World War II Third Reich Nazi militaria and collectables from small badges to complete uniforms, the Hitler Youth to the Waffen SS, and Enlisted Men to Generals. Parallel universes, dimensions that nearly resemble our own, were once pondered by Plato, and proposed mathematically by Princeton University graduate student Hugh Everett III in 1954. These parallel worlds, common in myth, have been staples in science fiction since Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novel,.

Part Two Theocracy Chapter 10: The Theocrats Parts two and three of WiH are presented as a dialog between my spirit guides and me. However, I wish to make it clear that very little of the material presented here was channeled in a single session. I would receive a few hundred words by automatic writing while in a fairly deep trance-state, then I would rewrite it while in a normal state of consciousness. Later, I would go back into trance to transmit the edited text to my spirit guides, and they would suggest corrections and additions. This process, repeated over and over, produced the dialog you are about to read. My spirit guides are responsible for the content and wording of both the questions and the answers.

This dialog starts with their answer to my request for knowledge of the Great Secret. The spiritual beings worshiped as gods by many religious groups are impostors.

They are nothing more than the disembodied spirits of human beings who refuse to reincarnate. They remain on the astral plane, where they exercise power over other spirits and over living people. We call them 'Theocrats,' a name also used to describe the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and other earthly rulers who justified their demand for absolute political power by posing as divine beings.

The concept that gods are impostors is the first postulate of a theory that provides explicit answers for almost any question about the nature of spiritual reality. Part of this theory is scientific. It explains what the soul is made of and how it functions. It also explains how the body, mind, and soul are inter-related and how psychic powers operate.

The rest of the theory is political. It describes the political organization of spirits on the astral plane, and the relationships that different factions of disembodied spirits have with living people. The Theocrats are violating natural laws when they refuse to reincarnate.

The souls of all living beings are constructed to incarnate and draw energy from the physical body. This is the only natural and efficient way in which the soul can get the vital energy it needs to function and regenerate itself. Although the mechanics of this process are quite complicated, we will explain them in some detail to allow you to understand the rest of the theory.

The soul is actually an astral body, made up of a special form of matter. This matter is composed of subatomic particles like ordinary matter, but with different properties. Let us call this special form of matter astral matter, and the ordinary form physical matter. The subatomic particles that compose astral matter have different properties from the particles that compose physical matter.

Physicists on Earth have named and described some of these properties, such as mass, spin, and electrical charge. You also have terms like 'charm' in your vocabulary for properties the scientific community apparently understands much less clearly.

The principal difference between astral matter and physical matter is that all astral subatomic particles possess much less mass than equivalent particles of physical matter. The charges and the mass ratios of the particles of astral atoms are about the same as those of physical atoms.

In other words, the particles that compose the nucleus of an atom of astral matter have a positive or neutral electrical charge and their mass is greater than that of the negatively charged particles that revolve around the nucleus. However, the astral subatomic particles equivalent to physical protons and neutrons are much less massive than physical electrons.

Since physicists often describe physical electrons as having 'negligible mass' compared with physical protons and neutrons, this means that the total mass of astral atoms is extremely small. How can astral matter exist in the presence of physical matter?

Why don't the tiny astral atoms simply get sucked in by the gravitational attraction of the physical atoms and end up orbiting them the way electrons do? Astral subatomic particles have a different characteristic that determines gravitational attraction. They are attracted by gravity to each other but not to particles of physical matter. In fact, the astral atoms and molecules that make up the soul occupy the same space as the physical matter that makes up the body. Both kinds of matter are mostly empty space between particles anyway, and since there is no gravitational attraction between the two kinds of matter, the molecules simply slip by one another. This also explains people's inability to see astral matter or detect it with physical laboratory instruments. Energy also exists in two different forms, physical energy and astral energy.

The photons that make up the two types again have different characteristics. Under most circumstances, astral photons do not react with physical subatomic particles. Nor do physical photons react with astral particles. However, the exception is important. You're saying that light and other electromagnetic energy do not affect astral matter. Does this mean that psychic energy is not in the electromagnetic spectrum at all, but in a different one? Advanced civilizations possess a unified field theory that describes the relationship between the two, but we can't describe it to you right now.

What's important in this discussion is that psychic or astral energy normally works only on astral matter. It does not produce physical or chemical changes in physical matter. The reverse is also true. How does psychokinesis work then, or does it exist at all? It exists, but it's nothing like what you now think.

In fact, your whole concept of the nature of psychic powers is a jumble of oversimplifications and errors. Psychokinesis does not move or change physical matter directly, but can do so by working through the links between physical and astral matter. These links are the 'Secret of Life.' The difference between living and non-living matter is that living matter is linked to astral matter but non-living matter is not. Complex organic molecules of physical matter can form a chemical bond with similarly constructed molecules of astral matter, and the resulting structure shows the characteristics of life: irritability and the ability to reproduce.

This process is very complicated, and your knowledge of physics is not adequate to understand all it completely. Here's an attempt to explain why astral matter can react chemically with physical matter only within living molecules and not within simpler molecules. It has to do with the vibrational frequencies of photons produced when electrons of both physical and astral matter change energy levels within complex organic molecules. These frequencies are the same allowing physical photons to convert to astral and vice-versa.

This happens only in certain kinds of molecules, not in all. These energy conversions allow a sort of chemical bonding to occur if the two molecules are similar enough. Does this mean that astral matter - in other words, the soul - plays a part in cell division? Yes, in the whole genetic process: it affects the reduplication of DNA. It also affects many different aspects of cell metabolism. And the breaking of the molecular bonds between physical molecules and astral molecules causes the phenomenon commonly called 'death'. How does this tie in with the idea that the body supplies the energy to nourish the soul?

Some of the electromagnetic energy generated chemically by the cell's metabolic processes is converted into astral energy by the links between the physical and astral molecules. This energy flows into the astral matter that composes the soul, powering its various functions and providing the raw material for regeneration of its astral matter. In other words, some electro-magnetic energy is converted into astral energy, passed into the soul, and converted into astral matter there to perform cellular growth and repairs. The astral plane is actually higher on an ecological energy chain than the Earth plane, which means it receives less total usable energy.

Plants convert solar energy into chemical energy. When animals eat the plants, they absorb this energy and use most of it in growth, repair of tissues, moving around, and other activities. However, some of it is also converted into astral energy and passed into the soul.

Since each of these energy conversion processes is less than completely efficient, each link in the energy chain has access to less total energy than the one below it. The impression of the human soul I get from this is that it's exactly the same size and shape as the body, linked to it cell-by-cell and molecule-by-molecule.

This is very different from my previous concept, which was that it is attached to the body at only one point through the traditional 'silver cord.' Please explain. Human beings actually have two souls, not one. So do all other animals; but plants have only one.

The soul we've been talking about so far is a primitive structure, an astral body that is merely an analog of the physical body. It is alive in the sense that it is made up of molecules of living astral matter, but it is not sentient.

It has a nervous system but not a mind. The true soul, the one you were just talking about, is a separate structure of astral matter. Using the term 'somatic soul' for the primitive soul linked cell-by-cell to the body and 'astral soul' for the other will make it easier to discuss this subject. The astral soul is a body of astral matter linked to the somatic soul's nervous system by what you call the silver cord. This is structured like a segment of plant root with feeder roots at both ends. The feeders at one end tap into the somatic soul's nervous system; those at the other end tap into the astral soul's nervous system.

Energy flows into the astral soul from the somatic soul and indirectly from the body through this cord. Energy flowing through the silver cord is the astral soul's only truly efficient source of nourishment.

This makes sense. I take it, then, that the silver cord breaks when the body dies, leaving the astral soul free.

Remember, though, that the astral soul loses its best source of energy when it separates from the body. By contrast, when the body dies, the somatic soul does not also separate and live on independently. It simply decomposes when the body decomposes.

Remember, it's very closely linked to the body with chemical bonds. I conclude from this that a new somatic soul is created during the embryological development of every new human being. In fact, a cell of living physical matter can't divide unless the astral cell linked to it also divides. Living cells and molecules can exist only in pairs, one physical, and one astral.

This is why many complex organic molecules undergo chemical reactions differently in living cells from the way they do in a test tube. I assume, then, that reincarnation occurs when an existing astral soul attaches itself to the developing somatic soul of a fetus.

You've also given a reason why the astral soul needs to reincarnate: to link itself to a source of vital energy and nourishment. Where in the process of embryological development does this occur? There are two very different reincarnation processes. The commonest occurs even before conception. Sexual activity often attracts a nearby spirit and causes a temporary attachment to a woman's somatic soul at the genital chakra. (The same attachment can happen to a man, but it generally lasts only a few minutes, because the attachment point in a male's somatic soul is vestigial, whereas the female's is fully functional.) The attachment can last up to about twenty-four hours; and if conception occurs during this time, some of the hormonal secretions that accompany the process cause the woman's nervous system to send energy to her somatic soul that keeps the attachment intact through the entire pregnancy.

Late in pregnancy, when the somatic soul of the fetus becomes sufficiently developed, another hormonal change causes the mother's genital chakra to reject the link to the attached soul, which then remains attached only to the fetus. I think this information might also explain why students of sex magic in both the East and the West have written so much about the relationship between the female menstrual cycle and various psychic and spiritual phenomena.

Most of them have noticed that kundalini energies vary significantly in both quantity and nature at various points during the cycle, and that there is also a connection to mediumship and even possession. Yes, this information can help magicians work out better theoretical explanations for the mechanisms of such phenomena. At present, the theories they use to explain their observed data are among the most complex and mystical hypotheses you'll find in occult books. This same concept should also be useful to people trying to explain some of the phenomena described by in: women experiencing phantom pregnancies after 'UFO abduction' experiences, etc. To get back to our discussion of the mechanisms of reincarnation, the primitive, involuntary form of reincarnation occurs in many of the more intelligent types of 'lower animals,' and it happens spontaneously to any human soul at a relatively low state of psychic development who happens to come close to a couple having intercourse.

Although it allows the soul to survive death, it has serious disadvantages for both mother and child. All during her pregnancy the mother suffers serious psychic energy imbalances, which can cause her both mental and physical illness. These are usually more uncomfortable than they are dangerous, but the damage suffered by the attached astral soul is often much more serious.

Signals intended for the mother's astral soul are also transmitted into the attached soul, and they usually scramble the contents of its astral mind quite badly. For this reason, few people who reincarnate by this method show the typical characteristics of the twice born: past-life memories, precocious intellectual or psychic development, etc.

What happens if an existing astral soul doesn't link to the mother's somatic soul? Does this cause an early miscarriage? Recent medical evidence shows that about half of all pregnancies terminate spontaneously within a week or two after conception; since an early miscarriage of this type closely resembles normal menstruation, the woman isn't aware she was ever pregnant. This has nothing to do with reincarnation, but has purely physical causes. Every human being has to have an astral soul. If an existing astral soul is not already attached to the mother, the fetus starts generating an astral soul of its own late in pregnancy. At this point, two things can happen.

Either a late reincarnation can occur, or the baby is born with a completely new soul, spontaneously created during its embryonic development. The people the Hindus call 'twice born' are those in which an astral soul at a reasonably high state of development has incarnated shortly before or after birth, a process that keeps the infant from developing its own new soul.

On the average, people with twice-born souls have a head start over those with new souls or souls received through early reincarnation. The astral soul of a twice-born person transfers memories into the physical mind during infancy and childhood that 'teach it how to learn.'

This is equivalent to raising the person's effective intelligence and creativity. Energy to nourish the soul flows from the body through the somatic soul to the astral soul, but there are smaller energy flows both ways that convey information. The astral souls of the twice born give them a head start by feeding valuable information into the physical mind. Why do the Theocrats refuse to reincarnate?

Remember Satan in Milton's 'Paradise Lost' saying, 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven'? The Theocrats are spirits with great knowledge and psychic power. They are a sort of ruling class on the astral plane, and they don't want to give up their power and privilege by reincarnating. Highly advanced souls who aren't Theocrats reincarnate and take the chance that their soul can properly educate their new mind, and that their next reincarnation will be a pleasant and valuable one. But it still involves taking a chance: the body might have hidden flaws that they don't detect before incarnating, or the child's earthly environment can take an unforeseen turn for the worse. Also, the late reincarnation process itself is as traumatic as the physical ordeals of giving birth or being born. This trauma erases many of the memories stored in the astral soul and damages the programming that governs the astral soul's functioning.

The Theocrats are too selfish and egotistical to take these chances, even though the alternative is extremely immoral. Another reason why Theocrats don't want to reincarnate is that human beings have two minds as well as two souls. One mind is in the physical body's brain, the other is in the astral soul, and both have separate consciousness. Normally, the astral mind is conscious while the body sleeps and unconscious while the physical mind is awake. The two are conscious simultaneously only during certain states of altered consciousness. This 'time-sharing' is humiliating for the astral mind's ego, which considers itself superior to that of the physical mind.

Theocrats want total consciousness for their astral ego, in addition to power over other spirits. This brings us to one of the most important things we have to tell you in this whole series of communications. The nourishment that disembodied spirits receive from living people as radiant psychic energy is not enough to sustain them by itself.

This is why all non-Theocratic spirits reincarnate within ten to fifty years after physical death: if they don't, the astral soul starts to degenerate because of a sort of malnutrition. The astral matter that makes up its tissues can't regenerate itself properly and reverse the effects of entropy. So the choice is reincarnation or illness, insanity, and death. The Theocrats have found an alternative to this, but it is an evil one: cannibalism. They use their telepathic powers to hypnotize spirits less highly developed than they are; then they attach the silver cord to them just as if the other astral soul were the somatic soul of an infant.

They can draw out enough energy this way to sustain themselves on the astral plane indefinitely, but the process destroys the other spirit. This is very frightening. Can they do this to just any other spirit, and can they do it to an astral soul incarnated in a body? Fortunately, no to both. If they could, neither you nor we would be here talking about it. The Theocrats would have eaten up all of us just to get rid of us.

They claim to be gods, but their powers are actually quite limited. Some of them are both more knowledgeable and psychically more powerful than most of the rest of us, living and disembodied, but they are far from omnipotent. They can't damage an embodied soul or override its conscious will, and they usually can't capture and devour disembodied souls who resist them, except for the weak and untrained ones that mediums call 'lost souls.' And even the majority of lost souls are capable of random psychokinetic bursts that allow them to flee the Theocrats when threatened.

The Theocrats obtain victims by posing as gods and by promising them 'eternal bliss in Heaven.' : Theocratic Bands Q. Please tell me more about the Theocrats and how they operate.

For example, who were they when they lived on Earth? Many notorious tyrants, conquerors, evil religious leaders, black magicians, and criminals have become Theocrats after death, but so have some people whom history calls saints or benign geniuses. Power corrupts, and the prospect of achieving immortality corrupts even more.

Many people with highly developed souls whose earthly lives were lived quite ethically chose to become Theocrats after death. This has been especially true of people who were religiously devout, then found out the horrible truth about their gods after death. If they were too powerful for the Theocrats to enslave and devour, some became members of the Invisible College and fought Theocracy; but others became Theocrats themselves. The temptation is very strong, because the Theocrats as a class have ruled both the Earth and its throughout most of human history. For example, most of the medieval Popes and other religious leaders notorious for being cynical and power-hungry are now Theocrats. So are many famous occult leaders, from Cagliostro down to.

I've learned a lot from Crowley's writings and from members of occult organizations he founded or influenced, but I've always also felt a deep emotional revulsion for him. While he was alive, Crowley was very similar to a double agent in espionage. Sometimes he helped us in our battles against the Theocrats, but at other times he worked for them. Of course, we were always aware that no matter which side he said he was on, his only real loyalties were to himself. This kind of egotism is a typical Theocratic personality-type, and proves that Crowley had been a Theocratic spirit between lives many times before. Right now, he's working with various Theocrats of an occultist persuasion, trying to turn some of the occult groups he founded into cults based on his worship.

He talked frequently about doing this during his life, and now he's in a position to put it into practice. This makes the War in Heaven sound more like the Allies against the Nazis than the forces of good against the forces of evil. It's all just politics. Both sides are working in their own interests. The important thing is that the self-interest of the Invisible College and of living people is the same. We acknowledge that we are part of the same human race as you.

The Theocrats are trying to become literally superhuman. Are you implying, then, that the time-honored goal of so many occultists - that of becoming or merging with a god-like being - is evil? That trying to do this turns people into Theocratic spirits who literally eat souls? This question doesn't have a yes-or-no answer, and before we can answer it all, we'll have to give you a lot more background information. The question isn't really a matter of morality so much as one of dealing realistically with natural law. For example, it is a serious violation of natural law for a disembodied astral soul to take on large amounts of energy by draining it from another spirit, because there is no template for determining how the energy is assimilated, as there is when the astral soul is attached to a body. In the latter case, the somatic soul acts as such a template.

When the somatic soul transmits energy through the silver cord to nourish the astral soul, the pulses of energy are arranged in patterns that keep the growth of astral tissues in proper balance. By contrast, when Theocrats absorb energy from other spirits, there is no such template, so the growth-pattern is random and may put the functioning of the astral soul out of balance. Because imbalances in the astral nervous system can cause irrational thinking and behavior, most of the Theocrats are insane.

And the bigger and older they are, very often the crazier they are. Many Theocrats do irrational and self-destructive things, and most of them eventually become so insane that other Theocrats destroy them. This means the Theocrats aren't really immortal?

Most of them aren't. They have the potential to be, but only by properly controlling the energies they assimilate, and few of them have the knowledge to do this. There are some very large, old, and stable Theocrats on the astral plane who do seem to have this knowledge, but they don't cause much trouble. They feed themselves by stealing spirits from other Theocrats and don't work directly with living people, so we don't worry about them much.

It's the younger Theocrats that cause the most trouble, both for the Invisible College and for living people. Why do the Theocrats maintain bands of spirit followers, and what are these bands like? The Theocrats enslave other spirits to provide psychic energy, as slaves or employees on Earth provide physical labor. Individual Theocratic bands can contain from a couple of dozen spirits to several thousand, with the average in the low hundreds.

The paintings and poems that describe a Heaven containing millions of souls are inaccurate. The daily activities of a Fundamentalist Theocratic band organized as Heaven are similar to a church service as such sects hold them on Earth, except that they go on perpetually.

The Theocrat in charge poses as the Lord God, and subordinate Theocrats pose as Christ, various Angels and Apostles, and so forth. God quotes the same Biblical passages and preaches the same sermons as preachers in the same sect do on Earth, and the congregation joins in singing the same hymns. Dead Fundamentalists in Heaven find out they even still have to confess their sins and receive divine forgiveness, because they are still capable of thinking 'rebellious and impure thoughts.' Of course, since they are in constant, direct telepathic contact with their God, the process is simple and automatic. Christians in Heaven are kept in a perpetual state of religious ecstasy, which activates their psychic powers under the control of their God. The Theocratic leaders of the band then channel this collective psychic energy to perform whatever functions they consider necessary. Most of the activities have to do with the survival of the band, and especially of the Theocratic dictator posing as God.

The band recruits new members from among the recently deceased, steals souls from other bands, fights to keep spirits like us from liberating members of the band, and so on. I still don't have a clear picture of how the Theocratic bands on the astral plane relate to living people. Each Theocratic band has to have a working relationship with a group of living people, often a religious congregation. Occult and political groups are also used; and now more and more Theocratic bands are controlling groups of people whose common interest is popular music, sports, or something else centered around the electronic media. Traditionally, the majority of Theocrats hung around places of worship, but now you can find them almost any place that crowds gather. Please clarify this. You talk about spirits being on the astral plane as if it's a place, but you also say, 'hang around places of worship.'

Just where is the astral plane? Is it on Earth, in another dimension, or what?

The is a condition, not a place. A spirit, meaning an astral soul, on the astral plane is in the condition of not being bound to physical matter through the silver cord. The Earth plane is the surface of the planet Earth as you perceive it with your physical senses.

The astral plane is that same place as we perceive it with our psychic senses. We and the Theocrats and all spirits live on the same world you do.

Spirits are present around you all the time, and if you enter the correct state of consciousness to put your psychic senses under conscious control, you can perceive them directly. This makes more sense than anything else I've ever heard about the astral plane. However, you and practically every other disembodied spirit I've communicated with telepathically or seen quoted in the literature still use the term 'astral plane' as if it were a place. You make statements like, 'When the soul separates from the body and arrives on the astral plane' Why do you do this? It's just a verbal convention, but we continue to use it to keep our communications with living people consistent with those of other spirits. You do the sane thing when you use illogical idioms and other grammatical structures simply to conform to common usage.

You're right. To get back to the Theocrats, then, every religious congregation has its own individual god? Yes, though there are also hierarchies of Theocrats on the astral plane that work very much like political hierarchies on Earth.

Does this mean that each Christian congregation has a Theocrat who claims to be an Angel or a Saint or something in charge of it, with some Theocrat equivalent of the Pope out there somewhere claiming to be the Lord God Jehovah Himself? This is roughly correct, but the reality isn't this simple. There are many such Jehovahs, thousands of them. The Theocrats who communicate telepathically to individual Christians when they pray also call themselves God or Christ or the Holy Spirit because that's what the believers expect, but they also claim to be angels or saints or devils when that seems appropriate. How are the Christian Theocrats organized - according to sect, or geographically, or what? The structure is very complex and constantly changing as Theocrats fight among themselves.

The intellectual content of Christian dogma among the living believers is a factor in this, as is the personality-structure of use religious mind control to program the minds of living believers, and the way they are organized as a political structure on the astral plane. However, the structure of the Theocratic bands on the astral plane is even more important.

There are many different kinds of spirits that you could lump under the rough heading of Theocrats. High-level Theocrats are rulers who claim to be gods or important servants of gods, angels and the like, and these all have bands of subordinates or servants working under them. They control these subordinate spirits by direct psychic means, something like hypnotism, or by persuasion or intimidation. This sounds very much like certain kinds of political structure on Earth, both in governments and in churches. I take it the Theocrats within each band have an ascending power structure, with a sort of 'dictator playing god' at the top, and other classes of Theocrats under them with different degrees of power and privilege.

And the lowest class at the bottom is like cattle, eaten by the rest. It is a very complicated structure, and it varies a great deal from band to band. For instance, there are dead Christians who think they are in Heaven, sitting around the throne of Jehovah 'eternally singing his praises,' when they're really just his slaves and possibly his dinner as well. Now you understand the real significance of 'Holy Communion.' As practiced in Heaven, there's nothing more unholy. I have always been revolted by the symbolic cannibalism in the Eucharist ritual, and I've heard a lot of other people say the same thing.

There's a terrible irony to the Christians eating the body of their god during life, and then having the process reversed after death. Only it's not funny, because in Heaven, the cannibalism is no longer symbolic.

And it's not just the high-level Theocrats who participate. All members of a Theocratic band are offered the Host, who is a rebellious or degenerating member.

Not all souls who enter Heaven can survive even through the obscene practice of feeding on other spirits. Many souls simply aren't developed sufficiently to survive very long even when nurtured within a Theocratic band, though they would survive if they reincarnated. Are there also Theocratic bands organized into a version of the Christian Hell, with the boss Theocrat claiming to be Satan and various subordinates claiming to be demons? Some people who deliberately become Satanists on Earth hold positions of power in 'Hell' after they die, and the lower classes are composed of Christians who believed the basic mythology but had too little self-confidence to believe themselves 'saved.' One major irony about Christian Hells is that individual believers usually don't have much power over whether they go to Heaven or Hell. That is determined more by which particular band of Theocrats gets to them as they're in the process of dying. All except the most devout believers have enough self-doubts about the strength of their faith and the certainty of their salvation that Satanist Theocrats can get control of them as they're dying and lead them off to Hell.

However, a Theocratic band organized as Heaven is more stable and easier to control than one organized as Hell, so Heavens are more common. There is no other significant difference between the two anyway: they are both just political institutions run to serve the interests of the Theocrats. The Moslem, Hindu, and Buddhist mythologies also describe a variety of afterlife states resembling the Christian Heaven or Hell; designed to imprison the souls of believers after death. As fanatical belief in organized religion declines in the modern era, the Theocrats have even devised ways to persuade atheists and agnostics to join Theocratic bands after death. The most common is simply to invite them to join what appears to be a community of spirits that includes some of their previously deceased relatives or friends, or some famous person they greatly admire.

Does this mean there's a 'Rock'n'Roll Heaven' presided over by Theocrats who claim to be the shades of Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, etc.? There isn't just one, but many of them, and the number grows every year. There are also 'Heavens' whose 'gods' claim to be politicians, movie stars, writers, and scientists, or even fictional characters.

However, we'd like to delay a detailed discussion of this until later. It's easier to describe the nature of Theocracy using the religious infrastructure that's been traditional through most of human history. Once we've done that, we will describe how the Theocrats have changed their methods because of modern technology and other factors, and what they intend to do in the future. For now, we will continue describing the traditional political structure of the Theocratic bands on the astral plane, especially those organized to resemble the Christian Heaven. Most of the lower-level spirits in these bands have no idea of what's actually going on, but genuinely believe that the afterlife is exactly what their earthly faith taught them it would be.

People who have had point-of-death experiences have often reported being met by Jesus, angels, or other religious figures who invited them into Heaven; but meeting spirits who claim to be previously deceased relatives or friends is even more common. Is this part of the recruiting process?

Point-of-death experiences represent a major mistake by the Theocrats: trying to recruit people who are close to death but not really dying. The silver cord is stretched out very long but not broken, and the mind is in a state of consciousness very similar to that occurring during the actual death process. The Theocrats perceive this and try to recruit the person into their band, but nothing happens because the silver cord is still intact, and disembodied spirits lack the psychic power to break it.

Eventually, the person returns to normal consciousness and remembers a point-of-death experience. We call this a major mistake by the Theocrats because many point-of-death experiences reveal information about the afterlife that the Theocrats would like to conceal. Sometimes, members of the Invisible College show up during the encounter and warn the person that the Theocrats are impostors who enslave and destroy souls. Only a few remember this warning consciously and talk about it afterwards, but many more are affected by it enough to become hostile to the Theocratic aspects of religion. I remember reading passages in accounts of point-of-death experiences that support both of your statements.

Especially, many people who have had such experiences tend to avoid church attendance and involvement with any sort of traditional religious dogma from then on. I've always been somewhat mystified by this, because it would seem logical for such an experience to strengthen faith in religion, not weaken it. The greatest enemy of Theocracy is the truth. The more that people find out about the true nature of the afterlife and other aspects of spiritual reality, the harder it is for the Theocrats to delude and enslave them.

This is why so many Theocratic religious sects forbid deliberate mediumistic contact with the spirit world. But point-of-death experiences are accidents, and there isn't much that the Theocrats can do to prevent them.

When people see the spirits of dead relatives waiting to greet then during point-of-death experiences, are these fakes like the Theocrats pretending to be Jesus, or are the other spirits really their relatives? Quite often, they really are. Theocratic bands often contain many members of one family. There are several reasons for this. Frequently, whole families belong to the same church congregation and are recruited, after death, into the Theocratic band that controls it. Even if not, ties of family affection are also used to recruit spirits after death. One of the most important activities of every Theocratic band is obtaining new members to replace the souls the band devours.

Maintaining a relationship with an organized group of living people also allows the Theocrats to maintain a social and political system here on Earth working in their interest. Theocratic bands maintain their relationships with the living by using, which should be described in a separate chapter. Let us end this chapter by pointing out that every single one of the ideas at the core of traditional deistic doctrine is a lie. 'Only God (under various specific names in different sects) is good: people are basically evil and are incapable of improving themselves morally by their own efforts.'

This is a lie. 'Only God is naturally immortal, but people can gain immortality by doing proper service for the Deity.' This is a lie.

'Human beings can receive forgiveness for their sins, and divine strength to prop up their various weaknesses, by ‘Letting God into their hearts' i.e., by creating a powerful psychic bond between themselves and the deity.' This is also a lie. From what I've learned so far, the biggest lie of all is that the 'gods' worshiped by organized religions are 'archetypes of virtue.' We humans are bad enough, but the Theocrats are obviously many times worse than the worst of us.

And it's not Satan who's the real 'Father of Lies.' However, the important thing to realize about this whole body of lies is that it makes people weaker and more evil than they already are, and increases their dependency on the Theocrats, as we shall describe next.: Religious Mind Control Q. Exactly how does work? It involves what modern psychologists call 'operant conditioning': altering behavior and mental programming by positive and negative reinforcement on the physical and sensory level. The Theocrats strengthen this conditioning on the physical level by transmitting ideas and emotions directly into people's subconscious minds by telepathy.

Religious mind-control techniques are easier to understand if you realize that the Theocrats use people's own psychic powers to control other members of the congregation. I've attended enough religious services of many different kinds to know that they frequently put believers into an altered state of consciousness and that they often generate quite a bit of. Is this what you're talking about? The key to the whole religious mind-control technique is putting people into a state of consciousness best called the 'religious trance.' It is essentially a mild hypnotic trance in which the conscious will is awake but passive, as opposed to deep trances, in which it is completely inactive.

People in a religious trance are completely aware of what is going on around them, and are recording these events in their memories exactly as they would in a normal waking state. They are also capable of thinking and acting voluntarily, but can only do so within certain very definite limits without breaking out of the religious trance and assuming normal consciousness. How do people enter the religious trance? People fall into a state very similar to the religious trance when they read, listen to music, watch television or a movie, listen intently to a lecture or radio broadcast, etc. The passive state that the will assumes during these activities is often called identification with the sensory intake, as in 'reader identification' or 'audience identification.' Identifying with what is being read, seen, or heard, actually means accepting the sensory intake uncreatively and uncritically on both the intellectual and emotional levels.

It also means agreeing with the ideas being presented and feeling the same emotions being described in the song, story, play, etc. It's fairly common to describe someone who's concentrating intently on reading, listening to music, or watching television, as 'hypnotized.' You're saying that this is literally true? Yes, but remember, it's a rather light trance.

If the material being presented begins to contradict the person's existing opinions or knowledge, identification breaks down. He or she assumes full normal consciousness and thinks, 'I don't agree with this,' or 'I don't understand this,' or 'This is wrong.' However, identification with sensory input can make people accept things they would reject if they were fully conscious, as long as the input isn't controversial or unfamiliar enough to break their concentration. Identification with sensory input is just the first step in entering the religious trance state. Once the conscious will becomes passive, the flow of character, assuming a level closer to that during sleep than that during normal wakefulness. In a person fully trained to enter the religious trance, electrical activity in the physical nervous system becomes stable at exactly the right level to allow an equal flow of energy into and out of the astral soul.

This allows the astral will to awaken partially, and creates a direct, two-way link between the physical mind and the astral mind. As long as the religious trance lasts, information can pass reasonably freely between the physical mind and the astral mind and vice versa. Also, the physical mind can receive impressions from the psychic senses of the astral soul more or less directly.

How does this compare to the trance state I'm in to receive this communication? Is it the same?

You are in a 'psychic trance,' which is not the same as a 'religious trance.' It's a much less passive state of consciousness, and involves much larger flows of energy into and out of the astral soul.

The psychic trance is controlled by both the physical will and the astral will acting in concert. The religious trance is controlled by outside sensory input into both the physical and astral minds.

The psychic trance is an active state of consciousness that leaves you free to ask questions and make comments using your full creative powers. The religious trance is a passive state used to control and brainwash people. The purpose of a psychic trance is for an individual to take conscious control of his/her psychic powers and use them to receive messages by telepathy or perform some other psychic working. What happens during the religious trance is not quite the same. Once people are completely in the religious trance, they are able to receive telepathic messages from everyone around them and from any disembodied spirits present; but the process is not nearly as conscious as what you're doing right now in a psychic trance. When religious believers say they 'feel the presence of God' at church services, they are referring to telepathic communication without even realizing it. Since the individual will is passive during the religious trance, the members of a religious congregation cannot use their psychic powers deliberately, under conscious control, as people in a psychic trance do.

They simply identify with what is sent to them, both intellectually and emotionally. Most of the telepathic intake received by an individual at a religious service comes from other members of the congregation; this is usually a more powerful influence than anything sent by spirits. The actual religious mind-control process, the technique that provides telepathic emotional reinforcement to help program people's minds, is a sort of 'psychic chain-reaction' that occurs while a group of people are in the religious trance together. In other words, the telepathic messages sent out by every member of the congregation influence the emotions and thinking of every other member, like a box of matches catching fire or an atomic chain reaction. This process creates a 'religious group mind': the telepathic transmissions of the entire congregation mutually reinforce one another until everyone present is thinking and feeling the same thing very, very strongly. People in such a state can feel extremely strong emotions, as strong as those that accompany the most powerful physical sensations such as sexual orgasm or extreme pain.

But this is done without much sensory stimulation - usually just preaching, hymn singing, or - because the reinforcement is coming from the psychic chain-reaction. I've heard this described as 'religious ecstasy,' but thought it was caused mostly by the sensory stimulation of the ritual itself combined with people's own desires to be deeply moved emotionally. I knew that psychic activity often occurred simultaneously, but never realized it was the key motivating factor for the whole thing.

The most important thing about this state of group religious ecstasy is that it generates large amounts of psychic energy. Part of that energy may be directly absorbed by any Theocratic spirits present, but most of it is diverted back into the physical minds of the members of the congregation to indoctrinate them with whatever the Theocrats want them to believe or feel or do. This is the essence of religious mind control.

In other words, a Theocratic spirit sends a telepathic message into the minds of people in such a state of religious ecstasy, and they generate powerful surges of telepathically transmitted emotion that program them to believe and act on the messages they receive. For example, the idea 'Abortion is murder' might generate powerful feelings of hate, whereas 'All Christians shall be as brethren' might generate feelings of familial love among all the members of the congregation. Within certain limitations, this is an extremely powerful method for controlling people's motivations and future behavior. One of its worst features is that the people being controlled enjoy it more than anything else in life.

You might call it the ultimate 'high.' And it's more addictive than any chemical drug. This means that the Jesus Freaks in the Sixties were speaking quite literally when they talked about 'getting high on Jesus.' At first thought, it is rather ironic that the Fundamentalists, who say they hate recreational drugs so much, are literally ' Jesus junkies.'

But once the thought sinks in, it's really tragic, like everything else I've heard so far about Theocracy. And the Theocrats deliberately make the religious mind-control process as addictive as possible to enslave believers. The whole vicious circle of sin, guilt, and forgiveness was deliberately designed to create a cycle of addiction that is almost impossible to break. The religious mind-control process resembles some of the direct electronic mind control described in anti-utopian fiction. George Orwell exaggerated when he thought the state described in his novel would arise out of modern Democracy and Socialism, but he missed something much more important.

His totalitarian state with its mind-control has always existed. It's as close as your local Fundamentalist church.

That's one of the most important things we're trying to tell you. People have always been 'property' and 'cattle' just as speculated, but it's not on the physical level. What has been enslaved is the mind during life and the soul after death. This is what was really hinting at in his, isn't it? And it also explains Shaver's Deros and hundreds of other references in fiction and serious speculation.

Very few of the people who wrote these references knew much about Theocracy as we're describing it here. All that really happened is that we were able to transmit a few words or some visual images to them telepathically.

Sometimes these were received in conscious 'flashes' of vision or inspiration; but more often they sank directly into the subconscious, and were later called up and considered original creations of the imagination. One example that comes to mind is the material about the Devil eating souls in by C.S. He must have picked up a glimpse of the truth about Theocracy, but he was so deeply brainwashed that it didn't liberate him.

His conscious intellect just twisted the information around to support his Christian belief system. Let's get back to the cycle of sin and forgiveness. I consider this one of the weakest points of Christian doctrine, because it seems to grant forgiveness without doing anything concrete to punish 'sin.' Even the token penance of saying prayers, etc., that Catholic priests hand out during confession doesn't seem like a realistic form of negative reinforcement to extinguish unwanted behavior patterns. This is quite true. The last thing the Theocrats want is for religious believers to stop sinning. That is why they made sexual pleasure a sin, and why Christianity and most other organized religions teach the obvious fallacy that women are inferior to men.

In other words, when the Theocrats made up religious doctrine, they included deliberate lies in it so that people would never be able to be completely virtuous. It's worse than that.

Fallible human beings can never be completely virtuous in the sense of being able to obey the absolute letter of any rigid ethical code. However, falling short of perfection in obeying most ethical codes provides reinforcement for modifying behavior in positive ways: the more people are punished for disobedience or rewarded for obedience, the closer their average behavior gets to the code. The 'better' they behave, the more positive reinforcement and less negative reinforcement they get. Even though they never reach perfection, they tend to feel the code is constructive because progress is rewarded and retrogression is punished.

This is easy enough to understand, but how does it apply to a moral code that says sex is sinful? That's the point we're trying to make. This kind of logic doesn't apply to such a code. Sexual desire originates on the biochemical level and cannot be extinguished by manipulating the programming of the mind.

People can be conditioned to hate and fear their sexual feelings and to avoid sexual behavior, but this doesn't stop the feelings themselves. They don't originate in the mind, so they can't be gotten rid of no matter how the mind is reprogrammed.

In this context, we are defining 'mind' as 'The information stored in the brain, plus the software for retrieving and processing that information.' Do you now understand the full magnitude of the problem that a completely false item of religious doctrine causes people? It's an inherently frustrating situation. The subjugation of women makes life much less pleasant for both genders. It turns women into slaves, forever unable to live full lives. And it does just as much harm to men when it turns them into oppressors and exploiters. This creates a no-win situation, because Fundamentalists still receive negative reinforcement even if they obey their moral code perfectly.

For example, trying to live up to Christian ideals of chastity is always going to create guilt feelings and internal conflict, because believing that sexual feelings are wrong does not extinguish them, even though it might repress or sublimate them. And living within a sexist family structure always creates interpersonal conflicts. I see now why you say this process is similar to drug addiction. The Fundamentalist moral code contains elements that can't help making people feel frustrated or guilty, which creates an artificial need for 'divine forgiveness of sins.' There's a significant difference between a humanistic ethical code and the moral codes of Theocratic religion. The former are designed to meet people's needs, the latter to meet the Theocrats' needs.

Even though most humanistic ethical codes are too idealistic to follow rigidly, 'human nature' itself regulates reinforcement in response to them in ways that prevent excessive guilt and frustration. In other words, committing murder or assault is severely punished, cursing and screaming at people less so, but the social environment of most societies does not punish people for merely feeling anger but not expressing it in word or deed.

However, the negative emotions themselves are a form of negative reinforcement. Notice that this process is self-limiting: serious offenses receive severe punishment, whereas minor ones receive light punishment.

This is not true of violations of religious morality based on absolutes. You and your readers should also be constantly aware that the Theocrats do not confine their activities to religion and occultism, but corrupt and control human beings through all activities that produce certain states of altered consciousness. For example, when people use the electronic media for passive recreational purposes - listening to popular music over the radio or on recordings, watching televised sports events and game shows, and playing the simpler computer games - they often enter a trance state that renders them vulnerable to telepathic mind-control by Theocratic spirits. We will discuss this electronic mind control in a later chapter; we must first give more background information about the nature of spiritual beings and psychic powers in general.: Soul, Mind, and Consciousness Q. Even though you've explained how the Theocrats indoctrinate people who attend religious services by conditioning them with a mixture of sensory and telepathic reinforcement, I still find it hard to understand this in terms of what I know about psychology. For example, how can the whole human race be so brainwashed that they don't even speculate consciously about certain aspects of spiritual reality? The idea that evil spirits might pose as gods and exploit people through organized religion is an obvious one, yet almost no one ever talks or writes about it.

The whole subject is literally 'unthinkable.' Also, if religious mind control puts people into conflict with their own human nature, as happens when they are taught that sexual feelings are morally wrong, why doesn't this negative reinforcement cancel out the positive reinforcement of religious ecstasy? And even more important, most Americans right now aren't Fundamentalists. The majority don't even go to churches regularly at all; and many of those who do, go to liberal churches that don't practice religious mind control as you describe it. Since this is so, why aren't all the facts about Theocracy and religious mind control common knowledge?

The answer to all these questions is the same: the Theocrats simply know a lot more about psychology than people do. An electronic computer analogy applies here. People on Earth right now are like the users of a computer system: they can in-put and retrieve data, and they can run the existing programs to process the data in set ways. Many of them have enough programming skills to modify some of the programs slightly, but they don't understand the basic design of the software very well. On the other hand, the Theocrats not only understand the software far more completely, but also have much easier access to the special 'command mode' used to modify it. This command mode is the telepathic chain-reaction used in religious mind control. Of course trained human psychics also have access to it, and so do spirits in the Invisible College; but it is still extremely difficult to free people from Theocratic control.

The mind of the average person on Earth right now is run by software designed by the Theocrats to keep people from consciously finding out they exist. And there's no use just telling people the truth: they simply can't understand or believe it, because the mental programs they use for understanding and believing things were designed by the Theocrats. Almost all religious and occult literature, and the majority of modern speculative writing that comes close to discussing Theocracy, assume that 'gods,' 'demons,' etc., have the power to kill humans who discover 'forbidden knowledge,' or at the very least, to over-ride the conscious will and keep humans from remembering such things or pursuing such lines of enquiry further. What are the facts on this? Especially, are the Theocrats aware of telepathic conversations like this one, and what can they do about it? Obviously, the Theocrats don't have the psychic power to kill people or analyze their conscious minds, or you wouldn't have survived to write this. They operate through the subconscious, and they keep people from finding out about them by making it difficult to understand certain kinds of spiritual information or draw rational conclusions from it.

An explanation of how they do this is quite complex. Like the answers to your first set of questions, it depends on a more complete knowledge of the nature of the mind and the soul than you now have, and this is going to be difficult to explain. Keep in mind, throughout what follows, that much of the terminology from psychology and computer science is going to be misused. We have to use the words in your vocabulary that are closest to the meanings we need to convey, but they aren't always too close. The first thing we need to clarify is the comparison between the human brain and a computer, and between the mind and the software and data in a computer.

The only similarity between the human brain and present electronic computers on Earth is that both store and process data. The methods for doing so are quite different.

This is where most of the books about biocomputers and psychocybernetics go wrong. They take the analogy between the brain and the computer, and between the mind and computer software, much too literally. The best example is that the electronic computer deals in absolute or 'hard' values, whereas the brain deals in comparative or 'soft' values. If you create a new file in a computer and enter data into it, the information stays there exactly as entered, and you can retrieve it in its complete original form just by entering the correct access code.

If you want to delete something, you can 'kill' it instantly and completely by using the correct commands. Everything you know about the human memory and learning process makes it obvious the human mind doesn't work this way. Memory storage and retrieval in the human mind is a cumulative rather than an absolute process.

If a person's senses receive a particular set of data only once, fewer of the individual details are recorded in memory than if it is received repeatedly. Also, information may be automatically forgotten if not periodically retrieved, a phenomenon that behaviorists call extinction. These two processes are almost impossible to analyze using a computer analogy. The electronic computer is an artificial construction, designed to do exactly what the human operator tells it to do.

It's also basically binary: a circuit is either open or closed, giving a series of 'yes' and 'no' answers. Computer software is designed exactly the same way, to match the hardware. The internal data-processing functions of the computer can be very complex, but this complexity is always built up out of these simple binary building blocks. Neither the brain nor the mind works this way.

Doesn't the biological principle of 'irritability' put a binary base under the behavior of living organisms? For example, some microorganisms show positive or negative: they approach a source of light, or they move away from it. This analogy doesn't hold up very well, because even microorganisms often show much more complex behavior than this. Biological behavior is based not on simple 'yes' and 'no,' but on increasing or decreasing orders of probability that an organism will respond in a given way to a given stimulus. The probability that an organism will show a given response is determined by the quantity and quality of reinforcement it receives for performing that response.

The behavior of the computer is based on 'either A or B.' The behavior of the biological organism is based on 'degrees of A or B' with the quantitative values of the probabilities being determined by environmental reinforcement of many different kinds. The computer model of the mind is still useful, though, because it's the only way even to begin to discuss the subject in the English language right now, poorly as the available terminology fits the realities. For example, it is much easier to understand the concept of the 'subconscious' if you think of the mind as the total data and programs stored in an electronic computer, with many different kinds of files, each kind having different access codes. In other words, what people call 'normal consciousness' is like a computer menu, which gives access to certain files and allows them to perform certain operations. Various 'altered' states of consciousness give access to entirely different menus. Since the Theocrats have some degree of direct access to the 'control mode' for modifying these programs in both the physical and astral mind, they have redesigned many of them to serve their selfish purposes for exploiting human beings both on Earth and after death.

Do they get this direct access during the religious mind-control process, and if so, why aren't people who don't attend religious services immune to it? Religious mind control is practiced in many different places besides religious services. The Theocrats often practice it on the crowds: • attending sporting events • in gambling casinos • at political rallies • during musical concerts of many types • in a number of other places. Whenever many people enter an intense emotional state at the same time and have their collective attention focused on a common objective, Theocratic spirits can use subconscious telepathic manipulation to put them into a religious trance and reprogram their minds with religious mind control. The Invisible College used the rock concerts, peace demonstrations, 'love-ins,' and similar events of the Sixties for exactly the same purposes. Before that we used meetings of fraternal organizations, a variety of progressive political meetings, and even the circuses and carnivals that used to visit every American village and town, as the Theocrats used, and still use, touring revival meetings. And the Invisible College will continue to practice religious mind control to reprogram people as long as the Theocrats do.

The important thing is to get as many of the facts as possible out into the open and let people decide for themselves. And it's finally beginning to happen. References to the truth about Theocracy are beginning to appear in the writings of hundreds of different authors. But the information is still mostly just isolated fragments, and it's also obvious that most of the people who write them down don't really know what they are, or even that they're very important. Even though most of the individual facts that make up the model of spiritual reality being presented in this book are already available to the public, very few people are capable of assembling them into a coherent theory, as you are doing here. This is because the mental programs they use to draw conclusions from information on spiritual subjects were deliberately designed by the Theocrats to be illogical and irrational. I've wondered about this for a long time, because empirical thinking appears to be the natural way for the mind to operate if you assume that the functioning of the thought-process is determined by positive and negative reinforcement.

As a general rule, assuming that the truth is true will bring positive reinforcement; assuming that it is false, or that something other than the truth is true, will bring negative reinforcement. There are exceptions to this rule, but it does operate with reasonable consistency, enough to program people with roughly empirical methods of thinking. This is what most people mean by 'common sense': drawing conclusions from the available observed information, and being willing to modify those conclusions if they are contradicted by further information when put into practice. Of course, this can get extremely complicated, especially when one is dealing with other people. Since the individual usually has rather incomplete information on a given subject, everyone makes a lot of mistakes. Also, people all tend to be conservative in making decisions: it's easier to keep on doing something the way you've done it before than it is to change just because the circumstances indicate it might be a good idea.

Both of these exceptions are important, but you should realize they are also self-limiting. The more information you receive that contradicts your present conclusion, the more likely you are to change it.

Also, your basic conservatism or inertia about changing opinions tends to give way when circumstances put enough pressure on you. When you start receiving significant negative reinforcement for behaving in a given way, it gradually becomes obvious that you should find an alternative. This is the way the mind operates in decision-making most of the time, especially in dealing with the physical world. But this kind of natural empirical reasoning is used much less often than one might expect in dealing with other people, and hardly at all in dealing with psychic and spiritual matters.

The Theocrats are responsible for this. The key to Theocratic power is the nature of what the behaviorists call reinforcement. As materialists, they think of it as something concrete; but it also has a subjective component, and the Theocrats are able to make use of this fact to manipulate the kind of reinforcement that people receive in response to their behavior. By 'a subjective component in reinforcement,' do you mean that a concept like 'pain' or 'pleasure' is subjective in the sense of being subject to interpretation by the person receiving the sensory impulses? That part of it is objective: the neural impulses we call pain are not the same as the ones we call pleasure; they have different electrical characteristics and travel over different circuits within the nervous system.

Yes, that's verified by what I know of scientific conclusions on the subject. Where, then, is the 'subjective component'? The best name for it in English is 'the emotional reaction to sensory stimulus.' As sensory stimuli are received by the mind of a person in a normal state of consciousness, they cause the retrieval of ideas and emotions from memory. This component is subjective because it comes out of memory storage rather than from the outside environment, and in many cases it has more effect on decision-making than the sensory input alone. Let's try a specific example.

Suppose a racially prejudiced white man takes a job where many of his co-workers are blacks. Initially, he tends to interpret everything they say and do in ways that reinforce his existing prejudice: if they are confident and assertive, they are acting 'above their station in life.' If they're friendly, they're being presumptuous and impertinent. If they sense his prejudice and keep their distance from him or act hostile, this is proof that people of different races are not meant to work together. His experience should be teaching him that, on the average, black people are no different from white people; but his own subjective reactions to sensory intake tend to prevent him from learning. The behaviorist literature describes these kinds of reactions, of course, because they are very common, but the psychologists don't even speculate that a deliberate conspiracy is responsible for those elements of human behavior that are irrational or self-destructive. Instead, they take a Darwinian approach.

For example, in the case cited above, they'd say that the prejudiced man learned his prejudice in an environment where he had little personal contact with black people: he received positive reinforcement from the prejudiced whites around him for showing negative emotional reactions when blacks were mentioned, so he became prejudiced. When he enters an environment where he comes in contact with black people, these prejudices continue to function until they are extinguished. This is a process very similar to random mutation and natural selection.

This process does account for a lot of human behavior. However, mental programming from Theocratic spirits has to be added into this equation. The Theocrats don't want people to learn from experience or adjust to new situations in their environment, so they encourage emotionalism over rationality. When people make decisions rationally, they are harder for the Theocrats to control.

Religious mind control is a delicate process, because the religious trance is a rather shallow one. If people in a religious trance perform rituals that are unfamiliar, or hear preaching that seriously contradicts their existing beliefs, they return to a normal state of consciousness. Effective religious mind control can be practiced during rituals only when those rituals remain relatively stable. This is also one of the principal reasons why Theocratic religion is socially and politically conservative or reactionary. I still don't see how the Theocrats can program the minds of the entire human race so thoroughly that the truth about Theocracy has never become common knowledge. A few people throughout history have, in fact, learned various elements of the truth about Theocracy and written them down in religious and occult literature.

However, these elements were always fragmentary; and more important, neither the people who found them nor the rest of the human race were capable of fully understanding them. Especially, no one was able to design experiments to discover further elements of this knowledge and work towards a unified theory to explain the whole thing. Why should the entire human race find it so hard to make the same breakthrough that I'm making, which enables me to discover and accept this kind of information?

I understand, at least partially, how religious mind control works on believers, but why should the minds of everyone else be similarly affected? This comes back to the basic behaviorist theory that human personality is conditioned into people by their physical environment - this includes the mental programs that they use to evaluate data and decide what is true and what is false. Even if you leave direct telepathic programming during religious mind control out of the picture, people still receive their programming from both their physical and social environments.

Programming from the physical environment usually favors empirical thinking, but that from the social environment favors acceptance of doctrine on faith. A large part of the customs and beliefs and instinctive emotional reactions that make up this social environment were created by Theocratic religion. The further back you go into human history, the greater the percentage of people who were devout believers in Theocratic religion and were subjected to religious mind control to a significant degree throughout their lives.

This definitely appears to be true when we look at Western history over the last thousand years, but I can see gaps further back. For example, it doesn't seem as if either the Romans or the Greeks were very devout during important periods of their civilizations.

On the contrary - the vast majority of the population in both civilizations were devout believers in Pagan religions that practiced effective religious mind control. However, there were periodic weakenings of religious belief among certain segments of the population, which allowed important occult, philosophical, political, and scientific works to be written, works based on some degree of empirical thinking. Remember, the Greek and Roman philosophers were just a tiny elitist group of intellectuals.

The majority viewpoint then was not that of Socrates, but that of the people who condemned him to death. The hold of Theocratic religion on most of Earth's living population did not begin to weaken until the Modern Era, from about the 1300's down to the present. And even today, the greater part of the population is still subject to religious mind control. Modern civilization does program people with personality structures that resist religious mind control, but the Theocrats have been able to counter our efforts along these lines by resorting to electronic mind control. My research into and the forces manipulating human civilization has given me the impression that the Invisible College also makes use of both religious and electronic mind control. This is true.

We discuss electronic mind control in more detail in the next chapter.: Electronic Mind Control A. Electronic mind control works on two different levels, just as religious mind control does. We described in some detail in how religious services put people into an altered state of consciousness similar to a light hypnotic trance, and how the thinking and behavior of people in such a religious trance can be influenced by what they experience through the physical senses during the service. In other words, they often learn to believe and act on the preacher's words as people, learn to react to post-hypnotic suggestions during regular hypnosis.

Electronic mind control does exactly the same thing, and often to an even greater degree. It is also even more addictive than religious mind control. Like religious mind control, electronic mind control works on two different levels, and. We will next discuss the physical level, which can be directly observed with the physical senses and analyzed with the conscious intellect. There are many, many books in existence that describe this process, including detailed instructions for spotting subliminals by analyzing movies or TV shows in extreme slow-motion, along with explanations by psychologists for determining what specific effects the subliminal messages will have on the viewer. Similar information has also been published describing how sensory mind-control is performed through popular music, radio talk shows, and other auditory media, though this subject has not been treated as extensively as mind-control through. Electronic or media mind-control has a psychic component just as religious mind control does, but this employs completely different mechanisms, and your readers should be careful not to get confused reading the two sets of technical details in one book.

They don't contradict one another, but they might seem to if not completely understood. Everything we said in Chapter Twelve about religious mind-control is based on the postulate that psychic phenomena are broadcast-propagation phenomena like light or radio waves, and that they obey the inverse-square law.

In other words, the strength of a telepathic signal varies inversely with the square of the distance between transmitter and receiver, so psychic workings function most efficiently when the people or spirits involved are spatially close to one another. This is one reason why we continually stress the fact that the astral plane is a condition, not a place, and that spirits are present in the same space that living people occupy.

However, there is a second, non-broadcast system for transmitting and receiving psychic energies between human souls, which we haven't mentioned yet. Do you remember the old Greek Myth about the ' woven by the goddesses called?

These threads actually exist, but they aren't woven by superhuman beings. They are 'transmission lines' of astral matter that connect one soul to another, and they allow telepathic communications over greater distances and with greater power than can be accomplished by ordinary 'broadcast' telepathy. These threads are created spontaneously when astral souls come into contact with one another while generating large amounts of psychic energy. Whenever the astral mind is in the correct state of consciousness, generating these threads is just as natural and automatic as the process that spiders use to leave a silk strand behind them when they travel. When this additional theoretical information is added to the material about religious mind control in Chapter Twelve, it explains how television evangelists can exert a direct psychic influence over their congregations from a distance.

The process has two possible starting points. First, people who regularly attend Christian church services dominated by the Theocrats are urged to watch certain television evangelists and to listen to designated religious radio broadcasts.

Over the years, an elaborate network of astral transmission lines has been built up to link the religious broadcasters to the clergy of Theocratic congregations all over the country, and through them, to the masses of ordinary members. These psychic threads are put in place when radio and TV preachers are invited to hold services at church conventions, or when a group of churches hosts a large local revival meeting with a media evangelist, or someone working for one, as a guest. This method is used primarily to link the churches to the hundreds of second-rank broadcast evangelists with regional or local media followings. The superstar evangelists who already have national followings reverse this procedure: they invite the ministers and elders of selected churches all over the country to visit their studios and become part of the in-house congregation during their broadcasts. In either case, psychic linkages are established between the media evangelist and the local churches. Some of the more ambitious TV evangelists have also directly linked large numbers of ordinary members of Theocratic congregations - and hundreds of thousands of new converts as well - into their electronic mind control networks by periodically holding huge, live revival meetings. (They are often held in major sports stadiums, which, as we will see in a moment, is especially appropriate.) This is also why several of the major evangelists have started colleges, and why one TV ministry even built its own imitation of Disneyland.

Sometimes the little details are more biting than the big, mind-boggling horror stories. Think of it: a theme park where families can get enslaved to both electronic and religious mind-control while they take their vacation! However, the media networks used by the TV evangelists are not the most important electronic mind control networks in the United States right now. The Theocrats have another mind control network that enslaves large numbers of people who have little or no interest in organized religion. It's centered on the major spectator sports, organized gambling, and the communications media that service both; and it controls more people than all the Fundamentalist churches and TV evangelists combined. It doesn't program people's surface thinking and behavior as thoroughly as Theocratic religion does, because there's less verbal-intellectual content, but it's just as effective at programming their subconscious minds into forming instinctive opinions favorable to the goals of the Theocrats.

People don't have to be watching a sermon or listening to a hymn to receive subconscious telepathic messages from the very same spirits who control fundamentalist religion; they only have to be in the correct state of altered consciousness (which TV and radio produces automatically in all members of the audience who haven't learned specific techniques for preventing it), and they have to have the transmission lines of astral matter implanted in the right part of their soul, linking them into the network. In other words, the football widow's husband absorbs just as much Theocratic media mind-control from his weekend glued to the tube as does the Fundamentalist who watches the same amount of religious programming?

Live sports events and casino gambling serve the same function in this network as church services and revival meetings do in the electronic religious mind control networks. Compulsive gambling, especially on sports events through an enormous (and mostly illegal) electronic bookmaking network, plays the same part as does the cycle of sin/guilt/forgiveness in Theocratic religion. And the Theocrats are now actively expanding this form of mind-control. Notice that many states have recently legalized various forms of gambling that plug people into the networks just described: • state lotteries • horse racing (including off-track betting) • bingo • card parlors, etc. It's no accident that gambling expands on both the in-person and media levels as the Fundamentalist churches and TV evangelism decline. The Theocrats are shifting their attention to activities more natural to the average opinions and lifestyles of present day Americans. Before I made the breakthrough, I always wondered why the Sixties Movement was instinctively hostile both to organized spectator sports and to organized gambling, while enthusiastically embracing a wide range of other 'vices,' major and minor.

On the purely physical level, being a fan of organized sports is usually only a waste of time, and gambling is only a waste of money, whereas irresponsible experimentation with drugs, sex, and lifestyles can do much more serious harm to people. I knew that both sports fanaticism and gambling were addictive and could sometimes seriously harm a susceptible person, but I also knew that virtually anything could cause a harmful addiction if a person has the right pattern of character defects. However, I also felt very strong background 'vibes' in the counterculture that said, 'Stay away from spectator sports and big-time gambling.'

Now I know why. Casino gambling in Nevada is one of the most important battlefields in the war between the Theocrats and the Invisible College. Once Theocratic spirits get their control threads on people gambling in the casinos, they continue to send telepathic messages into the minds of these people whenever they watch certain television programs, especially sports events and game shows.

However, the Invisible College also uses the Nevada casinos, though we're not going to give a detailed description of what we do there. As a magician working for the Invisible College, I go to the Nevada gambling areas periodically to do various magical workings to support our side in this conflict. Now, I already know I shouldn't describe these psychic battles in detail for security reasons, but it's OK to point out that they occur, isn't it? It's OK for your readers to know that the electronic mental reprogramming networks of the Theocrats and the Invisible College have their American headquarters in Las Vegas: the Theocrats are mostly on and we are mostly. And you should also add some advice for people who enjoy recreational gambling. If people want to gamble, we strongly recommend that they do it in private games with friends, or at local bingo or card clubs if such are legal where they live.

These forms of gambling can still plug people into an electronic mind-control network, but they're less dangerous than the Nevada casinos. Going to Reno or Vegas or Atlantic City to gamble for fun is like going 'out on the town' in Saigon during the late Sixties. There's a war on, and the innocent can get caught up in it as easily as the combatants. People who disregard this advice and go to Nevada to gamble anyway can minimize the danger if they are careful to remain in a normal state of consciousness. This means: don't sample the free drinks, and above all, don't gamble for more than an hour at a time. If you get at all intoxicated or spaced out from fatigue, the Theocrats can put you into the same type of trance that people go into at religious services, and start brainwashing you. They can also make you lose more money than you intended to risk: this now happens to the majority of people who go the Nevada casinos just to have a good time.

Electronic inter-state banking, allowing cash advances on almost any credit card right in the casinos, is partly responsible for this; but the major reason is simply that the War in Heaven is hotter than ever before, and both sides are generating a lot more psychic force. And remember too that gambling is just as addictive as alcohol or heroin.

The Theocrats love to turn people into compulsive gamblers. That suits their purposes just as well as turning them into Jesus-addicts needing their weekly fix of 'divine forgiveness of sins.' Of course, both sides in the War in Heaven employ electronic mind control, and the Invisible College does even more of it than the Theocrats, working mostly through popular music and pop culture in general.

Once people have been to a certain number of live rock concerts, whether huge ones in sports stadiums or small ones in clubs, then they are permanently linked into a media mind control network run by the Invisible College, and they receive subconscious telepathic messages every time they listen to the right kind of music on the radio or on their own stereo systems. The song lyrics perform the same function in this process as sermons do in religious media mind control. There are some truly amazing messages being sent through this medium these days - a lot of it sounds as if it's straight out of the pages of this book - and yet few people seem to be consciously aware of them. Some of the people who write for underground rock fanzines are beginning to realize that the songs contain important messages about life after death, magic, psychic development, etc., but the music critics whose work gets national circulation have given this little attention so far. This is mostly because it's so hard to hear the channeled messages in song lyrics: most of them are subliminal unless you go to special efforts to pick them out word by word, and when you do extract them, they're written in an elaborate jargon and code. People who are part of the mind control network learn a deep instinctive understanding of this code, but few can paraphrase the content of the messages into plain English. There's a further complication in all this.

We pointed out earlier that we have taken control of certain Christian churches and media evangelists and now use them to fight Theocracy. And in another chapter, we described how the Theocrats were also active in the middle of the Sixties Movement, trying to subvert individuals and groups over to their side. Exactly the same thing is going on today. We use sports and gambling for reprogramming when we can seize control of part of the network, and the Theocrats have a large and powerful following in the Popular music world.

A word of advice to conscious psychics and magicians: even if you remain hostile to all forms of involuntary mental reprogramming, you can still help people learn to defend themselves consciously against it. Every school of occultism has its spells for taking curses off of people, and most of them involve detaching the victim from the astral communications lines that are causing the problem. These techniques should be taught to anyone with sufficient control of the psychic powers to use them, and the 'clearing' rituals themselves should be widely and publicly performed. Of course, this will also knock out beneficial mind-control linkages put there by the Invisible College and all the 'good' occult groups, so we personally recommend that people who perform such spells should also be prepared to create new beneficial linkages of their own.

However, if you are still too hostile to all forms of mind control to do this, it's still more important to break the Theocratic linkages. That's a major difference between us and the Theocrats.

We would rather see people completely free of control-linkages than enslaved to the Theocrats. I believed for years before I made my breakthrough that a significant percentage of the 'dangerous visions' in science fiction and other speculative literature are spirit-dictated massages, and I now know the hows and whys of it. Yes, this is still another form of media mind control, operating through the printed word rather than the electronic media. Remember, people fall into a trance state reading light literature for recreation, just as they do watching TV or listening to music.

Even more significant, literally millions of Americans are now practicing relatively advanced forms of sex and drug magic without considering themselves formal occultists or bothering to learn the intellectual knowledge traditionally associated with such practices in both the East and the West: • the cabalistic/alchemical systems • the Tantric system • various Amerindian or African systems, etc. Instead, people just learn specific techniques by having sex or turning on with someone who already knows them, and then proceed from there by trial and error.

Many such experimenters have been hurt trying this, but a large number of them have gotten to the point where they can channel down instructions directly from spirits; and at that point they have almost the same access to psychic development tools as the advanced, formal occultists have. With one big exception: because they never bothered to learn the associated spiritual, cosmological, philosophical, ethical systems, they are almost totally ignorant of how to identify the political faction a particular spirit belongs to on the astral plane, so their channeled information is usually a mishmash from many different sources. We have now completed our explanation of what the Theocrats are and how they operate. Next, we will discuss the history of Theocracy on Earth, from its beginnings to the present.: The History of Theocracy A. Theocracy on Earth has passed through four different stages of development so far, and is now entering a fifth. We will describe the first four stages here, leaving the fifth for a later chapter.

The first stage was tribal shamanism of the type that produced the Alta Mira cave paintings thousands of years ago. First-stage Theocratic religions have never entirely died out, and still exist today among certain tribes of North American Indians, Africans, and Australian Aborigines. Most of them, though, have been evolving into more advanced types or have been replaced with outside religions since these peoples came into ever-increasing contact with foreigners over the past few hundred years. In the course of my training as a magician, I've worked with people who practice a number of these 'primitive' systems and found that many of them are as skilled at telepathy, psychic mind control, psychic healing, etc., as highly trained Eastern and Western occultists. I've also read extensively about dozens of other shamanic spiritual systems, and they all seem to be designed to teach advanced operational magic techniques as a routine part of religious practice. What's primitive about that?

When it comes to magic, it is Christianity and the other modern mainstream religions that are primitive, not the shamanic systems. First-stage Theocratic religions are not primitive from a human perspective, but they are from a Theocratic perspective. As you point out, most of them teach extremely sophisticated and effective psychic-development systems. This is what makes them primitive - in the sense of 'crude and inefficient' - from the viewpoint of the Theocrats, who judge a religious system by how well it allows them to control every phase of human thinking and behavior, especially the conscious use of the psychic powers. In any society with a first-stage Theocratic religion, the majority of people who learned significant psychic skills in a previous lifetime have an opportunity to develop them consciously during the present lifetime, because the shamans who serve as clergy are conscious psychics themselves.

Religious services in a first-stage Theocratic religion are usually conducted with the entire congregation in a psychic trance. This is in direct contrast to the more advanced forms of Theocratic religion, which discourage conscious, independent psychic activity, and employ the religious trance rather than the psychic trance. A religious elite composed of is much harder for the Theocrats to control than one composed of clerical or secular rulers who submit to religious mind control.

A shaman is much more likely to put his or her own psychic development above the telepathic commands of the Theocrats. Also, shamanic mythologies often contain major elements of the truth about Theocracy, and so teach people an instinctive aversion for mind control and enslavement by spirits. I know from my reading on the subject that most such religions teach that some disembodied spirits eat others.

They do, but the information is usually encoded in such a way that the believers, including the shamans who channel it, do not realize that the 'Eaters of Souls' are their own gods. Instead, the Eaters of Souls are said to be the gods of enemy tribes, or spirits that are very different from human beings such as of various Amerindian tribes, or the ghosts of human criminals and outcasts. The shamanic religions usually teach that a tribe's gods protect their own people from the Eaters of Souls. Also, the powers of the Eaters of Souls are exaggerated. Most of the legends say they can steal the souls of living people, except those of the most powerful shamans.

And this idea hasn't died out at all. It's present in the writings of, in the modern Fundamentalist propaganda about demonic possession, and in the extant first-stage religions themselves. For example, the present-day still have powerful instinctive fears of witches and shape-changers, and much of their traditional religious practice is intended as a defense against these evil beings. When you come right down to it, I myself feel deep instinctive fears that maybe the Theocrats can in fact forcibly take over the minds of living people or somehow damage their souls. Of course you have these fears. You learned them from a psychic and social environment still dominated to some extent by the Theocrats and their propaganda.

However, the very fact that you are able to write about this is evidence that the Theocrats are liars. Their control over people is indirect, exercised mostly by programming the subconscious mind. They can't overwhelm the conscious will of any normal person, only the wills of people with seriously damaged physical or astral minds; and they can't directly harm or enslave the soul when it is incarnated. However, at a certain point in the future, the Theocrats will probably become more powerful; but this has nothing to do with the history of Theocracy so far.

We'll deal with this subject in Part Three. For the time being, we will just say that it is nothing to be unduly alarmed about, because we're prepared to deal with it. OK, let's leave it alone for now and go back to the description of first-stage Theocratic religion. First-stage Theocratic religion is far less efficient than the more advanced stages of Theocratic religion in providing nourishment for the Theocrats, because it doesn't provide much opportunity for them to enslave and devour the souls of believers after death. The souls of shamans often don't allow the Theocrats to control them on the astral plane: either they reincarnate, or they set themselves up as independent Theocrats in competition with the existing ones hanging around that particular tribe. The whole religious system encourages people to practice conscious psychic development techniques and to become shamans themselves if they have the necessary talent.

Since the shamans enjoy political power and social prestige, there is strong motivation for psychic development, even though the training methods such primitive societies employ are usually extremely laborious, painful, and dangerous. I can see proof of Theocratic mind control and group minds by observing what happens when Amerindians move from isolated reservations to 'red ghettos' in the big cities. They suffer more from culture shock than do rural black people when moving to the city, because they are entering a totally alien environment on the psychic level as well as on the physical level. The blacks are already familiar with Christian group minds, but Amerindians who have been raised as believers in a first-stage religion are not. That is why many 'City Indians' are skid-row alcoholics, or spend much of their lives in prisons or mental hospitals. It also explains why a large number of City Indians who do adjust to the urban environment become Christian Fundamentalists: they don't have the experience to resist Theocratic propaganda and religious mind control.

This leads me ask: do the Theocrats who pose as the gods of a tribe with a first-stage religion find it easy to enslave tribal members who haven't have highly developed shamanic powers? Not often, because such people's fears of the Eaters of Souls keep them from approaching their gods after death. They expect to become fearful wanderers after death, and that's exactly what happens. Sometimes the Theocrats manage to catch them and persuade them to put themselves under direct telepathic hypnosis, but that's the exception rather than the rule. The Theocrats of a primitive shamanic religion are usually quite short-lived. Often, deceased shamans try being Theocrats for a while; then they have to reincarnate to keep from literally starving to death.

What, then, the Second Stage of Theocratic religion, and what cultures have practiced it? The Second Stage of Theocratic religion involves mass human sacrifice and usually cannibalism on a large scale as well. The Aztecs practiced it until about five hundred years ago, and some of the ancient Middle Eastern people did also, starting about five thousand years ago. I'm familiar with the practice of large-scale human sacrifice by the Aztecs, the Assyrians, some of the Babylonian and Punic tribes, and others; but don't human sacrifice and cannibalism go back much earlier as common religious and social practices?

Such practices were part of many primitive shamanic religions. The difference is in the scale of the sacrifices and cannibalism. The second-stage Theocratic religions became possible only when human societies started to become densely populated and highly organized.

Such societies built cities and had reasonably sophisticated farming techniques. They also had large, powerful governments and highly organized armies that fought major wars. For some reason, less is known about these societies and their religions than about either primitive shamanism or more advanced societies that existed simultaneously. I take it that the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews were not societies with second-stage Theocratic religions? No, both were in the Third Stage when they first appeared in written historical records, and archaeological evidence shows that they probably went directly from the first stage to the third, as did the Greeks and the rest of the Western Aryan peoples.

The Second Stage of Theocratic religion was a failed experiment from the Theocratic point of view. And from the human point of view, such societies were so repugnant that few people want to learn much about them. This is why historians have written so little about them. For example, the historians of ancient Rome reported that their leaders said, 'Carthage must be utterly destroyed,' and that the city was eventually torn down stone by stone, the population slaughtered, and the surrounding agricultural area sown with salt. But they didn't explain in much detail what it was the Carthaginians did that justified this genocide, except that they practiced human sacrifice. Now, the Romans also practiced human sacrifice through most of their history: gladiatorial fights to the death and throwing people to the lions are definitely in that category, but the Roman religion was still third-stage, not second-stage.

Human sacrifices were only a small, atavistic detail in Roman paganism, not the main focal point of the whole religious system that they were to the Carthaginians. As I understand a second-stage Theocratic religion, it's usually a literal theocracy, with the despotic rulers of the earthly society claiming to be god-like beings superior to the rest of the population. Is this significant? Third-stage Theocratic religions may also be ruled by 'God-Kings.'

The ancient Egyptians are the best-known example. And the rulers of many societies with fourth-stage religions have also claimed divine descent: the feudal emperors of both China and Japan are examples. Nor do the rulers of a second-stage Theocratic society always pose as divine beings. They may claim only to be a mortal priesthood acting out the will of disembodied gods; or such a society may have separate clergy and secular rulers. This is not a factor in determining whether or not a society has a second-stage Theocratic religion. Among the determining factors are a large, densely populated, totalitarian society and the practice of human sacrifice on a large scale. The most important factor is deism as we defined it previously: belief in gods that are omnipotent or at least significantly superhuman.

This separates the three higher levels of Theocratic religion from primitive shamanism, which considers the gods rather similar to earthly shamans, except that they are disembodied spirits. Often they are simply called 'The Spirits of Our Ancestors' or 'The Shamans in the Spirit World.' OK then, under a second-stage religion, people believe in superhuman gods who must be placated with mass human sacrifices that also often involve cannibalism. Is the cannibalism a significant factor? It was practiced only by those second-stage Theocratic societies that were short of red meat in their diet: the Aztecs and the ancient Polynesians, for example, who didn't have many domesticated food animals. The reason that second-stage Theocratic religion practiced mass human sacrifice was to supply the Theocrats with a constant food supply. When the victims were killed as part of a large public religious ceremony, the telepathic chain-reaction generated by a congregation in the religious trance was sufficient to put the victims' astral souls into a hypnotic trance before death.

When they were suddenly and violently killed, the Theocrats were usually able to get control of the souls before they had a chance to flee. This is one of the few examples in the history of Theocracy where the Theocrats were able to seize souls by force, and they could do it only with the help of large numbers of living people. This makes sense.

Does it also mean that human sacrifices performed by some of the more odious cults today don't have the support of the Theocrats? Well, the Theocrats, all of them, like to see cultists do terrible things like this because it gives occultists and everyone else outside Theocratic religion a bad name, but they don't usually get control of the soul of the sacrificial victim. There simply aren't enough people at such ceremonies to generate sufficient psychic power.

The main reason that second-stage Theocratic religion has been quite rare in history is simply that it's so cruel and violent. Societies like that had to fight endless wars against their neighbors, or else enslave and sacrifice a significant portion of their own population. Either way, they tended to become unstable because of the mass violence, or to be conquered by their enemies. However, the real reason such religions were short-lived is that they couldn't compete with third- or fourth-stage Theocratic religions when they came in contact with them. It's time to go on to discussing the Third Stage.

The Third Stage of Theocratic religion involves mass animal sacrifices. Although they prefer human souls, Theocratic spirits can nourish themselves off the astral souls of lower animals to some extent. And these souls are easier to paralyze and control with religious rituals than human souls are. However, the astral tissues of animal souls aren't very compatible with the astral souls of the Theocrats, so they are not a good food source. The main reason the Third Stage is considered higher than the second is simply that societies with such a religion can remain stable for long periods of time.

If the nutrition from animal souls isn't really adequate, do third-stage Theocrats tend to be short-lived? Yes, except that they also receive some nourishment from the psychic energy generated by their worshippers, which is better for them than the animal souls alone. Even more important, most of the major third-stage religions have had some fourth-stage components as well. This was especially true of the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Hindus, and Western Aryan Pagans. Judaism and Vedanta eventually evolved into fully developed fourth-stage religions. The others survived for a long time with a mixture between the two.

One of the chief characteristics of all third-stage Theocratic religions is their lack of concern for life after death. Greek and Roman mythology, for example, gives an extremely accurate description of what the afterlife was actually like for believers in those religions. Most people simply wandered aimlessly in Hades - the - for a few years and then sank into 'forgetfulness.' The concept of reincarnation was known, but only a few elite groups comparable to modern occultists put much stress on it: the Greek mystery cults, and a number of similar Roman sects, for example. Religious practice in third-stage religions was concerned almost entirely with gaining the favor of the gods during earthly life, not with life after death.

The Theocrats running such religions didn't know how to enslave souls on the astral plane, so they ignored them. Instead, they programmed living people to send them the souls of sacrificed animals, and to broadcast psychic energy during orgiastic rituals. What about the Fourth stage of Theocratic religion? The Fourth Stage of Theocratic religion is the one represented by all the major modern religions. Its most important characteristic is that the Theocrats use religious mind control to delude souls into deliberately putting themselves under Theocratic control after death, thinking they are entering 'eternal bliss in Heaven' or 'union with the Godhead.'

The nature of fourth-stage Theocratic religions has already been adequately discussed in previous chapters, so we will now leave the history of Theocracy and discuss the other side for a while: the Invisible College.: The Invisible College Q. You've already mentioned the Invisible College many times in this book, implying the general meaning of 'those spirits on Earth's astral plane who are active, conscious enemies of Theocracy.' At this point, I'd like to discuss this organization in greater detail. What kinds of spirits belong to it, and exactly what does it do to fight against the Theocrats? The Invisible College isn't an organization by the usual definition of that term, because it doesn't have a political structure that all members recognize. The name is just a collective term in common use on the astral plane to describe all disembodied spirits who are not members of Theocratic bands and are not merely lost souls wandering around helpless because they can't function effectively in the spirit world.

A synonym in wide use is 'free spirits,' which contains a play on words because 'free' is used in two senses at once. It means 'free of Theocratic control' simultaneously with 'free to move around the astral plane at will and communicate telepathically with other spirits.' There are three main groups of spirits in the Invisible College: • enlightened ones • magicians • space people The first major group of spirits in the Invisible College is the enlightened ones. Most of these spirits were highly advanced in spiritual knowledge and the use of their psychic powers during life, but they were also devout believers in some sect of the Eastern religious system that includes Vedanta and. They were wise enough to refuse to join the Theocratic bands associated with their particular sect after death, because they could psychically perceive the enslavement and exploitation going on in the various Heavens. (Few of the Western occultists who have called themselves 'Illuminati' or some other synonym of 'enlightened ones' join this group after physical death; most become magicians or Theocrats.) The enlightened ones could be very useful to our cause, but few of them are willing to stay on the astral plane and help actively fight Theocracy. They believe that the Theocratic perversions of Heaven they observe there are illusions, and that perceiving such illusions proves that they are not yet advanced enough to liberate themselves from the cycle of rebirth.

So they go back and live another earthly life, always hoping that the next time they die they will be worthy to enter the true Heaven. They consider the War in Heaven an illusion and run away from it, back into earthly existence, which they also consider illusory. The idea that much of the universe is 'maya' (illusion) is extremely common in Eastern religion and in Western occultism.

Where did it come from? It's just theocratic propaganda, and the refusal of the enlightened ones to help in the war against Theocracy is a perfect example of how effective it is. Physical life on Earth is no illusion, nor is existence as a disembodied spirit on the astral plane. What's illusory is the claim of the Theocrats to be the, and the lie that their Heavens offer the human soul eternal life. Do any of the saints in the Judeo-Christian religions become enlightened ones after death? This is extremely rare.

Most of them become Theocrats if they are devout members of Theocratic churches during life. However, some people who claimed to work miracles through faith in religious doctrine have become magician spirits after death. They were really occultists whose faith was merely a sham to allow them to work within the religious establishment. I've always had an instinctive feeling that Vedanta and Buddhism are less exploitative of believers than Judeo-Christianity, even though I knew that the Eastern religions aren't as different from the Western ones as many Americans believe because they can't tell Eastern occultism from the mainstream of Eastern religion. The information you've just been giving about the enlightened ones probably explains why I felt this way.

Even believers in the Western religious systems whose psychic powers are highly developed are still quite vulnerable to being enslaved by the Theocrats after death, whereas similar people in the East often remain free of Theocratic control and go on incarnating. I assume this happens because the Eastern religions teach belief in reincarnation as part of their official doctrine. This is correct.

However, the actual political structure of Judeo-Christian Theocracy on the astral plane is somewhat more complex than we described previously. In reality, the Theocrats in charge of bands force many advanced souls within these religions to reincarnate, because such spirits don't make very good subordinate Theocrats but are too valuable to the religion as a whole to kill. The average Theocratic spirit that we have described so far realizes that religious doctrine and mythology are lies and is cynically seeking immortality and political power.

The enlightened ones, although they possess a high degree of spiritual knowledge and psychic development, still actually believe in the doctrine. Therefore, if they joined a Theocratic band and observed first-hand how it operates, they might rebel. Because of this, the leaders of Theocratic bands usually persuade such spirits to return to Earth to further the interests of the religion. The contains references to this, if you know what to look for.

Do you mean the passages in which various people ask Jesus if he is Elias or some other Hebrew prophet returned to Earth? Liberal Christians often use passages of this type as Scriptural authority to support reincarnation, which, of course, they are.

But Jesus denied he was the reincarnation of any Hebrew prophet. He did, but it was just a simple 'No' to the specific questions. The questions themselves presented him with a perfect opportunity to make a definitive statement denying the existence of reincarnation, and he didn't take it. This suggests that the author of the passage was an enemy of Theocracy and knew elements of the Great Secret.

To get back to the point we were discussing, the Theocrats persuade many of the saints in Western fourth-stage Theocratic religion to reincarnate. Often, they become charismatic preachers who win large numbers of new converts, or religious leaders who increase the power of churches over the whole of society. In the process, they may become so corrupted by earthly power that they eventually become Theocrats. Do any of these souls ever see the fallacies in their religious beliefs and become enemies of Theocracy, if they are raised in the right environment when they reincarnate on Earth? It sometimes happens, but rarely.

The Western fourth-stage Theocratic religions are actually more sophisticated than the Eastern religions and much harder to break out of once you get taken in. This is because the Eastern religions teach reincarnation as part of their doctrine, and because occultists are allowed to work within the total structure of the official religion, rather than being cast out of it and openly persecuted as in the West. The second major group in the Invisible College is the magicians. The term 'magician' is used very loosely to refer to people who made effective conscious use of their psychic powers while alive, and did not voluntarily join a Theocratic band after death. It is a very diverse group, and the spirits that compose it belonged to many different cultures and social classes during life. Many magician spirits belonged to the Spiritualists, Theosophists, Rosicrucians, or other well-known Western occult groups during life. Others belonged to occult groups that are usually labeled as Pagan religions, such as Witchcraft, Voodoo, Santeria, etc.

Still others had been commercial fortunetellers or psychic healers. (Many of the magicians in this last category considered themselves Christians and performed their psychic activities 'in the name of Christ.' However, the Theocratic churches were afraid of their conscious psychic activities and banned them from membership, so they kept their freedom after death.) In the East, many martial-arts experts, Yogis, Tantrists, Zen Masters, Sufis, etc., become magician spirits after death, as do people who make their living doing divination or practicing psychic healing.

The shamans of the surviving first-stage religions also often join the magician spirits when they die. What all these spirits have in common is that they had wide practical experience with the operational use of their psychic powers when they were alive. (This includes some people who had possessed highly developed psychic powers during life but were never consciously aware of them.) The average magician had definite religious beliefs during life, but these were not strong enough to compel joining a Theocratic band after death. Magicians, living or disembodied, tend to be practical people, not mystics or 'true believers.

Most of the spirit guides who assist occultists all over the world in obtaining spiritual knowledge and in learning conscious control of their psychic powers are magicians. The Theocrats are seriously frightened of the work these spirits do, which explains why Fundamentalist propaganda contains such stern warnings against contacting them. This accounts for all the propaganda against and other aids that help people achieve independent, consciously controlled contact with disembodied spirits.

In the light of my present knowledge, all the warnings about demonic possession through engaging in mediumistic workings seem especially ironic: it looks to me as if the spirit-contact that Fundamentalists achieve at services using religious mind control are much closer to the descriptions of 'possession' than what happens to occultists when they hold mediumistic conversations with spirits. That is another important point this book has to make. What else do the magicians in the Invisible College do besides passing information to people with conscious mediumistic powers?

This is actually one of the less important things they do, because there aren't very many conscious spirit mediums. However, the magician spirits can communicate telepathically with a much larger segment of the living population on a strictly subconscious level, and do so very frequently. Such spirits are responsible for many experiences that people call prophetic dreams, flashes of insight, hunches, intuition, instinctive knowledge, etc. However, some of the experiences assigned these names are entirely the product of the person's own subconscious imagination or psychic powers.

There's usually no way to tell the difference. At this point, it seems necessary to bring up a point that may worry some readers. It's quite natural for people to say, 'I don't like the idea that a spirit or another person can plant in my mind an idea I will consider the product of my own memory or creative powers.

This is an invasion of my privacy and of my right to make decisions for myself.' From a purely ethical standpoint, I have to agree completely with this statement. All we can say is, 'Would you rather be drafted into the army to fight against beings as evil as Hitler, or to fight on their side?' Most Earth people simply don't have the psychic strength or spiritual knowledge to remain neutral in the war between the Theocrats and the Invisible College.

If we don't manipulate them subconsciously, then the Theocrats will do so anyway. We justify this according to our own code of ethics simply by applying the principle of 'greatest good.' An individual influenced by both the IC and the Theocrats has more freedom in the long run than one manipulated by the Theocrats alone. We still have to deal with the issue of 'informed consent,' but this book and hundreds of similar attempts to communicate the same information are intended to provide the general public with the information they need to make a choice. And this is what we are really talking about when we say we want people to 'make a personal breakthrough in spiritual consciousness.' We want them to learn enough about how mind control operates to avoid situations that expose them to it.

Even now, when very few people are consciously aware of the nature of Theocracy and the forces opposing it, our methods are still more ethical than those of. They brainwash people with religious mind control as their strategy of first choice, whereas we employ such methods very sparingly. When we work with people who are consciously learning occultism, we try to inform them exactly what is going on as well as we can. The more spiritual information they learn and the stronger their conscious psychic powers become, the more they are able to avoid subconscious telepathic mind control by either side in the War in Heaven.

For example, you yourself seem to be quite capable of questioning us on ethical matters and making your own value judgments about what you receive in the process of writing this book. Let's get back to the description of what the magician spirits in the Invisible College do. Placing information about Theocracy in the minds of living people is only their second most important job. The principal service they perform for the human race is assisting other souls in reincarnating.

It's an old Spiritualist tradition that mediums and their spirit guides offer help to the souls of the recently deceased that seem in distress. This sometimes comes to the public attention when it is done after someone has reported seeing a ghost, but many Spiritualists do a lot more of it privately. They consider it a good deed they can do in payment of the good that is done for them by being in direct conscious contact with the spirit world.

Unfortunately, the traditional Spiritualists and those of their spirit guides who held similar beliefs during life do harm as often as good when they attempt to aid lost souls, because most of them lack even the most rudimentary knowledge about Theocracy. I know exactly what you mean. Only rarely do Spiritualists make an overt attempt to help such spirits reincarnate. Instead, they talk about such lost souls being 'Earthbound' in the sense of being confined to a portion of the astral plane in direct contact with the Earth plane, and they try to assist the distressed spirits to enter the 'higher astral.' Before I made the breakthrough, I had no intellectual knowledge to make me disagree with this cosmology and the resulting treatment of lost souls, but I always felt an instinctive emotional unease whenever I witnessed or was told about such a ritual. Now I know why: the whole astral plane is in direct contact with the Earth, and the only parts of it that give the illusion of not being closely linked to Earth are those under the control of the Theocrats.

All too often, when Spiritualists and similar occultists assist souls in 'entering the higher astral,' they are actually sending them straight into the control of some band of Theocrats, to be enslaved and devoured. That is because the majority of Spiritualists and the magician spirits that serve as their spirit guides are too friendly to deistic religion and too ignorant of the realities of life on the astral plane.

This is beginning to change now, but it's still a major problem. In many cases, people who had read a lot of occult literature during life put up more resistance to understanding the true nature of Theocracy than atheists, agnostics, and even some believers in orthodox religion. It's actually easier to show religious people that their gods are impostors than it is to show occultists that there are no 'planes higher than.' The beliefs of the former are easier to refute because they are simple and clear-cut. The delusions of occultists are more complex and sophisticated.

Many of them tell us, 'OK, so some Heavens are really Hells of psychic vampirism. I'm going to keep looking until I find one that's not.'

Unfortunately, there are Theocratic bands specifically designed to entrap spirits like this, bands run by Theocrats who were occultists themselves during life. In other words, the Invisible College faces the same problems in dealing with people on the astral plane as I have in getting people on Earth to accept the information described in this book. There are thousands of years of false knowledge to overcome, and virtually every body of available spiritual information is heavily corrupted with Theocratic propaganda. It strikes me as miraculous that you were able to start teaching such knowledge widely, both on the astral plane and on Earth. Can you describe how? About seven hundred years ago, scientists from our world established two-way contact with spirits on Earth's astral plane.

Accidents in interstellar transportation had already marooned quite a few extraterrestrial spirits on Earth, but they were not capable of communicating with the societies they'd come from. (Ironically, psychic machines capable of establishing such communication existed on Earth's astral plane, but none of the spirits who came here by accident possessed the specialized skills for using them.) Of course such spirits were forced to reincarnate periodically, and every time they did so, they lost a portion of their original memories. This meant that Earth people remained ignorant of the basic facts about spiritual reality, including the true nature of the Theocratic spirits who claim to be gods. There were always a few spirits around who knew the truth, but they were seldom able to communicate more than hints of it to others before they lost the memory of who they were and where they came from. The two-way contact we speak of roughly coincided with the beginnings of modern Western civilization. There are numerous passages in occult literature from the late Middle Ages on about telepathic conversations between mediums and spirit-entities who resemble modern UFO-contactee descriptions of space people much more than they do the traditional angels, demons, or spirits of deceased Earth people.

Several of these accounts include what appears to be advanced information about physics, astronomy, and other sciences - and is exactly that. The accounts that have survived are just a small part of the whole. As soon as this contact was established, spirits from advanced civilizations started coming to Earth deliberately to attempt to build an advanced civilization here. The fight against Theocracy is a necessary negative step that has to be taken before the real goal is accomplished, which is to make the Earth a fit place for human beings to live. Both traditional occult literature and modern UFO-contactee stories are full of vague references to these telepathic contacts with extraterrestrial spirits, but such stories lack sufficient detail to make them credible.

Usually, they're just full of truisms and banalities that don't much impress the person who hears them. This is true.

It's taken centuries to prepare people even to think about what life in a truly advanced society would be like. The process has to be done gradually, over a long period of time, and most of it has been done on the level of action, not that of intellectual theory.

Why couldn't the space people, the spirits from advanced civilizations, take some kind of direct action against the Theocrats right at the beginning? Logically, getting rid of the opposition of the Theocrats would be the first step in building an advanced civilization here, not the last. It simply wasn't possible. The space people don't come here physically, but as naked spirits transmitted across vast distances. We come here with a certain amount of knowledge, a small part of which we can communicate directly to Earth people, and with psychic powers that are highly trained but not especially powerful in terms of force. The average Theocratic spirit is actually 'stronger' than one of us in terms of sheer ability to radiate psychic energy as a disembodied spirit. It would seem more logical to assume that your better training would give you more raw psychic power as well.

This is rather hard to explain, but you should be able to grasp at least some of it. Remember that the space people are as human as you are, though not all of us inhabit bodies at home that resemble yours. Every human soul is intended to link periodically to a body. That means it has a certain size and shape, a fixed composition and patterning of astral matter, that is natural for it.

A normal spirit can transmit only limited amounts of astral energy through the psychic powers. This amount of energy is actually lower, not higher, than that which can be radiated by the psychic powers of a similar spirit incarnated in a physical body. I'm already familiar with this idea: the incarnated soul draws energy from the physical body to energize its psychic powers. Now, the Theocratic spirits are not bound by this limitation, because they don't incarnate periodically and don't have to worry about keeping their astral soul in a natural condition.

Instead, they absorb energy from other spirits and grow as much as they can. Abnormal growth gives them access to more internal astral energy and hence stronger psychic powers than a normal spirit possesses. OK, I understand this.

You are forced to use finesse rather than brute strength in fighting the Theocrats, and also forced to enlist the aid of living people in many different ways. I would also like to point out how closely some of the matters just discussed tie in with certain details in the Shaver Mystery as discussed in. But what about psychic technology? I know you now have access to it. Couldn't space people have activated these psychic machines long ago, and saved Earth people centuries of misery? We didn't do this until the present because the process requires large amounts of astral energy. One of the reasons we have assisted you in building a physical technology is so that we could tap some of the psychic energy raised by the electronic networks and use it to repair and run psychic machines constructed of astral matter.

We could have done it previously only by using the methods employed by second-stage Theocratic religion: mass human sacrifices and mass destruction of human souls. This is far beyond the limits to which we will stretch our ethics. It's a means that no end will justify. We will discuss psychic technology further in Part Three. For now, we'll continue discussing the wars that free spirits have been waging against Theocracy throughout history, starting with the concept of 'The Devil.' : Satan and Buddha A. The whole mythology of Satan and the Rebellion of the Angels was the creation of spirits fighting Theocracy long ago, and the original teachings of the Buddha contain similar elements.

Why does the Invisible College deliberately use terms like 'Satan'? Doesn't your use of this kind of terminology make it easier for Theocratic propaganda to accuse all of your friends on Earth of being 'devil-worshippers'? Somewhere in this book we're going to have to deal with accusations of this sort, so we might as well do it here. We have good reason to use terms that encourage people to take a closer look at the Biblical myths about Satan, which we'll describe later in this chapter. For now, we'll just refute the charge that the Invisible College advocates worship of Satan, because we totally reject the concept of 'worship' as the term is usually defined: 'Absolute, unquestioning belief in and obedience to a spiritual being or a body of doctrine.'

Individual sovereignty is the most fundamental postulate of the philosophy of the Invisible College. Each person must assume full responsibility for making value judgments on ethical and political matters. We never advocate absolute obedience to any authority, even our own. We urge people to resist orders from leaders if they disagree with them, and to use laws, customs, and ideologies only as guides for making their own decisions on specific issues.

Assuming personal responsibility for running their own lives makes people wiser and stronger, because they are usually rewarded for their successes and punished for their mistakes. Unquestioning obedience to orders or fixed doctrine only makes them increasingly dependent and powerless. To get back to our discussion of the devil, the concepts that Satan is a 'God of Evil' who demands the same kind of worship as or other Theocratic conceptions of deity, and that he tempts people to do exactly the reverse of all the individual ethical principles in the Judeo-Christian moral code, are both Theocratic propaganda incorporated into religious doctrine to keep people from understanding our original and constructive purpose in creating the myth about Satan and getting it incorporated in the Bible. This is obvious once you point it out.

Satan has a much more favorable image in literature and folk-tradition in all the Judeo-Christian cultures than you'd expect him to have if he was really the archetype of reversed Biblical morality that religious doctrine claims he is. Look at all the folk tales in which the Devil simply opposes the puritanical, 'bluenose' aspects of Christian morality that say that sex and other sensual pleasures are intrinsically evil. We've already pointed out the role these puritanical doctrines play in the religious mind-control process.

The Theocrats want religious believers to feel guilty every time they feel sexual desire or enjoy any 'pleasures of the flesh.' The guilt literally addicts them to attending church services that subject them to religious mind control. When the Devil of folk tradition says that sensual pleasure is not immoral in itself, then he is actually advocating an ethical code superior to the Judeo-Christian one. Satan, in other words, often preaches a perfectly valid, humanistic morality, rather than the inversion of Judeo-Christian morality that religious doctrine attributes to him. I've certainly seen examples of this in literature from many different countries and eras. In ancient Hebrew, the word 'satan' simply meant 'adversary' or 'enemy.'

We communicated the myth about the 'temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent' to some of the prophets who wrote the Old Testament just to ensure that people who read Judeo-Christian scripture would realize that Jehovah has enemies. We are also responsible for other elements in that myth: that disobeying Jehovah by eating the 'forbidden fruit' enabled human beings to discern good from evil, and that there was another secret, that of the tree of life' that would give people eternal life without involvement with Jehovah or other Theocrats. Now that you point it out, the whole myth of the 'Fall of Man' doesn't seem to belong with the rest of the creation myth in Genesis. The material in the book of Genesis, even though it pertains to the Creation and the earliest history of the Hebrews and the Jewish religion, was mostly dictated to Jewish prophets after the Exodus. Judaism started to adopt important elements of fourth-stage Theocratic religion during the Egyptian Captivity, not long after Ikhnaton tried to change Egyptian Paganism into a fourth-stage religion and failed. Fourth-stage Theocratic religions all have a creation myth that includes the concept of Original Sin. I had formed the impression that Christianity was a fourth-stage religion from its beginning but that Judaism was still in the third stage at the time it was founded.

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

I understand this part well enough. Please continue explaining the creation myth in Genesis and the origin of the concepts of Satan and the War in Heaven. First of all, a fourth-stage Theocratic religion has no need for a god of evil to tempt people into sin: the concept of Original Sin itself makes any sort of Devil superfluous.

However, if such a concept survives as an atavism from an earlier stage of the religion's development, it does no harm, any more than did the token sacrifices of doves by the Jews at Jerusalem, as described in the New Testament. Judaism had originally been a polytheistic religion. Most of the angels with names ending 'iel' had originally been 'god of.' ; for example, 'Barakiel - God of Lightning.'

Therefore Judaism already had a concept of 'Satan' similar to the 'adversary' or 'trickster' gods in other third-stage religions. It was quite natural to incorporate Satan into the creation myth to tempt people into Original Sin. Was the Hebrew Pagan deity Satan originally a god in serpentine form like and some of the other African trickster deities? We really don't know. What we're telling you here is mostly derived from our knowledge of modern religious and occult works, supplemented to some extent by rumors that have circulated on the astral plane for thousands of years.

We have no exact historical details on any of this, just educated guesses. However, the choice of a serpent image for the deity that tempted people into disobeying Jehovah is obvious if you realize that it was enemies of Theocracy who dictated the myth in the form in which we know it.

The serpent was intended as a symbol of reincarnation, because snakes shed their skins, leaving behind a casting that resembles a dead snake to a casual glance, while the animal crawls on about its business with a shiny, new, young-looking skin. The Theocrats who called themselves 'Jehovah' did not want people to believe in reincarnation, even though the fourth-stage religious concept of 'dwelling in the House of the Lord forever' was probably not known to the Jews at the time the creation myth was first dictated. Many scholars today don't think the concept of reincarnation was even known to the Jews at that time. As we said before, we have no exact historical knowledge of the time, just age-old rumor and inference from literature on Earth. However, our best guess is that every human culture throughout history and back into prehistory has had at least rudimentary knowledge of reincarnation. There are references to it in literature from every culture we know about, including those in the ancient Near East contemporary with the people who wrote Genesis, so we assume the concept was known to them. More important, a small number of people in every culture have always possessed enough conscious past-life memories to circulate persistent rumors about reincarnation, even though a Theocratic religion does its best to suppress them.

I've gotten the impression from what you've told me so far that the Invisible College has only been in existence for a few centuries, that it started around the end of the Middle Ages or after. If so, who was opposing Theocracy at the time of Moses, or whenever the myth concerning Adam and Eve and the serpent was written? Exact names for the forces opposing Theocracy are actually arbitrary and unimportant. We prefer to reserve the term 'Invisible College' to refer to the highly organized opposition to Theocracy that started when large numbers of spirits from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations started coming to Earth voluntarily about six or seven hundred years ago.

However, small numbers of such spirits have been accidentally transported to Earth's astral plane throughout history and far back into prehistoric times, and many of them have tried to fight Theocracy as best they could. One spirit with advanced knowledge could have been responsible for the creation myth we're describing here.

You already understand how the Theocrats dictate 'Holy writ' to religious believers, don't you? Well, I assume from reading about Mohammed and the Koran and similar cases that the process is almost identical to what we're doing here to produce this book: some form of automatic writing or other mediumistic reception of data from spirits on the astral plane. The only difference is that the spirits involved are Theocrats instead of members of the Invisible College. You're right. However, it's extremely difficult for the mediums themselves to tell exactly who in the spirit world is dictating to them at a given time. That's why we always review everything you receive from us several times and leave you to be the final judge as to whether what you've received is really from us or is Theocratic deception. I realize that I have to be responsible for that, to ensure that what I receive is internally consistent and agrees with my own rational judgment based on the evidence available in my memory.

I suspect that the Invisible College finds it easier to send anti-Theocratic messages to the prophets of Theocratic religions, who don't normally question divine revelations, than its for Theocrats to deceive conscious Spiritual Revolutionaries like me. And this is exactly what happened with the myth about the serpent and the Fall.

A spirit hostile to Theocracy managed to dictate the story to one of the Hebrew prophets, and somehow it survived long enough in folk tradition to be written into the Old Testament. And we're glad it did, because it reveals some important spiritual truths to anyone capable of understanding them.

• One is that Jehovah has an enemy who communicates with people and urges them to rebel • Another is that these messages of rebellion are involved with ethics and morality Jehovah says, 'Right and wrong are only what I tell you they are, and they are absolute values that never vary.' Satan, on the other hand, says, 'Use your intellect to determine what is right and wrong in a given situation, because such value judgments are highly dependent on the environment you're in at a given time.' Since the latter statement is rational and the former irrational, people are put into conflict with Theocratic religious doctrine every time they use their intellect to make rational value judgments. Most organized religions seem rather proud of the fact that people have to accept their doctrine on faith simply because it isn't rational.

They do, because they have no choice. And this religious myth is one of the reasons why.

The Theocrats don't want people to become consciously aware of the basically illogical nature of absolute moral doctrine, but there is nothing they can do about it. The more highly developed a person's rational intellect, the less likely he or she is to accept religious doctrine on 'blind faith.' The serpent myth is only a minor detail in Judeo-Christian mythology, but it has been very important over the centuries in the fight against Theocracy.

And it's also obvious why the Judeo-Christian Theocrats countered it with further mythology about Satan as the Father of Lies who goes around telling people it's good to kill and steal and otherwise do the opposite of the religious moral code. The Theocrats tried to obscure the information about using the intellect to make ethical decisions on a rational basis. They added many extraneous details to the mythology about Satan.

For example, they included the idea that telepathy, mediumship, and other are either 'works of God' or 'works of the Devil.' This allows them to forbid religious believers to communicate with spirits hostile to Theocracy without revealing various facts about spiritual reality that the Theocrats wish to conceal. And then there's all the propaganda about demonic possession. As we discussed earlier, the irony of the whole concept of 'possession' is that the Theocrats themselves practice something rather similar to it when they program people into becoming willing slaves through religious mind control.

The important thing to remember whenever possession is mentioned is simply this: no spirit, Theocrat or otherwise, can actually force living people to do things contrary to their conscious will and their customary ideas of right and wrong. Even can only reprogram a person's opinions and beliefs one small step at a time: it's a slow, gradual process, not a sudden, dramatic takeover. It's very important for the reader to realize this. However, we do have to point out that even gradual reprogramming can produce some extremely evil and violent people if it continues over a whole lifetime.

There are plenty of people in this country right now who are emotionally and morally capable of 'killing a Commie for Christ' or acting on the literal meaning of the Biblical passage, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' However, this has nothing to do with the sudden, violent 'possession by evil spirits' that Fundamentalist propaganda spreads around so freely, and that many serious occultists also accept. That, fortunately, is a myth. You haven't covered the Tree of Life yet. What was that supposed to represent?

As the serpent myth represents the concept that people have the right to determine good and evil for themselves through the free exercise of the conscious intellect, the Tree of Life represents certain essential details of the breakthrough information - the concepts that people can only achieve immortality through reincarnation and that the 'eternal life in heaven' offered by deities is a delusion. However, you must remember that the Tree of Life is mentioned only so the Theocrats can gloat that they prevented people from gaining this knowledge. The myth states that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and learned to distinguish right from wrong with the rational intellect, but they were expelled from the Garden of Eden before they could 'eat also of the fruit of the Tree of Life, that is also in the Garden, and become like unto us.' Many occultists and Biblical scholars have been intrigued by that passage, not just for the tantalizing references to a secret of immortality, but because it s one of the only passages in the whole Bible in which Jehovah uses the first-person plural, 'us' instead of 'me'. The secret referred to in this passage is not just immortality, but the complete knowledge that Theocratic spirits have about the nature of the soul, reincarnation, psychic powers, etc. Apparently the spirit who dictated these passages tried to communicate the whole breakthrough and failed. The beginning of Buddhism is a similar case in which enemies of Theocracy tried to help people to make the breakthrough but didn't quite succeed.

After the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he made some statements that seemed self-contradictory, at least on the surface. He attributed his spiritual progress to his own efforts, not to a 'gift' from omnipotent deities.

He also stated in so many words that ordinary people could achieve enlightenment through practicing the proper psychic development techniques. But at the same time, his statements about reincarnation appeared paradoxical. He said that achieving enlightenment meant that he no longer needed to reincarnate, but he also said that he would continue to do so to help other people achieve enlightenment.

This seems to be a major contradiction, because if enlightenment had made him a sort of 'super-god,' superior to the Vedantic gods, then he wouldn't need to incarnate to assist people in spiritual development. He could do it as a disembodied spirit, remaining on the astral plane and using his enormous psychic powers to communicate whatever information people needed. Once people make the breakthrough, it becomes obvious that there is no contradiction in any of these statements about the Buddha. What the Buddha called his enlightenment is actually a version of this breakthrough. He became consciously aware of exactly what the Vedantic gods really are and how they operate, even though the words in which his followers wrote down his knowledge are somewhat confusing.

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

Many modern Buddhists believe that if they personally achieve enlightenment, their souls will merge with the soul of Buddha into Nirvana, a 'state of blissful nothingness.' Vedantic doctrine in the time of the Buddha already taught that enlightened souls would merge with Brahma or some other god. This doctrine was grafted onto the Buddha's teachings after his death, when Buddhism was taken over by the Vedantic Theocrats. You're saying that Buddhism was originally founded to fight Theocracy? So were Gnosticism and some forms of early Christianity. But to get back to Buddhism, the Buddha implied by his own example that the enlightened were capable of transcending reincarnation but deliberately chose not to do so in order to be of service to the human race.

The Buddha realized he could become a Theocrat and remain on the astral plane indefinitely, but he refused to do so for ethical reasons. This interpretation of the early Buddhist teaching is possible for people who have already made the breakthrough from some other source, but it is not stated clearly enough in the writings themselves to make finding and understanding it very easy. Even though he founded a major religion, the enlightenment the Buddha achieved was still only a partial breakthrough.

Much of what he learned from the Invisible College was on a subconscious level; it is reflected indirectly in his various teachings and practices as described by his followers after his death when they wrote the early literature, but much of it never came out in so many words in his actual teachings. In other words, he didn't actually say that the Vedantic gods are evil beings who eat souls, or that enlightened souls need to reincarnate for their own good as well as that of living people. This vital information is implied, but never directly stated.

For example, the Buddha did teach that animal sacrifices and 'austere practices' - by which he meant self-torture, starvation, etc. - are not mandatory for onto achieve enlightenment; but he didn't antagonize the Vedantic majority around him, or their gods, by saying that 'The gods are evil.' However, after his death, the legends portrayed the Vedantic gods as 'worshipping' the enlightened Buddha, implying at the least that they had no power over him. It is also important to remember that the Buddha was preaching to an audience with far different religious beliefs from those of modern Westerners, or of modern Buddhists, for that matter.

The Vedanta of his time was a third-stage Pagan religion based on large-scale animal sacrifice and orgiastic rituals, but its doctrine also included many atavistic myths surviving from the first stage. As well as being the priests of third-stage Vedanta, the Brahmins also functioned as first-stage who insured that various spiritual beings were 'fed' to keep them from eating human souls after death. Direct references to the gods as 'Eaters of Souls' occur in Vedantic hymns used in the Soma ritual. I've also noticed another seeming incongruity about the teachings of Buddha. He stresses that enlightenment is achieved only through psychic development practices, but most of his actual sermons or lectures seemed to be on ethics. Buddhist ethics are very similar to the traditional Vedantic ethics of the culture he lived in.

He stressed certain elements more than others - for example, total non-violence against both people and animals - but these were already present in the Vedantic doctrines, which contained many inconsistencies. Yes, he preached a version of the Vedantic ethical code and religious customs stripped of some of the worst self-contradictions, like the concept of non-violence co-existing with animal sacrifice and with various forms of violence against oneself in the name of religious practice. However, it is easy to misunderstand what he was actually doing, which was to separate ethics from the process of achieving enlightenment. In other words, he said living ethically was important, but not directly related to the psychic development that causes enlightenment. Again, this interpretation is possible from reading the Buddhist literature, but the point is not made clearly enough for most people to understand it. Certainly most modern Buddhists don't.

Modern Buddhism, except for a few occult groups associated with it, is a Theocratic religion. Buddhists feel that their ethical conduct as well as their psychic development practices will earn them enlightenment by pleasing various incarnations of the Buddha, all of which are imagined to co-exist as gods similar to the Vedantic gods.

This is not what Buddha taught at all. Certain Zen masters, whom I class with the occult minority within Buddhism, have said things like, 'There are no gods; there are no Buddhas.' When they do this, they are fighting against the tendency of the majority of Buddhists to worship the Buddha as a god, instead of seeking enlightenment through their own efforts and practicing ethical conduct for humanistic reasons - to serve their own interests and that of other people - instead of to earn divine favor. Zen masters have even told students who were drifting into deism, 'Contemplate the Buddha as a piece of dried shit.' Before I made the breakthrough, I put a pantheistic interpretation on passages like this: 'The Buddha is everywhere, including in the desiccated turd.'

Now I see that this is an attempt to answer the Theocratic tendencies in Buddhism by trying to extinguish the believer's tendencies to fall into deism. This anti-deistic, anti-Theocratic teaching is even more evident in the doctrines of some of the Eastern occult secret societies involved with the martial arts. These secret societies have often worked under the direction of the Invisible College to fight against the control of both religion and politics in China and Japan by the Theocrats. That's why they sometimes tell initiates, 'we are devils,' because they are literally fighting against the 'gods,' in the sense of fighting deism and defending the idea that people can achieve enlightenment through their own efforts. However, you have to be careful when you read about secret societies of this type, because many of them have fought for the Theocrats at one time and against them at other times, depending on the personalities and beliefs of the members. At this point, we'll leave the adversaries of Theocracy within religion and go back to discussing the work of the Invisible College in building modern Western civilization.: The Age of Reason Q.

When you refer to the Age of Reason, are you describing what went on in the old Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges several hundred years ago, when these organizations had so much influence over the development of modern civilization? We wanted initiates on the lower levels to be reprogrammed to accept what's now called the 'Philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment. This included the form of political liberalism sketched out in the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, support of capitalism and industrial technology, a progressive attitude towards innovation in science and the arts, reliance on rational pragmatic decision-making over dependence on tradition, and a general attitude toward life that was constructive, optimistic, and tolerant. We realized it wasn't possible to turn most of these people into high-level psychics or magicians or to teach them much about the true nature of Theocracy; we just wanted to turn them into 'good average citizens' as that term is defined in the United States today. You've already figured out some of the things we did to accomplish this, and we will now explain the whole subject more clearly.

Two types of consciousness-raising programs were used within the lodges: • one trained initiates in the lower degrees to become rational atheists and political liberals • the other, more advanced, program, taught high-level occult knowledge and conscious control over the psychic powers The first of these programs always had many more members than the second. Initiates who learned to accept the often became immune to falling into a religious trance during the rituals. This is an example of the difference between the way we reprogram people's minds and the way the Theocrats do. We keep planting information in the subconscious that says, 'Think for yourself.

Don't accept anything without evidence. Do what you feel is best under the circumstances rather then just accepting what someone tells you. You can become a better person if you only learn how to do so. Judge yourself realistically: you are neither a self-righteous saint nor a miserable sinner, but simply an ordinary human being with free will and control over your own destiny.' This is almost the opposite of what the Theocrats program in during Fundamentalist Christian services.

They want worshippers to say 'Thy will be done,' and submit completely to the telepathic influences they receive, as well as to obey religious doctrine to the letter. It's easy to see how your method tends eventually to liberate initiates from the influence of religious mind control: the more that people are affected by the reprogramming process, the less motivation they have to enter the religious trance, which involves voluntarily allowing the conscious will to lose control. This is correct. The more people become accustomed to making decisions rationally and forming an accurate appraisal of their self-worth, the less likely they are to fall into a religious trance during rituals. When individuals in one of the old lodges reached this stage of being in a normal state of consciousness during the rituals most of the time, they automatically progressed to one of the 'higher' degrees and assumed one of the numerous positions of subordinate leadership. Initiates on this level were expected to study the lodge's traditions, mythology, and doctrine intensely on a strictly intellectual level.

This wasn't done at rituals that employed the religious trance, but through ordinary reading and tutorial study, exactly as if the initiates were learning history or mathematics. This is the level that tried to replace Christian faith with 'worship of the Goddess of Reason,' and then went into a philosophy that would be called 'scientific materialism' and 'rational humanism' today. This middle level of initiation was intended to produce a personality-type similar to one very common in American society today - the millions of people who are not very interested in spiritual matters of any kind, but are chiefly concerned with their personal survival and happiness here on Earth. Some of them call themselves atheists or agnostics, but just as many profess nominal belief in Christianity or some other religious or occult system. However, regardless of what they say they believe, spirituality has very little emotional impact on their daily life. People like this are still either a slight majority or a very large minority in American society. When we started this process several centuries ago, the influence of Theocratic religion was still so strong that it was easier to turn people into atheists or agnostics than to teach them directly about spiritual reality.

We taught people to relate positively to the material world, and to the advanced civilization that was beginning to develop around them, as more than just, 'a vale of tears to pass through on the way to Heaven.' We wanted the relationship between people and their earthly environment to become more important than their relationship with 'God' and religion.

We had to proceed step by step and use the methods of behavioral psychology, which are based on knowledge of how the human mind is actually programmed. States of consciousness and environmental reinforcement are the most important factors to consider here. Can you clarify this? When you say 'states of consciousness,' are you talking about the religious trance? We had to proceed step by step. First, we took people who had been raised within Theocratic religion and had been entering the religious trance during church services all their lives, and we manipulated them into attending the rituals of the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges. These rituals also employed the religious trance and, on the lower levels of initiation, taught a doctrine that was not so alien to the average lodge member's existing Christian beliefs that it broke the trance.

During these rituals, members were gradually reprogrammed to become more rational in their thinking and more materialistic in their emotional goals for their lives. The social environment of the lodge increased their self-esteem, so they no longer thought of themselves as 'miserable sinners in need of salvation' but as 'free men under God,' and eventually as 'free members of a brotherhood of equals. Lodge members received positive reinforcement through religious mind control during lodge rituals. This made the members feel good while they learned various philosophical principles quite different from those at the core of Fundamentalist Christianity even though phrased in many of the same terms.

One very important thing to realize here is that the basic ethical philosophy of the eighteenth-century Freemasons was very, very similar to the moral codes of the various Theocratic Christian sects of the day. At least ninety-five percent of the individual precepts were the same. That's hard to accept. Nevertheless, if you think about it without bias, you'll realize it's true.

In fact, there is only one fundamental difference between the two codes of conduct, which affects a small number of separate ethical precepts. Christian doctrine says, 'Your first duty is to obey the will of God as you perceive it during church services and in private prayer and meditation; your second is to obey religious doctrine and tradition as you learn it on the intellectual level; and your third is to follow the dictates of your conscience and intellectual will.'

By contrast, the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment says, 'Your first duty is to follow the dictates of reason as applied to the knowledge you learn from your environment; your second is to work for your own survival and happiness as long as you don't harm other individuals or society in general by so doing; and your third is to work for ‘the greatest good for the greatest number,' which sometimes involves greater or lesser degrees of self-sacrifice.' These statements are diametrically opposed in theory, but in the routine circumstances of life in a reasonably stable society, they produce behavior that is almost identical.

In other words, both the Christian and the Freemason valued a work ethic, tried to avoid harmful excesses of all kinds, etc. The difference is not in what people did in the way of detailed, routine ethical behavior, but in the long-term effects that the two radically different philosophical codes had on total personality development. The Christian code took people deeper into bondage to the Theocrats; the Masonic code liberated them from that bondage without substituting any other master for 'God.' What's most important here is that the Masonic initiates were taught to receive increasing amounts of positive reinforcement from their material and social environment, and decreasing amounts from religious mind control. Now you can understand what we mean by 'states of consciousness' and 'environmental reinforcement' in this context. We were using the significant increase in the quality of individual life resulting from technological advances to extinguish the influence of religious mind control over people's emotional life and personality development. Eventually, a great many members of the lodges became immune to religious mind control and remained in a normal state of waking consciousness during the rituals.

More important, they taught these same principles to their children of both genders, so the all-male lodges eventually changed the average personality structure of the whole society. Is this one of the reasons why Fundamentalist propaganda claims that, 'Secular Humanism is a religion'?

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

The idea that people can significantly improve the quality of life on Earth by their own efforts is one of the most important strategies that the Invisible College uses in fighting Theocracy. Its strongest point is that we don't need to use subconscious emotional manipulation or intellectual persuasion to get people to accept it. Autocad 2007 Free Download Full Version With Crack For Windows 7 Torrent.

Just living and working within a modern technological society proves the basic validity of a humanistic philosophy by direct environmental conditioning. On the conscious level, people may think about the problems modern society has not yet solved and yearn for 'the good old days'; but on a deeper level, they know they are as well off, on the average, as human beings on this planet have ever been. Theocratic propaganda and religious mind control have great difficulty extinguishing this intuitive feeling, because its cause is environmental conditioning rooted in physical reality. I speculated in Part One that the lodges you're talking about were controlled by a small, secret conspiracy of advanced occultists who had at least a rough conscious idea of what they were doing. Is this true?

We actually had to do most of the work ourselves. In fact, the chain of cause-and-effect was almost exactly the opposite of what you speculated about in Part One. We, meaning disembodied spirits in the Invisible College, telepathically manipulated the subconscious minds of leaders in the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges to design their rituals and doctrines in certain ways. Many of the individual elements of these rituals and doctrines were drawn from the writings and practices of previous occult groups, including some that you would consider quite advanced in both spiritual knowledge and psychic training techniques.

However, the vast majority of the men who actually incorporated these elements into Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had only a vague idea of what they were doing. They read various occult works, talked to members of many different occult organizations, and incorporated those ideas that 'felt right' into the lodges they were founding or re-organizing.

Of course, it was our subconscious telepathic influence that guided this process. Are you saying that the pre-existing knowledge gathered by advanced occultists over many centuries was useful to you in founding lodges and manipulating them into the form you desired, but that there was no conscious human conspiracy involved? This is not true either. There were many different conscious conspiracies of advanced occultists, in the seventeenth century and later, which realized that various lodges of the Freemason and Rosicrucians were beginning to have a major influence on the progress of Western society and tried to manipulate their activities in ways that would produce what we now call 'Modern Western Civilization.' Practically every advanced occultist in Europe joined one or more of these lodges at this time. And once they'd joined, they tried to teach their particular school of knowledge to their lodge-brothers and to influence the development of the lodge's doctrines and rituals to conform to their particular preconceptions. These occultists included Cabalists, Gnostics, Alchemists, Hermetics; and influences from all these spiritual systems are still visible today in the Masonic and Rosicrucian doctrines.

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

The important thing to remember about all this is that the individual elements of advanced occult knowledge and the people who brought them into the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges of the Age of Enlightenment were not the 'secret, conscious, guiding conspiracy' that you speculated they were. This is obvious now. You were the conscious guiding force, and the advanced occultists were actually being subconsciously manipulated along with the rest of the people involved.

Well, many of the occultists had some conscious knowledge of what we were doing, and were actively co-operating. Unfortunately, some of them actively opposed us by trying to turn their lodge into a Theocratic Cult. Possessing advanced occult knowledge doesn't automatically make a person morally virtuous. Even today, some of the advanced occult lodges derived from the Masonic-Rosicrucian tradition are 'Black Lodges' (lodges under the control of the Theocrats). It's extremely important for your readers to realize that Theocratic enslavement and psychic vampirism are not things that happen only to disembodied spirits after death.

Living people can do virtually the same things to other living people. Black magicians can't literally devour other people's souls the way the disembodied Theocrats do to other spirits, but they can still deprive people of all free will and self-esteem, and eventually drive them into insanity or suicide. This can be done in a Christian context, as did with the People's Temple, or in the context of almost any other religious or occult group.

Many of the modern cults are also examples of this Theocracy on Earth like, the, etc. However, such groups aren't always openly identified as religious or occult organizations. The was such a group, and so was the. So are many terrorist groups, especially those in the service of Islamic Fundamentalists.

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

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

Yes, and this attitude is becoming more and more common as more people make the breakthrough and become consciously aware of the existence of Theocracy. This is another main reason why we are having you write this book: to warn potential victims of this new type of mind control and teach them how to avoid it. We'll tell more about this fifth stage of Theocracy later. It is important to remember that people have been making the breakthrough for centuries, in the sense of realizing that the 'gods' behind many religious groups are simply the spirits of ordinary deceased human beings playing politics and trying to remain in positions of power on the astral plane for long periods of time.

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

You can see why many occultists wouldn't want to listen. The quality and completeness of a person's breakthrough knowledge are very important.

Until very recently, communicating many of the individual details that constitute the breakthrough has been extremely difficult. Notice that when you write about it, you employ many terms and concepts from recent scientific discoveries: computer science, behavioral psychology, modern physics, etc. Think how much harder it would be to understand Theocracy without this background. I understand. Please amplify what you said about the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges being a cause more than an effect of advanced occult conspiracies during the last three or four centuries.

It's very simple, really. The presence of the lodges in Western society increased the number of advanced occultists enormously, because they served as a visible training ground for people who otherwise might never have had access to psychic training and spiritual knowledge outside organized religion.

The rituals and jargon of the lodges were secret, but everyone knew approximately what went on inside them - or at least, anyone with the potential to become an advanced occultist could guess. This meant that fewer people who had possessed occult training in a past life would spend a 'wasted' incarnation in which they had no access to formal training. This makes sense, and also seems relevant to the basic theme of this whole book, the War in Heaven. You're describing what the struggle between the Theocrats and the Invisible College is really like.

It resembles an ordinary political conflict on Earth: fights to recruit new members, to build institutions that serve the ideological cause, etc. It's not a war between 'God and Satan' at all, in the sense of a conflict between absolutes of good and evil. It is completely a matter of politics, and neither side is completely good or bad. Of course, we are convinced that the side of the Invisible College is better than the side of the Theocrats by any reasonable ethical standard.

To sum up what we've said in this chapter, the Age of Reason was a major step in the progress of Western civilization and a significant victory for the Invisible College over the Theocrats in the War in Heaven. During the period from about 1700 to the 1960's, there was just as much improvement in the average level of individual human consciousness as there was in physical technology, scientific knowledge, and the design of social and political institutions. Our goal was to break the hold of religious mind-control over the majority of people in the First World, and we accomplished it reasonably well. Large numbers of people are still enslaved to, of course, but such belief-systems no longer dominate the collective consciousness of the society to the extent they once did. Today, even the majority of people in the advanced Western countries who consider themselves devout religious believers actually put reason above faith, and humanistic concerns before blind obedience to traditional doctrine.

Do you see why we used the quasi-religious rituals of the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges to accomplish this? Well, it looks as if you used a form of religious mind control to raise the consciousness of the majority of people you worked with, because they had started out as religious believers and were used to such techniques. However, you taught more advanced psychic training techniques such as sex magic to the minority who were ready for it. The important thing to recognize here is that even the most advanced magical lodges based on the Masonic/Rosicrucian tradition still train their members with rituals that employ the religious trance. I've noticed that most advanced traditional occult organizations still practice such rituals: for example, they teach people to enter a true psychic trance by first entering a religious trance. Now that I've made the breakthrough, I realize that is why I've also felt uncomfortable trying to participate in the magical workings of such lodges: I know how to assume a psychic trance directly, and feel an instinctive revulsion during rituals that attempt to put me into a religious trance. This is correct, and it's the main reason why we've been spreading the word telepathically that the Age of Reason is ending and a new age is beginning.

Its starting point is another major revolution in consciousness, as we will discuss in the next chapter.: A Revolution in Consciousness Q. The term 'revolution in consciousness' is usually associated with the Sixties psychedelics movement. Can you answer some of the questions I've had about drugs that I've never been able to figure out on my own? There's much more to the revolution in consciousness that's now going on than just the widespread use of consciousness-altering drugs, but it's a good starting point. Especially, the drug issue illustrates that there's a War in Heaven going on: we try to teach people how to use drugs for their own good, and the Theocrats work to create the 'drug problem' in an effort to sabotage our attempts to take human consciousness on this planet another major step forward.

The modern struggle between the Theocrats and the Invisible College over the recreational and other uses of psychoactive drugs started long before the Sixties; and the drug then involved was alcohol. The real reason that the Prohibition Amendment passed after World War I is that we suddenly stopped opposing the anti-alcohol movement that Theocratic Fundamentalists had been leading for decades. In other words, we decided, 'Let the Christian Temperance Union and the other prohibitionist organizations have their way; maybe total prohibition of alcoholic beverages will fail so miserably that it will convince the majority of Americans that puritanical laws regulating intimate details of the personal lives of individuals are a bad idea.' And our plan worked.

Government policy and general opinion in this society are now treating alcoholism more as a medical and psychiatric problem than as a moral or criminal problem. This is actually a significant step forward for the whole civilization: learning how to deal with a social problem to minimize the total harm it does to the society. I've always found it inexplicable that Western society can deal with the alcohol problem in a reasonably sensible and sophisticated manner, but not with problems caused by drugs other than alcohol. This is happening because the drug controversy is now one of the two or three most important battlegrounds between the Theocrats and the Invisible College.

The key to understanding why involves certain side effects of LSD and various psychedelic drugs closely related to it: mescaline, psilocybin, etc., in both their pure and their botanical forms. I was right at the heart of the Psychedelics Movement in the Sixties and Seventies, but I never really figured out what was going on. Obviously, the Invisible College was urging large numbers of people to take these drugs, seemingly indiscriminately; but I never found out why. In fact, I often got angry with you for trying to 'turn on the world' to LSD, seemingly with little regard for the consequences.

Occultists have used powerful psychedelic drugs of this family for centuries as aids to psychic development, but always with a great deal of caution and respect. Only occultists at a reasonable level of advancement were supposed to take them; their use was denied to the really immature and unstable. Also, occultists have always taught that psychedelics use was should be combined with other psychic training techniques, to maximize the benefits and minimize the dangers. However, when I tried to teach these methods of psychedelics use in the context of the Sixties counterculture, I found that very few members of the movement had the patience for such a conservative approach. Practically everybody just said, 'I'm going to keep on dropping acid until I get rid of my hangups and expand my mind, and then I'll worry about all this stuff about meditation and psychic exercises.'

And I was aware why so many people felt this way: at this stage of my psychic development, I was beginning to become consciously aware of your telepathic messages advocating indiscriminate use of LSD and similar drugs. Quite frankly, I disapproved of this policy, because I saw so many people hurt themselves with irresponsible drug-use.

You are aware by now, aren't you, that most of the people who experienced 'acid freakouts' during the Sixties didn't suffer significant permanent damage? This seems to be true on the average, yes. Also, I'm now mature enough to realize that a lot of the drug-users in the Sixties Movement who killed themselves, committed serious crimes, or became insane enough to be institutionalized, would probably have done something similar sooner or later anyway, even if they'd never used drugs. This was a significant factor in our decision to take the risk of starting the Psychedelics Movement.

We still have to admit that there were casualties, though, and we're sorry about it. However, we have to point out once again that a war is being fought and it's your freedom, that of the entire human race, that's at stake. I understand all this by now, though I'm not sure how many of my readers will. Well, there's nothing I can do about this except tell as much as I can of the facts and let people make up their own minds about who's right and wrong. What I'd most like to know about the whole drug question is simply what the Sixties Psychedelic Movement was for. What, exactly, were you trying to accomplish, and did it succeed? The answer to your second question is, 'Yes, fairly well.

Better than our expectations.' The answer to the first is technical and almost impossible to describe in English, but we'll try. Since you, and probably a significant number of your readers, are familiar with electronic computers, we will use computer terminology for our explanation.

First, you have to realize that a normal state of consciousness is comparable to a computer program that's already running in an input or output mode instead of a command mode. In an input mode, you can enter data into the files of the computer to be stored or processed. In an output mode, you can retrieve information that's already been processed, and print it out or make some other use of it. On most modern computers, you can switch between these two modes very easily, and this analogy seems to apply to the mind as well. The input mode of normal consciousness consists of receiving information through the senses and entering it into the memory, where it is processed in various ways and is available for later retrieval. The output mode consists of making use of data that the mind has already processed to feel emotions, think, speak, listen, move the body, and perform a wide variety of other activities.

The whole thing is much more complex and sophisticated than anything conceivable for electronic computers, even in theory, but the analogy should be clear. However, you can't modify the program that's running on an electronic computer set to an input or output mode. In order to do that, you'd have to enter some kind of command mode. As an example, before I typed this paragraph, I entered the command mode of this word processing program and changed the margins for this one paragraph.

But now I'm back in the input mode to write this. When this analogy is applied to states of consciousness in the human mind, you have to realize that the situation is very complex. On one level, you feel that you have a great deal of free will, a large measure of control over what you think and do and even over how you react emotionally. This is simply because you are aware of a large number of different alternative courses of action open to you at any given time. You are much less aware of those alternatives that are not open to you.

For example, large areas of your total memory are not available to conscious access at any particular time. Like many electronic computers, the human mind arranges memories in banks, and you normally have access to only a few of these at any one time.

You can change banks by an act of conscious will, but this often loses you access to information you could recall easily before, from the other memory bank. In addition, there's the subconscious, which contains memories that are very rarely available for conscious access. It also appears to me that normal consciousness includes at least limited command functions: for example, deliberately 'putting yourself in a mood' to do a particular thing that you couldn't do without advance concentration and preparation. This may be analogous to certain capabilities on this word processing program: for example, I don't have to leave the input mode to PRINT IN ALL CAPS or to underline. Yes, but you can't change the line-length except by going into a command mode, as you did above.

Now the point we're trying to make here is that LSD and related psychedelic drugs create a state of consciousness that is similar to putting a computer into a command mode and making changes in the program that is being run. This brings us back to my original objections to your advocacy of indiscriminate use of powerful psychedelics during the Sixties. Going into a command mode on a computer is useless, and usually detrimental to finishing the job at hand, unless you know exactly what you're doing. For example, the command mode I entered to change the margins could also have been used to delete the whole file I'm working on, and that could have been done by pushing only two keys. Fortunately, the very complexity of the human mind makes it much less vulnerable than that. What actually happened when the average person in the Sixties Psychedelics Movement took LSD wasn't the same as the limited work with entering a 'command mode' and doing deliberate mental reprogramming that Western occultists have traditionally done when they used psychedelics. It operated on a level unknown to the occultists.

In other words, you yourself, and all the people you considered serious occultists, underwent the same involuntary mental changes as the 'street hippies' did because of taking LSD. You accomplished your limited psychic training goals, while they did nothing but 'sit and groove'; but the drug itself was doing something much more fundamental to every one of you, every time you took it. I'd already guessed most of this, but it's still a little disturbing to see it put into words. Exactly what changes are you talking about, and how do they relate to the analogy about command modes? Well, the computer you are using to write this book has several different levels of command modes, doesn't it? For example, the lowest level is the one I used to change the margins.

Beyond that is another level at which I could enter another application entirely, such as creating and sorting data in an address file. Beyond that, I could write a program in Basic or Assembly Language and create a word-processing file similar to this one, but with whatever modifications we desired. And beyond that, I could write or install a Machine Language program that would change the computer's capabilities for writing new programs, including teaching it an entirely different computer language. By this analogy, the traditional use of psychedelics by occultists is on the level of writing a Basic program. That's how people learn to use telepathy and other psychic powers: they actually write a new program, but to do so, they use capabilities already present in their mind all along, as your computer has the Basic programming language among its files. This explains why psychedelics are not essential to psychic training. They can speed up the process under the right circumstances, but they don't seem to be able to give a specific psychic talent to just anybody.

There are large numbers of otherwise intelligent and creative people who simply can't learn to become telepaths or mediums, for example, with or without taking drugs. On the other hand, a lot of experienced occult teachers who dislike drugs assert that they can accomplish exactly the same degree of psychic training for a given person without using drugs as could be accomplished with them; it would just take longer. I tend to agree with them in general, though I still fall into the 'pro' rather than the 'anti' camp of occultists when it comes to psychedelic drugs as a psychic training aid. The real reason we advocated widespread use of LSD in the Sixties had nothing to do with the short-term effects of the drug, or with conscious use of those effects for psychic training. To get back to the computer-language analogy we've been using, the 'mind-expansion through LSD' that we were advocating involved a Machine Language program, not merely a Basic program.

Repeated use of LSD over several years makes fundamental changes in people's mental programming, and we used LSD plus direct telepathic conditioning techniques to significantly reprogram the minds of several million Americans. We also used environmental conditioning through the general emotional climate of the Sixties counterculture itself, as expressed in its art, music, slogans, etc. Nvidia Nforce2 Ultra 400 Lan Driver. To tell the truth, I found all that stuff about 'Peace and Love and Flower Children and Dropping Out and Everything Should Be Free' to be naive and impractical at best, and at worst to be self-destructive.

You felt this way because you already had high ideals and were concerned mostly with trying to put them into practice. We created the emotional atmosphere you find naive and self-destructive simply to teach a certain amount of idealism to young people who had been raised in average Fifties American homes that almost completely lacked it.

Throughout their childhoods, they had been taught to value various shallow forms of material success more than anything else. We were trying to push them in the right direction, and advocating widespread use of the powerful psychedelics was our principal means of doing so. How did the reprogramming that you carried out through the Sixties counterculture and psychedelics movement compare in effectiveness with that accomplished through religious mind control by Theocratic religious groups?

There is a tremendous difference, roughly that between doing something using a high level of technology and doing it by human muscle power, with the psychedelic drug being analogous to the machinery. We did more reprogramming in a few years on more people than the traditional religious Theocrats do in the same number of decades.

Unfortunately, the Fifth-stage Theocrats now have access to mental reprogramming techniques just as effective as those we used in the Sixties; but this is a subject we'll discuss later. Well then, why did you stop?

Why didn't you let the Sixties Movement continue indefinitely? I realize that you would have had to make the material you were using to reprogram people much more complex, but wouldn't this have happened naturally as they matured and gained in knowledge and experience? No, it doesn't work that way, unfortunately. It was extremely difficult just to program large numbers of LSD users with a set of vague idealistic principles that would make their opinion-forming and decision-making processes more tolerant and flexible. It was totally impossible to start teaching a detailed, sophisticated ideology.

The major reason for this is that we were working almost entirely through people's subconscious minds, so that they were absorbing short strings of data at random places in their mental files. As long as these messages were simple, clear, and positive - and it's this that made you call them 'naive' - then they did more good than harm. If we'd tried using more complex material, it would have merely confused the recipients, probably to the point of interfering with ordinary mental functions. In fact, most people in the Sixties counterculture suffered temporarily from a significant degree of this kind of confusion and impairment anyway. I'm pretty sure I understand now.

You were only trying to reprogram as many Americans as possible with some vague principles that would make them more socially and politically liberal, on a very fundamental level. Even before I made the breakthrough, I was aware that something like this had happened. At this point, let us end the discussion of drugs and go on to other aspects of the War in Heaven that mark the beginning of a new age of human civilization on Earth.: The Aquarian Age Q. I've never believed in astrology, so I've always felt a little uncomfortable using terms like 'Aquarian Age.'

Why did you let it get started in the first place? We had nothing to do with putting this term into common use. However, once large numbers of people started using it entirely on their own, we invented our own mythology around the rudiments of the Aquarian Age story and have been transmitting it telepathically into the subconscious minds of many different people. It now appears in messages channeled to the New Agers, in popular song lyrics, and many different places in fiction and poetry. First, here's the basic astrological myth about the Aquarian Age. The Age just ending was called the Piscean Age, after the constellation of Pisces, the Fishes. It's an appropriate name, because this was the Age of Christianity, which has the fish as one of its symbols because in the Greek that the early Christians spoke, the word for 'fish' is also an acronym for the phrase ' Jesus, the Anointed One, God's Son, the Savior.'

And the Age just beginning is called the Aquarian Age after the constellation of Aquarius, which represents a human being pouring water out of a jar. Now, here's our supplemental mythology about the Aquarian Age, which centers on the concept of 'water.' In this context, Water symbolizes spiritual power. During the Piscean Age, the human race on Earth resembled an enormous school of fish: they were utterly dependent on the water, and had very little control over it. They simply lived in it and hoped to survive. The New Age symbol is the human being taking control of the water, which also represents spiritual power.

However, if you take a closer look at the astronomical mythology represented by the constellations, you'll see that the water poured out by the Water Carrier is the source of the great celestial river, the which runs from the celestial equator far down in the southern sky. This huge outpouring of spiritual power represents several things we'll cover in Part Three: the apocalyptic events that will free the human race on this planet from Theocracy, and the birth of new gods. It's details like this that I need for the book, even if they're not directly connected to the point being discussed: they prove that there's an external creative intelligence behind many of the intuitive flashes that inspire people to create modern mythologies. Another example concerns several modern researchers who received telepathic communications containing words in an unknown language from sources that identified themselves as 'space people.'

Occultists later identified the words as belonging to the 'Enochian' language. Over three hundred years ago, the English occultist received a long series of channeled messages in this language, and occultists still study it today. The reason we telepathically transmitted Enochian words like 'affa' - meaning, very appropriately, 'nothing' - to the Ufologists was to steer their thinking in certain direction. We knew that if they published these words or repeated them very much, someone with occult knowledge would tell them where they came from. It was just another way of supplying evidence that there is a connection between what modern Ufologists call telepathic contact with space people, and the mediumistic communication with spirits that occultists have been practicing throughout history. Even with evidence like this to guide them, most of the Ufologists remain materialists.

We keep telling them, 'The Invisible College is composed of disembodied spirits. We're dead people, not living beings from other planets. Some of us are extraterrestrials, yes, but we're extraterrestrial spirits, not living people.' We keep telling them this whenever we are in telepathic contact, and they keep right on theorizing about interstellar space travel and other dimensions. Next, let us tell you about the so-called 'Sirius Connection,' which you mentioned in Part One without ever quite figuring out what we were doing.

This was a complicated ploy of exactly the same type as the one we just mentioned. We started sending telepathic messages like 'Sirius is very important' when we found out that news of the explicit astronomical knowledge about the invisible companion of in the Sudanese 's mythology was about to surface. In the early Seventies, when we started sending such messages, the same information that later appeared in was already known to certain anthropologists and members of the occult and UFO communities, especially French speaking ones.

This information is extremely impressive, because it contains the period of revolution of the companion around the larger star and the fact that this companion star is composed of super-dense matter. The information contains enough detail to make coincidence unlikely, and there is evidence that the Dogon possessed it before Western scientists did.

When I first read The Sirius Mystery, I tended to dismiss the whole thing as a hoax by the Dogon. I speculated that some of them had heard the astronomical information about Sirius from some passing trader only a few years before they told it to the anthropologists. A lot of the traders in that area were Arabs, and amateur astronomy has always been popular hobby in the Arab culture. No, the Dogon got the information centuries ago. They may or may not have gotten it second-hand from the ancient Egyptians, but they could have. This and many other pieces of advanced astronomical and astrophysical information have been in circulation among free spirits for thousands of years.

I begin to get the point. You sent out telepathic messages about Sirius to get the materialists like Wilson, Leary, and various Ufologists to listen to you, knowing they'd encounter the information quite soon. I assume you knew in advance that The Sirius Mystery was being written. It's more complicated than that. If we hadn't started the telepathic communications, several of these people would have accepted the information about Sirius and the Dogon as hard proof of physical visitations to Earth.

As it was, we complicated the issue in their minds, and may have kept them from seriously misleading the significant number of people who regard their opinions as authoritative. When you say, 'complicated the issue,' are you talking about R.A. Wilson's making a connection between the modern Sirius Mystery and the 'Great Star' legends of the Masons, Rosicrucians, and various occult groups?

Yes, the 'Great Star' is also the 'Great Secret': a version of the truth about Theocracy. This same symbolism is also being used by a number of different factions of spirits and living people involved in the psychic warfare to be described in Part Three. For example, some of then call themselves 'cats' or 'lions' and refer to certain other types of spirits as 'dogs' or 'Sirians.' These terms refer to different details of the physiology of the astral soul, and there are spirits of each type in the service of both the Theocrats and the Invisible College. I also see another possible tie-in here. Ever since R.A. Wilson wrote the!

Books, he's had a following composed mostly of counterculture people who publish underground magazines devoted to discussing his work, and to similar material by Leary, Burroughs, etc. Some of these people were part of the Sixties LSD movement at the time when the media were full of anti-drug propaganda claiming that LSD damaged the chromosomes, and that the children of everyone who used it would be born deformed or mutated. My own opinion at the time was not to take these claims seriously, because they were supported by insufficient evidence - and history seems to have proven me right. The assertion that LSD causes physical mutations seems to be entirely false. But this didn't stop certain members of the Sixties counterculture from taking this 'mutation' propaganda and turning it completely around.

In other words, they admitted that LSD causes mutations, and not in the descendants of the people who take the drug, but in the users themselves. And of course they claimed that these mutations were extremely beneficial, turning acidheads into supermen. Now, I had enough scientific knowledge and plain common sense to dismiss these claims as obvious nonsense, typical of the alternating delusions of persecution and grandeur so common in the counterculture at the time. And, on the purely physical level, nothing has happened since to convince me that my snap judgment was wrong. However, the belief that acidheads are mutants in a literal, physical sense and therefore superior to ordinary people has never died out within the counterculture. It seems commoner in the counter-culture today than it was in the Sixties.

Is the Invisible College responsible for this? Some of the people who are going to read this book and other explicit writings about the War in Heaven, and who are going to make the breakthrough and join the movement to teach others the truth about the nature of spiritual reality, are going to describe themselves as 'mutants' of this type.

Personally, I feel more like an alien than a mutant. I have past-life memories set on other worlds, and I really don't feel comfortable in any cultural group on this planet. This is because you're here to help in the building of an entirely new and more advanced civilization on Earth. And a large number of the people who call themselves mutants are also of extra-terrestrial origin.

That's another thing you'll want to concentrate on in your future writings' helping these people realize who they are, and what they're on this planet to do. Here's a question I asked before and didn't get answered. I'll try to ask it again, because it pertains directly to the subject of mutants.

During the Sixties, often said that LSD helps people unlock cosmic secrets that are encoded in our DNA; and at the time, I found this concept completely incomprehensible. But he's still saying the same thing today. For example, he said in Neurologic just a few years ago that, 'Most of the characteristics formerly attributed to the soul now describe the functions of DNA, whose complex messages originate from higher intelligences in other solar systems. The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems able to escape from the doomed planet and contact manifestations of the same amino-acid seeding that have evolved in other solar systems.'

What is the relationship between the concept in this quotation, the acid mutants, and the cosmology that you've already given? First of all, there was never a physical seeding of amino acids to start organic life. What actually happened was that disembodied spirits went to planets that were ready for life to develop, and created the amino acids by telekinetic manipulation of existing organic molecules. They assembled these amino acids into physical DNA using their own astral DNA molecules as templates. When Leary and other scientists theorize that the physical DNA contains an evolutionary program that automatically causes new species to develop, they are slightly misinterpreting messages that we put in their subconscious minds. What we are actually trying to tell them is that evolution is guided by the psychic manipulations of disembodied spirits, but most such scientists are still too materialistic to accept such an explanation. Their conscious minds are unwilling to admit the literal existence of the soul and other spiritual phenomena, so they try to stretch theories from physical science to fit the evidence they discover.

This sometimes causes non-scientists who read their works to engage in speculations about evolution and mutation that stray very far from reality. What we're really telling all these people is simply, 'Try to develop conscious control over your psychic powers during your present lifetime, so you'll have a better chance of surviving after death.' LSD and other psychedelic drugs are a dangerous but useful tool for doing this, and so are many psychic training practices derived from occultism and religion. We do want people to evolve; but the evolution is spiritual, not physical. However, there's a lot more to the War in Heaven than just a struggle between the Invisible College and the Theocratic spirits who operate through organized religion and try to retard material progress towards an advanced civilization on this planet. During the last five years, as this book was being written, the power of the religious Theocrats to influence the evolution of Western society has steadily declined, but that does not mean this Spiritual Revolution is going to be quick, easy, or bloodless. What's actually been going on during the last twenty years is that the Theocrats are preparing to achieve their final goal.

Throughout recorded history, the Theocrats have falsely pretended to be gods. Now, because of the Earth's extremely high and unstable population, they actually have a chance to assume godlike powers.

This is what the War in Heaven is really all about, and this what we will describe in Part Three.

The United States and Mexico went to war in May 1846. Except for the first battles fought in a disputed border area, all of the fighting took place in Mexico. The United States invaded and occupied Mexico City. The war took the lives of at least 25,000 Mexicans and nearly 14,000 U.S.

The United States finally withdrew its forces in July 1848, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed and ratified by both countries. Mexico reluctantly ceded 530,000 square miles of territory to the United States and gave up claims to disputed territory in Texas. Mexicans then and now have viewed this war as unnecessary and unjust. In a ceremony in 2010 commemorating those who had sacrificed their lives in defense of their nation, Mexican President Felipe Calderon described the war as an “unjust military aggression motivated by clearly imperialistic interests.” In the United States, views on the war have been more contested, but a significant proportion of American leaders, citizens, and historians, past and present, have viewed it as unnecessary and unjust. In the words of one historian, “It was a war of choice, not of necessity, a war of aggression that expanded the size of the United States by nearly one quarter and reduced that of Mexico by half.”.

President James K. Polk Throughout the war, as U.S. Forces invaded and occupied northern Mexico then captured Mexico City, President James K. Polk maintained that the United States was fighting “a just war.” In his war message to Congress on May 11, 1846, he charged that Mexican forces had “invaded our territory and shed the blood of our fellow-citizens on our own soil.” Given the “grievous wrongs perpetrated by Mexico,” said Polk, the United States had no choice but to fight for the “vindication of our rights and defense of our territory.” Many prominent Americans at the time disagreed with the president. Among them were former president John Quincy Adams, future presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S.

Grant, former vice-president John C. Calhoun, and three-time presidential candidate Henry Clay.

Illinois Representative Abraham Lincoln Two weeks after the president presented his war message, John Quincy Adams delivered a speech in the House of Representatives in which he denounced “this most outrageous war,” charging that its real purpose was territorial aggrandizement and the expansion of slavery. Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, in his first major speech in the House on January 12, 1848, challenged the president’s claim that American blood had been shed on American soil, stating that the evidence fell “far short of proving his justification.” In his lawyerly fashion, Lincoln presented counter evidence showing that Mexico had a better claim to the disputed territory. The president himself, Lincoln added whimsically, was a “bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.”.

Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina was a Democrat and a slaveholder, like the president, but he, too, could not endorse the war. In Calhoun’s view, President Polk had usurped the constitutional powers of Congress by placing U.S.

Troops in the disputed territory and provoking hostilities. As he explained in a speech on January 4, 1848, “I opposed the war then [at the outset] not only because I considered it unnecessary, and that it might have been easily avoided; not only because I thought the President had no authority to order a portion of the territory in dispute and in possession of the Mexicans to be occupied by our troops... But from high considerations of reason and policy, because I believed it would lead to great and serious evils to the country, and greatly endanger its free institutions. Whig Party leader Henry Clay Henry Clay, leader of the Whig Party, was no longer the “war hawk” of 1812. He had honed his diplomatic skills as secretary of state under President John Quincy Adams and facilitated domestic political compromises as well. He believed that a compromise with Mexico could have been achieved had Polk negotiated “in a true spirit of amity and conciliation.” Speaking to a large gathering in Lexington, Kentucky on November 13, 1847, the elder statesman argued that the president had rejected this “pacific and moderate course” in favor of planting U.S. Forces “in a warlike attitude” in the disputed territory.

“This is no war of defense,” he declared, “but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression. It is Mexico that is defending her fire-sides, her castles and her altars, not we.”. The war was personally tragic for Clay, as his son, Henry Clay Jr., was killed in the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. Informed that his son had died fighting bravely, the grieving father confided to a friend, “That consolation would be greater if I did not believe that this Mexican War was unnecessary and of an aggressive character.” His son, he said, had not inquired as to “the causes of the War.

It was sufficient for him that it existed in fact, and that he thought the Nation was entitled to his services.”. Raids by hostile tribes became more frequent in the 1830s and 1840s, in large part because the Mexican government could not afford to protect its northern provinces. Governors of the northern provinces issued desperate appeals to the central government, but to no avail. According to the historian Brian DeLay, native warriors “killed or captured several thousand northern Mexicans between 1831 and 1846.” They also plundered homes and stole valuable horses and livestock, effectively crippling the ranching and farming economies in the north. Mexican leaders attempted to pacify the Indians with an ambivalent mix of trade incentives, peace agreements, and revenge attacks. The revenge attacks, which included displaying “Comanche scalps, ears, hands, and heads in Mexican settlements as trophies,” increased the cycle of violence. In 1835, Texas was home to 30,000 Anglo immigrants and 8,000 Mexican Tejanos.

The first Americans to settle in eastern Texas did so legally through an empressario land grant from the Spanish government in 1820, later honored by the Mexican government. Under the guidance of Stephen Austin, Anglo American immigrants obtained large parcels of land for a small price. They were supposed to become Mexican citizens and convert to Catholicism but very few did. A separatist Anglo rebellion erupted in late 1826 (the Fredonian Rebellion) but Austin and most other Anglos chose to aid the Mexican government in suppressing it. Fearing more such rebellions, Mexico passed a law in April 1830 that severely restricted further American immigration. Americans nonetheless kept coming – illegally.

Many of these illegal immigrants, moreover, brought their black slaves with them, violating another Mexican law. To get around the letter of the law, they declared that their slaves were indentured servants.

The Texan quest for independence, as such, was motivated by both a desire to be free from Mexican rule and a desire to establish and expand slavery in a land where it had been forbidden. The Alamo mission near San Antonio The Texan fight for independence began in October 1835 and lasted seven months. The rebel force consisted of Texas Rangers, with much experience fighting Indians, and American volunteers streaming into Texas, included the famous Tennessee congressman David Crocket. All of the latter acted in violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1818, which forbade private military expeditions, but the Jackson administration ignored the law.

Texan forces were defeated at the old Alamo mission near San Antonio on March 6, 1836, and again at Goliad on March 22, but rallied to defeat Santa Anna’s army at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21. The Mexican Army executed 342 prisoners-of-war at Goliad. Texans responded in kind at San Jacinto, “slaughtering hundreds of unresisting Mexican soldiers,” although the deaths were officially reported as battle deaths (the tally was 650 Mexicans and 11 Texans killed). In Washington, President Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) remained officially neutral during the low-level war between Texas and Mexico.

Like his predecessor, Andrew Jackson, Van Buren rejected requests to annex Texas for a number of reasons. First, northern free states and especially abolitionists were opposed to it, evident in the fact that eight state legislatures passed resolutions and 600,000 citizens signed petitions against annexation.

Secondly, the annexation of Texas could very well involve the U.S. In a war with Mexico, as Texas was still part of Mexican territory in the eyes of the Mexican government.

Thirdly, annexation would surely involve the U.S. In the ongoing Indian wars in the region; and, fourthly, related to this, the U.S. Army had its hands full fighting Seminoles in Florida. Americans had expected a quick victory in Florida, but Seminole leader Osceola proved to be an elusive foe. The Second Seminole War lasted seven years, from 1835 to 1842, the longest in U.S.

History up to that time, and cost the lives of some 1,600 U.S. Troops and $40 million. It was one of the most unjust wars in U.S. History, being fought for the sole purpose of banishing Seminoles to reservations in the west and making room for white Americans and their slaves in Florida. Polk & George Dallas poster, 1844 President John Tyler (1841-1845) was more amenable to annexation than his predecessor.

Tyler signed a treaty of annexation with Texas in April 1844, but the Senate refused to ratify it, thus leaving the issue hanging as the presidential election approached that fall. Van Buren was expected to be the Democratic Party nominee, but his opposition to the annexation of Texas led expansionists to push for the relatively unknown James K. Polk was a former Tennessee congressman, Speaker of the House (1835-39), and one-term governor, but he had lost the last two gubernatorial elections.

With Andrew Jackson’s support, however, and a few rule manipulations, Polk became the nominee over front runner Van Buren. Polk ran on an expansionist platform designed to appeal to both southerners and northerners, respectively calling the “re-annexation” of Texas and the “re-occupation” of Oregon territory – misleading terms that implied existing American ownership. Polk did not mention California or New Mexico while on the campaign trail. Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay opposed the annexation of Texas without first settling the border dispute with Mexico. He voiced his opinion in a letter to the National Intelligencer on April 17, 1844: I certainly am not willing to involve this country in a foreign war for the object of acquiring Texas. I know there are those who regard such a war with indifference, and as a trifling affair, on account of the weakness of Mexico, and her inability to inflict serious injury upon this country.

But I do not look upon it thus lightly. I regard all wars as great calamities, to be avoided, if possible, and honorable peace as the wisest and truest policy of this country.... Honor and good faith and justice are equally due from this country towards the weak as towards the strong... I consider the annexation of Texas, at this time, without the assent of Mexico, as a measure compromising the national character, involving us certainly in war with Mexico, probably with other foreign powers, dangerous to the integrity of the Union, inexpedient in the present financial condition of the country, and not called for by any general expression of public opinion.

Clay was expected to win the presidential election in November 1844, but Polk pulled an upset. Polk won a small plurality of the popular vote, 49.5%, as compared to Clay’s 48.1%, with Liberty Party candidate James G. Birney garnering 2.3%, including 15,800 votes in the state of New York. According to the historian Brian DeLay, “Had Clay won just 5,107 more votes in New York State from the nearly one million cast, he would have become president and there almost certainly would have been no annexation of Texas, no war with Mexico, no U.S.

Civil War, and a vastly different continental story. But by the narrowest of margins Polk’s vision took the day.” Polk’s electoral victory led to a new surge of expansionist fervor in the country.

Sensing the time was right, outgoing President Tyler proposed to Congress that Texas be admitted as a state rather than a territory, thereby requiring majority approval in both houses of Congress rather than two-thirds of the Senate (the last attempt had failed). The strategy worked and Tyler signed an annexation bill on March 1, 1845, three days before Polk was inaugurated.

Herrara knew it would be foolhardy to wage a war against the United States and thus he attempted to find a middle way between upholding national pride, which meant appearing bellicose, and finding an acceptable compromise. Washington was well aware of the situation. Its agents in Mexico – William Parrot, John Black, F.

Dimond, and others – continually informed the Tyler and Polk administrations that the saber rattling public pronouncements of Mexican leaders were all show and that the leaders were in fact seeking an honorable way out of the impasse. In July 1845, Black reported that the Herrera administration was seeking a “substitute for war which in its opinion will save its honor,” and that Mexico had “nothing to gain and everything to lose” in a war against the United States. That same month, Mexican General Mariano Arista reported to his superiors that his army in the north was bereft of essential provisions, indeed that his men had “almost taught themselves not to eat.” Hungry, poorly clad, and lacking mules, horses, and military equipment, desertions were depleting the Mexican ranks. In August, Dimond, the American consul in Veracruz, informed the Polk administration that the Mexican army on the northern frontier was in a “starving condition...

A wretched state even for peace to say nothing of war.” To Polk, this was good news, as Mexico’s distress made it more likely that the government would accept the exaggerated boundaries of Texas and sell its northern territories to the United States; or failing that, Mexico’s military weakness would allow the U.S. To quickly gain the upper hand in a war. With regard to the Oregon territory, Polk encouraged the saber-rattling rhetoric of “Fifty-four forty or fight!” (referring to the upper latitude of the jointly held Oregon territory) in order to pressure Great Britain to back down on its proposed dividing line of the Columbia River. Polk wanted the boundary further to the north and suggested to the British the 49 th parallel, which was far below 54-40 latitude. According to the American diplomatic historian William Weeks: He fomented Democrats from the Northwest such as Edward Hannegan of Indiana and William Allen of Ohio to demand all of Oregon, assuring them that he would never back down from the claim to 54-40 even though he planned all along to use their extreme claims to form the basis of a compromise at 49 degrees.... Here the president benefited from the demonstrated willingness of Americans to fight even when a lack of preparedness and plain common sense seemed to preclude that option, and indeed, the chest-thumping assertions of Hannegan, Allen, and others bore some resemblance to the War Hawks of 1812. Polk, unlike Madison, was not controlled by hotheads in Congress but rather used their threats to help extract a deal.

Polk concluded the Oregon deal in June 1846, two months after the U.S. Went to war against Mexico. The Oregon Treaty established the border at the 49th parallel, with the British keeping Vancouver Island. Polk thus got what he wanted, even if his expansionist allies were disgruntled at the compromise. Polk’s militant posturing had pressured Great Britain to agree to a boundary line north of the Columbia River, but he knew that if he pushed too hard, Great Britain could ally itself with Mexico against the U.S., thus creating a formidable barrier to his plans for California. General Taylor’s camp at Corpus Christi Polk began military maneuvers in July 1845.

Without authorization from Congress, he directed General Zachary Taylor and 4,000 troops to advance to the south bank of the Nueces River, near Corpus Christi. Six months later, on January 13, 1846, before learning of the outcome of John Slidell’s mission in Mexico City, Polk ordered Taylor to proceed further to the Rio Grande, thus entering disputed territory. As Polk later wrote in his diary, he anticipated “a collision between the American and Mexican forces.” Taylor’s troops set up camp on the north side of the Rio Grande, opposite the town of Matamoros, on March 28. They built a makeshift fort, aimed their artillery at the town, and blockaded the mouth of the river, denying food and supplies to 4,000 townspeople and 3,400 Mexican soldiers stationed there. Apart from entering into what Mexicans considered their territory, the blockade itself was an act of war. According to the historian Glenn Price. The first indisputable act of war was an act of the United States, when its naval forces blockaded the Rio Grande on 12 April 1846.

Even had the land on the left bank of that river been within the limits of the United States, to blockade the river, which in that case would have been the international boundary, was an act of war. That conclusion needs no supporting argument, but it may be of interest to point out that the United States government was on record as stating that any attempt by Mexico to close the river to American traffic would justify hostilities.

Instructions given General Zachary Taylor by the Department of War stated that “the Rio Grande, in a state of peace, may be regarded as equally open to navigation of the U.S. & Mexico,” and should this “reciprocal right be resisted by Mexico,” Taylor was at liberty to force it open by military power. Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga replaced Herrara as president of Mexico in December 1845.

He immediately found himself in the same dilemma as his predecessor, having no means of stopping the United States from moving into (disputed) Mexican territory while nonetheless being pressured by the public to uphold national honor and exert a valiant defense of the homeland. Paredes dismissed Slidell in March 1846, explaining to him that the presence of American troops on Mexican soil made negotiations impossible. Slidell also lacked proper credentials and had come with an additional agenda other than negotiating the border dispute. Paredes demanded that U.S. Forces return to the north side of the Nueces River, but he nevertheless sought to reassure the U.S.

Of his intentions by issuing a manifesto declaring that he “would never commit a single aggression against the United States,” but only act in defense of Mexico. Battle of Palo Alto, May 8, 1846 On April 23, with the American troops encamped opposite Matamoras and having blockaded the river, Paredes issued another manifesto, this time declaring that “from this day defensive war begins.” The following day, the Mexican commander at Matamoros, General Arista, informed Taylor that hostilities had commenced. On April 25, Mexican troops crossed the river and attacked a U.S. Patrol unit, killing eleven men. Full-blown battles followed at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma on May 8 and 9, both of which U.S. Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant later recorded in his Personal Memoirs, “We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it,” otherwise it “was very doubtful whether Congress would declare war.” News of the first skirmish reached Washington on Saturday, May 9.

President Polk was at the time preparing a war message to Congress based on Mexico’s refusal to receive John Slidell. With the outbreak of fighting, Polk had what he wanted. He could now claim that “American blood had been spilled on American soil,” and thus that the United States was fighting an honorable, defensive war. “To Polk,” writes Weeks, “the fiction of Mexican aggression had to be staunchly maintained so as to justify a cession of territory as punishment.”. US House of Representatives On Monday, May 11, President Polk presented his war message to Congress. He blamed Mexico for the outbreak of hostilities and declared that he had done everything in his power to avoid war.

He did not ask Congress for a formal declaration of war, as required in the Constitution, but stated that war already existed and asked Congress for money to supply troops in the field. Representative Linn Boyd, Democrat of Kentucky, introduced an amendment to the war bill paraphrasing the president, declaring that “a state of war existed” between Mexico and the United States.”. Objections were immediately raised. Whig Representative Robert Toombs of Georgia charged the president with “usurping the war making power” of Congress as well as “seizing a country” not our own. South Carolina representative Isaac E.

Holmes, a Democrat, argued that the outbreak of fighting did not mean that war had broken out, as only Congress could declare war. He noted that in 1807, the British warship Leopard had fired on the U.S. Warship Chesapeake, killing a number of Americans, but that this attack had not resulted in war; nor should the outbreak of hostilities in Texas.

Holmes’ Democratic colleagues did not agree, however, and Boyd’s amendment passed by a partisan vote of 123-67. A similar amendment introduced in the Senate passed by a vote of 28-18. In the murder of Mexicans upon their own soil, or in robbing them of their country, I can take no part, either now or hereafter. The guilt of these crimes must rest on others; I will not participate in them; but if Mexicans or any other people should dare invade our country, I would meet them with the sword in one hand and a torch in the other... We may always justify ourselves for defending our country, but never for waging a war upon an unoffending people for the purpose of conquest. There is an immutable, an eternal principle of justice pervading the moral universe.

No nation, or people, or individual ever did or ever will violate that law with impunity. I do not see on what principle it can be shown that the President, without consulting Congress and obtaining its sanction for the procedure, had a right to send an army to take up a position, where, as it must have been foreseen, the inevitable consequences would be war.... The question is, Was it proper? Was it right?... Why was it necessary to cross the desert, and take up a position immediately in front of the friendly town of Matamoros?

Why was it necessary to take up that position, with the batteries pointed against the town at a distance of not more than five hundred yards from its environs? It was an aggressive act; an act which the civilized world will designate. It was as much an act of aggression on our part as is a man’s pointing a pistol at another’s breast.... I have felt that these acts of the Executive ought to be condemned – I do condemn them.

I think that they will be condemned by the people of the United States. By these acts we have been precipitated into a war with a friendly nation.

In the end, the Senate voted 40-2 to approve supplies for the troops (coupled with the acknowledgement that war existed), and the House voted 174-14, with 35 abstentions. These tallies, however, hardly reflected the strength of the opposition. As the historian John H.

Schroeder explains: As sensitive politicians, most administration critics could not vote their consciences at the expense of their patriotism. Because they understood that national public opinion would be outraged and demand retribution for the attack on the Rio Grande, the opposition dared not risk charges of failing to support an endangered American army. That fear of being labeled disloyal was the foremost consideration in the minds of dissidents. In presenting his war bill to Congress, Polk made no mention of his desire to obtain California and New Mexico.

According to the historian Ballard C. Campbell, Polk’s “interest in using the war for territorial gain was not publicly disclosed until August 1846, when the president asked Congress to approve a $2 million appropriation that could be used as partial payment to Mexico for territory – or perhaps a bribe to Santa Anna.”. Indeed, on July 6, an agent of Polk, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, the nephew of John Slidell, met secretly with Santa Anna in Havana, where the latter was living in comfortable exile. Mackenzie conveyed to him that President Polk would assist his return to power in exchange for negotiating the cession of the disputed border area and at least part of California, for which Mexico would be liberally paid. Mackenzie came away from the three-hour meeting believing that he had succeeded in his mission. Santa Anna was subsequently allowed to pass through the U.S.

Naval blockade and return to Mexico. Rumors that Santa Anna intended to sell out his country followed him into Mexico City, but he proved them wrong, gathering together a new army to repel the invaders. Polk had been duped. Most Anglo Americans viewed Mexicans as an inferior race based on their mixed, Spanish-Indian ancestry.

While not scorned as “savages,” they were depreciated as “an idle, thriftless people” who did not deserve to rule over the lands they held in North America. Some viewed the inability of Mexicans to pacify hostile tribes as confirmation of their inferiority. Perpetual disorder in the Mexican government furthermore prompted predictions that Americans would one day rule Mexico. William Seton “Guy” Henry, an American journalist who covered the war, wrote of the Mexican people: The finger of Fate points, if not to their eventual extinction, to the time they will cease to be the owners of the soil, and when the Anglo race will rule with republican simplicity and justice, a land literally “flowing with milk and honey” – who will, by their superior mental and physical abilities... Populate the country with a race of men who will prove the infinite goodness of our Maker, in creating nothing but what is for use and some good purpose.”. Recruitment poster, Holmes County, Ohio Anglo American racism created substantial barriers to peacefully resolving outstanding issues with Mexico through negotiations. Not only was there a widespread belief among Americans that the “inferior” Mexican people must sooner or later give up their lands to the superior “Anglo race,” but the very idea of sitting down at a table and talking as equals was anathema to many.

According to Glenn Price, “The attitude was that there was very little difference between an Indian and a Mexican; serious and respectful diplomacy was out of place in either case.” For Polk and many other Americans in that intensely racist era, the mere fact that brown-skinned Mexicans expected to be treated as equals constituted a challenge to the assumed racial hierarchy of Anglo (white) dominance. Polk and company expected Mexicans to accept their status as an “inferior race” and give in to the demands of the “superior race.” Indeed, Mexico’s failure to do so was deemed a sufficient cause for war. According to the historian Amy Greenberg, “Polk viewed international relations through the lens of slaveholding and dominance”. Polk’s concept of justice was unquestionably shaped by his experience as a slavemaster. Some slaveholders, such as Henry Clay, or Thomas Jefferson a generation before, struggled with the knowledge that slavery was wrong. But like most intensely conservative slave masters in the 1840s, Sarah and James Polk believed the domination of white over black was part of God’s plan.... Domination of the strong over the weak, and white over black or brown, was not just the reality of slavery, it was also, in their perspective, right.

Of course, there is a long history of one group dehumanizing another when desirous of their land. The English did it to the Irish in the mid-16 th century, depreciating them as pagans (most were Catholic) and savages who improperly used their lands, which British lords proceeded to take over. Andrew Jackson did much the same in the 1830s, labeling the peaceful Indians of the Southeast “savages” and declaring his intention to “reclaim them from their wandering habits,” despite the fact that they had taught Virginia settlers how to grow corn. During the U.S.-Mexican War, the refrain of Anglo-Saxon superiority followed every American victory.

When General Taylor captured the Mexican town of Monterrey in September 1846, for example, Walt Whitman described it as “another clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon character.”. “Let the half-civilized Mexicans hear the crack of the unerring New Hampshire riflemen.” Outspoken Anglo American racism coupled with American aggression evoked fear in Mexico.

John O”Sullivan A third factor influencing American attitudes toward Mexico was the ideology of “manifest destiny,” which combined religious, political, and racial ideas into a righteous justification for American territorial expansion. The most famous proponent of this informal ideology, John O’Sullivan, editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, expressed the view that U.S. Expansion was divinely ordained; that it would extend freedom, democracy, and civilization to new lands; and that more land was needed for a rapidly growing Anglo-Saxon population.

In asserting this presumed mandate from heaven, O’Sullivan made the case that America represented a new order of civilization, as compared to Old World empires, and that the American character was inherently noble and good. As he wrote in 1839: What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement can cast his view over the past history the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed? What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties, the injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect? America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields but in defense of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes.

We have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones, nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy. This flattering view of American history and identity ignored much actual history, including the recent forced removal of Native American tribes that caused thousands of deaths. Nor was it true that democratic governments eschewed aggression and imperialism. Herring comments: Dubious when it was written, O’Sullivan’s affirmation soon proved completely wrong. The Mexican-American conflict of 1846-48 was in large part a war of lust and aggrandizement. The United States had long coveted Texas. In the 1840s, California and New Mexico also became objects of desire.

With characteristic single-mindedness, Polk set his sights on all of them. The United States, in other words, was becoming more like Old World empires, except that a president rather than a king was leading the nation into “scenes of horrid carnage.” O’Sullivan coined the particular catchphrase “manifest destiny” in the July-August 1845 issue of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, just after Texas was annexed to the U.S. The slogan was quickly picked up by other expansionists who used it to embellish American territorial ambitions with noble ideals. Among the latter was the president of the United States, James Polk. In his Third Annual Message to Congress on December 7, 1847, he said: “No country has been so much favored, or should acknowledge with deeper reverence the manifestations of the divine protection. An all-wise Creator directed and guarded us in our infant struggle for freedom and has constantly watched over our surprising progress until we have become one of the great nations of the earth.”.

Elder statesman Albert Gallatin Among those who called attention to the banality of “Manifest Destiny” was Albert Gallatin, former congressman, secretary of the treasury, and foreign minister, who wrote at the age of eighty-seven, “What shall be said of the notion of an empire extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the North Pole to the Equator? Of the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, or its universal monarchy over the whole of North America?” Such “allegations of superiority of race and destiny neither require nor deserve any answer; they are but pretenses under which to disguise ambition, cupidity, or silly vanity.” Abolitionists also held forth a different vision the nation’s progress, one that extended freedom and democracy to three million people enslaved in the United States.

Peace advocates, too, conceived of progress in different terms. They envisioned a time when war would be transcended through “the general use of conciliation, arbitration, judicial methods, and other peaceful means of avoiding and adjusting differences among nations,” as stated in the 1828 charter of the American Peace Society. In short, not all Americans believed that their nation’s providential mission lay in conquest and imperial power. A sizable minority refused to accept the idea that the United States must follow in the footsteps of Old World empires. Their vociferous protests against the U.S.-Mexican War indicate that many people recognized and wrestled with moral choices in their day.

It was not fate or some elusive concept of “manifest destiny” that led the U.S. Into war in 1846, but Mr. Polk and the militant expansionists. Could war have been avoided?

Surely it could, had Polk been willing to compromise with Mexico as he did with Great Britain. Had John Slidell gone to Mexico City “in a true spirit of amity and conciliation,” as suggested by Clay, and had Polk not initiated aggressive war maneuvers, negotiations with Mexico over the disputed territory would likely have succeeded. The Mexican government, for its part, could have recognized Texas independence early on, accepting the loss of territory. Whether or not the United States could have obtained California without war is a more difficult hypothetical question. That Mexico might have been willing to sell all or part of California is indicated by the fact that, in 1846, Santa Anna offered to cede Alta California to Great Britain in an attempt to keep it out of American hands. The British declined the offer and encouraged Mexico to settle its differences with the United States.

Given Mexican fears of racially-charged Anglo imperialism, the U.S. Might have offered an accompanying non-aggression treaty. After receiving the casualty report from the Battle of Buena Vista, the Philadelphia North American editorialized on November 11, 1846, “Wars are always popular at a distance.

The bulletin that announces the destruction of a thousand fellow beings is received with... Pride, pomp and circumstance of a glorious war.... Let our people realize the price paid for conquered provinces and military glories.” No doubt, many did realize that day the price paid for conquest. Yet the tendency to glorify war, celebrate victories, and make heroes of commanding officers remained steadfast throughout the war.

Whig politicians who opposed the war were as eager as Democrats to honor American warriors. Indeed, they selected General Taylor as their presidential candidate in 1848.

War news from Mexico (1851 hand-colored engraving by Richard Caton} The U.S.-Mexican War was documented like no other war in history up to that time. At least eighteen American journalists were embedded in U.S. Army units during the war.

Hundreds of soldiers wrote letters and dozens were christened “occasional” or “special” correspondents for mass circulation newspapers. Americans also established newspapers in occupied Mexican cities. The public’s demand for eyewitness accounts of battles and first hand news of the war was insatiable. Even antiwar editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune felt obliged to print every detail of battle, as “carnage” is what sold newspapers.

Newspapers also published lists of casualties, often gathered by journalists, which were more fearfully awaited. News from Mexico took at least ten days to reach New Orleans, after which it was distributed by steamship, rail, or horseback to other cities (telegraph lines were in their infancy). It took another eight days to reach Washington from New Orleans. American journalists and soldier correspondents typically praised American courage in the field and exulted over American victories, but they also described the dreary and brutal reality of the war: debilitating diseases in the camps, inadequate provisions, disorderly conduct, conflicts between soldiers and officers, desertions, American atrocities against Mexican civilians, and persistent Mexican guerrilla attacks that made it all-but-impossible for soldiers to celebrate their battle victories.

The glorification of war, as such, was tarnished by the reality of it. Three weeks after the first major battles of the war at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, Christopher Haile of the New Orleans Picayune walked through the battlefield and reported on the scene. “Rather than recount the battle,” writes the historian Michael Scott Van Wagenen, “he discussed the ‘feelings of deep sadness’ and horror he felt on visiting these places. Palo Alto turned particularly dramatic when the party stumbled across the remains of Mexican casualties of Taylor’s artillery that had been mummified by the sun. He spared no detail in describing the mangled bodies and the ‘countenance which their death agonies had stamped on them.’” More typically, it was American casualties that tore at the hearts of Americans. As these casualties mounted, public enthusiasm for the war rapidly diminished. By the end of 1846, the initial rush of volunteers had slowed to a trickle and few were interested in re-enlisting after their term of duty ended.

The regulars received low pay and were subject to harsh discipline. Volunteers also received low pay but the discipline was light, if not woefully lacking.

Some volunteers signed up for three month terms, which hardly allowed for training and regimentation (the federal government later required 12-month terms). Many volunteer regiments elected their own immediate officers “and expected to be treated as citizens, if not heroes,” according to the historian Paul Foos. The regulars, however, proved to be the more disciplined and effective soldiers. “Zachary Taylor, who found the volunteers impossible to control, believed them more trouble than they were worth,” writes Greenberg.

“Perhaps he was right. Volunteers, lacking both training and discipline, were not only less reliable under fire than the regulars, and disproportionately susceptible to communicable disease, in part because of poor sanitation practices, but also committed atrocities against Mexican civilians that would come to shock Americans back home.”. Casualty list in the Charleston Courier (click to enlarge) The casualty rate for soldiers was extremely high on both sides. Of the 90,000 U.S. Soldiers who served in Mexico, nearly 14,000 died, a death rate of 15.5%, or one out of every seven soldiers. According to Eisenhower, this was “the highest death rate of any war in our history.” On the Mexican side, the death rate was even higher, although figures are less precise. Of some 82,000 men who served in the Mexican army or were guerrillas, an estimated 25,000 lost their lives, an astounding death rate of 31%, or almost one out of every three soldiers.

These figures do not include Mexican civilian deaths, the number of which is unknown. As Mexican armies included many women and wives who assisted the soldiers, they were subjected to the travails of exposure, hunger, and disease as well. American casualties • Total number of U.S.

Soldiers who served in Mexico: 89,836 (Regulars: 31,024; Volunteers: 58,812) • Deaths during the war: 13,962 (15.54%) • Killed in action or died of wounds: 1,733 • Died of disease or other causes: 12,229 • Wounded: 4,152 Mexican casualties • Total number of Mexican soldiers mobilized: 82,000 • Total number who died during war: 25,000 (30.5%) • Killed in action or died of wounds: 5,000 • Died of disease or other causes: 20,000 • Missing: 10,000 Disease was the biggest killer in the war. For every U.S.

Soldier who died in battle or from battle wounds, seven died of disease. “As was typical for other 19 th-century conflicts,” writes the American military historian Derek R. Mallett, “infectious disease accounted for far more deaths than battle trauma.

Yellow fever, malaria, dysentery, and epidemic measles, mumps, and even occasional smallpox were problems both on campaign and in camp.” Much illness resulted from drinking tainted water from polluted streams, a situation exacerbated by a shortage of wood to make fires and boil water. Soldiers also needed better tents and medical care. This became apparent during the nine months that General Taylor’s troops spent camping near Corpus Christi (July 1845 to March 1846).

According to Foos: Dysentery and fevers raged through the camp until one-sixth of the men were on sick report, and about one-half suffered from some degree of infirmity. The tents provided by the Quartermaster’s Corps were worn and rotten... The border region suffered from frequent “northers,” fierce storms that could drop the temperature from ninety degrees to below freezing in a matter of hours. The men slept in mud and cold water, the quartermasters having neglected to provide floors for the tents. To these indignities were added late pay from the Quartermaster and swarms of “camp followers” – liquor sellers, gamblers, prostitutes, and criminals – intent on quickly relieving soldiers of their pay, and sometimes robbing and assaulting them.

Taylor could do little to disperse this rabble in Corpus Christi as civilians were subject only to civil authority. Desertions were common on both sides.

The number of U.S. Deserters is estimated at 9,200, about ten percent of the regulars and nearly seven percent of the volunteers. This is the highest desertion rate in any American war. Mexican lancers and infantry Mexican troops often outnumbered U.S. Troops on the battlefield but failed to win a single major battle in terms of forcing an American retreat.

The Mexican army had antiquated short range artillery and often ran short of ammunition. American long-range artillery eviscerated Mexican units at a distance and thwarted Mexican charges.

Army also had more highly trained officers and engineers, and was far better supplied than Mexican forces, notwithstanding many limitations. Mexican troops were literally starving at times. Unable to defeat the Americans in pitched battles, Mexican fighters resorted to guerrilla warfare. This asymmetrical warfare consisted of attacking small groups of U.S.

Soldiers, plundering supply trains, disrupting communication lines, and making travel unsafe except in large armed groups. The guerilleros or rancheros, as they were called, also took revenge against Mexicans who accommodated the American invaders. Commanders treated the guerrillas as outlaws rather than soldiers, denouncing them as “atrocious bands” that “violate every rule of warfare observed by civilized nations.” Mexicans could also make claims on the unwritten rules of civilized warfare, as the abuse of Mexican civilians began as soon as the Americans set foot in Matamoros in May 1846. Apart from guerrillas, prisoners-of-war were generally treated decently by each side. Almost all were paroled within a short time. Parole was a widely used practice in which prisoners were allowed to go home under an oath not to bear arms for the duration of the war, or until exchanged for prisoners held by the other side.

This was not an undesirable outcome for many soldiers. For the U.S., paroling Mexican prisoners was a necessary measure, as the U.S. Army could not afford to feed, house, and guard thousands of Mexican prisoners – and the U.S. Captured many more Mexican prisoners than the other way around. In paroling Mexican prisoners quickly, President Polk also hoped to gain favor with the Mexican public and counter the “prejudice” of Mexican newspapers toward the American invaders. On July 9, 1846, he ordered General Taylor to interact with captured Mexican officers and inform them of the willingness of the United States to establish an “honorable peace.” Such efforts to win favor with the Mexican people and convince them of America’s good intentions were fundamentally at odds with the basic mission of the war, which was to conquer and break the will of the Mexican people and government. Polk decided on the invasion of central Mexico in November 1846, following General Taylor’s capture of Monterrey and the Mexican government’s continued refusal to acquiesce to U.S.

The invasion, led by General Winfield Scott, began with the bombardment and takeover of Veracruz in March 1847 and ended with the fall of Mexico City in September, although the vicissitudes of occupation continued. Forces finally withdrew in July 1848, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been signed and ratified by both countries.

• Personal violence – the abuse of civilians by individual soldiers, including robbery, rape, and murder. This unscripted, wanton violence was especially prevalent in Taylor’s northeastern campaign, despite efforts by U.S. Officers to stop it.

• Counter-insurgency violence – the extension of anti-guerrilla operations to civilians, including revenge attacks, torture, and intimidation; aimed at negating civilian support for guerrillas and extracting information as to their whereabouts. As guerrilla warfare was deemed outside the rules of civilized combat, special U.S. Counterinsurgency units engaged in “uncivilized” methods with tacit approval by commanders. • Collateral war violence – war operations such as bombardments and sieges of cities that result in extensive civilian casualties and property damage. Bombardment of Veracruz under General Scott stands out as one of the more egregious examples of “collateral damage,” as hundreds of civilians were killed or wounded. • Structural violence – official policies that impoverish, oppress, or humiliate the civilian population, including taxing the population to support the U.S.

Occupation and imposing martial law. Both Taylor and Scott imposed martial law on Mexican towns but, to their credit, refused to take provisions from the civilian population without paying for them. Major-General Zachary Taylor General Zachary Taylor’s occupation of northeastern Mexico began on May 18, 1846, when his troops crossed the Rio Grande and took control of Matamoros unopposed. The Mexican army led by General Arista had retreated to the interior the night before, being short of every kind of provision.

In June, Taylor began receiving reinforcements, mainly volunteer regiments, in anticipation of moving on to other towns. He waited until August for the arrival of steamboats to move his troops and supplies to Camargo, 80 miles upriver. The waiting period proved hazardous for the 4,000 residents of Matamoros. According to the U.S. Army military historian General John S. Brown: As the boredom of garrison duty began to set in, plundering, personal assaults, rape, and other crimes against Mexicans quickly multiplied.

During the first month after the volunteers arrived, some twenty murders occurred. Initially, Taylor seemed uninterested in devising diversions to occupy his men and failed to stop the attacks.

As thefts, assaults, rapes, murders, and other crimes perpetrated by the volunteers mounted and Taylor failed to discipline his men, ordinary Mexican citizens began to have serious reservations about the American invasion. Taylor’s lackadaisical approach to discipline produced an effect utterly unanticipated by the Polk administration, many of whose members, particularly pro-expansionists such as Secretary of the Treasury Robert J. Walker, believed that Mexicans would welcome the Americans as liberators. Instead, public opinion turned against the Americans. Some of the volunteers and above all the Texans seem to think it perfectly right to impose upon the people of a conquered City to any extent, and even to murder them where the act can be covered by the dark. And how much they seem to enjoy acts of violence too! I would not pretend to guess the number of murders that have been committed upon the persons of poor Mexicans and the soldiers, since we have been here, but the number would startle you.

News reporters caught wind of the mayhem. In mid-July 1846, the journalist George Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune reported from Matamoros, “Several Mexicans were killed in rows last night – some say five or six – by drunken brawlers who hang about the camp of the Texans.” Kendall’s colleague, Christopher Haile, commented on the rising attacks against the American volunteers, observing that the inhabitants “appear sullen and inclined to seek revenge... They hate us cordially.” Guy Henry, a writer for the New York magazine, Spirit of the Times, offered a more sympathetic view of Mexicans after visiting hospitals in Matamoros.

“I left the hospital shocked with the horrors of war,” he wrote. The hospitals were “filled with wounded and dying” Mexican soldiers, their amputated limbs confirming the effectiveness of American artillery at the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma.

The big story in the American press, however, was the great victory of Taylor’s “heroic little army” in these two battles. A Illinois paper editorialized, “The prowess of our brave soldiers has made the perfidious Mexicans bite the dust.” A South Carolina paper proudly proclaimed that “since the eventful days of our Revolutionary struggle no battle has been fought in which the heroes who march under the Star Spangled Banner, covered themselves with more glory, than did the little band who pressed forward at the command of the heroic Taylor, and charged an enemy of vastly superior numbers, in the very teeth of their roaring, death-dealing cannon!”. Mexican surrender at Monterrey Having set up a supply depot at Camargo, Taylor’s next objective was to capture the fortified city of Monterrey, defended by 7,300 troops under General Pedro de Ampudia. Taylor arrived with about 6,600 soldiers, having left behind 4,000 volunteers in Camargo. The 10,000 residents of Monterrey had just celebrated the 250 th anniversary of the city’s founding on September 20, 1596. Taylor’s forces struck on September 21. After three days of bombardment and fighting, with each side suffering some 450 casualties, Ampudia offered to surrender the city on condition that his troops be allowed to withdraw without harm and that an eight-week armistice go into effect.

Taylor accepted the terms, half-expecting that a political settlement would ensue. President Polk was irate upon hearing the news of the armistice. He recorded in his diary that if Taylor had imprisoned Ampudia’s army, it “would probably have ended the war with Mexico.” Polk had hoped for a knock-out blow that would force the Mexican government to relent. Instead, the Mexican government remained intransigent on ceding its northern territories and Polk began planning for an invasion of Mexico City.

He also sent a message to Taylor to terminate the truce. In early October, Secretary of War William Marcy furthermore ordered Taylor to “draw supplies” for our Army “from the enemy without paying for them,” and to “require contributions for its support” to the extent practicable. Taylor wrote back that “it would have been impossible hitherto, and is so now, to sustain the Army to any extent by forced contributions of money or supplies.” He continued to pay Mexicans fair prices for necessary provisions. This official practice, however, did not prevent individual soldiers from taking what they wanted, their low pay or late pay being a catalyst to their thievery. American journalists were on hand to observe the American occupation of Monterrey. The Charleston Mercury reported on October 11, 1846: “As at Matamoros, murder, robbery, and rape were committed in the broad light of day, and as if desirous to signalize themselves at Monterrey by some new act of atrocity, they burned many of the thatched huts of the poor peasants. It is thought that one hundred of the inhabitants were murdered in cold blood, and one...

Was shot dead at noon-day in the main street of the city.” This story was republished in other U.S. Newspapers and in London as well. American depredations were also reported in the Mexican press, which charged that “the volunteers, the most unprincipled and ungovernable class at home, have been let loose like blood-hounds on Mexico. News of Buena Vista One week after the Battle of Buena Vista, the last formal battle in the northeast region took place outside the city of Chihuahua.

Doniphan and some 1,000 soldiers, having made their way from Santa Fe, defeated a Mexican force of comparable size and took charge of the city. Doniphan arranged for American merchants to be established and kept watch for guerrilla activity during his two month stay. With many of his volunteer enlistments ending soon, he took his regiment to Saltillo on April 28, allowing the Mexican governor of the state to take charge of the city. With the end of major battles in the northeastern region, Taylor focused on maintaining law and order, preventing and responding to guerrilla attacks, and, to a lesser degree, protecting communities from Indian attacks. Comanche, Apache, and Navaho raids in northern Mexico were on the rise, due in part to the diversion of Mexican forces to fight the Americans. Imposed martial law on Mexican communities.

One regulation stated, “All Mexicans, except the Police, are ordered to confine themselves to their houses after sunset. Any found in the streets after that time will be fired upon.” Another warned that any Mexican found selling liquor “will be punished by confiscating all their property and such other punishment as may be ordered by a court martial, not excepting death.”. General John E. Wool General Wool, as military governor of Saltillo, added to the oppression by instituting a policy that held whole towns responsible for any stolen U.S. Army goods, threatening the residents with large fines.

The innocent, as such, were made to pay for the guilty. “Within a few months,” notes Brown, “Wool collected more than $8,000 in fines, as well as livestock and other personal property. General Wool also made an effort to crack down on reckless American violence and abuse. He imposed stricter discipline, instituted curfews, tried to keep troops away from population centers, and threatened disobedient soldiers with discharge.

Judging by news reports, however, these measures were not enough. John Durivage, a correspondent for the New Orleans Picayune stationed in Monterrey, wrote on April 25, 1847: You have published accounts of the disgraceful outrage perpetrated before the battle of Buena Vista, and will be no less shocked to learn that an equally sickening scene of outrageous barbarity has been perpetrated in this region by persons calling themselves Americans. It appears that near a little town called Guadalupe, an American was shot two or three weeks ago; and his companions and friends determined to revenge his death. Accordingly a party of a dozen or twenty men visited the place and deliberately murdered twenty-four Mexicans. General Taylor confirmed the lawless personal violence in a dispatch to the War Department on June 16, 1847: I deeply regret to report that many of the twelve months’ volunteers, in their route hence to the lower Rio Grande, have committed extensive depredation and outrages upon the peaceable inhabitants. There is scarcely a form of crime that has not been reported to me as committed by them... Were it possible to rouse the Mexican people to resistance, no more effectual plan could be devised than the very one pursued by some of our volunteer regiments.

Early photo of U.S. Soldiers entering Saltillo President Polk’s blunt strategy for dealing with the difficulties of occupation was to win the war as quickly as possible and get out. In public pronouncements he gave no indication of the problems of occupation. In his Second Annual Message to Congress in December 1846, he praised “our volunteer citizen soldiers, who so promptly responded to their country’s call, with an experience of the discipline of a camp of only a few weeks, have borne their part in the hard-fought battle of Monterrey with a constancy and courage equal to that of veteran troops and worthy of the highest admiration.” There was no mention of discipline problems or abuses, or efforts to correct these. His message the following year was much the same.

“Too much praise can not be bestowed upon our officers and men, regulars and volunteers, for their gallantry, discipline, indomitable courage, and perseverance, all seeking the post of danger and vying with each other in deeds of noble daring.”. Stephen Kearny Col. Stephen Kearny’s “Army of the West” thus entered Santa Fe unopposed on August 18, 1846. In a display of power, Kearny’s troops marched in, sabers drawn, with cannons firing in the distance, and hoisted the American flag over the governor’s palace.

Joseph Magoffin, an aide to Col. Kearny who later became mayor of El Paso, indicated in his official report that the Americans were graciously received by the inhabitants: “Gen’l. Kearny entered this city on 18 th 5 o’c P.M., the authorities & people of the place being ready to give him a hearty welcome.” Lieutenant Richard Smith Elliott, a correspondent for the St.

Louis Reveille, looked more closely at the reactions of the residents: Our march into the city... Was extremely warlike... From around corners, men, with surly countenances and downcast looks regarded us with watchfulness, if not terror.... Strange, indeed, must have been the feelings of the citizens, when an invading army was thus entering their home...

All the future of their destiny vague and uncertain – their new rulers strangers to their manners, language and habits, and, as they had been taught to believe, enemies to the only religion they had ever known.... As the American flag was raised, and the cannon boomed its glorious national salute from the hill... A sigh of commiseration, even for causeless distress, escaped from many a manly breast, as the wail of grief arose above the din of our horses’ tread, and reached our ears from the depth of the gloomy-looking buildings on every hand. Kearny informs New Mexicans of their new status Col.

Kearny informed Governor Armijo that the United States was in possession of Santa Fe and all territory east of the upper Rio Grande, in keeping with the extended Texas border appropriated by the United States. Kearny and his officers furthermore made an effort to win favor with church leaders and “reputable citizens of the city,” attending church services and holding a “splendid ball at the Palace.” The occupation, in Magoffin’s view, was an unqualified success. “The fact is, to make a long story short, Gen’l. Kearny by his mild & persuasive manner has induced the good people of New Mexico to believe that they now belong to the greatest nation on earth, & that the stars and stripes, which are now so gallantly waving over the capitol of this city, will always give them ample protection from foreign foes.”. However exaggerated Magoffin’s account, the Indian threat did, in fact, create a measure of cooperation between the occupying American forces and New Mexicans.

On September 18, Kearny initiated a campaign against the Navajos, his forces augmented by sixty-five Mexican and Pueblo Indian volunteers. The campaign quickly shifted to negotiations, resulting in a treaty of “permanent peace, mutual trust and friendship” on November 22. Alexander Doniphan signed the treaty on behalf of the United States. Fourteen Navajo chiefs signed with an “X,” persuaded no doubt by the American purchase of several hundred sheep and cattle from the Navajos. Kearny had meanwhile departed for California on September 25, leaving Col. Sterling Price in charge of a reduced regiment.

Before leaving, Kearny sent a report to President Polk assuring him that civil government had been established and order secured in New Mexico. The assurance was premature. Although Kearny’s occupation was considerably less abusive than that of Taylor in the northeast region, the occupation was nevertheless unwanted and eventually resisted.

According to one account: Bored U.S. Troops, overcrowded in Santa Fe, started to attack New Mexican civilians; racial tensions escalated (in their memoirs of the conquest a number of U.S. Soldiers made ugly statements expressing contempt for Mexicans). Some New Mexicans regretted not having offered more resistance when the U.S. Army took possession of the territory. Now they planned revolts.

In December, officials uncovered a plot to overthrow the occupation forces and assassinate Governor [Charles] Bent. The conspirators were quickly arrested, and the guard was doubled at the governor’s palace. An insurrection led by Pueblo Indians broke out in January 1847. They killed Governor Bent, rallied support among the small towns of northern New Mexico, and prepared for an attack on Santa Fe. Price, with some 500 soldiers and artillery, attacked the rebels with maximum force at Pueblo de Taos, February 3-5.

Price reported 150 Mexican and Pueblo Indians dead, and U.S. Casualties of seven dead and forty-five wounded. Over the next three months, trials were held and 22 Mexicans and five Pueblo Indians were hanged. Drescher, a U.S. Soldier who witnessed the hangings, wrote in his memoirs.

“You should have seen the poor wives of the Indians hung — heard their moans and observed their despair.” The New Mexico territory thereafter remained securely in the hands of the Americans. San Francisco harbor, 1846 The Polk administration made quick work of conquering Alta California, having prepared well in advance. In June 1845, eleven months before the outbreak of war, he sent “secret and confidential” instructions to Commodore John Sloat, commander of U.S. Naval forces in the Pacific: “If you ascertain with certainty that Mexico has declared war against the United States, you will at once possess yourself of the port of Saint Francisco, and blockade and occupy such other ports as your force may permit.” Sloat was thus prepared to act when he received word a year later that hostilities had commenced.

He took charge of Monterey on July 7, 1846, and San Francisco two days later, announcing, “Henceforth California will be a portion of the United States.” As in New Mexico, Sloat told the Mexican people that the U.S. Was not “an enemy” but a friend who would treat them with respect.