person account:"I had an experience with my mother. For several days before her death, she was in a comatose state-no movement of the eyes, no reflexes if touched about the eyes. Yet, when she died, an expression came upon her face that I could read so well. It was as if she were saying,'What is this that is happening to me?' It was a look of unmistakable puzzlement. There was indeed something happening that was reflected in her facial expression."
This man said that he doesn't believe that this experience have him a glimpse of heaven, and he didn't sense he was in the presence of God or Jesus Christ. Yet his mother obviously saw something. What might it have been?
To summarize, the negative near-death experiences in our study include some of the following features: * featureless, sometimes forbidding faces; *beings who are often merely present, but aren't at all comforting; *a sense of discomfort-especially emotional or mental unrest; *feelings of confusion about the experience; *a sense of being tricked or duped into ultimate destruction *dear about what the finality of death may involve.
We know that the large majority of near-death experience have been described in neutral or negative terms, but does this necessarily mean they involved hell?
Certainly, most of our responses-and that includes more than six in ten people in our survey who reported coming close to death-merely described their accident or serious illness, without injecting mystical elements into the account. Also, the negative descriptions and evaluations of the near-death experiences were often only mildly negative; or in some cases, they mixed negative and positive elements together.
This scenario may not be quite in line with some pictures of hell as a place of total, unmitigated torment. But at the same time, it's not necessarily inconsistent with many religious concepts of hell.
For example, the New Testament pictures Satan, his followers and all unbelievers as being thrown ultimately into a lake of fire and brimstone (Rev 20:7-15) at the end of the age, or human history. But the Bible is rather vague about what happens between the time of death and this final judgement.
The Apostle Paul sometimes refers to followers of Christ as having "fallen sheep" until the last judgement; others have described the state between death and final judgement as a "dreamless sleep." In this condition, the dead awaiting the end of history may be regarded as, in effect, unconscious or unaware of the nature of the afterlife until their ultimate resurrection. On the other hand, in support of immediate transport to heaven (or hell), many people cite such passages as the thief on the cross, who was told by Christ,"Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."(Luke 23:43)
What it comes down to is that Christian theologians and Bible scholars can't agree about what happens to a person immediately after he dies. And that's part of what makes the increasing number of near-death reports so tantalizing. It's quite possible that close brushes with death may briefly open a window on the negative as well as the positive poles of the afterlife. If this is so, then perhaps what we've been glimpsing, in these accounts of unpleasant near-death experiences, is something of what the negative side of immortality may be like.
In support of this interpretation, it's helpful to compare our findings with what some leading religious thinkers and philosophers have surmised about the negative, hellish dimension of the afterlife just after death. C.S. Lewis, for example, in his The Great Divorce, pictures hell as an empty city, which at first glance seems vaguely depressing and boring, but not necessarily a centre of terrible tortures.
But the emotionally devastating aspect of the place gradually comes to light when it becomes clear that the inhabitants-or former inhabitants-of the city just can't get along with each other without quarrelling. As one of Lewis's characters says, "As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before the week is over he's quarrelled so badly that he decides to move." So the town keeps expanding as people move away from other people, leaving empty houses behind.
Another character explains the antisocial, shrivelled-up nature of hell in these terms;"All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World [heaven]. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste...For a damned soul is nearly nothing; it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gift, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see."
In other words, the true nature of hell slips up on those unfortunate enough to enter it permanently. It may seem only neutral or mildly negative at first, but it gets worse and worse before you know what's happening. In the Christian view, the distinctive thing about hell is that it's a state of separation from God-and that is ultimately what Lewis is getting at in his description.
In our general survey of the American public's convictions about the afterlife, those who believe in hell also offered some interesting commentary on what eternal separation from God might be like.
One Arizona woman said she believes that those going to hell will, immediately after death, enter a "a tunnel full of roots, full of devils and mean people." And in some parallel accounts related by those who had negative near-death experiences, we also came across a few references to tunnels or caves. In other words, the tunnel concept, which has so often been mentioned in connection with the heavenlike near-death experience, may have a negative as well as a positive application.
Another description of the eternal abyss, which comes quite close to the accounts related by those with near-death experiences, was offered by a New York businessman: "I think it's the opposite of heaven. I think it will be dark, not a sense of light as in heaven. Also, there will be a constant negative deterioration of the personalities of those who go there. Growth is a part of God and heaven, while destruction characterizes hell.
"Also, I don't think there's going to be a lot of camaraderie there. Some people say, 'I don't mind going to hell because there will be a lot of good company there.' But I don't think that's true. I think those in hell will be totally alone. There won't be a lake of fire with many people around-each individual will be by himself. And those in hell will be forced to look within themselves and constantly deal with their most difficult emotions and feelings of hopelessness."
The negative descriptions we received from some of those who same close to death are not as horrendous as the "eternal fire" and similar characterisitics of hell to which Jesus and others in the New Testament refer (eg. Mathew 18:8). But at the same time, our reports picture a kind of unpleasantness that no one in his right mind would choose to experience for any period of time. And if C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and others who have speculated creatively about the afterlife are correct in assuming that the terrors of an existence without God gradually intensify after death , then perhaps in some of these near-death accounts we are indeed witnessing the first stages of some sort of negative superdimensional reality after death.
But both in religious tradition and also in our near-death reports, the afterlife is comprised of more than just pleasant or unpleasant places, locations or dimensions of reality. We've also seen some indications that each place has a special population that gives it a distinctive character.
11 Consequences of the Enlightenment
David Hume one of the rising stars of the new pragmatic atheism of the enlightenment started promulgating similar ideas to Voltaire. That everything is in the brain and their is no external God and that man rules supreme. We assume that all these seekers after God and spiritual beings which have existed for thousands of years are ultimately deluded and their writings not worth considering. (Intelligent beings have existed into far ancient times. The burning of the great Library of Alexandria destroyed alot of light.) This is only the start of the rise of a new type of inversive brethern believing that they are doing good but deluding people into a merry death dance of the soul. Monastics and Hermits are rarely understood and are critisized as having constant dreams and torments of woman tempting them in their dreams into the death throws of ecstasy. But beliee mem These beings laugh at these futile criticisms. They live with an ecstasy of the soul and bliss which cannot be described to followers of the inversive brethren nor capable of being understood. The loving energy and peace flows naturally through these people from God and their wisdom is divine and crystal clear. But we must be careful here that too many get carried away that they lock themselves away for too long a period away from tackling the spiritual forces of evil. The furure may incorprate a new understanding of the spiritual forces or dimensions at work in a human being and understand the limited laws and nature of the universe and human character as it is all pretty limited. the universe is designated to survive a period and terminate during this time the same problems occur again and again the need for man to have his heart dealt with by God. In the year 4000AD there will still be seekers after God and spiritual wisdom will be more advanced than ever before. A new age of wizards and powerful beings may loom with advanced control over chi forces and advanced knowledge to do good.
"A young man in his early forties confided in me recently about obscene sexual images that he was having during his times of spiritual communion with the freemasons, as well as disturbing feelings about blood and killing loved ones. The man was stable, mature, and had no history of mental illness. After counselling it was discovered that the sexual imagery was linked to Freemasonry symbols, the blood and the knife which he was tempted to use to kill a loved one was linked with the Oaths in Freemasonry. When this man was cut free from all his links with Freemasonry in the name of Jesus Christ those disturbing feelings and images went and he has not been tormented since." Extract from "Inside the Brotherhood" by Martin Short ISBN 0 586 07065 6
The quest of Thesophists is as St Albert the Great said of the philosopher's stone, 'If it exists, I want to know what it is like. If it does not exist, I would like to understand the meaning of such an illusion'. Between God and the Great Architect of the Universe, between the religious and the invisible, mysticism and inner freedom, there exists the same distinction as between worship and symbolization. Some writers consider that religious feeling is indeed the 'prime matter' or raw material on which the process of initiation acts. Others think that the transmutation which occurs in a person gaining access to the invisible has the effect of converting his religious feeling into poetry.
The response of the initiate is to explore and examine the working fiction. This fiction crystallizes and expresses a dream, not a concrete solution: a dream which looks into the future, a dream not yet freed from the false and the pathetic, but a dream without which people would never achieve enlightenment.
It is surprising to see side by side the two terms spiritually and secularism which, in their common sense, contradict one another. However, freemasonry was founded to reveal their possible identity, to expose the rending of the human into two constituent aspects(the political and the poetic) and to seek a possible answer to this apparent paradox.
The very notion of the Divine, in the light of science, takes on a new aspect. It is no exaggeration to say that today Perfection, the Absolute or the Principle to which one aspires-whether we call it God, Reason or the Great Architect of the Universe-comes about in one' s progress towards knowledge. Is this not the object of the Reintegration which the Tradition asks of the initiate. (Paul Naudon)
12 The British Labour Party
The founder of the Labour Party and it's first MP Keir Hardie once said,"Man had to choose between God or Mammon" and "The poverty of the working classes is the poverty of his ideals". Have we really taken on board his divinely inspired questions?
The first statement would not be very popular today. The second would barely raise him from his slumber. But there is still hope. Beings of the light are working to disseminate truth into the ether. So we can use or spiritual energy and absorb the loving energy (or prana) from God to nourish others. The divine wisdom will give us clarity. The Christian contribution to the Labour party has been substantial compared to other parties and a book is scheduled by Harper Collins which should be published in the near future.
Britain has been pursuing both China and Iran into the 'global friends' of the free market without any confrontation or mention of the appalling human rights records which these countries have. Is Britain getting it's priorities right with it's foreign policy? In Iran we have political arrests, torture, unfair trials and summary executions throughout the country. Prisoners of conscience were among those detained or serving long prison terms after unfair trials. Judicial punishments of flogging and amputation continue to be implemented. Political opponents are abducted and killed outside Iran suggesting that they may have been victims of extrajudicial executions involving Iranian officials. Yet we welcome the representatives of these countries as 'equals' and friends in a new global free trade environment governed by meaningless 'political correctness'.
In China, hundreds of political activists and members of religious or ethnic groups were arrested. Scores of them, including prisoners of conscience, were held without charge or sentenced to terms of imprisonment after unfair trials. Over a dozen prisoners of conscience were released from prison, but not unconditionally. Thousands of political prisoners, including hundreds of prisoners of conscience arrested in previous years, remained imprisoned. Torture and ill-treatment of prisoners were widely reported. The death penalty continued to be used extensively.
The foreign policy of the British government is about making money and getting rich quick through 'free' trade. No thought is given to the many thousands of people who may be suffering in these countries through appalling acts of 'barbarism'. It's foreign policy should take into account human rights issues and impose conditions or barriers to exert influence to help improve the situations in these countries.
We have to got to examine men's hearts-the inward change as J.C.Ryle would have it in practical religion.
13 Theosophical Society(Search for the divine wisdom)
There is a huge stream of thought from alchemists, mystical philosophers, the hermetic tradition and just about every culture from around the world which has built ideas around the existence of man's soul. Are we destined to moulded by such arrogant buffoons. But when it comes to the philosophical interpretation of man's soul do we have that crystal clear vision or are we being led into darkness away from God's eternal decree:"Justification via faith in God (or Christ)". Seek God and Pray constantly that wisdom will be relieved to you. Its the occultic good to allow your mind and heart to grow. Do nothing to stunt this and be sceptical of philosophies and religions which require you to stunt the mind. I am personally a Calvinist and try not to be blinkered when I am looking at and understanding the various cultures from around the world. Catholicism is second best, but it needs independent accounting mechanisms and bodies.
manifeste spectare
Figures of Light
Hands that Pray bring love that's just a finger-touch away
Figures of Light aware of every plea swirl the thoughts of those who see
Minds in Flight deliver deeper insight
Souls of Golden Light have soundless voices that split the night
Lips of Power kiss tear-stained brow, fulfilling a solemn vow
Hearts of Joy ever caring; ever sharing all forbearing. forever beating through no divide at all
Extract from the Gift of Golden Light by Stephen O'Brien ISBN 0-553-50310-3
14 On Scotland
This had always been a spiritual country and I am sure God helped it in its wars of independence. By endowing men with supernatural power. But he gave us wisdom and we realised that those we called enemies are not enemies but we are one under God. The unification and signing of the convenant under Cromwell was the stirrings of a powerful united nation in the world with a purpose. Today confusion reigns and man has lost touched with his soul. Is this not true the world over? If man was to trust God he needs not have the same fear and confusion and he will do good the world o'er. Whatever happens to Scotland whether it becomes independent or not. I am sure God will not abandon it to the netherworld as it remains close to his heart. Iona has a place in God's heart as the spiritual Scot does.
The MSP's of holyrood vote for themselves wage rises and give each other gifts. They are also on a joint crusade of political correctness(salvation in a Catholic monarch). The Scotsman newspaper also based in Holyrood fires its propaganda through the usual rose tinted spectacles that everything is fantastic and Edinburgh is the centre of the world. A stone's throw away to the South of Holyrood lie the council estates Dumbiedykes and Craigmillar. People in these estates die from poverty, drugs and a lack of compassion. This is totally ignored. What did these people get from the politicians in the way of gifts last Christmas? As Jesus said, 'They are spiritually blind' and it is only through him that they can awaken God within and truly see. Despite being one of the financial centres of Europe. Edinburgh contains vast amounts of poverty and selfishness. We are not just talking about Dumbiedykes and Craigmillar but many other areas as well. If we are to turn this around it requires a change of attitude by both parties. Not merely throwing money at the problem. The true problem is that of the human soul.
15 Commentary on the Moment
The person with the divine wisdom can make the loving energy manifest and can use it and direct it. He often becomes frustrated at the darkness in world spreading fear, confusion and death. Time is short. Seek God and awaken your soul. The divine knowledge becomes so obvious and simple as the dark cloud lifts from your mind and heart. Pray for wisdom and for the advancement of good. But you must realise that man is subject to his own free will and self-delusions. Humanity will progress to the sixth race.
16 The Islamic Religion
Mohammed didn't follow the code which he preached. He took many wives. One of which was nine years old and incited his followers to warfare and violence. It seems you don't have much of an option with this religion. Either submit or you die. The way they treat their woman falls far short of decency (It has certainly been the case that most Muslim shopkeepers in Dundee stock vast quantities of pornography). They also believe that angels are sent by the devil. Continuous murder, bombings, hijackings, suicide bombers and wars is the way to victory for this faith. Those who are not subject to this cancerous evil are lucky they are in the light of love. This religion of pure hatred reaps its own harvest of death. Pray for this religion to retreat back to the vaults of hell. I see virtually no blessings from God for the people of this religion. The Islamic peoples once possessed culture-philosophy, engineering, architecture, but all that was a long time ago. Now a darkness like no other has a grip. Why don't they open up and allow theosophical centres and give them free speech to challenge this religion. They are the people of the lie.
16 On UFO's
We have scanned the known universe for communications waves from the nearest systems within 100 light years. Nothing has been found. Some radar contacts have been positive and books by Timothy Good(Alien Liaison, Alien Update, Beyond Top Secret) and "UFO Deadly Concealment" by Derek Sheffield.(ISBN 0-7137-2620-2) prove to be good evidence. I would believe that their concept of spirituality would not differ much from ours as the laws of the universe would be fairly constant. All highly evolved life forms would have a soul which will be under God's sovereignty. Prana or Chi energy(a concept from Eastern religions) fills the universe so hopefully it will energise cells in other life forms with good energy. This type of bioelectric energy circles in meridians and is made manifest in many ways. Kirlian photography has shown it changes colour with certain moods. A spiritual healer has quite a strong manifestation of energy in a kirlian photograph. A third reich in space is out of the question.
In the book "Soviet Psychic Discoveries" a leading Soviet academic who researched the UFO phenomena put forward his conclusion that a "supercivilization" exists with limited contacts. It may be that we have to wait until our time has come to be introduced to the inter-galactic political sphere. No mass interventions are made as not to cause mass panicie.. stock exchange crashes, mental instability. It is better for our own health that they do not make full contacts. Mental, material and spiritual evolution must be made within humanities own violition. "The galactic code requires no intervention with primitive species incapable of interstellar contact".(Quote from "Soviet Psychic Discoveries"). But a small number of ET's have intervened in secret anyway.
A lecture given by the Scottish Truthseekers Society by Stephen Black gave weight to the idea that the good ET's which are similar to humanoids are influenced heavily by ideas of esoteric Christianity. One of these particular ET's wears a cross.(source:website spiritweb).
I think that it is generally accepted that there is limited contact with certain races of ET's. Just as good and evil exist on earth it must exist with ET races. The so-called grays and perhaps others are materialistic and depraved. Others are angelic and adhere to esoteric Christianity. The messages coming from the contacts with the angelic beings is that humanity has to end the division, strife, depravity and evil by unifying around the God of goodness, love and wisdom. 17 The Term Occultic Knowledge
Knowledge of mystics, philosophers, hermits, psychics, spiritualists and the paranormal rejected by orthodox materialism science. It does not mean evil knowledge. We are subject to free will. If we seek evil what will you expect? This material plane is a separation of good from evil. No evil is allowed in god's presence. We are made a little lower than the angels but we came become angels if we diligently seek the Lord. A Christian should not become blinkered and should read and study widely. Membership of the Theosophical Society enables our religion to stand the test of scrutiny and it gets full marks with the evidence thus far. Spiriualism as Conan DOyle would have it seems to explain the afterlife as made up of levels which is open to just about any culture. It seems that there is no excuse for spiritual cultivation and to approach God. Above all "strive,strive,strive" as the bible would put it. God would not have made it that difficult he has made it quite easy in some parts and other knowledge can also be helpful. Most religions are indeed similar. Taoism is similar to Christianity which is similar to Muslims and the moral requirements of Buddhism and others. But God made it easiest throught Christiainty. He sent a living example and the best book of wisdom going around. Through dedicating one day a week and other periods for study of the word the supernatural forces at work shape your character called grace this means we don't have to spend hours trying to achieve spiritual perfection as the buddhists try to do. It is alot easier when God does it all for you. Read "Practical Religion" by J.C.RYle.
18.MAGICIANS
18.1 ABRA-MELIN "I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, and what I..call the evocation of the spirits" W.B.Yeats
In a certain sense, the life of the major poet W.B. Yeats was a quest for his "Real Self", a search into the inmost recesses of his soul in order to find unity with that divine spark that Yeats believed was at the core of his being.
Yeats' poetry was almost a by-product of that search: a welling-up of the waters of spiritual vitality from the "inner space" of his unconscious mind. And much of his poetry is magical in the sense both that it possesses the force of incantation, and that its inspiration is to be found in what the occultist Dion Fortune termed the "Western Esoteric Tradition".
In his notorious book, Ideas of Good and Evil, he wrote of his fundamental belief in magic. Yeats followed this affirmation of his belief by describing an experience with an experiment involving the use of Enochian tablets that resulted in his imagination beginning "to move of itself and to bring before me vivid images..."
The Mage In view of Yeat's lifelong quest for his Real Self it is perhaps rather surprising that he never ventured to experiment with the technique of discovering what some occultists call "the Operation of Abra-melin". It is almost certain that Yeats knew of this technique; the manuscript that describes it was translated into English in the 1890's by his friend, MacGregor Mathers.
Mathers published his translation of the manuscript, entitled "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-melin the Mage" in 1898. Financially it was a disaster, selling very slowly and not even recovering the costs of its printing and binding. This was probably because most serious occultists of the time thought of it as "just another grimoire and therefore not worth bothering about". A "grimoire" is a textbook of ritual magic dating from the Middle Ages to the early-nineteenth century. Most of these books are indeed, "not worth bothering about", ranging from the sinister to the just plain silly-full of absurd spells, for instance to "hinder a sportsman from killing any game" and to have "carnal knowledge of any woman, whether she will or no".
HOLY GUARDIAN ANGEL The Sacred Magic of Abra-melin the Mage, is however, in a class of its own, teaching a yoga-like method of giving the aspirant a knowledge of the Real Self which the author, using the terminology of his own time, calls the "Holy Guardian Angel".
Perhaps the reason why Yeats never attempted to carry out the Abra-Melin experiment was simply that he considered it too time-consuming. The aspirant has to spend many months in prayer and chaste solitude. At the end of this period, following white magical rites, the Holy Guardian Angel manifests itself. That is to say, the aspirant becomes at one with his or own Higher Self-the spirit manifests itself in everyday life, the supernormal becomes part of the material reality.
MIRACLE TALISMANS This inner unity being achieved, the successful experimenter has the power to employ various lettered squares, "Abraham talismans", to perform miracles. In recent years Mathers' translations of Abra-melin has been reprinted several times. I know several occultists who claim to have successfully performed the processes outlined in it. How seriously such claims should be taken as a matter of personal opinion.
18.2 ALEISTER CROWLEY(1875-1947) Born into an upper middle-class puritan family. Crowley first became interested in the occult while an undergraduate at Cambridge. Always a controversial figure, the press first took him to task for his advocacy of eroticism in his 'White Stains' book. By way of reply, he gave a lecture in his mistress's home on 'sexual poverty in Britain'. He then joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society of which the poet W.B.Yeats and Bram Stocker, the author of Dracula, were also members. Crowley became the society's grand master and formed a homosexual partnership with Allan Bennet, known as Iohi Aour, another of its members. The two of them abandoned themselves to magic and Crowley declared his with to become a 'saint of Satan' and to be known as the 'Great Beast' or 'the wickedest man alive'.
THE GREAT BEAST
In 1900, Crowley was expelled from the Order of the Golden Dawn for extreme practices. He founded his own order, the Silver Star, and set out to travel the world. Crowley settled for several years in Sicily with a group of disciples, but rumours of drugs, orgies and even sacrifices led to his expulsion from Italy. His travels also took him to Ceylon, where he met up again with Bennett, who had become a Buddhist monk, and to Madras where he was initiated into Tantrism. In Paris, he met Rodin, Rilke, Somerset Maugham and finally Rose Edith Kelley, his 'scarlet woman' whom he was to marry. It was in Cairo that a medium in a trance revealed the 'ultimate mysteries' of sexual magic to the young couple and urged them to set up the order of the Silver Star.
Rose died an alcoholic, leaving a daughter called Night my Athatour Hecate Sappho Jezabel Lilith, who was to die in tragic circumstances. Crowley, who lived for some time at Boleskine, on the shores of Loch Ness, continued to travel, surrounded by women. With Victor Neuburg, he journeyed into the Algerian desert to meet the spirit of evil. The two men were later found half-dead with exhaustion. Crowley finally came to believe he was a vampire, began to inject heroin, and adopted a wildly promiscuous lifestyle. When war broke out, he offered Churchill an infallible magic method to ahieve victory. Churchill declined the offer!
18.3 ISRAEL REGARDIE This man was a practising alchemist who suffered a laboratory accident was by profession both a psychotherapist and a chiropractor-a therapist who uses manipulation of the spinal column and other parts of the body as a method of treating disease.
His approach to the psychotherapeutic side of his healing activities was thoroughly eclectic for while he was a fully qualified practitioner of a form of analysis developed by Willhelm Reich, a one-time pupil of Freud; he was also confident that Jungian theories proposing the existence of the "Collective Unconscious" were of much importance. In them he noted many resemblances to traditional beliefs associated with magic and mysticism.
REICHIAN THERAPIST Reich was a major influence on Regardie. He had been a practising Freudian analyst and had formulated the theory of "physiological armouring". By this Reich meant that various physical symptoms without any neurological cause, were the result of the body adopting a posture that, in reality; was cause by that person trying to communicate a psychological disorder. This theory had a very great influence on Israel Regardie in the formulation of his healing exercises.
OCCULT EXPERT Regardie was, in fact, an expert on almost every aspect of western occultism. He had been initiated into the Stella Matutina, a Rosicrucian offshoot of the Golden Dawn in the 1930s and had subsequently edited and helped to publish many of the instructional manuscripts and pamphlets prepared by MacGregor Mathers and his associates-for example those that deal with Enochian Magic.
Regardie was no mere theoretician. He had worked almost all of the practical techniques of western occultism; he had conducted rituals designed to charge his psyche with subtle energies; he had consecrated several of his own "magical implements"; and he had tried to make astral journeys. After his initiation into a grade of the Stella Matutina rather pompously termed "Lord of the Portal", Regardie had become acquainted with a magical technique known as the Middle Pillar exercise. This was taught to Regardie as a method of energizing centres of psychic force that, it is claimed by occultists, exist in the astral and other subtle "bodies" that underlie the physical bodies of human beings.
LINKED SPHERES Regardie and other initiates of his grade were instructed to think of these centres as corresponding to the centre column of the kabalistic Tree of Life which comprises three rows of linked spheres. The middle row of circles-the Middle Pillar-are the spheres of Beauty,Foundation,Kingdom, and the Supreme Crown;collectively, the Pillar of the Equilibrium.
The initiates were told that they should visualize the Middle Pillar first. They should stand up and imagine a brilliant light shining above their heads. They should then visualize this light descending to the nape of the neck. Then moving down to the heart, and from there to the hips and then down to the feet - all regions of the body that are thought to be centres of spiritual energy. The initiate should recite the Hebrew names for God, which correspond to each energy centre. In this way, the cosmic forces symbolized by the various spheres of the Tree of Life, would be made available to the corresponding aspects of the spiritual core of the individual initiate. The initiates would be able to utilize these cosmic forces to enhance their spiritual being.
Israel Regardie claimed that he practised the Middle Pillar exercise at least once a day. According to his own account he found the exercises to be extremely effective. Not only did he feel better mentally, he said, with an enormous improvement in the harmony of the various components of his mind and emotions, but he also felt charged with an increased vitality that made it easier for him to cope with the stresses and strains of everyday life.
For the rest of his life Israel Regardie employed the Middle Pillar exercise. After he had gone into practice as a chiropractor, the alchemist and mystic developed certain methods that he believed gave him the power to transfer to his patients some of the vast cosmic energies that he professed to have tapped by his continual use of this exercise.
EASTERN TRADITIONS While the Middle Pillar technique is unquestionably of western origin-being, as we have seen, the development of a complex Golden Dawn process for projecting the kabalistic Tree of Life as a column of spheres-the theories underlying its use have a marked resemblance to concepts associated with Indian and Tibetan yoga. The psychic centres of the Tree of Life, supposedly vivified by the use of the Middle Pillar exercise, correlate well with the chakras that are believed to be energized by the practitioners of the Kundalini yoga of Bengal. There are of course differences between the two techniques, perhaps the most vital difference being that the Kundalini and Middle Pillar energy flows rotate in opposite directions. The Chinese developed a philosophic system based on chi energy flowing around the meridians and they had similar ideas (like Middle Pillar)of building this energy up called chi gong or chi kung(ISBN 1-85230-783-8).
Israel Regardie drew upon the teachings of an astonishing collection of writers, including C.G. Jung, Aleister Crowley,H.P. Blavatsky, and D.H. Lawrence. Like Regardie, Lawrence believed in the existence of subtle psychic centres associated with the head, the solar plexus and the genitals. Lawrence was a believer in all things psychic for most of his adult life. Indeed, even as he lay dying in a sanatorium in Venice, he claimed that he had an out-of-the-body-experience in which he floated above his bed and saw himself with Maria Huxley, who was by his bedside.
19 Psychiatry People with multiple personalities and 'hearing' voices are rarely cured through the method of popping pills. I believe human beings are closely linked to 'another world' and somehow God fits into the equation. Spirit entities not always of noble personage occupy a person. A hypnotist was able to cure a person of multiple personalities by accepting this type of theory. Sometimes these people get better in group therapy it was found. Perhaps by directing the love energy (chi)towards them it can alleviate systems by filling the a vortex of darkness in the close proximity to a number of human beings. The phenomena of spiritual healing could be tried in the future if overcoming the barrage of criticism by blinkered materialistic science.
We clearly have a long way to go to understand the totally of human consciousness but the psychological structures which incorporate a soul and God have been more successful(Jung) than approaches to understanding the human mind through atheistic material means(Freud: Freud once removed a bone out of a woman's nose to cure 'neurosis'). Do we really understand ECT and psychosurgery. Alot of these mentally ill people suffer alot of misery. A bit of love, sympathy and faith can sometimes help.
In Britain they were talking of introducing compulsory ECT and psychosurgery. One man suffering from depression was totally destroyed by these methods which we do not fully understand. He suffered 16 treatments of ECT and had psyhcosurgery. A particular case reported in the Scottish press.
When I am talking of the 'other world' in psychiatry. We can back this idea up with the evidence of spiritualist mediums, poltergeist manifestations, out-of-body experience, near-death experiences. The psychological science of the soul is understand by few but could help in the future.
A initially sceptical psychiatrist who used exorcism as part of his treatment was shocked and surprised by the positive results achieved and wrote the book "The People of the Lie" by M Scott Peck. ISBN 0-09-972-860-5. Patients showing diabolical mischief are candidates for exorcism.
I would like to mention a particular experiment which might help us toward better understanding.. An experiment carried out by Dr Jacobo Grindberg of the National University of Mexico, was outlined at a conference on science and consciousness in January 1994:
He took a number of couples, some of whom had been in long-term relationships, other who had more recently fallen in love, and had them look into one another's eyes without speaking or touching one another. Then they were separated and put in Faraday cages (which isolates them from external stimuli), and wired up with a device to measure electrical activity of the brain. When a stimulus was applied to one of the subjects, the other mirrored his or her brain activity-even though they could have had no knowledge of the stimulus being applied to the other. Grinberg found that this 'transferred potential' did not diminish, even when the couples were separated by a greater distance, suggesting that the information was not being conveyed by any conventional means.
Commenting on these experiments , Dr Fenwick of the Maudsley Hospital, London, whilst accepting the unlikely possibilities of the experiment not being set up properly or of the results being falsified, added: 'The third possibility is that it is a true effect and it comes about in way we can't account for at present. If you get direct brain-to-brain transfer of physiological stimuli, it seems logical to postulate that the mind may not be entirely confined to the skull.' (Sunday Times 30/1/94)
20.Communism
God's plan in nature is variety and we each have different gifts and work to carry out. Communism was created on the basis of the lack of trust in goodness of a particular individual. You do have philanthropists and kind rich people. Some rich people through their own initiative do good works. The same can be said of the working and middle classses. It's leaders thinking that they were on the only force capable of good and lost sight of what was evil. The ability of a peoples soul and the supernatural spiritual power of the human being to be led out of darkness was impossible under such a system. What is needed is a change of attitude from within. The removal of free-thought and freewill kill the soul and God. But the death of this system has given new hope to the peoples of Russia and I hope that protestant Christianity can strengthen it for the future.
21.Final Commentary Yet all traditions of the spiritual lore of the world point the moral that after aspiring sainthood and holy consecration has crusaded the world over in vain for the Holy Grail, the weary seeker found in on his return home, broken and dispirited, in the cup which he offered, in plain unheroic sympathy, to the beggar on his own doorstep. The lesson of these myths is indeed a might preachment to humanity. For eventually, after long delusion in pursuing the coveted divinity in distant idealism, the heart finds that in tutoring the wild instincts of the animal self, in putting an end to the persecution of the spiritual soul by 'the one born after the flesh," in giving freer play to the charitable nature of Christ within, there is the only true romance that life offers!And we would do well to keep fresh in mind Paul's urgent reminder that the Christ is nowhere but within us. Nature implanted the very self of the god deep within our own constitution, like a seed in the soil, to make sure that we would never miss recognizing and cultivating it. But very clearly C.G.Jung, the eminent psychologist, seen and stated the lurking harm in this psychological subterfuge:"The Imitation Christ will forever have this disadvantage; we worship a man as a divine model, embodying the deepest meaning of life,and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make real the profound meaning within ourselves. If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do no affect him, nor does he affect me. But if, I know, on the other hand, that God is a mighty activity within my soul, at once I must concern myself with him." These are the words of the weightiest import and require some courage in the speaking. They should be warmly welcomed, for they hold a possible hope for the awakening of a decadent spiritual sense and the salvation of the race from present evils.
With all our voluminous Bible "study" we have not yet even mentally caught the meaning of the light that came to illumine the darkness of every man; the little leaven(of righteousness) in the lump of animal sense life; the tiny grain of mustard seed in the earth; the money invested with the usurers(the "users," in the real sense); the oil in the virgins' lamps; the gold in the fish's mouth. We have missed the day-to-day meaning of it all. We have so far abstracted the reference of the mythological and doctrinal structures from the plane of actual relevance that we have created for them a sort of detached compartment in some rarefied realm of our life called the "supernatural",the "magical" and the "miraculous". We have associated religion with this remote area, and left it without dynamic applicability to secular living. So that the sincere and intelligent segment of modern people, in disgust and revulsion, have rejected the whole of the religious presentation, as being irrational, the product of an unenlightened and unreliable mystical tendency. And the concept of the supernatural element in life has been repudiated with perhaps justifiable bitterness. Yet wisdom is needed here, a wisdom based on the true knowledge of anthropology. For inconceivably strange and fanatical to the humanists as must sound the declaration now to be pronounced, it must be decisively reaffirmed that the proper concern of true religion was, is and must ever be with just those repudiated elements, the "supernatural," the "magical" and the "miraculous"! For with the advent of Christ into mortality there was introduced into life a power of a distinctly higher order, that from the limited vision of the Adamic man, of natural endowment only, was in every sense of the term supernatural. Quite literally the natural man was linked with light and life of a being decidedly above his rank. Remember, his name was called "Wonderful". His divine presence and influence was to astonish the lower man with the continued working of things that would seem "miraculous" to him. The healing of the wounds and infirmities of the self below the interposition of his grace would appear to be no less than "magic" to him. The humanistic revolt against supernaturalism in religion is fully warranted as a rebound from a caricatured and distorted theology. Ecclesiasticism must censure itself for the defection of secularist support. But humanism and sheer human ethical culture are themselves reminded that they have erred no less egregiously in failing to see that their scorn of the "supernatural" is not justified. Their mistake has been in attacking the "supernatural" where it has been erroneously mislocated-in the heavens; and not affirming it when correctly localized in the spirit immediately within man. It is idle to haggle about the corrected definition of the word. To be sure, it must be used in a distinctly relative sense, for in a broad sense nothing in the whole realm of life can be super, beyond or outside the natural. But surely in relation to the capacities of the animal self that constitutes the human part of man, the life of the indwelling spirit is legitimately affirmed to the supernatural. Paul tells us that first comes that which is natural, then that which is spiritual, in the order of the unfoldment. Our task, as Plato says in the Timeaus, is to bring the supernatural down onto the plane of the natural and wed the two together in the finale in a new union. The "weaving" together of mortal and immortal natures is the chart of our enterprise.
Reverting, in conclusion, to our starting point, it may now be said that the restoration of religion to its primal basis in anthropology is the only likely mode of saving its institutes from Marxism and savage-capitalism. The latter can thus be made to see that no scheme of social and economic betterment, no matter how mechanically perfect it may seem to be, can operate to expected perfection so long as humanity in its continued ignorance of the terms of the life problem, will remain in subjection to the motivations of the lower carnal mind, actuating to selfishness. This does not for an instant absolve us from the necessity of establishing a more equitable economic order. The point is that it must be seen that such a aim can ignore, flout, much less destroy, the program of the cultivation of true values in that area of life called religion-and hope to succeed. The marxist leaders and those of savage capitalism can not be so blind as to miss the fact that life has essential values on planes other than those of physical well-being, and that a philosophy must be twisted to falsity which links the success of an economic system at man's merely physical level with the destruction of the cultus of spiritual values ultimately the hunger for life itself. The material has now been presented which will enable them to distinguish true from false appraisals in religion, and to conserve the one while dropping the other. Religion seen again as bases on anthropology, must be replaced by all parties on its ancient throne as the "king of sciences". Philosophy is the "meaning" of life, and though it sounds almost blasphemous in the ears of a mechanistic age, it must nevertheless be asserted courageously than even an age that deifies mechanical genius will find it a fatuity to attempt to devise a workable mechanism for the happy ordering of life so long as it does not know what that life consists of and what it "means". And religion is philosophy, or "meaning" emotionalized.
The historical Jesus, as a civilizing influence, has now been tried for some sixteen centuries. Catholicism was in no doubt needed a reformation. The pope ceased to become a representative and gave dictates and decrees which are unscriptural. The generosity of the people was abuse by raking in money through 'absolution via cash'. Which is false doctrine. Evil exists everywhere but more so within the Catholic church:Theives, peadophilles etc Here is an extract from a recent article:
CHURCH TO EXPLOIT ABUSE LOOPHOLE The Scottish Catholic Church could try to exploit a legal loophole in a bid to avoid paying out millions of pounds of compensation to victims of sexual and physical abuse. (DAILY RECORD, 16/1/00,PG.19)
Is this not the same in America? Thank God for the reformation. This is not heard of in Calvinism. Also the mafia and P2 Lodge freemasons running vatican finances and killing the previous pope for meddling is a sharp rejoinder that the Catholic church needs to bring back the faculty of reason and aim for a greater purity, understanding and independence. The totalitarian tendencies of the Catholic church make manifest much evil. But despite this there exist within the Catholic church men of great faith and generosity which I am impressed with but I am disappointed with the lack of progress in the reform aspect.
Religion as sentiment merely, will not find acceptance with the economic radicals; but religion, as anthropology, must do so. After all, life is lived in consciousness; the localization of all realities is found there. Man's conscious, or psychological, reaction to life can be ignored only at the cost of fatality to the scheme which flouts it. A Prince of Peace did begin his entry into the human heart and consciousness when man was fabricated. He is struggling to assert his lordship over the elements of a conscienceless tumult of blind energies of our animal childishness. The destiny of humanity, for weal or woe, is inwrought into the fabric of these interwoven living powers. As needful as is technical knowledge to an engineer who has a complicated mechanism to handle, is the restoration to mankind of the body of ancient theology, the knowledge concerning the deity that is linked without physical forms.
The impending fate of civilization hangs upon the answer we give to the question: Can it be restored in time to save the West from anther plunge into centuries of spiritual darkness? Apparently so far we have failed to raise the brute to manhood that the only criterion of "advance" of the present epoch over medieval inhumanity would seem to be the substitution of the machine gun and poison gas for the more gentle rack and the iron maiden! All the while our Saviour is at our elbow. But so long as we look externally for his benignant ministrations we shall not be able to give effect to his miraculous efficacy in healing the imperfections of our nature. The stability of human society was in olden times, and again must be, grounded on knowledge that deep within us is a truly superhuman agency, a seed portion of the eternal being, which will link us securely with imperishable reality. The deifiic Presence has promised that he will guide us into all truth, and in association with him we shall find that "his ways are ways of pleasantness and all his paths are peace."
23. The Knights Templar and the Holy Grail
Henry Lincoln(a self-proclaimed expert on the Templars) cites that Baphomet makes a very good cryptogram of the Hebrew for Sophia(Goddess of the feminine principle and wisdom). Sophia was revered by the gnostics also. On that score, all the books that come out about the Templars: "The Temples of the Knights of God" "Murdered Magicians, the templars and their myth" "Proceedings against the Templars in France and England for heresy AD1307-1311" "The Templars:Knights of God";ISBN 0892812214 All give varying pictures. Some books emphasize the Solomon's temple in the masonic tradition. The reason for that is that they were called "The poor fellow knights of Jesus Christ and the temple of Solomon". In the 12th century(1118) the order was founded. The order was founded along Cistercian lines hence the white cloak. The red cross is added to the mantle later.
It is also necessary to explain about the Templar's themselves, constituted in a very small part of knights. More numerous were the clerics and the third group of craft workers, cooks, carpenters and stonemasons etc. Clerics carried out the administration work of all kinds, Knights did the fighting, the craft workers did the fortifications etc and the order held rites of sanctuary. The order did not contain many knights in relation to the other groups. It expanded quite rapidly from its foundation. In the 200 year period from 1118-1310 a great deal in communications and work took place. Pilgrimmages, travel, banking, organisation of people in boundaries, holy wars and crusades entirely occupy this period and all enmesh the people of Europe. There were great disruptions of material life and their are colossal movements of mind and spirit underway. The Arthurian tales tell us of an age of chivalry promoting the feminine as a symbol of the human soul. The princess or soul trapped in the tower. The tower being materialism. Freed by the Knight Errant. The sleeping princess held in a state of enchantment in a stone castle in the middle of a dense wood is awakened by a kiss(love conquers all). Vast sufferings and loss of life during the crusades ultimately lead to failure and to the Saracens retaining the holy land and the heart of Christianity ie.Jerusalem(the holy city). And perhaps a question arose as to how could God allow such a thing to happen.(Deliberate aggressive warfare is not really a Christian ideal, but defensively okay). But the war was seen as the Holy of holies. Had evil triumphed? The problem with the relationship with spirit with matter was it was clearly interwoven with how evil entered into this God created world. The juxtaposition of matter and energy(spirit) clearly played a part in the manifestation of order and chaos(good and evil). The gnostic belief of salvation though knowledge that is by comprehension of the true nature of reality appealed to the artisans, mystics and soldier monks. A new outlook was emerging-study of Greek classics, alchemy, Babylonian mathematics,gnosticism and neo-platonism. These began to reveal a sort of western mystery tradition long suppressed by the church and also heralded the dawn of the age of chivalry. Chivalry is a teaching system. There are many legends of chivalry and man's veiled accounts of man's search for truth. These beautiful stories are not merely folklore but are part of a once well organised teaching process that involved an individual on the quest for something remote and hidden(a treasure beyond price). Perhaps the best know of this mystery teaching is the high history of the Sangreal. Traditions of the Holy Grail and its connections to the Knights Templar can be traced in many European authors and Parsifal the perfect Knight(Wolfram Von Eschenbach) achieved a great deal of acclaim in the 13th century.
In fact Templesium, the Knighthood of the Grail and the Templar order are practically indistinguishable in German mystical lore. The only other possible contender for the title of Templesium understood to be the Knights of San Salvador de Montreal (1120) founded at the same time as the Templars and possibly part of that order. They were later known as the order de San Salvat. The knights had lent their name to the mysterious Mount Salvat which stood the legendary castle of the Holy Grail. In the 14th century a subsequent order had been founded by Bridget of Sweden known as the Brigateen order. This order disguises the grail tradition in a Christian guard. Centres of that order were in Scandanavia, Germany, Scotland, Netherlands and San Diego de Compostella, Golithia, Spain- the most popular and greatest centre of the Brigateen order. The nature of this European gothic material is perhaps best understood in Eschenbach's epic medieval poem Parsifal. Eschenbach wished to depict through his work the Templar's as a Christian brotherhood seeking to create a kingdom of the faithful (an elect of the Lord).
An institution outwith the Roman hierarchy free from the pope, privileged priesthood and without the inquisition. A new body of honourable mankind. Living without fear and where God himself would allow revelation of the Grail and be King and judge of such a people. Eschenbach considered the real and natural priesthood to belong to those individuals who struggled towards a true affinity with God and not an exclusive class of persons merely following the vocation of priests. Finally he proclaimed for the templar's the idea of a perfect constitutional brotherhood something which was heretical. It suggest something distinct from both church and paganism. It also implied that the quest for the grail kingdom alone led to salvation. Honour and glory to the vanquisher of death. To the source of life eternal went the phrase for the Grail. Just as the Knights of the Temple fought for the Holy Sepulchre. So would the knighthood of the Grail fight their way through death's dark veil to Mount Salvat (the Mount Royale in the Grail Kingdom). If this mystic dream of such brotherhood could become a practical reality then the political and religious institutions of Europe would almost certainly undergo change.
But in 1307 such dreams became a nightmare of the repression due to torture, death and arrest of the Templar order. The legends of the Sangreal bore a message not of the usual Christian form but veiled in the guise of chivalry. The true knight is not to seek war but the kingdom spiritual. The temple is not made with human hands, but is eternal in the heavens. The communion between God and man is complete. Legends personify seekers of the grail as Ticheval the seeker of the grail. He is a poor knight having war'd against the saracens(it is an allegory against all godless materialism) gives his last to the poor and needy. His courage and humility is marked with his piety and humility. The perfect knight while one day walking in the wood comes face to face with an angel who informs him that he is to be the guardian of the mysterious chalice known as the holy grail. This he will find on Mount Salvat. The knight is warned by the angel that he may speak of his quest to no-one. Ticheval then ponders which direction he should take and where Mount Salvat should be. Nobody to this day has found this mystical place. The trials of Ticheval who possesses nothing, but his sword and armour(and largely also allegorical) he passes through vast solitudes of impenetrable woods, climbs jagged peaks, overcoming obstacles, overcoming all barriers of faith and fortitude. Trusting all the while in nothing but a small intangible cloudy light. This mystically leads him onwards and finally clinging to the black rocks and gazing straight ahead and scales the last possible height of Mount Salvat and there he behold's a beam of radiant light. The Sangreal bourne in the air by invisible hands. He raises his heart in passionate prayer so that he may be found worthy enough to take up his charge as guardian. In a state of rapture he then hears the spirits of a welcoming host of veteran knights in shining armour.
The Sangreal as it seems so effervescent as it is beautiful soon allegorically fades. The mystery tradition tells us that the Grail vanishes from earthly view. Only when mankind becomes too materialistic and too gross to obtain the wonder in its midsts. Because the grail could no longer visibly sustain itself on the Earth. Ticheval conceived the plan of building a worldy temple of great purity suitable for its reception in a future and more spiritualized Earth. 'Legends of the Middle Ages' pg.246-The knights who help build this mystic temple are called templars as the legend tells us. There is an obvious similarity between Ticheval's temple and King Solomon's temple can hardly be overlooked. It has long been said that there exists a secret doctrine for those who undertake and devote their lives for the search for the grail. In this respect the Teutonic grail sagas of Germany are also mirrored in the Celtic Arthurian cycle and in Spanish and French myths. The grail is seen as the chalice of Christ's blood or the Celtic vessel of resurrection. Allegorically it could be viewed as a secret gospel or secret doctrine or a tradition of a spiritualized knighthood only giving allegiance to divine kingship as embodied in the spirit of Ticheval and his sacred mission. Through these teaching stories such knighthoods were answerable only to God and not the man made institutions.
The chief function of the grail kingdom seems conceived to supply a constant type of spiritualized person who can obviously govern worldly society. Ideal and perfect knights trained and destined to become a practical incorruptible civilizing power. Such knights not seen as a passive spiritual force in humanity but also accurate and powerful in the banishment of evil from this earth. The acquisition of high conscience and natural personal nobility could not be reached other than by the conquest of one's lower nature gained in this earthly field of struggling and suffering where gross and godless materialism was the tyrant giant the impossible barrier that the solitary knight must overcome before the vision of the grail kingdom can become manifestly visible. To sustain the poor fellow soldiers still fighting their way if you like to self-realization in the ever the shadowy vision of the mystical guardians led by the mystic king to whom is entrusted charge the holy relic and teaching.
The earthly sights from which this invisible help operated was enshrined in secrecy. Legend has it that so carefully secluded was the spot that it could not by discovered other than by the aid of a higher power. And that the Grail King still has communion with the gross material world despatching the occasional faithful champion in cases of relentless need. The belief in such occult intervention in the affairs of base man was frowned upon by both the Vatican and state. Faiths and concepts which lay beyond political and religious control were being accused of being heresy and treason or both. The challenge to the Temple and the religious authorities inherent in the idealized grail kingdom and psychic inheritance seems very clear. But allied to the far flung Templar institutions of the 13th century was the involvement of the age of chivalry. The concept of sacrifice and emphases on honour, courtesy, care of the poor and the weak. and the idealization of the feminine. This new amalgam didn't fit in well with the totalitarian aims of European history with its ethics of the jungle and wars of universal homicide and the quest for political power. In 1307 the slaughter of the Templar order suddenly eradicated the problem or did it?
The whole question of what happened after the Templar suppression is one which I suppose occupied many scholars and those interested in the occult. There is no question that some books teach that the Templars fought at Bannockburn. It is a fact of life that the Templar suppression was ordered everywhere in Europe except for the sole exception of Portugal and Scotland where no order for suppression was ever issued. A verdict of not proven was issued by the papal authorities in Scotland headed by Bishop William Lamberton of St. Andrews. But the order in Scotland lost its cloak, its insignia, its construction and property. Its property consisted of 625 properties administered by clerics and workers. The knights were a very small body. But only the knights were charged with heresy. No charge is brought against clerics or fellow craft but the disruption caused huge upheavals. Although you could suggest perhaps that this underground movement did not die but continued on. Rosycross (Rosicrucians) The individual founder member of this order wandered the roads of Europe and founded the knowledge of alchemy. Its symbols are similar to the templar symbols. However the templar order in Scotland was demolished and handed over to the order of St John. Mystic teachings of the Grail ie.Veil of Veronica and where Adam is buried were of great interest to Madame Blavatsky. One of these were the occultic paintings of the Scottish painter John Duncan(one in Dundee art gallery) another was the 1810 revival in Germany. A document 'Templars in Cyprus' produced in Germany revealed the subject of matter and energy. The key which opens the futures iron door and all the hidden caverns of the past and natures most occult laboratory. Blavatsky stated that she believed the templars were about:
1. Restoration of true Christianity 2. Freedom of thought and restoration of one universal religion 3. Sworn to a vow of obedience, poverty and chastity
The templars were the first true knights. The cross pointed to the four corners of the compass and was recognized in all countries. In order to avoid the persecution the Templars performed rituals in the greatest secrecy. Ecclesiatical worship was carried out in chapels belonging to the order. The main charges brought against the order were correct from the standpoint of the Vatican of what the pope and his council believed to be correct. The superior form of Christianity which the Templars possessed could be described as a amalgamated from of free thought and Theosophic Calvanism. Other Templar groups in Europe have developed strange horrendous untruths. But the Scottish order remains true to most of the original aims and purposes.
24. A Brief history of John Knox the reformer
Despite the tremendous impact John Knox made in Scotland and England making necessary the conditions for the Union with sympathisers both North and South of the border he is largely ignored today in the modern secular and political educational system.
Political correctness is rife within the system. A wild life, promiscuity and bestiality is considered to be okay by modern standards. SNP educationalists prefer to ignore him for greater emphasis on the great battles trying to create 'nationalistic' emotions. 'New' Labour is into the same neo-liberalism political correctness. The gay lobby seem to be in the news every week accusing the world of not bending to their will. Gaining powerful allies within both SNP and 'new' labour. Oh how far man has fallen!
None the less I have included a short history of John Knox. I hope you find it both surprising as intellectually interesting.
THE TRUMPET'S BLAST
At the end of the second millennium, it can be difficult for a visitor to Scotland to believe that the nation was a backwater five hundred years ago. In fact, however, one sixteenth century writer could, without fear of contradiction, describe it as "a corner of the world separate from the society of men...almost beyond the limits of the human race."
However, Scotland in the early 1500s had one thing in common with the rest of Europe: a deeply corrupt and spiritually impoverished church, with spiritually and morally moribund leadership. To cite one notorious example, David Beaton, cardinal and archbishop, legitimated at least 14 children as his own. So much for celibacy. In addition, such was the spiritual ignorance that George Buchanan could claim that some priests thought the New Testament was a book recently published by Martin Luther!
Such spiritual penury was not confined to the lower orders. During the course of the trial of Thomas Forret in 1539, his prosecutor pulled a book out of Forret's glove and shouted, "Behold, he has the book of heresy in his sleeve, which makes all the confusion in the kirk." This prime exhibit for the prosecution was, in fact, Forret's copy of the New Testament! When one discovers that the presiding bishop at the trial confessed, "I thank God that I never knew what the Old and New Testament was," it comes as no surprise to learn that the brave Forret was burned at the stake.
Enter John Knox, and reformation was under way.
But Scotland was by no means transformed overnight. Nor was Knox the first Scottish reformer. He had been preceded by a roll call of heroes of the faith, men such as Forret, some of whom had given their lives for the recovery of biblical truth and the reformation of the church. Patrick Hamilton had been burned in 1528, and George Wishart (for whom Knox had been a bodyguard) was executed in 1546. So Knox came to reap what others had sown. His calling was to secure this embryonic work of God's Spirit.
Born in Haddington, East Lothian, sometime between 1513 and 1515, Knox received his schooling locally and then, according to Buchanan's testimony, at the University of St. Andrews. He became a priest and returned to his home parts as a notary and tutor. We know as little about his conversion as we do about Calvin's, except that on his deathbed he asked his wife to read him the passage of Scripture where he "cast his first anchor" (presumably in faith); she read John 17.
His life can be divided basically into four segments:
1.Following Wishart's martyrdom, Knox came to St. Andrews with some of his young students and, in 1547, joined the group of reformers living in the castle there following Cardinal Beaton's murder. When he was appointed to preach, he refused, but he was virtually manhandled into accepting a call from the castle congregation to become their minister. Within a matter of months, however, the castle was under siege from French ships in St. Andrews Bay. Knox and others were captured, and he became a galley slave for 18 months. 2.In 1549, Knox was released and made his way to England. He pastored a congregation at Berwick, but soon moved to Newcastle. He then became a royal chaplain during the days of the young King Edward VI. Moving further south, his influence grew, not least in his insistence on what came to be known as the "Puritan" principle regulating public worship: only what is commanded in Scripture is mandated in the life of the church. Paradoxically, it was the Presbyterian Knox who was influential in having the so-called Black Rubric included in the Book of Common Prayer, stating that kneeling to receive Communion was not a sign of devotion but merely a convenient form of administration. The death of Edward in 1553 was a body blow to the reforming party in England, leading as it did to the enthronement of Mary Tudor ("that idolatrous Jezebel" were Knox's carefully chosen words to describe her). Knox sought refuge on the Continent. 3.Between 1553 and 1559, Knox lived a somewhat nomadic existence. He spent some time with Calvin in Geneva ("the most perfect school of Christ ... since the days of the apostles," he called it). Thereafter he accepted a call to pastor the English-speaking congregation at Frankfort - sur-Main. But trouble arose there over his vision for a church that would conform absolutely to the New Testament pattern. In 1555, after a further period in Geneva, Knox returned to Scotland to strengthen the work of reformation. He particularly sought to encourage members of the Scottish nobility whom he feared were in danger of easy compromise with Rome.
Knox married Marjory Howes and, in 1556, returned to Geneva, where he pastored a congregation of some 200 refugees. The following year he received an urgent invitation to return to Scotland - 1558 was the scheduled time for the marriage of the young Mary, Queen of Scots, to the dauphin of France, an event that seemed to destine Scotland for permanent Roman Catholic rule.
Urged on by Calvin, Knox made a difficult and dangerous journey through war zones to Dieppe, only to receive word that some of the nobility no longer felt the urgency of the situation (some of them were actually in Paris at that time making preparations for the much-feared marriage of Mary). Knox's response was to urge upon these "Lords of the Congregation" the taking of a common band (bond or covenant), thus setting a precedent of covenant-making in Scottish piety.
A taste of Knox's vigor can be savored in a letter he wrote that same year to the people of Scotland, urging them not to compromise the Gospel. He reminded them that they must answer for their actions before the judgment seat of God. They could not then say:
"We were but simple subjects, we would not redress the faults and crimes of our rulers, bishops, and clergy; we called for reformation, and wished for the same, but Lords' brethren were bishops, their sons were abbots, and the friends of great men had the possession of the church, and so we were compelled to give obedience to all that they demanded.' These vain excuses, I say, will nothing avail you in the presence of God." 4.In 1558, England's "Bloody" Mary died and was succeeded by Elisabeth I. Knox sought a safe passage home through England. By this time, however, he was known as the author of the infamous "First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment [i.e. unnatural rule or reign) of Women", which had been published anonymously at first in Geneva (and had gone on sale without Calvin's knowledge). The safe passage was refused, and so it was by boat to Leith, the harbor for Edinburgh, that Knox finally returned home to begin his most important phase of public ministry. Despite his lengthy absences from his native land, several things equipped Knox to lead the reformation there. His name was associated with the heroes of the recent past; his sufferings authenticated his commitment; his broad experience had prepared him for leadership; and his sense of call made him "fear the face of no man." Knox gives a vivid account of these days in his "History of the Reformation in Scotland" (Banner of Truth). His famous interviews with Mary, Queen of Scots, often misrepresented, indicate his total commitment to the principles of Scripture. It was probably that total commitment that led to a dwindling of support among those from whom he had hoped so much. In earlier days, his radical vision had provided an opportunity for the nobility to lead Scotland into the future, but many were to prove too little concerned for the radical transformation of the spiritual life of the church and nation. As one modern scholar put it, "the language of the covenant had been replaced by a more seductive image - the common weal [i.e well-being]." This change in Knox's influence was illustrated at the coronation of the young James VI, where Knox preached the sermon but the ex-Roman Catholic bishop of Orkney performed the anointing of the king in accordance with the ancient rites. The return of bishops to the kirk already had appeared over the horizon. By the summer of 1572, Knox was a shadow of his former self Weakened by a stroke, it was beyond his powers to preach in the Church of St Giles, although he managed to do so occasionally at the nearby Tolbooth. By November, it was clear he was not long for this world. On the morning of November 24, he asked his wife to read 1 Corinthians 15 to him, and around 5 o'clock came his final request "Reid whair I cast my first ancre," meaning from John 17. By the end of the evening, he was gone. Knox himself wrote with deep gratitude to God of the work that he had seen accomplished: "As touching the doctrine taught by our ministers and. . . the administration of sacraments used in our Churches, we are bold to affirm that there is no realm this day upon the face of the earth that hath them in greater purity; yea (we must speak the truth, whomsoever we offend), there is none... that hath them in the like purity." Many explanations have been forthcoming for Knox's influence and that of the Scottish Reformation. No doubt there were many factors at work in the providence of God that brought about such spiritual renewal. But Knox's own conviction was this: "God gave His Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance." Therein lies the greatest lesson of his life.
CARVING OUT A LEGACY
In August 1963, the appearance of a nude model on the stage of the Edinburgh International Festival caused outrage in Scotland's capital. Queen Elizabeth's cousin, the Earl of Harewood, was at that time the festival's artistic director, and he complained sourly to the press in these words: "The fact is, my greatest enemy is still that old Presbyterian John Knox."
Doubtless, this was not the kind of tribute Knox had in mind when he prophesied before his death that, although his own unthankful age would not recognize what he had been to his country, ages to come would bear witness to the truth. Yet it is a remarkable fact that having troubled the consciences of monarchs in the sixteenth century (Queen Mary said she feared Knox's sermons and prayers more than the English army), here at the end of the twentieth century he is still cited as a major influence on Scottish culture and opinion.
Williston Walker, the Titus Street professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale, sums up his assessment of Knox's significance in this way: "He influenced not merely the religion, but the character of the nation more than any other man in Scottish history." And Thomas Carlyle, the social historian, gives an even broader opinion of Knox's legacy when he writes, "He was the chief priest and founder of the faith that became Scotland's, New England's, and Oliver Cromwell's: that is, of Puritanism."
But Knox's influence certainly has been very much wider than the boundaries of his native Scotland. After his release from the French galleys, Knox settled in England, first in Berwick and Newcastle. From there, the Duke of Northumberland brought him to London, and he became a royal chaplain to Edward VI and one of the most powerful preachers in London.
It was at this time that the Articles of the Church of England, which Archbishop Cranmer had prepared, were submitted to six theologians, of whom Knox was one. The king signed the authorization of the 42 articles just before his death. The evidence of the strength of Knox's influence is clear, and the Protestant emphasis in the subsequent Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England owe not a little to him.
He also played a crucial part in having the "Declaration on Kneeling" inserted into the 1552 Prayer Book of the Church of England. Cranmer already had sent the text of the Prayer Book to the printer. But Knox, meantime, was called to preach before the king and used the opportunity to condemn kneeling in receiving the Lord's Supper, which the Prayer Book decreed. After his powerful sermon, Knox was instrumental in having the so-called Black Rubric inserted in the Prayer Book, ruling out both Roman and Lutheran interpretations of the meaning of kneeling. Although it was dropped for a time, it was restored in the 1662 Prayer Book that still is used by many Church of England congregations. John Duke calls it "Knox's best gift to the Church of England." However, Knox's most significant legacy lies in the three foundation documents of the Reformed Church, which replaced the Church of Rome in Scotland. They were the Scots Confession of 1560, the First Book of Discipline of the same year, and the Book of Common Order of 1562. They defined, respectively, the creed, government, and worship of the Reformed Church. Knox was crucially involved with them all, and it is important for us to consider each of them briefly.
1. The Scots Confession of 1560
Neither Knox nor his five colleagues who were responsible for this statement of the Reformed faith had the weight of scholarship or the length of time necessary to produce an exhaustive theological treatise. But the twenty-five chapters have been assessed by Scottish church historian J.D. Douglas in this way: "Expressed in places less like a theological document than like a robust manifesto that reflected the contemporary climate, the Confession remained the basis of Church of Scotland teaching until the Westminster Confession of 1647. Even then, the earlier document was often regarded as the purest expression of the kirk's mind and heart."
2. The First Book of Discipline
Composed in less than three weeks in May 1560, although later revised, the book deals with the government of the Reformed Church. However, it embraces the whole order of society, and submits all manner of ecclesiastical and social practices to the final authority of Holy Scripture. Hume Brown, the historian, considers it "the most important document in Scottish history." Here indeed is the seedbed not just for Presbyterian church order and government, but for the principle of a well-educated ministry and the universal opportunity of education to the university level.
Douglas points out that in relation to the preaching ministry, the Book of Discipline insisted "Scripture was to be expounded consecutively, so that people might know the complete teaching. The impact was to be assessed in weekly meetings for catechetical purposes. There were to be weekly exercises for ministers within reasonable distance, for the discussion of Scripture doctrine.
3. The Book of Common Order of 1562
Sometimes mistakenly called "Knox's Liturgy" (for Knox was no liturgist) or more acceptably "The Order of Geneva" (for it was used by Knox in Geneva), the book was designed to be a simple directory for worship in the Reformed Church. To this day, there is a "Reformed Book of Common Order" in wide use in the Church of Scotland, based entirely on the 1562 book. It is a simple form of worship, reflecting the desire that the Word of God would have a dominant place both as the regulator of the church's worship and as the substance of its teaching. With a number of exceptions, the Reformed Church congregations in Scotland still worship today in all essentials as they did in Knox's time.
Together these three documents were like foundation stones for the Presbyterian and Reformed churches as they developed under the guidance of people such as Andrew Melville and his successors. Over the centuries, of course, there has been an infinite variety of opinion as to Knox's character, but there surely must be complete unanimity about his importance. Love him or hate him, revere him or deride him, this was a man raised up by God not only for his own nation and time, but for generations yet unborn throughout the world. Martyn Lloyd-Jones even argues that Knox was the father of the American Revolution!
In Scotland itself, he has been both loved and hated, honored by some as one of the greatest men and greatest preachers Scotland ever has known, and spurned by others as a bigot and an embarrassment.
However, those who disparage Knox would do well to remember that in denouncing him, they denounce also the qualities that have enabled the children of a small, poor nation to set their mark upon the history of the world.
THE THUNDERER
John Knox is best known as Scotland's greatest Reformation hero. Make mention of Knox and people immediately think of an uncompromisingly zealous advocate for the Reformed faith and the reformation of worship in the light of sola Scriptura. While there may well have been a Scottish Reformation without him, it is doubtful the Reformation would have been as biblically faithful and Christ-centered without him.
Knox was a man of 'many parts.' He was a fearless advocate for the Gospel; he was a brilliant controversialist; and he was a leader of national and international significance. What is often forgotten, however, is that at heart Knox was a pastor, a minister of the Gospel of the grace of God. He saw that his main duty in life was "to blow my Master's trumpet."
In the providence of God, Knox exercised his pastoral ministry during the most turbulent of times. Few men have had to contend with the unceasing, life-threatening opposition that dogged Knox throughout the length of his pastoral ministry. More than once he had to flee for his life due to the uncompromisingly biblical nature of his preaching. Not once, however, did Knox contemplate accommodating his preaching to the prevailing political or ecclesiastical consensus. In this, Knox remains an enduring model for ministers of Christ in every age.
Knox's call to the preaching ministry gives us a significant insight into the man he was. Far from pushing himself forward, Knox displayed an initial reluctance to enter the ministry. After receiving the pastoral call from the congregation in St. Andrews Castle in 1547, Knox, in his own words, "abashed, burst forth in most abundant tears." This deep sense of privilege, mingled with an equally deep sense of his own unfitness, was an enduring feature of Knox's pastoral ministry.
As a pastor, Knox recognized from the very beginning that his primary calling was to preach God's Word. From his first sermon, Knox revealed the boldness, even fearlessness, that would characterize the whole course of his pastoral ministry. Taking Daniel 7:24-25 as his text, Knox showed how the lives of the Roman clergy, the doctrines of the church, ecclesiastical enactments, and such "blasphemous" pretensions as papal infallibility all proved that the Roman Church was not Christ's body but the "whore of Babylon" and "the synagogue of Satan," and that the pope was not the "Vicar of Christ" but "Antichrist."
Knox's sermon became the talk of the town. "Others lopped the branches of papistry," it was said, "but he strikes at the root, to destroy the whole." Far from being gratuitously rude, Knox was subjecting corrupt, God-dishonoring, Gospel-denying church to the searching scrutiny of God's Word.
That first sermon, and the debate that followed, marked out the parameters of Knox's pastoral ministry. As a result of his uncompromising preaching, "a great number of the town openly professed" Reformed doctrine. The boldness that marked Knox's first sermon was an indelible feature of his subsequent pastoral ministry. Perhaps his most daring sermon during these years was preached on Christmas Day 1552 in Newcastle. Knox had learned that Mary Tudor might soon come to the throne, and he warned in his sermon of the dangers of papist rule - a warning that might easily have cost him his head!
When Mary was crowned in 1553, it was not long before Knox was persuaded by friends to leave England. Although exiled, he continued to exercise an effective pastoral ministry by writing letters of encouragement to his former congregations. In his "A Godly Letter of Warning or Admonition to the Faithful in London, Newcastle, and Berwick", written in 1553, Knox called upon his readers to "let it be known to your posterity that you were Christians and not idolators; that you learned Christ in time of rest, and boldly professed him in time of trouble." From 1560 until his death in 1572, Knox was minister of the most significant church in Scotland, the High Kirk of St. Giles in Edinburgh. It was said that one sermon from Knox had more galvanizing impact on the hearts of God's servants than 500 trumpets sounding in their ears.
It is difficult to separate Knox the pastor from Knox the Reformer. It was his commitment to preaching God's Word faithfully that gave to Knox his deep concern for the whole people of Scotland and that led him to press for a school in every parish, a college in every town, and a university in every city. In particular, Knox's pastoral faithfulness gave him a deep concern for the poor. He wrote, "Fearful and horrible it is that the poor, whom God hath so earnestly commended to our care, are universally so condemned and despised."
As a pastor, Knox exemplified at least three qualities that ever should mark the life and ministry of ministers. First, he believed not only in the infallible authority of God's Word, but also in its absolute sufficiency. His espousal of the "regulative principle" was grounded in this conviction. Second, as a pastor, it was said that he never feared the face of man (or woman!). Like Luther, Knox was always ready, if need be, to "stand alone." Truth before consequences was a non-negotiable conviction in Knox's life. Third, he preached "the whole counsel of God," in season and out of season, to great and small, without fear or favor.
For all Christians, but perhaps especially for pastors, Knox is a model of single-minded, self-denying service to the flock of God.
The Banner of Truth has published the enormously vital book of John Knox's, "Reformation in Scotland." http://www.banneroftruth.co.uk ISBN 0851513581
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Hear endeth the document by Scottish Theosophical Society. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/theosophical Merlin Master of the Occult (101733.3653@compuserve.com)
All the Best manifeste spectare
"Come, follow me" Mark 1:17
Epilogue
I have reached the inner vision and through Thy spirit in me I have heard Thy wondrous secret. Through Thy mystic insight Thou hast caused a spring of knowledge to well up within me, a fountain of power, pouring forth living waters, a flood of love and of all-embracing wisdom like the splendor of eternal Light.