A Spiritual Perspective

For me, my worldview does not become comprehensive until the metaphysical/spiritual/mystical (pick the term that seems to suit best) perspective is incorporated, because I view all my work and life through a mystical lens. By that, I mean that I always seek the biggest possible picture in everything that I look at and experience. In order to speak to the world of scholarship, science, history, et cetera, it has been necessary to try speaking the language of those disciplines. While my work on Columbus and the European conquest of the world can stand on its own historical legs (or my research on fluoride, thermodynamics and cancer treatment can stand on its own scientific legs), history only tells part of the story, no matter how comprehensive it may seem, no matter how heavily it relies on "primary" source material.

The world of our everyday conscious minds is a limited one, bound by our sense perceptions and the course of our thinking. A history that only hews to the "facts," or a science that is only concerned with what its instruments can tell it, is materialistic. While a historical account that adheres to the "facts" can be admirable, "facts" are not as objective as we might like them to be, and what facts are presented and omitted is hardly an objective undertaking. Materialism is the worship of the material world and our physical existence. Carl Sagan practiced it, as did John D. Rockefeller, although he was a devout Baptist (Rockefeller became the most excited when pondering how rich he would become[1]). A mystical viewpoint also looks beyond the physical plane, seeking a larger framework of understanding, and exploring the nature of our consciousness.

James Randi and friends aver that there is no solid evidence for anything existing beyond the physical plane. The rationale for that viewpoint usually relies on the logic of making evidence of a reality beyond the physical plane conform to the physical plane’s rules. If people begin with the assumption that the only "real" things are those detected by their senses, their circular logic will "prove" their assumption’s accuracy. If somebody has visited another dimension, only an artifact of that dimension (or conformance to this one) can convince materialists that they really went there. That introduces standards of evidence that are often impossible to achieve, so Randi can be right. This essay will lay the groundwork for how I developed my perspective. An intellectual game did not bring me to my perspective, but my experiences.

“Reality” may not be objective. My reality does not have to be Carl Sagan's. Paranormal experiences have shaped my view of reality far more than the study of books and science. I cannot "prove" my reality to anyone else. My experiences are nobody else's, but I have discovered that having "paranormal" experiences is something that anyone can attain. Nobody need take Randi's word or mine for it; they can seek and have their own experiences. When people have their own paranormal experiences, they are not at the mercy of the world's Sagans and Randis, telling them that there is no veil, so therefore nothing on the other side, or that they were just "imagining" it.

My mental gifts were recognized early in my childhood, and my parents groomed me for a life of achievement. It did not quite turn out as anticipated. When my sixth grade teacher remarked that he thought my parents were pushing me too hard, and that I could not seem to accept failure, I think he was sincere.[2]

The spiritual aspect of my upbringing was not ignored, nor was it pushed. My parents were raised in staunchly Christian environments. My mother's mother ran her Lutheran church for about fifty years, and my father was a Bible scholar who once had thoughts of becoming a minister. To my parents' credit, their children were not subjected to intense Christian indoctrination. I attended Sunday school for about three years of my childhood, until I was twelve. As I look back from an adult perspective, I appreciate what those church workers did. There was love there, and they were trying to help raise "good" children, but I was largely oblivious to it, just wanting to get my Bible verses accurate and getting my goodies for acing the "curriculum."

A few years later, my maturing mind considered the Christian view of God and the Cosmos, and I decided it made no sense to me, and I began calling myself an atheist. It was a ridiculous label to use, as at that age few children can willfully ascribe to any "isms." Parents and other authority figures heavily influence a child’s worldview at that age. By age 15, I was fully involved with growing up, dealing with the new rage of hormones coursing through my body - replete with acne, body odor and unbidden erections - and preparing myself for the adult world. I kept pulling the straight As, and was at the top of nearly all my classes, from kindergarten through my college diploma.

My parents sent me to Europe for two months in the summer of 1974, just after I had turned sixteen, as part of a student tour that studied the Old World’s art and culture. It was an intense tour, visiting nine nations (we would have also visited Turkey, but the Cyprus War was being waged) and about 50 cathedrals, 50 museums, and nearly every noteworthy cultural relic in continental Western Europe. The students were the tour guides, each becoming an expert for part of the tour, having signed up for what they wanted to lead.

At that age, I was oblivious to art and culture. I had visited several science museums, but European art and culture was alien to me. About the only exposure to other cultures was knowing my Mexican-American friends and watching Kung Fu on TV, not for the Eastern philosophy, but for how Kwai Chang Caine kicked righteous butt every show (only when egged into it, so I thought). I was a Gilligan's Island fan. I had no interest or even knowledge about what to become "expert" in, which was a major reason I did not want to go, because of the homework required to prepare. When the list finally came around to me, about the only part not taken was a man named Vincent Van Gogh and Holland. I had never heard of him, but had to study his life and work to play tour guide in Holland and the museums that housed his work. I discovered the world of art, and to this day Van Gogh is my favorite artist. I have stared at his paintings and drawings for many hours, sometimes mesmerized in museums while looking at his work. If I did not have to earn a living, I would prefer being an art historian.

My summer in Europe was a rite of passage, and the beginning of my adulthood. It was an awakening, but on the spiritual front there was nothing happening. I had abandoned religion as a superstition, and my early fascination with strange phenomenon (I avidly read Frank Edwards' Strange World and Stranger than Science at age thirteen) was being replaced with an adult, no-nonsense view of such things. That changed. In the autumn of 1974, my father and brother came home one night and said they could see my aura. I had never heard of an aura. They stood me in front of a white wall in our home and told me what they saw. They said the class they were taking had trained them to see auras. I was amazed. I asked, "Can I see it too?" Their response was that I could, after taking the class.

The next month my entire family took the course. The class was called Silva Mind Control. Reading auras was not part of the official Silva curriculum, but something our teacher had thrown in. Silva Mind Control was not marketed as a class to develop one’s psychic muscles, read auras, or any of those "New Age" concepts that abound today. Instead, it was marketed as a way to improve the memory, think positively, and a host of "tame" ideas. The course was presented with a scientific basis. The buzzwords of today’s "New Age" were not in evidence. The class taught the students how to meditate, without Eastern religious concepts. Instead, the class was about controlling brain waves. By slowing brain waves from the usual waking consciousness of 21 cycles per second, to the range of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep of around 11 cycles per second, the brain could work more effectively, more creatively, remember more, etc. The class was forty hours long, about half lecture and half meditation exercises. The instructor had galvanic skin response devices where we could measure our brain waves. Those devices were predecessors to today’s biofeedback machines.

From Monday to Friday, we attended the class in the evening. On the weekend we finished with two ten-hour days of instruction. I had no idea what I was getting into, or what the class was really about. With each new exercise, I became more familiar with the mental state they called "being at level." It is not easy to describe, and can be subtle. Unless one is familiar with meditative or prayer states, or has been through intensive meditation exercises, it is difficult to comprehend that state. In general, people are more relaxed, their minds clearer and not easily distracted. Usually, there is nothing spectacular about it. It is similar to the hypnotic state, but where the subject controls the process. As we performed our meditative exercises, the instructor played a tape with a somnolent sound. He also read us the Silva script, which was filled with positive images and conditioning.

One conditioning statement was that if we fell asleep during the mediation sessions, three taps on the shoulder would wake us up. It was similar to a posthypnotic suggestion. About the third night (class was from about six to ten PM and was held about an hour’s drive from home, which made for long days), I fell asleep during a session, and all I remember is feeling a tap on my shoulder and springing almost out of my chair in shock. I was embarrassed as I saw the instructor standing next to me, and the whole class (about 20 people) looking at me and smiling. When the exercise was finished, I was asleep, and the instructor demonstrated to the class how powerful the mind is. He stood next to me and tapped my shoulder firmly. The class noted that I did not budge. Then the instructor tapped my shoulder firmly again. There still was no response from me. As he touched my shoulder for the third time, I nearly leaped out of my chair. The class was impressed, I was embarrassed, and as I look back, that was my only warning that my worldview and life direction was about to radically change.

On the weekend came the ten-hour days, the exercises becoming progressively longer and more involved. No longer were we merely learning how to "go to level." The instructor had us "project" our awareness into a cube of metal that we held, and eventually had us project our awareness into our homes, plants, and family pets. The exercises were fun, and my imagination was being used like never before. It did not feel much different than daydreaming, but was perhaps more vivid.

On Sunday afternoon came the end of class and the grand finale, one my father and brother had not told me about. We were going to project our awareness into people and "work cases." It was strange to me. The idea was thinking of somebody I knew with a health problem, and I would write that person’s name, gender, age, and city of residence on a card, as well as their affliction. Then a second person would read off the name, gender, age, and city of residence to a third person who had "gone to level," and they would "project" their awareness into that person, going on nothing more than that information, and diagnose the problem and send healing energy to the person.

I had a strange mixture of exhilaration and uneasiness. On one hand, it was similar to a classroom experiment, my academic background came to the fore, and I loved the classroom. On the other hand, I would be the experiment. I avidly read Frank Edwards’ stranger tales years earlier, and doubted the scientific worldview told us the entire story. I suspected we might have unacknowledged abilities, but being put on the spot to perform psychically was unnerving. I had one of my "cases" easily picked out.

My first employer was a black man named Isaac Brown. I worked for him the year before, tearing apart a walnut farm, salvaging the wood from the buildings. He lived in Ventura’s poor section and my father bought scrap wood from him. My father got me the job, and I made $1.50 an hour. Mr. Brown had diabetes and an injury related to it. My employment ended while he recovered from his injury-related illness and the business folded. Mr. Brown also had an index finger that had been severed at the middle knuckle, but he was my case because he had diabetes. I was the scientific kid, and I remember hiding my card as I wrote his condition, not wanting to compromise the reading with flashing the card to the potential psychic, whomever that might be. I did not write about his index finger being severed. His diabetes had caused him to lose half of his foot. Those were his spectacular medical conditions, and I certainly did not write about his race. I did not even think about his finger.

The "psychic" who worked Isaac Brown's case was a woman that people might call a "yuppie" today. She probably felt as I did: she was not taking the Silva course to increase her psychic prowess. She probably did not feel too psychic. Improving the memory and thinking positively was how the course was pitched, and I do not know for sure, but that probably drew her to the class. She closed her eyes and went to "level," and I gave my card to the moderator. He read off: "Isaac Brown, age 42, male, Ventura, California." The class was held in Santa Barbara, about 40 miles from Ventura, and I doubt that woman would have known a poor black man named Isaac Brown.

The woman's eyelids fluttered, and within seconds of being given Isaac Brown's information she said, "I keep getting the impression that he is black," and she then held up the hand where Isaac was missing most of his index finger, bent the finger where it was severed and said, "He is missing the end of this finger." From the moderator reading Isaac's name to her holding up her finger took less than ten seconds. The first ten seconds of her first "case" changed my life forever. The "probability-and-outcome skeptics" who try explaining such events as sheer luck carry no weight with me. The odds of somebody trying to act psychically after finishing forty hours of training, and having a "hit" such as that on their first attempt, and attributing it to coincidence, is one in millions. The "skeptics" can never take away my knowledge with their pronouncements and arguments. I know. They have only their empty theories; I have experience.

One requirement of performing psychically is quieting the intellect we operate from so often, letting the impressions come forth without judging how reasonable they seem. Her intellect may have kicked in after that, and I cannot recall if she even determined that he was diabetic. I just sat in awe of her holding up her bent finger, telling us that its end was missing. I was stunned. For the moments she let her impressions flow unencumbered by the intellect, she performed with the best of them. One might say that Isaac Brown is a cliché name for a black man. Maybe so. The index finger, which I did not even write on the card, and she had no way of seeing anyway, eventually expanded my universe of the possible about a million-fold.

Then it was my turn. It can make people nervous to perform that way. It felt like I was making it up. When the impressions come, keeping the intellect at bay is the key to being accurate. In my first case, I said the woman had a stroke that had paralyzed her right side. One diagnostic tool is "putting on" the head of the person being read, and feeling what they feel. That is how I diagnosed the paralysis. My "wild guesses" and irrational feelings were correct. Everybody in the class had similar experiences. I discovered that day that the abilities of human consciousness were barely dreamed of by mainstream society. I have sat in several Silva classes (attending the class for the rest of my life is free) and have regularly witnessed students making "hits" similar to the ones I saw in my first class.

Brian O’Leary (astronomer, ex-astronaut, and free energy visionary) had a similar experience to mine, five years after I did in a course called Lifespring, which was a cross between Silva Mind Control and EST (another human potential class that I took in the 1970s). When it came time for Brian to work his "case," he made up out of the thin air that his case was a man who was a meteorologist-journalist who preferred hanging out on the west coast of Maui and lost his wife by death. Those "wild guesses" were true.[3] Others in the “New Age” community entered it through Silva Mind Control, including Shakti Gawain. She nailed ten cases in a row when she took Silva Mind Control.

The introduction to Silva Mind Control began my spiritual journey. Silva has classes in most large cities. Because of revelations of government mind control programs such as CIA's M-K-ULTRA, the course now is called the Silva Method. There are millions of satisfied graduates, and the money-back offer has been around since the beginning. I heard of one person once who took them up on it. Actually, I heard of two, but the first one got her money back to prove to her family that the course was not a "scam", and then her entire family took the class and she paid the money back.

After that class, I was taught how to see auras, and it takes the same training to "work cases" to get one sensitive enough to where auras can be seen. For the "skeptics" who think it was the after-image retina phenomenon, I have news for them: it was not. In the fifth grade I became fascinated with the after-image phenomenon, and for a few months I created image after image that I could stare at, and then stare at a blank wall and see the "negative" of the image before my eyes. I am familiar with that phenomenon, and it was quite different than seeing auras.

For anybody who risked a few hundred dollars (Silva has always given refunds to anybody who wanted their money back for any reason) and a week’s worth of their time, they could have proven those things to themselves, and they can today.[4] Nobody needs to read "research," hear "debunkers," or watch "psychics" on TV. They can prove it to themselves. We cannot prove our experiences to anybody else, not really, but we can prove it to ourselves. The “miracles” that Jesus performed did not seem so impossible anymore, but neither did they provide a basis for worshipping the man. He was a great master, yes, but he was demonstrating abilities inherent in everybody, and he said we would "do greater works" than he performed. I believe it, now. Over the years, I have participated in and witnessed phenomena that went far beyond "working cases."

Many years later I would discover the work of James Randi and other "debunkers," with their broad proclamations and arrogant boasts. One of Randi’s books is titled Flim-Flam!, Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and other Delusions, putting his opinion of those he investigates and the phenomena’s legitimacy in the book's title. The "debunkers" usually have no idea of what they are talking about, as they are bereft of experience, and most have never even pursued it.

Studying the debunkers’ work has been educational. Randi is so highly biased that he disqualifies himself as an investigator.[5] There are a fair number of reasons why Randi and others are doomed if they really seek evidence of the paranormal, and abilities of human consciousness that go beyond the ability to rationalize. Their goal is "proving" that their narrow view of reality is the "right" one.

Experiencing the paranormal is one of the easiest things to achieve if one seeks sincerely and leaves one's mind open. If people fervently believe that there is nothing to the paranormal, they will probably never experience it, or if they do, their minds will go into overdrive to convince themselves that they did not have the experience. Wanting to be right might be humanity's greatest failing.

After our family took Silva Mind Control, we explored those new realms. We learned how to communicate mentally with our cats. Animals are naturally psychic, much more so than human beings. We went to level and mentally pictured our cats doing something that we wanted them to. To do it successfully, it must be an atypical behavior but not one that was disagreeable to the cat, because we are asking the cat for a favor. We had two kittens, and we mentally pictured them jumping into our laps, something they never did. One of us would sit on a stool and go to level, while the others watched. The cat began looking at the person at level intently, then walked over and jumped into his lap. I saw our kitten do it for my brother, and it did it for me.

My father began experimenting with pyramid power. Pyramid energy is one of the more derided aspects of the "New Age." My father bought some pyramids and began experimenting with them. He had one that he put his razor blades on, to keep them sharp. I cannot speak for how effective such "uses" of that energy are. I have seen Kirlian photographs of an energy spike coming off the apex of pyramids, and even the Great Pyramid. Something is happening. Pyramid energy is apparently a subtle energy that is not very detectable by our modern instruments, but I saw that plants could recognize it.

My father built a pyramid with a wooden frame and clear plastic stretched between the frames, forming its planes. Such pyramids are usually built to the relative dimensions of the Great Pyramid at Giza, as my father did. My father made the pyramid about four feet wide at its base. He designed it to be suspended from the ceiling over a chair, so somebody could sit under it. Nobody in our family really used it, and my father eventually hung it from the ceiling in a corner of our enclosed, fiberglass roof patio, to get it out of the way. On the patio were pet cages (my brothers and I raised rats and mice), bicycles and other assorted clutter. On a table, my mother had some houseplants, and one was vine-like, hanging over the table’s edge, dangling a few feet, its end nearly touching the ground. My father hung the pyramid on the patio. The pyramid's base was about five feet off the ground. It was a couple feet above the table that held the plant, and a couple feet away horizontally. About a week later, I was sitting on the patio and noticed that plant. It is one of the most amazing things that I have ever seen. The vine dropped down over the table as it had been, but at about a foot below the tabletop the vine made about a 130° turn, and more than a foot of the vine's end was pointing into the air, aiming at the pyramid! In botany, there is a phenomenon known as phototropism, where plants can grow toward a light. That plant was growing toward the center of the pyramid, about where the King's Chamber is in the Giza pyramid.

The "skeptical" crowd derides pyramid energy as pure moonshine, while the scientific community also ignores "pyramid energy" as a fantasy. I once knew a houseplant that knew better (or perhaps it read the National Enquirer). After witnessing that phenomenon, I have never laughed at anything being theorized about the Great Pyramid's purpose.

Aura reading became quite a pastime for us. We went to classes where twenty of us took turns getting in front of the class, and we all looked at our auras. Reading auras requires the kind of training that meditation offers, although some can naturally see them. Today, I cannot see auras anymore. I am "out of shape." If I want to see auras again, I will have to regularly meditate to redevelop those "psychic muscles" (something I am planning to do after this web site is finished).

I had a childhood friend take the class, and we used to "work cases." Each person had their preferred method of doing readings. What worked well for me was “putting on” the person’s head and feeling what they felt. It was an empathic method. Once I read an old man that my friend knew. While doing the reading and "wearing" his head, my back felt as if I was wearing a hubcap between my shoulder blades, and I must have looked like Quasimodo. When the reading was over I asked my friend if he noticed my hunched back, and what it might mean. He said that the old man had a very hunched back, which looked like the way I was hunched over.

Sometimes there was a downside to being empathic. I have participated in plenty of "hands on" healing over the years. Once I worked with somebody who had severe back problems that resulted in volcanic migraine headaches. While laying my hand on his neck, suddenly the muscles in the back of my neck tightened up and my neck was sore for days. He said that was what his neck felt like. One might say that it "backfired." I have had numerous paranormal experiences such as those, and they would usually happen when I did not expect them.

I have attended dozens of "channelings," in which somebody lets another being come through their awareness. The "skeptics" dismiss the phenomenon as bogus, either as a fraud, wishful thinking or some other delusion. I once had a private session when the channel told me that I was misaligned with my spirit’s light (during my dark days with Dennis), and she asked my guides and other helpers, such as angels, to help align my body with the light of my spirit. I had little idea what that entailed, and did not know what to expect, if anything. The channel is a friend of mine, and I did not expect her to try to convince me that something happened when it did not. As I sat there, she looked at me and said that my friends were trying to help me. Just then, something strange happened. My awareness began "turning" in my body. It is difficult to describe. It felt as if my awareness was being twisted in my body, as though I was no longer "straight" in my body. My head wanted to twist to the side, and I was straining to keep it pointed straight ahead. It was quite a trip. I had nothing to compare it to, although years later I heard that my experience was related to vertigo. I do not know if what my unseen friends attempted was successful, but it was strange.

Those experiences and many others were part of a drastic change in my worldview. The single biggest change was the first, when that woman held up Isaac Brown's severed finger. After that, I was not quick to call anything "impossible," especially regarding the abilities of human consciousness. By age twenty-one, I had five years of increasing study under my belt. In those days, a few books were highly influential to me; one was Illusions by Richard Bach which was his follow-up to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I have read a vast array of spiritual material since Illusions, but it is still one of the greatest spiritual masterpieces I have seen. Perhaps the most influential book I ever read was the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, first published in 1907. Levi Dowling, an American Christian minister, wrote it. Dowling produced the book over a number of years while in a deep trance state. He was supposedly accessing the Akashic record, where every thought and act of Creation is recorded. That is the theory, anyway. After my experience with Silva Mind Control, I would not scoff at much in the paranormal realm. I read the Aquarian Gospel at age eighteen. For the first time, I began understanding spirituality. For two years, that book was on my bedside table. Every night as I went to bed, I picked up the book and read from it.

Something happened when I took Silva Mind Control. It was a dual blessing. One effect was that my imagination became more vivid. In addition, my intuition and sense of truth was awakened. If I had read the Aquarian Gospel at age 15, it probably would have been largely meaningless, but with my intuition awakened the text leapt off the page. The words sang to me. I had a sense that I was reading The Truth. By "truth," I do not mean the sense of right and wrong or what really happened two thousand years ago when Jesus walked the earth. It bypassed the intellect. The words spoke to my soul. Perhaps the right and left halves of my brain were becoming integrated, or my head and heart were united. I realized that my linear, logical mind was not in charge of the process, but was along for the ride.

I studied the life of Jesus as ardently as any fundamentalist Christian, but not the version they did, and without their fundamentalist beliefs. The sense I received of Jesus' life was radically different from the typical Christian view of his life and work. Jesus was a mystical master second to none. The feats I performed and witnessed on my journey with Silva Mind Control were baby steps compared to the mastery of Jesus. He was a living example of humanity’s potential. Walking on water, turning water to wine, raising the dead and doing the loaves-and-fishes trick seemed quite normal once I realized its nature. Jesus said those "feats" were a part of human nature, and once we had attained our own self-mastery we could all do those things, and greater still.

Yet, all those "feats" were merely ancillary to his primary message: love. Jesus demonstrated the power of love. Love is such a peculiar word, yet the most important. The Beatles could sing about love in every song, but that word is not used in our Western world often. What is love? It seems to be the power of Creation, or God's real name. What we feel when we think of our spouses, children, parents and friends is a pale reflection of God's love. Our love is not unworthy, yet few of us have attained unconditional love: love for love's sake. That is the love of God, and that was the state that Jesus attained, his Christhood, asking the Creator to forgive his murderers, for they did not know what they did.

From studying the Aquarian Gospel I understood that Jesus did not want to be worshipped. Paul began corrupting it, turning the good news from Jesus into the good news about Jesus. That was where Christianity made the wrong turn, from which it has yet to recover. Christianity is the cult of Jesus. Jesus lived to show us all our innate potential, and awesome it is. We can all attain the mastery of Jesus and go beyond it, and I understand it is the destiny of us all, someday. I have hardly picked up the book during the past twenty years, and as I am writing these words I have been leafing through the Aquarian Gospel, and it holds up well. Long ago, I realized that the only thing worth knowing about Jesus was love. It has been the true north of my spiritual compass ever since. The yardstick I have used ever since in assessing spiritual material, the motivation of others and myself is this: is it loving? In the end, that is all that matters to me.

Love does not judge. Pure love is unconditional. The Creator does not judge his/her creations, but loves all equally. When Jesus spoke of loving the enemy, he was talking about a level of love that few people in the past two thousand years have even attempted. He was far, far ahead of his time.

At about the same time I read the Aquarian Gospel and Illusions, my father introduced me to body of work that was creating a sensation in the spiritual community. It was the work of a non-physical entity named Seth, who spoke through Jane Roberts, an American. There was little to compare it to at the time. Mystics and spiritualists across the globe studied the books. Seth’s identity was a source of speculation by many, including Roberts. I did not care much about who or what Seth was; it was what he said that got my attention. My awakened sense of truth was awed by Seth's perspective, which was loving and of unfailing good cheer. Even if he was Jane Roberts' alter ego, I had heard no mortal evince such an exalted and loving perspective. Seth looked at the BIG PICTURE of life. Along with the loving attitude was an involved and challenging perspective of our physical dimension, why we are here, and what lies beyond this reality.

The first book Seth dictated was Seth Speaks, followed by what many, including me, feel is his magnum opus, The Nature of Personal Reality. Two books followed that nearly broke my brain, titled the Unknown Reality. When the Seth books were published, there was nothing quite like it in Western culture, particularly a prominently published book (bodies of work such as the Silver Birch and Theosophy material qualified, but were not widely known in the West in those days). Later, the term "channeling" came into vogue to describe the phenomenon. As a body of channeled work, I consider the Seth Material still one of the best. If one's intuition is not awakened, the words of Seth can be seen as gibberish, and many have dismissed it as nothing but the alter ego of a deluded woman.

In the end, the mark of enlightened material such as Illusions, the Aquarian Gospel or the Seth Material is that its message leads people back to their own integrity, the value of the individual, the power of the self, and it is always loving. Those perspectives sought no acolytes and addressed each of us as equals. If cults sprang up around them, it was not because the masters encouraged it.

While I avidly studied the masters’ teachings, my life was also barreling along. I was attending college, becoming a staunch pacifist, becoming involved with women, being a collegiate track athlete, entering the working world, driving and growing up. At age 19, I prayed for guidance and was told that I might like studying business. That happened concurrently with girlfriends, track, work and my spiritual studies. A lot was happening, and I did not always handle events as well as I would have liked, but I have no regrets. We are all on our divine journeys, and all roads are there to be walked. Every experience is an important part of the journey, and to regret any of it is to deny our divinity. Making "mistakes" is one of life’s most important parts. Even not learning from our "mistakes" is important, from a certain perspective, and we get as many chances as we need to get it right, and “getting it right” means learning the lesson of love. That is my understanding today, and I doubt it will change much.

As I look back, a vital part of my journey was trying to integrate my spiritual studies with my academic studies. I tried wedding my spiritual studies with my studies of business and economics. I tried seeing how capitalism could be an ideal vehicle for enlightened spirituality. I was in for some painful realizations. Yet, if I had not been that way, I would not have walked my path. I see a divine plan in my strange journey, and I am not sure where it will ultimately lead, but I trust the journey, although some days I whine and ask for Scotty to beam me up.

My "Easter Bunny" question evidenced the "cognitive dissonance" I was undergoing. My spiritual training gave me the strength to question what I was seeing, because my capitalistic indoctrination was colliding with the real world. If I had no spiritual foundation, I may have quickly joined my comrades, easily dismissing the question of whether we were truly contributing to the world. I would not have really cared about the answer, as long as I was well paid. If I had played the game as my peers did, I would probably be rich today, but my soul would be gnawing at me, and I would be wondering when I would do something important. My dream of changing the world of energy and helping heal the planet, however grandiose that might seem, would probably have eaten at my soul like a cancer.

Eventually the mystical student realizes that spirituality is not really about other dimensions and arcane powers. It is only valuable in how it is applied to this world. The old saying of being so heavenly bound that one is no earthly good applies richly to the spiritual journey. Living one’s enlightenment on the mountaintop is easy. Far more difficult and rewarding is living that enlightenment in society. In the end, there is only one Creation, one universe, one place where we all exist. An important aspect of this plane of existence is that the path of truth abounds with paradox and dichotomy. As the great physicist Niels Bohr once said, when scientists encountered a paradox, it was great news, because wrestling with paradoxes was where the scientific progress was made.[6]

As an analogy, suppose I am a virtuoso violinist in this life. On the other side, I do not lay down my violin, but join a great symphony, learning to participate in making music that I could not produce by myself. Ultimately, every one of us plays our part in Creation’s symphony, and although some of us may play solo leads at times, and some play kettledrums while others play the piccolo, every instrument is essential. On the other side, we find ourselves playing music that we doubted was possible on this side.

Whether people believe in an immortal soul, or believe their existence is dependent on their body's chemistry, every earthly human can probably agree upon one idea: we all have a physical body. Because we all have bodies, and they all have needs such as air, water, food, shelter, sex, etc., to an extent we are all "self-serving" as we care for our bodies. Since it takes two people to procreate, and few have a tropical island to themselves or can survive alone on a mountaintop, humans interact.

To the extent humans interact, we serve each other's needs. People are other-serving when seeing to the needs of others, and self-serving when seeing to their own. All humans engage in both activities. According to nearly all mystical material, that interaction is the primary reason we are here. We evolve our souls by inhabiting this dimension, interacting with each other (including animals, plants, Mother Earth, etc.) helping and hurting each other, and living with the consequences. Even for people who believe that oblivion awaits them at death, they can probably relate to the self-serving/other-serving dichotomy.

Throughout our lives, we constantly make decisions whether to serve ourselves or serve others. Infants are totally focused on survival. Parents are (usually) totally focused on that infant's well being. The infant is self-serving, the parent other-serving. As with all decisions in life, especially when humans interact, the question of whom we are serving is constantly with us, and can make seemingly straightforward decisions more complicated. Why do parents have children? Is it to give life where there was none, passing on the blessings they have received? Is it to breed a farmhand, somebody to exploit today and perhaps support them when old and feeble? Is it to have built-in friends, built-in sex slaves, or a built-in retirement plan? Is it a bid for immortality? Do people do it in a moment of lust, not thinking or caring about the consequences of bringing a child into the world? Is their own motivation to serve the child or themselves? Is it both? Is it to serve the Creator? It can appear extremely complicated, but always comes down to whom is being served.

There is not a single human interaction where the issue of it being self-serving or other-serving does not apply. The ideal is getting as good as we give, being self-serving and other-serving at the same time, or balancing the scales in the end. The Beatles sang, "The love you take is equal to the love you make." Our motivations are not always clear to others, or sometimes even to ourselves. Even the issue of self can become contentious. Is the "self" the body? What is called the consciousness? Is the self the individual, the tribe, the nation, the universe, the soul? Is it all of the above? Most people probably think of the conscious mind and the body it inhabits as the “self.”

Most people on earth are mostly self-serving. Stated another way, if all human decisions made in one day were weighed by relative scale (where helping an old lady across the street would not count as much as jumping in front of a train to save somebody's life), sorting to one-side the self-serving actions and other-serving actions to the other, the scale would tip to the self-serving side.

There is tremendous variation with each person, each day. A nursing mother is generally other-serving when she nurses her infant. When she is feeding herself, she is serving herself, although part of her motivation may be being healthy in order to properly care for her infant.

Most mystics say the reason we are here is to learn about love, to remember who we are - divine children of Creation, and in fact, the Creator itself. A life lived in service to others is apparently the most "worthwhile." Very few people have ever achieved such a lofty goal on earth. People who do so become "saints," religious icons and beloved heroes. The quality that "elevated" them was often their love and consideration for others, but a predominantly other-serving life is an ideal that few attain.

Yet, each person has "heroic" moments. The mother awakening to cries at 2 AM and soothing her child, the father awakening at 5 AM to earn the family's daily bread, jumping in front of a train to save somebody's life, can all be profoundly other-serving activities. But on balance, most people are mainly concerned with caring for themselves.

A deeply profound body of mystical literature is the Ra material, which presents an intriguing way of viewing a soul's evolution. In Ra's perspective, ensouled entities on the physical plane mostly fall somewhere between 50% self-serving and 95% self-serving. Ra discussed planetary evolutions and an event known as a "harvest." Harvest happens when an ensouled being attains a mastery of their physical plane lessons, and are "promoted" to the game's next level. Ra did not discuss good or evil, but "positive" and "negative polarization." Positive polarization is equated with an other-serving mentality, while negative polarization is equated with the self-serving mentality. Ra called it "love of other self" and "love of self." Ra stated that if an ensouled being devotes greater than 50% of its energy to serving others, it is eligible for harvest on the service-to-others path. If an entity devotes greater than 95% of its energy to serving itself, it is eligible to be harvested on the service-to-self (or love of self) path.

Both paths require intense dedication. On today's earth, few are eligible for harvest on either path (Ra stated that 20% of the human race may be eligible for harvest today). Ra stated that Genghis Kahn, Rasputin, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler were all harvestable on the love-of-self path (otherwise called self-serving, negatively polarized, or what I call the dark path).[7]

Ra made no judgment regarding the two paths, even stating that the two polarities are required so souls can evolve through this plane. Without the tension those poles create, there would be no growth. Other planes have other means of growth. Ra also called the path of love-of-other-self the "study of what is," and the path of love-of-self the "study of what is not."

Those polarities can also be described as the paths of light and darkness, good and evil, etc. Whereas the path of light is committed to truth and love, the path of darkness is committed to illusion and fear. Ra described further dimensions of existence that pursue those paths. It is a fascinating perspective that this essay cannot do justice to. It provides a framework to understand interactions between beings on this plane and beings in others, how humans evolve on the physical plane, and the soul's journey. Others have called the path of serving others the path of service to self through others. Ra said that the dark path leads to a dead end of sorts. The study of "that which is not" is valid, with many valuable lessons learned along the way. As that path is progressed, higher levels of power and understanding are attained. Along the light path are constantly increasing levels of expansion and integration into Creation. Along the dark path there are constantly increasing levels of concentration and a withdrawal into one's perceived self. Along the light path there is an eventual reunification with the source of creation, the ultimate coming home. The source of creation is love, and it is the force that created and sustains not only this universe, but also all of creation.

Because love is the power of creation, love is the game humans are learning, because we are learning to be creators here at earth school.[8] There are no spiritual lightweights on the planet at this time. This is an extremely challenging place to be. As the light path leads to a wondrous reunion with the Creator, those at the dark path’s highest level also realize that a reunification with The Source is its next step. When a highest-level dark path being attempts that reunification, it gets a rude awakening: the dark path does not lead home. As it is the study of "that which is not," the entire path is ultimately one of illusion, and self-deception.

As that highest-level dark path entity "knocks on God's door," God’s greeting is approximately:

"I am glad you are here, but I have news for you. You are a being of light, not darkness. You trod your path because I gave you the freedom to choose it. It was not real, not in the way you might think. I am proud of you, my child, but there is an important lesson your path has not taught you, the lesson you must learn before you can come home. You cannot fit in here, as much as I would like you to. You would not be able to stand it. I created you and everybody else. I love you, as I love all my creations. Your path has led you here, but loving yourself, while an important lesson, is only part of the journey. The journey is not complete until you love all of Creation, as I do. You have racked up quite a tally. You incurred many debts to others as you failed to love them, and only loved what you thought of as yourself. As you failed to love others, you also failed to truly love yourself. You owe yourself a great debt that you can only pay while serving others. I have a deal for you. All the mastery, all the wisdom, all the greatness you attained on your path, which is indeed impressive, you can trade in for an equivalent status on the path of light. From that exalted rank of light, you will labor long to settle your debts, make right your wrongs, and bring as much light to Creation as you earlier brought darkness to it. I think you will find that loving others is highly rewarding, not only to yourself, but also to others. You have a choice. You can stay where you are, at the dark path's highest level, where you can progress no further, because there is nowhere else to go. Or, you can accept my offer, working magnificently with me, engaging in fabulous work on behalf of Creation, and when you have balanced your scales, you can come home, and it will be glorious."[9]

The Ra Material is popular and highly regarded. More obscure are two recent books by Gina Lake, channeled by "extraterrestrials." Her themes are similar to Ra's.

The dark path is self-serving, and a primary goal is exploiting others. They see others as there to serve their needs. While light path beings live by love, the dark path motto is "look out for number one." They believe that looking out for themselves is the only credo worth living by, and they see light path beings as naïve or foolish. Their afterlives are not pleasant. The dark path is an inverted view creation. Put another way, the dark path is an attempt to become the Creator without love. It is an impossible dream, but such is the dark path's folly, the study of that which is not.

What goes around comes around, and dark path initiates realize that God created with love, and God's creations love it back. There is a feedback effect, whereby the love of God's creations also help sustain God. In the inverted dark path perspective, they think that manipulating others is how creation functions. They think love is weak, better dispensed with. Fear is "what it is all about" to them. They have yet to realize that love is the greatest power, and indeed the only power. God's creations ideally give love back to God as freely as God gave it to them. In the dark path's inverted perspective, they believe the exhilaration of the fear they experience is Creation's essence, and they induce fear in others, receiving a feedback effect, nourishing themselves. They think God does something like that. Their understanding is inverted. Fear is the absence of love, and in the dark path's inverted logic, they feel if they can inspire fear in others, they are becoming creators.

As stated in Lake's The Extraterrestrial Vision, those dark path initiates are acting appropriately, in light of their beliefs. She summarizes the situation on earth regarding the committed self-servers with:

"Self-servers are as diverse as any random group of people. They work in many different professions, but are particularly drawn to ones involving power. Much of the corruption in business and government is perpetrated by self-servers, many of whom are highly intelligent. They are never found in service professions, except as impostors or con men who prey off those in need. They have no sympathy for the needy, because they believe everyone should be self-sufficient. They believe that those who can't take care themselves will learn to take care of themselves by being taken advantage of. Consequently, they feel a spiritual duty to take advantage of the weak."[10]

Lake's material evokes Ra's perspective, as well as another extraordinary body of work known as the Michael material, which has been produced by various channels. As souls evolve through the physical plane, they progress through “soul ages,” which can be likened to the changing perspectives a human being passes through while they progress from birth through age eighty. Generally, the more lives we live, the more our souls evolve and become "older." I have never seen channeled material that does not admit that reincarnation is a fact, although a number of the Eastern religions' distortions are not necessarily valid.

Some dark path goals are inciting fear in others and recruiting others to their path. They are nourished by fear, in a pathological way. In Barbara Marciniak's seminal Bringers of the Dawn, in chapter eight is another perspective of the dark path. It appears that dark path entities that have evolved beyond physical plane realities, such as Genghis Kahn, are helping humanity stay in fear, because fear creates an energy that nourishes them. A humanity in fear, bathed in violence and misery, is something they thrive on. Humanity has proved a most productive herd for negative emotional "nectar."

In a first-person account by Michael Roads, in his mind-blowing Into a Timeless Realm, he saw those beings that keep humanity in misery because they thrive on it.[11] Those parasitic beings did not create the conditions of human misery - humans largely did that to themselves - but they capitalized on it and furthered it, using deceptive and secret tactics.

Michael Topper and his wife echo those themes in Topper's peculiar prose. Topper's perspective is decidedly mortal, yet interesting. The theme of dark path beings thriving on fear, even to the point of inducing fear in people, extracting chemicals that fear produces in the human body, then bathing in it, are in Topper's writings.[12]

To bring this essay back to "earth," how does it relate to my work? The self-servers on this planet are in it for themselves. They feel a duty to exploit others. Evil is their business, profiting from the misery and exploitation of others. This site documents many extremely dark situations, and many people refuse to believe that people will actively and consciously create situations where others suffer and die. They cannot believe that people could act so "diabolically." Dark path initiates depend on that denial.

Because the dark path is the study of that which is not, deception and secrecy are their tools, which is largely how the U.S. government operates. In the end, the dark path folks’ greatest victims are themselves, and the most deceived chumps of all are themselves, completely misunderstanding who and what they are. The greatest deception is self-deception. It takes two to tango, and while dark path beings play their games, they actively deceive others, and their greatest victory is not forcing people to do their bidding, but having them freely choose to.

Dark path initiates know that few will consciously let themselves be used by dark path practitioners. So, they must deceive people into serving dark path interests instead of their own. That is not an easy trick. Most people are consciously committed to neither path. They worship comfort. Most merely try surviving. A full belly, a roof over their head, and their addictions sated are primary goals of the vast majority of humanity at this time. Most people can be called "good," because they will try doing the "right" thing if it does not cost them too much, and usually will not go out of their way to hurt others. Most Americans would return a wallet they found on the ground, provided it did not have too much money in it (recent research - in 2001 - shows that about half of all Americans will return that wallet; I was being too optimistic). My experiences ruefully showed me that it goes little further than that, however.

How can the dark path folks exploit people, while having them believe that their actions serve the common good? Dark path initiates commonly use a singularly effective tactic: enslaving people, while telling them they do it to protect them. When the FDA relentlessly wipes out cancer cures that actually work, while throwing doctors into jail, or Dennis is thrown into jail on fabricated charges to prevent free energy from happening, or a life insurance company that specializes in selling term insurance because all other policies are scams is ruthlessly attacked by police state tactics, the stated rationale is always "protecting the public."

Protecting the public is the world's largest protection racket, and the vast majority of humanity pays dearly for such “protection.”

Dennis was fond of saying, "Put a man in a big enough cage, and he thinks he is free." Barbara Marciniak's Pleiadians say that the most effective prison is one where its prisoners do not realize that they are in prison, and those prisoners will believe almost any clever lie, as long as believing it keeps their bellies full.

The dark path is dark indeed. In the family of light, ties of mutual love bond them together. In the family of dark, it is mutual self-interest. They work together not for love of each other. They might experience some light and often-phony camaraderie, but they generally fear and hate each other. Each realizes that they cannot subjugate an entire planet or galaxy by themselves, so they need comrades of like mind. They are always watching their backs around each other, as they know that everybody is in it for themselves. There can only be one Emperor of the Universe, and they all want the title, so the kinds of power plays that occur in their circles most would rather not hear about. In addition, their conspiracies and game plans are always falling apart, because they cannot work in unison very effectively. They are all vying for power with each other. The idea of following orders is a dark path invention, used to keep those below them in the hierarchy in line.

Most young men would never willingly kill people in war, if left to themselves. Consequently, a system has been devised to glorify violence, dehumanize the "enemy" (young men just like them), shield them from war's realities until they are on the battlefield, condition them to obey orders and call them cowards and even execute them if they do not obey. Wars are always created and egged on by dark path initiates, with the masses falling into line as they have given away their responsibility to the "powerful." A twist on the “protection” racket is having people support violence to “save” somebody, or “get” the bad guys, such as riling up Americans to cheer the bombing of Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan. The dark path folks must laugh heartily as the American people fall for it each time, as those cheering Americans believe they are helping the people they bomb.

Einstein once remarked that human stupidity is one of the truly infinite aspects of our universe, and dark path members eagerly exploit it. They play to people’s sense of helplessness and feelings of victimization by selling violence as a remedy for the world’s ills, as if there were no other choice. The demonization of Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega or Slobodan Milosevic (or America’s demon of the hour, Osama bin Laden) is merely state propaganda, and the masses fall for it every time. Indonesia’s Suharto makes them look like choirboys, but he always did our bidding, so he was a respected ally who we heavily armed. Hussein, Noriega and bin Laden all were lauded U.S. allies while they did our bidding, and became demons when they failed to. The dark path folks smile every time people support violence, as they know it always leads to more violence, and they truly get thrills out of bloodshed (as long as it is not their blood being shed) and the suffering of others. Millions of people cheering massive violence wreaked against distant peoples is a dream come true for dark path initiates.

"Power" as discussed in this essay is not true power. Love is the only power. The earthly power of controlling and manipulating others to one’s will is counterfeit power. It is stealing the power of others. True power comes from within. Detonating a nuclear bomb is "powerful" in its own way, but is a pale and dark imitation of real power, which the dark path initiates have yet to learn.

Val Valerian, in his Matrix III, establishes broad categories to classify humanity into, with rough percentages. It relates somewhat to the light-dark polarity.[13] Valerian did not present his data to expressly deal with the integrity issue, but it has a relationship and gives rough numbers. Valerian sees it in terms of those who give away their personal power. It can also be seen as serving themselves. Most people do not want to be responsible for their lives, and arriving at a new level of integrity and taking back their responsibility has a price. When faced with the decision to be responsible for one's life, more than half of humanity at this time readily falls back into complacency, easily controlled, giving up their freedom for comfort and "security." As Ben Franklin once observed, those who give up their freedom for security deserve and receive neither. About a quarter of the human race feels there is something wrong with the picture, but shuffle along with the herd nevertheless. About ten percent know there is something not quite right, and have tried to do something about it at some level, but were repressed in one way or another and still shuffle along with the herd. A few percent have figured it out and have broken away from the herd. About five percent of humanity are committed self-servers, and actively and knowingly use others for their own ends. Those numbers are handy and relate to the integrity issue. Those few who have broken away from the herd are mainly other-serving. The ten percent have tried to be other-serving and are to a degree, but have been beaten back into line. About ninety percent of humanity makes up the "Great Herd" and is easily manipulated. The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path.

Those are general categories and percentages, and are only for illustration, not to be taken literally. That category of five-percent dark path initiates has various levels of accomplishment and commitment. The dark path is not forever, either. Eventually, all dark path initiates wake up. Not many reach that highest level of dark path evolution and meet the Creator, to be told they cannot get home on their path. Most figure it out before then, getting a belly full of the pain and suffering that attends their path, and eventually revert and pursue the light path. An initiate who attains the "mastery" of the dark path, equivalent to a Genghis Kahn is far less than five percent of the population. A Genghis Kahn is one in many millions. On the light path, a Jesus or a Buddha attained levels of mastery that have proven to be one in billions on planet earth, so far.

Being other-serving is the ideal, and the vast majority of humanity loves other-servers, partly because they get something out of the deal, and the 95% of us not on the dark path can be inspired by their example. That ninety-percent of humanity will not accept personal responsibility for their lives, and rather easily give it up. They look for other-servers to give it to. That is their great folly. Other-servers realize that nobody should give their power away, and usually do not seek positions of earthly power. As Lake's ET friends stated, the self-servers seek power and can be found flocking to positions of power as moths flock to a light bulb. The self-servers engage in a charade. They masquerade as other-servers, asking the masses to give them their power (responsibility) so they can serve the "common good." As Dennis has said, they serve humanity all right, they serve up a plateful that they feast on every night. It is not always the case, but those in positions of power in today's world are largely self-serving.

Because of the game humanity plays today, other-servers can fill those "powerful" roles, not because they lust for it, but they realize it is a way to counterbalance the self-servers, hoping to help steer the masses toward a brighter future. It is dangerous work, not only due to the many temptations, but they are swimming with the sharks. Every self-server in public life says they are an other-server, battling all the self-servers. Nobody stands up and says that they are a “bad guy.” Everybody sees themselves as good guys, rationalizing their deeds, whatever they may be, no matter how dark.

Many years ago I read about the shantytowns that ring Latin American cities such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, etc., where life is nearly unbearable. Life is cheap there, with children on their own on the streets, trying to survive with no parents, at age three. Life is so horrible there that a class of children assassins developed, and a practitioner was called a pistolero. A pistolero was a gun for hire, committing murder for a price. Life was so cheap they would murder somebody for as little as five American dollars. One of those teenage assassins righteously defended his profession. He said, "There will always be bad people who need to be killed. I am providing a public service." For as little as five dollars, that pistolero would be convinced you were a bad person who needed to die.

While discussing assassins, it is worth mentioning that they are usually men. Women have an inside edge on the light path over men. They have bodies designed to serve others. Their wombs and breasts are designed to nourish life. They are more inclined to be other serving than men. That does not make women "better" than men. Neither gender is superior, and humans all spend plenty of lives as each. The war against women the West has waged for millennia is revenge, somewhat. It is a reaction to a time when men were denigrated, relegated to being little more than something to inseminate the female, who possessed the power of life (men were perceived similar to how a drone bee is). The coming age, if we make it, will have a balance between the sexes, with each fully appreciated for its distinct and valuable qualities. The world's situation today can be seen as the male principle out of control. That perspective can be seen in many areas, such as the endless wars, the environmental rape (raping Mother Earth), or male-based Western "medicine," where the body is seen as a battlefield, with the only legal medicines being drugs and surgical procedures, violent methods that violate the body's integrity. Healing is feminine work.

Regarding light workers in politics, although Abraham Lincoln's tenure as president had many dark and bloody events, and Lincoln was a lawyer and politician, with all the unsavory ramifications of those professions, Ra says that in 1853 Lincoln's soul made a deal with a fourth dimensional light being. Lincoln then became a "walk-in," whereby another entity inhabited Lincoln's persona, and the great labors of his last twelve years were accomplished by a great light being.[14] I will not contradict it, although many people in the South may not agree with that assessment. Ramtha has called Lincoln America's "greatest king." The imperial impulse had much to do with keeping the union together.

There are more other-servers in the CIA than Ralph McGehee and the few other CIA employees who spoke out as he did. Ralph's intelligence was not what enabled him to figure it out, but his pure heart. The CIA psychologically screens its fieldwork applicants, trying hiring people who blindly follow orders. For every Ralph McGehee who took the high, hard road, there were numerous other CIA employees who at one level or another eventually saw the big picture. Some quickly became disillusioned and quit the CIA, getting a "real job" or becoming a missionary or other undertaking designed to serve humanity. Others developed a gradual uneasiness over the years as their experiences contradicted their indoctrination. At some point, the CIA ceased to be fun and they left. Others gradually felt the pain of having their ideals and reality clash, but developed coping behaviors such as drinking and other dysfunctions. Some devoted their spare time to charity work or something else they saw as truly helping.

Others figured it out as Ralph did, but did not have the courage to take his path. As with Ralph, they were too far along in their careers to practically change into another. They watched the calendar, counting the days to retirement, drinking themselves into a stupor nightly to live with their situation, exemplifying a life of quiet desperation.

In his In Search of Enemies, John Stockwell wrote about CIA case officers who return to the CIA headquarters at Langley from abroad (as Ralph McGehee did) and reception they receive,

"Case officers often come back unnoticed, drained by their experiences and haunted by their consciences, by the suspicion that the things they had done were pointless as well as cruel. They rarely have the same sparkle and drive on the next assignment - or the next. In offices throughout headquarters were those who had given up, who were walking out their years before early retirement, becoming grey fixtures like safes and Xerox machines."[15]

Some would speak up in the CIA's halls, trying to reform it or openly question the CIA's stated mission, only to be quickly swatted down or ostracized. If they stayed in the CIA, their lives were made unpleasant. Very few would wake up as Ralph did and do something about it, taking great personal risk to tell the world what was happening. Ralph is around one in twenty thousand. During World War II, there were virtually no German soldiers who spoke out against the Final Solution.

There are also CIA employees who see the situation exactly as Ralph does, and are supremely happy. They are dark path initiates, crave positions of power, and love being on the "winning" side. How many in the CIA’s ranks are like that? It is probably ten percent at most. The others engage in many sophisticated rationales for their actions. To one degree or another, they have had the opportunity to see what Ralph saw, but prefer to not. They do not want to believe they are serving darkness, and engage in many games of denial to protect their consciences. McGehee's CIA associate who was assigned to work with him on censoring his book thought McGehee should be taken out and shot. He believed McGehee was a traitor to the noble cause. That man was a prime example of how the masses react to a Ralph. Ralph represents a shattering of the mass illusion, and the herd does not like having its self-serving illusions shattered. The emperor may be stark naked, but few want to hear it. In an earlier time, Ralph may have become a victim of mob violence, nailed to a cross or have some other grim fate. Many years later he may have become a posthumous candidate for sainthood, but in America, there are other ways to deal with Ralph. The most effective method is denying him access to the podium. If his voice is a mere whisper next to the trumpet blare of propaganda, and he is discredited with lies, few will hear his voice or heed it, and few want to anyway. Everybody wants to believe they do good deeds, and do not take kindly to being told otherwise. Ralph has been actively spied on and subjected to a campaign of intimidation over the years as the CIA tried silencing him, quite illegally. In 2000, the CIA finally succeeded in silencing him. In 2004, John Perkins, after years of soul searching, spoke out from the privatized middle management of the empire.

That is the point regarding spirituality and how it relates to my work. As the Bible says, many are called and few are chosen, and the world's fate rests in few hands. It does not have to be that way. The forces of darkness easily manipulate humanity. The relatively few committed light workers are trying to wake us up, so we do not stampede over the nearby cliff. The dark path is not easy to tread. They are continually trying to navigate between enslaving humanity and destroying the planet, which would end their racket. They want alive and terrified slaves, not a destroyed planet, but it is not an easy tightrope to walk.

Mr. Deputy is a dark path acolyte. He is fairly accomplished, but not in the dark hierarchy's upper echelon. He is a soldier, following orders and making a good living by preying upon others, doing his part to keep humanity in chains, posing as a “public servant.” He may not realize the full implications of his actions, but even if he did, they probably would not affect him, other than feeling good about a job well done. Until people encounter their mentality, that may seem to be going too far. Dark path initiates rely on the denial of the average person. People do not want to believe that those in positions of power are self-serving, because they have given their power away to them. Therefore, they often go to great lengths to stay in denial about the state of affairs, although the effort they can expend in battling their cognitive dissonance can reach surreal levels.

There is reason to be optimistic about the future. If enough people make the effort to simply choose the light, not because it will win, but because it is good, a great age of light, love and healing awaits us. The Bible describes the Thousand Years of Peace. Native Americans have called it Paradise Restored. Some call it the New Age, and various cultures have other terms for it, but we are not there quite yet. We also might destroy ourselves. If we do, either through warfare, environmental destruction, or both, we will continue our incarnation cycles, but on another planet. Michael says that if we do, we will probably choose a life form that cannot manipulate its environment, dolphins and whales being examples of ensouled species that cannot destroy their environment. We probably would have no opposable thumbs in our next attempt to get it. One reaction to that notion is that if we did something like that, we will not have learned our lesson. The truly happy ending would have us finishing our incarnation cycle in a life form that can manipulate its environment, and finally learn the lesson of living in harmony with it. That would be the ideal, but Michael says the ideal is rarely attained on the physical plane, and very few wrap up their incarnation cycles by living the life of a Jesus. Our physical lifetimes do not end until we enjoy being here, loving the trip. Then we graduate to other adventures.

Robert Shapiro’s Zoosh says that the path to the New Age, healed planet, etc., is not by destroying the darkness with light, but by honoring the darkness for what it is, appreciating it, and having it take its rightful place in the cosmos. Darkness is largely running the show on Earth, and that was not its intended stature. Unmitigated evil will always destroy itself in the end, when there is nothing left to destroy. Zoosh states that the ideal mix of light and darkness is about 98% light and 2% darkness, to spur continued growth. Without some "discomfort" on this plane, there would be no incentive to grow. What is happening, according to Zoosh, is a healing and redemption of the darkness, where it will play the role it was designed for. The lessons learned by having darkness in charge have been profound and harrowing for humanity, yet valuable for Creation. It is apparently a great sacrifice for every one of us to be here, acting on this stage at this time.

The Michael material covers those topics in depth. Michael says a species destroys its home planet by warfare or environmental destruction a third of time, and completes its incarnation cycle on another planet in a different life form. Of that third, one-third is by warfare, and two-thirds is by environmental destruction. Humanity is today at that juncture where we may kill ourselves off. This is the turning point in our evolution. Michael's vast perspective and dispassionate view of an ensouled species destroying its home planet and simply choosing another one to continue its journey can be unnerving. Michael says that if we do destroy this planet (or make its environment hostile to life), those who have contributed the most to its destruction (mainly dark path acolytes) will incarnate on this planet as it is dying, experiencing the consequences of their activities. That is not because God forces them to, but because the nature of our souls and the incarnation cycle is acting in the world, and learning by reaping the results of our actions. We reap what we sow. It is a law of creation that applies from top to bottom. Often we sow in one life and reap in the next.

Michael's perspective can be interpreted as stating that those on the dark path are generally younger souls. Lake's ET perspective states that plainly. Spiritual teenagers are running the world today, seeking "power" over love, and even confusing the two. Every soul is divine, and the path of darkness is one of God's gifts. It is a consequence of having "free will," which is something that animals do not have. A rabbit, bear, tree, shark or dog cannot choose to be "good" or "evil." They are not playing that game. To the extent animals are "vicious" in today's world, they are largely reflecting back to us our consciousness. They are also not too happy playing that role. They look forward to when we "get it." Viciousness is not their natural state, and the time is coming soon when the lion will lay down with the lamb. Mother Nature is not competitive, but cooperative, which is another lesson that humanity has yet to learn.

Another way of describing the coming transition is calling it a dimensional shift, where humanity is transitioning from the third to fourth dimension, which apparently has never been tried before while staying in a body. Robert Shapiro's Zoosh discusses those concepts and length in the Explorer Race and Shining the Light series. In the fourth dimension, people can read each other's thoughts, so the charade of dark path initiates deceiving others is impossible. Consequently, in the fourth dimension one does not find light and dark path initiates sharing the same planet. They each have their own planets, and imagine a planet where everybody is on the dark path and they all know it.

Those different schools of thought do not contradict each other, and neither do the teachings of masters such as Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, etc. Michael likens the seeming differences in the various mystical philosophies to studying various systems of the body, where Jesus' teachings are like studying the circulatory system, Michael's teachings are like studying the endocrine system, Buddha's teachings are like studying the nervous system, the Ra material is like studying the lymphatic system, Jane Roberts' Seth material is like studying the digestive system, the Alexander material is like studying the skin, Barbara Marciniak's Pleiadian teachings are like studying the sensory systems, Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God material is like studying the immune system, Zoosh's Explorer Race material is like studying the skeletal system, and so on. Each is a valid system of study, seeing a different facet of reality, each complementing the other.

That is what I have learned on my journey so far, and I will surely have a somewhat different perspective in twenty years. Nobody need agree with everything (or anything) presented in this essay, but it gives some insight into the perspective that dominates my writings.

The earliest human writings evidenced ancient belief in the supernatural and in realms of existence beyond the physical plane. The Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh and his otherworldly journeys circulated as oral histories for a millennium before being written in cuneiform on clay tablets. That epic influenced myths ever afterward, including Old Testament tales.[16]

Only with the modern age’s appearance have any peoples ever officially disavowed the idea that anything existed beyond the physical dimension. Such a viewpoint is known as materialism, although such terms as atheism, agnosticism and “skepticism” have also described philosophies that reject the notion of life after death. America’s Founding Fathers were largely deists; they believed in a creator of sorts, but one that remained aloof from the physical plane and the concerns of humanity. Thomas Jefferson created a Bible that edited out all of Jesus’ “miracles,” and ended with his entombment.

Although mysticism never died out, the West was fully in materialism’s grip during the 20^th century. A curious phenomenon happened during the later decades of the 20th-century; Western emergency medicine advanced to the point where clinically dead people were revived. They reported otherworldly realms remarkably similar to what mystics had described for millennia. The current research on the phenomenon began with Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, which appeared in 1975. Before Moody’s first book was even published, he met a person who had one of the most spectacular near-death experiences (NDE) yet recorded. Dannion Brinkley was struck by lightning in 1975 and died. While he was dying and dead, he had most aspects of the classic NDE, with the tunnel of light, the being of light, the love that permeates the place he visited, a love immensely more intense than anybody feels on earth, a life review and visiting realms that no motion picture can do justice to. As with most who return from an NDE, Brinkley wanted no part of coming back to earth’s vale of tears, but was told that his work here was not finished, so his consciousness came back to his body while it was being taken to the morgue.[17]

One of the few NDE accounts that might top it is Grigorievich Rodonaia’s. He was a Georgian dissident that the KGB assassinated, and his body was taken to a morgue and frozen for three days. When the doctor began cutting into his body for the autopsy, Rodonaia’s eyes opened. They closed his eyes, and they popped back open. At that point, the doctor panicked. Rodonaia was brought back to life and spent nearly the next year in intensive care. He reported visiting realms similar to those described in mystical accounts. As Brinkley was shown many future events that came true (Moody recorded them, and his amazement grew during the subsequent years as the predicted events kept happening), Rodanaia brought back “proof” of his death experience’s validity when he told the hospital staff that he had been able to see into an infant there, and the child’s pelvis was fractured, which the doctors were unaware of. X-rays proved Rodanaia’s information accurate.

There have been many pieces of evidence that validate NDEs, as far as human consciousness not being dependent on the human body for existence. The materialistic presumptions of science, as well as the “Pearly Gates” tales of Christianity, have been challenged by the NDE phenomenon, and there have been numerous attempts to challenge the validity of NDEs, coming from both mainstream religion and science, them being the former and current authorities of reality. While creditable efforts have demonstrated that NDEs are influenced by the person having them, such as their culture, beliefs in an afterlife and so forth, no attempt to invalidate them, such as calling them demonic experiences (fundamentalist Christian debunkers) or byproducts of the brain’s chemistry (the “skeptics”) has been persuasive.[18]

It is nearly impossible to find anybody who has had an NDE and has been convinced that “they just imagined it,” or it was a byproduct of lack of oxygen to the brain. The post-NDE transformations of people’s lives are nearly as spectacular as the NDEs themselves. Brinkley is a case in point. He was in about 6,000 fistfights while growing up, and was a triggerman for a U.S. assassination squad in Southeast Asia while America was killing millions of people. After his “lightning therapy,” Brinkley developed startling psychic abilities.[19] Although his soldier background is evident in his perspective (he is a right wing Southern boy who was a Marine), he also renounced violence and realized that life was all about love. Nearly every NDE survivor has a radical change in their life’s priorities, seeking the spiritual and abandoning materialism. That radical change in people’s outlooks has led to many divorces, as their materialistic spouses cannot handle the change. Whereas having the nicest house or the newest car on the block may have once been the goal of the pre-NDE-person, the post-NDE-person wants to help others and enjoy every breath, and none of them have any fear of death, as far as it meaning oblivion. They know they are on earth for a reason, and know that when their time comes, they will leave earthly life, and gladly.[20]

The life review portion of an NDE can be astounding. When Brinkley had his NDE, he not only reviewed every moment of his life, but also what everybody felt as they interacted with him. When he relived his 6,000 fistfights and his murders, he also saw them through the eyes of those he fought and murdered, feeling what they felt. That was the worst part of his NDE, and makes the Golden Rule a little easier to understand, and the concept of sowing and reaping. It was sickening to feel the emotional pain people felt as he beat them up or murdered them. The worst feeling of all was when he beat people up for the sheer fun of it. He also was able to see the “ripple effect” of his actions. When he was an arms dealer to the United States’ Latin American puppets, he got to see and feel the effects of the weapons he sold, such as feeling what a little boy felt when his father was murdered with a weapon that Brinkley sold. After his agonizing life review, he expected some kind of rebuke or punishment from the being of light with him, and instead received love and joy, with an enigmatic reply:

“Who you are is the difference that God makes…and that difference is love.”

Just before being sent back to his body, with his new mission in life of helping to raise human consciousness, Brinkley’s guide told him,

“Humans are mighty spiritual beings. All they need to realize is that love is treating others the way they themselves want to be treated.”[21]

When he was dead, Brinkley was shown a device he was supposed to build when he returned to earthly life: a bed that helps people have out-of-body experiences, and across-the-veil experiences with “dead” people. The Monroe Institute does something similar. One of the most validating parts about the NDE and out-of-body phenomenon is that Brinkley, The Monroe Institute, Bruce Moen and others is that they do not ask anybody to believe anything they say, but they assist others in having experiences of those states for themselves, and they can make up their own minds. It has nothing to do with faith, especially the blind kind. Today there is even a TV show, Crossing Over, where John Edward brings messages from the other side to people in the studio audience. Every show, Edward has “hits” of the Isaac Brown variety. The “skeptics” who try explaining it away as a “cold reading” or other trick carry zero weight with people who have experienced John giving them messages from their departed loved ones.[22] As with all efforts such as Edward’s, the goal is teaching others to do it for themselves. Nobody need rely on the “experts;” anybody can seek and have those experiences for themselves, but it requires self-discipline

The many testimonies of people who have had NDEs strongly correlates with what mystics and channels have been saying for a long time. The term “afterlife” is something of a misnomer; time does not exist beyond the physical plane, so nothing can really be “after” anything else. The trappings of conventional heavens and hells are rarely reported. The beliefs of the experiencer help create their immediate afterlife experiences. Whereas ancient Greeks crossed the River Styx after they died, some modern Christians were also greeted at the Pearly Gates and given the standard-issue harp, which they began strumming. Those with rigid beliefs about what awaits them can become mired in those expectations. Hard-core religious fanatics and hard-core materialists can be stuck there for a long “time.” Hard core materialists can spend centuries in a kind of catatonic state, constantly repeating to themselves that they do not exist. Eventually they realize that something is saying “I do not exist,” and they begin waking up to life in the other side.

Robert Monroe called the out-of-body realms he visited “Focus Levels,” with every being focusing on the level appropriate to their development. In Monroe’s terminology, Focus 1 is physical reality, and Focus 10 is like a waking dream. Focus 23 is where some beings go after physical death, where they either do not realize they are dead or are unable to free themselves from the attractions of earthy experience. What people call ghosts are usually beings caught in Focus 23. It is related to the Christian concept of purgatory. Focuses 24 to 26 are where most people on earth today quickly end up after they pass over. They are also called “belief system territories.” In Focuses 24 to 26, there are Romans hanging out in Elysium, harp-strumming Christian heavens and every otherworldly realm that any human group has ever postulated. They are real, in that people experience them as real, just as we experience physical reality as real. They are way stations, however, that people are attracted to based on their beliefs and spiritual development. Nobody is sent anywhere; people go to what they are drawn to. If a small town’s citizenry all attended the same church, believing that a particular kind of afterlife environment awaited them, they will go there and live after their physical deaths, until they are ready to move on to their larger lives. Physical existence is an extremely traumatizing experience, and among those “many mansions” are places for souls to recover from earthly experience.

The harp-playing heaven is not all that heavenly, and after plucking those strings for what can seem a long, long time, souls begin wondering if harp playing is all there is to heaven. When they begin wondering if there is something more, helpers are always nearby (angels and other friends) to help them discover what that might be. Focus 27 is a place where beings begin integrating, healing and putting their earthly experiences behind them.

Focuses 24 to 26 also contain what can be called hells. Once again, nobody sends anybody anywhere, especially against their wishes. Those who live in the various hells are there because they are attracted to them. Bruce Moen was one of Monroe’s pupils, and he once visited a “hell” in Focus 25, where emotional sadists lived, playing evil tricks on each other. The major difference between such a hell and earth is that there is a vast spectrum of spiritual attainment of people living on earth. Some are on loan from heaven, more are on leave from hell, and most today just try getting through life without hurting anybody too much, or helping anybody too much, either. So, people on earth interact with a wide spectrum of souls. The emotional sadist that Moen visited, named Max, played his games on unsuspecting people during his earth days, but in Focus 25, Max’s world was completely populated with emotional sadists like him. On earth, Max was a big fish in a little pond. In Focus 25, Max was near the middle of the food chain, bearing the brunt of emotional sadism as often as he inflicted it. In that hell, they all lived to inflict emotional pain on others, but the only victims they had to prey upon were each other. If there ever was a fitting hell for Max, he was in it. He is going to stay there as long as he wants to play the emotional sadist game. There are also thief hells,[23] soldier hells, murderer hells, rapist hells and so on. Some try out each hell in succession, an experience called “hell-riding.” The only way out of those hells is through love: being able to both accept it and give it.

Some are so attracted to their hell that they become masters of it, becoming the “king of hell.” They are so clever that nobody can beat them at their hell game, them always getting the upper hand. All souls are part of a larger entity, as with the mid-causal entities Seth and Michael. Those in hell are stuck, with arrested development. All entities evolve, and when a group of a thousand souls is ready to travel to the causal plane, and one of its souls became the king of its hell, the thousand souls will “move heaven and earth” to try getting that soul to leave its hell and rejoin the others. If the soul cannot be persuaded to leave, the other souls will move on. Little did the “king of hell” realize that those other souls were part of its larger self, and when the other souls leave the astral plane for the causal, much of the “substance” that helped sustain the “king of hell” also leaves, and the king of hell cannot “hold itself together,” and its personality eventually disintegrates, with the “king of hell” eventually becoming little more than a fly, buzzing around in that hell’s energy.[24]

Cult members can live together in the Belief System Territories for a long time. Their heaven, however, can be a hollow one, like that harpist heaven.[25] When they finally decide they have had enough of the Belief System Territories, they move on to Focus 27. Each teaching, such as Monroe’s, has particular terminology, and can be seen to correspond to concepts in other teachings. In the Richard Material, what Monroe calls the Belief System Territories and Focus 27 (also called the Reception Center, or the Park), Richard calls the Place of Self-Deception (like a Hollow Heaven), the Lower Regions (like Max’s Hell), and the Place of Preparation.[26] It is the realities that are important, not the terminology. Robert Siblerud’s The Science of the Soul covers that territory and far more, describing the various planes of existence, at least those somewhat knowable by earthly souls. It is not a matter of belief and dogma, but realms that sincere seekers can explore for themselves, but usually only older souls have much interest or talent for such undertakings, as they are on the inward journey, not the outward one that younger souls are on.

There are also heavenly realms that far exceed in love and grandeur anything that can be written about or even imagined while on earth. The Michael teachings describe the planes he is familiar with, and earthly souls can somewhat comprehend the astral plane, but not really the higher ones. Michael is a mid-causal entity, and readily admits that the next plane of his evolution, the Akashic plane, is as much a mystery to him as the astral plane is to us.

There are high-quality accounts of the other side of death, by people who recently passed over. Ken Akehurst’s Everyone's Guide to the Hereafter and Helen Greaves’ Testimony of Light are excellent accounts of the initial afterlife experience. Akehurst was an average everyday English workingman, and he reported from the Belief Systems Territories. Life was “good” there, immensely more enjoyable than physical existence, but Akehurst also advised earthlings to give up their addictive behaviors before they died, because they would simply bring them along to the other side, but with no way to satisfy them. Robert Monroe and others have described beings that died with physical addictions. They often become “trapped” in Focus 23, alcoholics hanging around earthly bars to possess a passed-out drunkard, to get the brief thrill of being inebriated. All physical additions can lead to agony on the other side, where the addiction cannot be sated, which can lead to hanging around those who are still physical, to try getting a vicarious “sniff” of their addiction. Greaves channeled the experiences of a Catholic nun she knew in life, and the woman began dictating to Greaves mere weeks after she had passed over. The nun was in the Belief Systems Territories to begin with, but rapidly passed on to Focus 27, where she met her soul. Greaves described the dramatic change in the nun’s appearance and demeanor after she met her soul.

Virtually every existing account of the other side and channeled teaching accepts reincarnation as a fact. The only exceptions are people who have only had an NDE, where they are merely on the threshold of the other side (Bettie Eadie’s Embraced by the Light is one of those accounts), or only in the Belief Systems Territories, as Akehurst was. Akehurst was not yet to the point of reuniting with his soul (it does not happen in the Belief Systems Territories, but further along the path), and asked around about reincarnation, but was left to figure it out on his own. Greaves wrote another book titled The Wheel of Eternity, which described her experiences with a woman who was a ghost in her home, trapped in Focus 23. Greaves participated in helping that ghost realize where she was and why, and helped her move on. Greaves also helped an English aristocrat who went straight to “hell” upon leaving earth life, but was granted “shore leave” to come to Greaves’ home, where she also eventually was able to accept love, leave her hell, and move on.

After exploring the literature on crossing to the other side and what awaits us, and leavening it with my experiences, one issue is clear: bribing people with heaven or threatening them with hell are counterproductive. We go to whatever we are attracted to, and how we live our lives on earth determines where we go on the other side. What we think is important while we are here, but more important is what we say, and what we do is the most important, and the motivation behind our actions is all-important. Religious fanatics often have the most difficult time on the other side; their beliefs are conditioned by fear, not love. Rigid beliefs are the greatest obstacles to enlightenment, and all belief-fanatics are advised to give them up if they want a pleasant transition to their heaven. Living by Jesus’ Golden Rule - treating others how we would wish to be treated - is the best prescription for raising one’s awareness and having a joyous transition to the other side. Love is the only answer.

I want to paint the big picture, as far as can I glimpse it from my limited physical perspective. So, here I will tell a tale. I will reference parts of it, where some sources are, but that is only for the reader’s reference. The following tale is not necessarily the “right” one. Richard Bach’s Donald Shimoda said he did not know if his view of creation was “true,” but he believed it because it was fun to believe it.[27] I cannot “prove” this tale to anybody, and it is partly mine. Nobody needs to believe it, even me. This could all be wrong. We are not our beliefs, and believing that we are can get us into trouble.

The question I ponder the most these days is “why?” Why are we here? What game are we playing? Why this universe? It is the unfathomable question. Even Sai Baba says he does not know what God had in mind when this reality was set up. All the same, many sources hint at it, although I wonder if they really know, either.

Virtually every mystical source agrees that beyond the physical plane, time and space largely do not exist. They are artificial constructs used to create this dimension, a dimension that is ultimately illusory. There is also plenty of first-hand human testimony regarding that phenomenon. People who clinically die and are revived report reviewing their entire lives, in greater detail than is seemingly possible, in mere instants of earth time.[28] The further a physical being “progresses” on “the other side,” the less their existence has time and space-like attributes, to eventually be abandoned, much as a child eventually abandons training wheels. With that limitation acknowledged, I will write in time and space terms, being that I live in a dimension where it defines our existence.

In the beginning, the creator gave birth to an immense number of beings, somewhere on the order of the number of stars in the observable universe (200 billion multiplied by one trillion), and perhaps a truly infinite number. They were the creator’s playmates, in a sense fashioned from the creator’s rib. There was no physical reality as we know it. All beings had free will, and creation was one big celebration, with everyone laughing and playing. All were equal to the creator, as everybody was made from the same “stuff.” One day, one being decided to play a game of creating a hierarchy. He said to his pals,

“Give your will to me. Free will can be burdensome, and I have a special ability to handle it. If you give your will to me, I will take care of it, making your decisions for you, and making your existence easier.”

Some say the being made his pitch at the creator’s request.[29] Others say that the being was an outside agent, seeming to come from outside creation. That being’s sales pitch was well done, but about 99% of the creator’s playmates replied with something like,

“Thank you for your offer, but I think that my will is something I am supposed to manage by myself. Yes, some decisions seem difficult, but if I do not make them, I think I will diminish myself (and hence creation) in some way. Your offer is generous and noble, but I think I am better off making my own decisions.”

After eons of recruiting effort, that being recruited about 1% of the creator’s playmates to his new program. The new recruits gave their free will to that being. A hierarchy was created, with that being managing the free will of that 1%, with other beings helping him. It developed into a hierarchy, with that recruiter at the top, the helping levels below him, and those giving away their free will at the bottom. Eventually, those at the bottom gave away virtually all their free will to the hierarchy. Free will was an essential component of the creator, and when those beings gave away their free will, they also lost other given attributes, particularly their awareness. In Judeo-Christian circles, that loss of awareness is known as “The Fall.” That being who invented and recruited others to his hierarchy is known as Lucifer in those circles, and that time of carefree play is known as the Garden of Eden. The tale has been greatly distorted in Genesis, with women being blamed for The Fall, the sin was seeking knowledge, the Garden of Eden was in today’s Middle East, and that tempter was in the form of a snake, as the serpent was the symbol of women thousands of years ago.

The Fall took a long time. As everybody has free will, the creator could not infringe upon what transpired, even if his playmates gave their will away. Even though he cautioned that 1%, he had to watch them give away their will and gradually lose their awareness. They devolved to a state that had not been seen before. Whether Lucifer did it at the Creator’s bidding or not does not alter today’s situation. If Lucifer did the Creator’s bidding, however, I am not currently happy about it, because I am a member of that fallen 1%.[30] Was it a test that God invented? Did we ask to take the test? Did we think we could become creators, and God replied, “So, you think you want to be a creator? I have a little test, to determine if you are ready.” If it happened somewhat like that, at this time I question my wisdom. Life on earth is not my idea of a good time, having lost awareness and a seeming lack of free will, not continually bathing in the love that is a natural part of the “other side” and being at the mercy of forces seemingly beyond my control.

So, what to do about the fallen 1%? No being can fall so far that all awareness and memory is lost. As awareness was lost, those beings also fragmented into a hierarchy of awareness that resembled Lucifer’s. The aspect of those beings that remembered their Garden of Eden days preferred their former awareness to what happened after they gave away their free will. They realized their mistake, and the creator (with the other 99% assisting) invented a system to allow them to regain their awareness and reclaim their will. A remedial school was developed for lost beings to regain their awareness. No being embarked on the journey that did not desire to regain its awareness.

The densest, lowest, most elementary part of the course was invented. It is known as physical reality, where I live. In the fragmentation of awareness, “lesser” beings were created. Paradoxically, creation is one being. There is truly no separation from the creator, yet we all have our individuality. In this dualistic plane of existence, all explanations of the big picture contain paradoxes. Every being is part of the whole, and the whole cannot be whole without each part present. Every atom is a necessary and infinitely valuable aspect of creation. That is the unfathomable aspect of creation that no earthly source has ever dealt with to mortal satisfaction. Earthly brains are not equipped to comprehend infinity and dimensions where time and space do not exist. That is part of the frustration of being here; having extremely limited awareness while inhabiting the physical realm. While the physical realm is the densest and cruelest of dimensions, it is also where the most growth happens, and lessons are learned here that cannot be had anywhere else.

Humans are considered sentient. Sentience is quite a ways along the developmental path. Sentient beings begin their physical reality journey as less aware forms. Today’s human beings began their physical reality journey spending time as parts of stars, interstellar dust and other things before focusing on earth. As we focused on earth, our early experiences were involved with being parts of the atmosphere, even as clouds. Our awareness eventually became earthbound, and we spent eons as parts of earth, parts of oceans, mountain ranges and deep within the earth’s core. As we got the hang of physical reality, we eventually became life forms, the simpler, unicellular organisms to begin with. Our awareness became ever more fragmented with that process, but it was also a way of creating a “concrete” foundation for us to begin rebuilding our former awareness.

This story will seem similar to the theory of evolution. The scientists have an accurate view of the process, to a limited degree, but they also largely have it backwards. Our current consciousness is not a byproduct of chemical and evolutionary processes, but is the driving force behind them. There is an interaction, however, similar to Marx’s dialectical materialism, but not materialistic. Materialism largely ignores consciousness, chalking it up to a phantom of chemistry, but consciousness is the engine of the entire process. Life is not an accident, but the purpose of physical reality. Everything in the universe is alive in some way, as it is all a manifestation of consciousness. Physical reality is a place of interaction of more evolved consciousness with less evolved, the less evolved seeming to be rocks, trees and other “unaware” things. Each has its own awareness, perhaps less evolved than human consciousness, but no less divine and necessary for creation.

Seth says that there is no division of the self, which is another way of saying creation is one. Nevertheless, each particle of creation has its individual integrity, and every atom has its divine awareness. Seth says that the bedrock of our reality, its most elementary component, is a unit of consciousness, which is far, far smaller than an atom or any subatomic particle that has been identified.

In the fragmentation of awareness of which physical reality represents the lowest level, there are many levels of awareness, wholeness and fragmentation. An electron in a squirrel’s toe has an awareness of itself, its role in the oxygen atom it is part of, its role in the water molecule it belongs to, the cell it helps comprise, the muscle it is part of, the squirrel it is part of, the squirrel species it is part of, the planet it is part of, the solar system it is part of, the galaxy it is part of, and the universe it is part of. They all build upon each other, all part of the whole, similar to an onion’s skin.

The package of consciousness that concerns humans is commonly called the soul, which is an entity that manages the growth of awareness through the physical plane for sentient beings. Every human being is part of a soul, or as it is stated more commonly, each human has a soul. Michael calls human beings fragments. According to Michael’s view of creation, an earthbound human is generally one of more than one hundred lives that a soul experiences on the physical plane. In the grand plan of regaining fallen awareness, souls help integrate the growing awareness. Michael’s conception of a soul is probably not the same thing as those who gave away their free will to begin The Fall, but it could be considered close. The entity that Paddy McMahon dealt with seems to equate the two.[31] Virtually every piece of mystical material admits that reincarnation is a fact. The mystical branches of the Judeo-Christian religions, specifically the Rosicrucians, the Sufis and the Cabbalists (the mystical branches of Christianity, Islam and Judaism) all taught reincarnation as a fact, while their orthodox counterparts denied it. On the other side of the veil, the closer a personality is to their earthly life, the less they are aware of their soul, or other earth lives their souls have lived. Although the heavily edited New Testament removed more than half of Jesus’ life, and probably many references to reincarnation, Jesus’ statement that John the Baptist was Elijah returned to human form has survived.[32]

The plan to regain awareness is a vast one that no earthly awareness can fully comprehend. Even the exalted awareness that Jesus and Buddha manifested can only hint at the big picture. Physical reality is where awareness grows at its most elementary level. The lessons learned at the physical reality level are essential for the progressing levels of awareness, similar to a three-year-old’s lessons of caring for himself being essential lessons that see him through his earthly life.

Everything on the physical plane has correspondence to the “higher” planes. The most beautiful tree on earth is a drab reflection of how it appears in higher planes. The most profound and intense love we ever feel for our loved ones barely hints at the magnitude of love that permeates the higher planes, and it is as available as the air we breathe. The physical plane is the most rudimentary manifestation of the higher planes’ principles. Numerology studies the mystical significance of numbers. Numbers are not only for scientists and accountants, but a reflection of the higher planes, and today’s mathematics is merely one of many ways to deal with numbers. There are perhaps an infinite number of valid mathematics systems, and we could glimpse many that would have little or no meaning to our minds. Nevertheless, there are many significances to numbers that go well beyond what scientists think of them, with one, two, three, four and five having a great deal of mystical significance. If there was a “divine” number, however, it might be seven. There are many systems of thought where the number seven has special significance (seven chakras, seven deadly sins, sacred seven prayers, seven days of the week, seven colors of the rainbow, etc.). The Michael teachings are oriented around the number seven, and can be highly useful in helping understand the soul’s journey through the physical plane.

The Michael teachings define the soul as an entity that inhabits the astral plane. The astral plane is the one just “above” the physical plane. The soul that Michael describes “gives birth” to about 120 personalities that inhabit the physical plane. Some souls live only one earth life, while others live thousands and some never do. It is up to the soul. Again, there is not time as it is thought of past the physical plane, and the soul’s 120 personalities all exist at once as far as the soul is concerned, similar to leaves on a tree. However, the physical plane has been set up with linear time, so part of the soul’s awareness experiences those lifetimes in linear sequence, each experience building on the other, as the soul’s awareness “grows” through the physical plane. The soul grows in awareness with each physical life lived. The astral plane is where souls rest between lives. When people have NDEs, out-of-body experiences or visions of heaven, they are generally describing the astral plane. In a paradoxical fashion that earthly brains cannot fully comprehend, souls “invest” themselves in each earthly personality it gives birth to. The soul experiences each physical lifetime and learns the lessons it provides, although the earthly personality has little or no conscious awareness of the soul that gave it birth. On one hand, that does not seem very fair. On the other, the “on its own” aspect of the earthly personality allows it to develop in its own right. When the earthly personality leaves physical reality, it comes back to the astral plane and is eventually reunited with the soul, but it might take quite some “time.”

Just as every atom has its own awareness and “soul,” so does each human being. The human soul is no “better” than the atom’s “soul,” as all are ultimately made of the creator, and are the creator. Even so, the human soul is much “larger” and more complicated and evolved than the atom’s soul, just as the soul is a more evolved and complicated entity than an earthly personality. That does not detract from the integrity of each atom or human personality, however.

Each soul eventually becomes part of a larger entity on the plane “above” the astral plane, called the causal plane. Michael claims to be an entity composed of more than 1000 souls. With each soul living more than 100 lives, the Michael entity draws upon the experience of more than 100,000 human lives to inform his perspective. The further the entity integrates on its way back to the godhead and full awareness, the less “personality” it possesses, so Michael has a clinical detachment and dry sense of humor, mostly confined to puns. Michael hails from the middle of the causal plane, and is thus called a mid-causal entity. Seth has also been called a mid-causal entity. Seth evidences far more personality than Michael does, perhaps partly because Jane Roberts is part of the Seth entity, him being a “big brother” of hers. Many people channel the Michael entity, but each interacts with a slightly different facet. One person may channel a facet composed of 50 souls of Michael’s 1050, while another person channels a “subgroup” of 40 others. It, combined with the people doing the channelings, gives the Michael material a slightly different flavor, depending on who is channeling it.

The Michael teachings correspond to many others, such as Gurdjieff’s, the Indian caste system and others (the caste system being a badly distorted corruption of valid perspectives). When souls begin the long journey, they choose a “role,” which is a common theme in mystical material. Seth discussed “speakers” as one of the permanent roles that some souls choose, while Alexander describes a system quite similar to Michael’s. In Michael’s view, a soul will choose one of seven roles: artisan, server, warrior, scholar, sage, priest and king. Each has its own orientation and awareness, and it will always have that role. Each role has its strengths and vulnerabilities. Each role progresses through its ages, its awareness expanding as it “grows” older. Michael teaches that there are seven soul awarenesses, or “ages,” with seven levels within each “age.” On the astral plane, the soul is aware of all its physical lives, but as the physical plane journey progresses with its linear time, each personality is somewhat aware of its “earlier” lives, and builds upon that awareness with each succeeding life.

The “grand plan” to regain awareness has been designed so no soul can “backslide” all that far. We cannot really “fail.” That is apparently part of the creator’s compassion. No soul can become so lost that it cannot get back home one day. We have free will, but it is constrained by some fairly narrow parameters on the physical plane: we cannot remember our nightly trips back to the astral plane, we generally cannot recall our past lives, we must eat to sustain our bodies, gravity makes us earthbound, the love energy that comprises the very atmosphere on the higher planes is not obvious here, we feel pain and must die one day.

Mystical students often read about how wonderful an opportunity earth life is, but discarnate entities say it. It is easy to wax rhapsodic about earthly existence when one does not live here. Although third grade was a valuable experience, I do not want to live through it again. It is difficult to imagine a sane being choosing the existence found on today’s earth. Earth is a vale of tears, and has largely been so for a long time. I hope we somehow earned this difficult existence. The sources I respect the most say that physical reality, especially life on earth these days, is not an easy experience. I consider Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God material a masterwork, although Walsch’s God can seem a somewhat flippant Pollyanna at times (and other problems), but Walsch’s God admits that our best day on earth is the day we die and leave behind this dense existence. The general mystical consensus is that being born is the hard part of being here, and dying the easy part. If earthly life was the best that the creator could come up with when he decided to do a little creating, then we all could make many suggestions. Whatever delights may wait on the veil’s other side do little to mitigate the cruelty of this existence, not while we are here. The standard mystical tale, however, is that we all chose to be here, and only the bravest of the fallen are on earth right now. This is the cutting edge in many ways, apparently. For humans, earth is a school, not a home, and there is nothing “wrong” with trying to make the school cleaner and prettier (or making sure we do not burn it down), the curriculum less painful and the classes more fun.

There are no human souls, just as there are no cat souls. There are souls that express themselves as humans, and souls that express themselves as cats. Animals are not ensouled as humans are. While it is usually one soul for each human, it is more like one soul for a flock of geese. Also, that “soul” is not playing the same game as a soul playing the human game. Humans exercise free will in a way that animals do not. A goose cannot decide to be “evil,” although there are some mean geese out there.[33] Domestic animals are usually bridging the transition between sentient and non-sentient animals. Domestic animals are around humans partly to investigate what being ensouled is like. Our pets observe us for more reasons than we might think. If they find the ensouled state attractive enough, they may begin incarnating on the ensouled cycle.

Each of Michael’s roles has its positive and negative pole. The pole operated from depends on if the personality is operating from love or the lack of it (fear). We can choose love or fear here in physical reality (the freewill deal), and fear is a normal condition, largely based on feelings of not being in control of what happens to our bodies. Love is the energy of creation. God creates with love. It can even be said that God is love. In physical reality, love is not as readily available as it is on the other side, where feeling love is as natural as breathing. The feeling of separation from God’s love is perhaps the cruelest aspect of physical reality.

Once the cruelty of not remembering to ask to come here, and having a difficult time feeling the hidden love that sustains this universe, is accepted, the rest is not difficult to imagine or comprehend. The discarnate entities say it is in our best interests to not remember our larger lives, but they also do not live here. Our goal here is choosing and feeling love. As souls “age,” each level has unique lessons to learn, and souls adopt “overleaves” for their physical personalities. In more than 100 lifetimes, each overleaf is explored. Each overleaf also has its positive and negative aspect. The overleaves are: goals, modes, attitudes and a “chief feature,” which is how fear predominantly accesses the personality. At the footnote ending this sentence is a highly abbreviated rendition of the Michael material.[34]

On earth, the “Young Soul” stage of the cycle has dominated human awareness for the past two thousand years. Young Souls are great at building civilizations and destroying planets. Winning is everything to the Young Soul. Killing and being killed has been a predominant theme for the past two millennia, especially for the Europeans who conquered the planet. Humanity is at the brink of self-extinction, as it has focused its awareness outwardly as far as it can. The inward journey that the Mature Soul awareness initiates is humanity’s next step. It is the most dramatic transition that any ensouled species makes. Mature Souls began outnumbering Young Souls on earth during the past generation (during the past decade it became 34% versus 33% of the world’s human population), and the transition is underway to begin exploring emotional and inner realities. Whether the transition will be completed before humanity exterminates itself has yet to be determined. The human race will probably make it, but billions of people may not survive the transition. Those who still prefer playing the kill-and-be-killed game may soon find themselves on another planet to continue their game, as Earth will not allow herself to be destroyed. Although the kill-and-be-killed game provides valuable lessons, no planet can host that game indefinitely. The gentle will inherit the earth, and Earth will eventually ascend to higher planes and leave this one behind, just as humans do.

In earlier lives, with the focus outward, humans typically incur a huge burden of negative karma. They spend their later lives paying it back. Those early lives are when people can more readily walk the “dark spiritual path,” making self-service a science.

It is easy to see how limited human awareness has been, even during our history. For one instance of many, the Catholic Church’s dogma had earth being the universe’s center. Today’s dogma from many corners is that humanity is alone in the universe. Hundreds of years ago the West rediscovered what Pythagoras knew: earth orbits the sun. As science rose, our sun became understood as just another star in the sky, and the one our planet orbited. Eventually the Milky Way became seen as a cloud of stars, and not long ago the concept of a galaxy was developed. Eventually our sun became seen as merely one of about 200 billion stars in our galaxy. As our scientists kept looking outward, other galaxies were seen, and seen, and seen. Today, it is accepted that there are perhaps one trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Now that is a universe created by a big “C” Creator. What if the universe is 100 billion times larger than we think it is? What if it is truly infinite?

Seth and Michael state that humanity has barely scratched the surface of the physical universe’s vastness and strangeness. Seth says that science has erred in estimating the earth’s age by a few orders of magnitude, and that the earth is actually trillions of years old and has not always resided in our solar system. Michael says that humanity is merely one of one million ensouled species in our galaxy, and pondering one trillion galaxies gives a tiny glimpse of the potential diversity of our physical universe. To glimpse that diversity, we share this planet with another ensouled “species”: cetaceans (dolphins and whales). They chose bodies that cannot manipulate their environment. There are many first-person accounts of whale and dolphin sentience. Cetaceans play the game differently than humans do. A pod of twelve dolphins will have twelve souls, but the souls share the bodies, swapping them, which is one reason they do not fear death as humans do. Whales apparently think holographically, which is nearly impossible for us linear thinkers to comprehend. As Europeans conquered the world and exterminated humans across the planet, they also drove whales to near-extinction. Many dolphins and whales are only beginning to suspect that human beings are sentient, as they did not think a sentient species was capable of the genocide their kind experienced at human hands.

In the universe there are sentient clouds, mountains, trees, birds and life forms humans can barely imagine. Humans are a sentient form of ape. Channeled material regularly describes how humanoid sentient species are the predominant ones in our little corner of the galaxy, as they all hail from the same rootstock, the inhabited planets being “colonized” in a sense. The human race apparently has had plenty of help from our galactic cousins, genetically and otherwise.[35]

Channeled entities often throw out statements that blow away the participants, the listeners shaking their heads in dismay or awe. Once somebody asked Michael if the Big Bang and the scientific establishment’s notion of an expanding and contracting universe, to lead to another Big Bang in billions of years, was correct. Michael replied that there is some truth in that notion, but the universe had done it more times than there are atoms in our universe. Seth says that our universe is not expanding in the way our scientists think. Whatever the “right” answer may be, our earthly minds, with their puny conceptions, are poorly equipped to grapple with those ideas. Throw in infinite parallel and probable existences (and physical dimensions where time and space are more “fluid”), and no earthly mind fails to “blow a fuse” when trying to comprehend those concepts.

The Michael material is only one of many worthy teachings. What is coming up for humanity is a healing of the “heart-mind split.” It is also called the Second Coming, the New Age, Paradise Restored, etc. Love will reign, not fear, but we must choose it. It will not fall into our laps.

It is also possible that there is something very big afoot on earth. There might be a lot more about to happen than merely an ensouled species turning the corner, beginning its inward journey after a long time of focusing outward. Michael admits that the human species is more sexually polarized than 95% of ensouled species (again, we need only look at cetaceans to get an idea of less polarized species). Kryon, Zoosh, Barbara Marciniak’s Pleiadians and others say that the human race is a special experiment, and its outcome could change the way our universe functions. That can seem grandiose, but it may also be true. If true, it has everything to do with love. I once asked Hinono a few questions. He said, “the Creator is coming,” with a “big love” that nobody here has quite experienced yet.

Michael claims no ultimate awareness, nor does Seth or any other reputable channeled entity (except perhaps Walsch’s God). Jane Roberts would periodically channel Seth Two, which Seth called his “big brother.” Seth Two was obviously unused to using a human body, and said that his joy created universes, and that it was challenging for him to relate to human awareness and emotion.

All those ideas are worthy to ponder, but our reality is that we must eat to survive here, and growing our awareness while caring for our bodies is our earthly task, and it keeps our hands full. If people truly begin caring for each other, then humanity might have a gentle transition to a healed humanity and planet. Much is possible, but not when most Americans predominantly operate from their personalities’ negative pole, while calling it its positive pole. Humanity’s primal nature is love, and Jesus and other masters came to remind us of that fact.

In the final analysis, it is our reality, our world, our everlasting lives. What will we do with them?

[1] See Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, p. 18, 19, 33.

[2] I saw those words in my school district’s "cumulative file" after I graduated from high school. My sixth grade teacher's comments stared out at me. I believe it was sincere, but also was influenced by two factors. I was a bit of a discipline problem in those years. Another factor was that I was more intelligent than my teacher, and sometimes better informed. I was a normal child in most ways, but one day my teacher showed the class the eastern and western hemispheres on a globe. The only problem was that he was pointing out the northern and southern hemispheres. I raised my hand and said I doubted that he explained the hemispheres accurately. To his credit, he asked me to show the class how I thought the hemispheres were oriented on the globe. I did. It retrospect, that was quite a spectacle, to have a student challenge a teacher's presentation because it was inaccurate, and the teacher allow the correction. I had never seen it done before, and have never seen it since. When I finished showing the class how the hemispheres really lined up, my teacher said that he would perform some research that evening. The next day he announced that my explanation was correct. It took a big man to admit that his eleven-year-old student had corrected him. Yet, I believe that the event, along with my admittedly unruly demeanor, had something to do with my teacher's writings in my cumulative file. I do not feel that my parents pushed me too hard, although it could have appeared that way. They conscientiously undertook the task of raising a well-behaved, helpful and obedient child whose IQ was in the genius range, and I was blessed with experiences that many children my age did not have, and I cannot fault my parents for it.

[3] Brian describes that event in the foreword to his book The Second Coming of Science, and Brian credits that event with propelling him into mysticism.

[4] I have a close friend who was a Silva instructor for many years, and he recently told me that in the unfortunate situation in today's hurried society, the Silva class has been truncated to twenty hours, a "Silva-lite" to those of us who took it the old way. I think the old way still exists, but may be more expensive. I recommend the full course, not the abbreviated version.

[5] Also, Randi may not be as honest an "investigator" as he seems. .

[6] For an example of that mentality, see Werner Heisenberg's "Truth Dwells in the Deeps" in Ken Wilbur's Quantum Questions, pp. 33-38. Heisenberg relates a conversation that he, Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli had. Those men were decidedly mystical, as were nearly all the greatest physicists of the twentieth century.

[7] For Genghis Kahn and Rasputin, The Ra Material, p. 118. For Himmler and Goering, The Law of One, Book II, p. 60. Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty are the authors.

[8] In the opinion of entities such as Zoosh, as channeled by Robert Shapiro.

[9] That is my interpretation, not endorsed by anybody else.

[10] Lake, Gina. The Extraterrestrial Vision, pp. 19-20.

[11] Roads, Into a Timeless Realm, pp. 190-211.

[12] See Valerian, Matrix III, p. 488-538.

[13] Valerian, Matrix III, pp. 0002-0003. His table does not add up to 100% (it adds to 110%), but gives very general numbers.

[14] Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Book II, pp. 60-61.

[15] See Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, p. 56.

[16] See Carol Zaleski’s Otherworld Journeys, pp. 14-16.

[17] See Brinkley’s Saved by the Light.

[18] NDEs have been a subject of considerable personal interest for me, as my paranormal experiences prepared me to investigate them. Kenneth Ring performed the seminal work on NDEs, as far as attempting controlled research and comparing NDEs to extraterrestrial close encounters. See his The Omega Project.

Gregory Little attempted something similar, though more from a debunking perspective. Little chalks up most paranormal phenomena to electromagnetic illusions. See his Grand Illusions. There is significant Bible quoting in Grand Illusions. John Michael McCarthy’s phantasmagoric cartoons strangely dominate it. The thesis of Grand Illusions is worth considering, but the admittedly Christian Little had an agenda. To a degree it was a defense of his faith, and needs to be read with that in mind.

Going further into materialistic, “its an illusion” dismissals of the NDE experience is the work of Susan Blackmore, the leading “skeptic” to try formulating a materialistic theory of NDEs. See her In Search of the Light, and her materialistic theory of the NDE experience in The Near Death Experience - A Reader, edited by Lee Bailey and Jenny Yates. At least she appears to be an honest debunker. Her theory is partly based on dismissing the notion of reincarnation, and she formulates a questionable interpretation of the words attributed to Buddha. Buddha emphasized the here and now, and his de-emphasis on the afterlife and reincarnation has been misinterpreted by many Westerners as being a strike against the reincarnation concept. Astute scholars of Eastern literature, especially regarding Buddha’s teachings, assert that anybody thinking that Buddha was skeptical that reincarnation was a fact is sorely mistaken. See Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads, pp. 948-949. See Head and Cranston, eds., Reincarnation, an East-West Anthology, pp. 12-16. See Zimmer, Philosophies of India, pp. 464-487. See Huston, The World's Religions, pp. 82-153, especially pp. 115-116. See Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, p. 484. See Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Blackmore then invented a chemical/physiological explanation that was creative, to say the least. Blackmore’s and Little’s are the best efforts I have seen that try invalidating the NDE experience, and had serious shortcomings.

Perhaps the strangest attempt to invalidate the NDE experience is Richard Abanes’ Journey into the Light. Abanes attempts to demonize the NDE, arguing that NDEs are encounters with Satan. Abanes spends most of the book enlisting the work of scientific debunkers of NDEs, in an effort to try invalidating all NDE experiences. The last third of the book, however, is a betrayal of any pretensions to scientific objectivity, and is a descent into demonizing anything that cannot be found in the Bible. The book is a strange alliance of science and religion to try invalidating experiences that challenge both worldviews. Abanes’ book made it to the mass market, but is appropriate only for the fundamentalist Christian section of bookstores. The last part of Abanes’ book was reminiscent of Ron Carlson and Ed Decker’s Fast Facts on False Teachings, which calls every philosophy, faith and religion not fundamentalist Christianity the devil’s work.

[19] See Brinkley’s Saved by the Light and At Peace in the Light for his account of coming to grips with his new abilities.

[20] See Cherie Sutherland’s Reborn in the Light.

[21] See Brinkley’s Saved by the Light, p. 59.

[22] Joe Nickell is one of the “skeptical” faithful, always ready to invoke the “scam” angle, no matter how much evidence flies in the face of his theorizing.

[23] See a description of a thieves’ hell in Moen’s Voyage to Curiosity’s Father, pp. 149-154.

[24] See Moen’s Voyage to Curiosity’s Father, pp. 111-170. I suspect that the Creator does not simply leave things there, but at some stage those “flies of hell” will receive their redemption by an act of grace that no earthly being can currently imagine.

[25] Moen describes a “hollow heaven” in his Voyage to Curiosity’s Father, pp. 171-186.

[26] See Graham Bernard’s The Challenge of Evil, pp. 5-7.

[27] See Bach, Illusions, chapter 17.

[28] See Brinkley’s Saved by the Light. Michael Roads, in his Into a Timeless Realm, described time as appearing “spherical” instead of linear. Many near-death experiences (NDEs) describe that “fast-forward” life review.

[29] Robert Shapiro’s Zoosh says this. After this essay was written and this site pretty much finished, an article came out in the Sedona Journal of Emergence, November 2002 issue, pp. 69-70, titled “The Sacrifice of Lucifer,” by Yaël Powell, who claims it is a channeling from God. It is along the lines of humanity exploring “anti-love” due to the free will God gave us, and Lucifer volunteered to help us make this exploration that God did not anticipate, as God knows that love is all there is, we are exploring what we are not. It is a very compassionate article.

[30] Paddy McMahon’s The Grand Design material discusses that issue.

[31] See Paddy McMahon’s The Grand Design material.

[32] See, for instance, Reincarnation, An East-West Anthology, edited by Joseph Head and S.L. Cranston; Arthur and Joyce Berger’s Reincarnation, Fact or Fable?; Reincarnation, edited by Sylvia Cranston.

[33] : - )

[34] Many people channel the Michael teachings. The sources used for this essay are: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Messages from Michael, More Messages from Michael, Michael’s People and Michael for the Millennium; Joya Pope’s The World According to Michael and Upcoming Changes; José Stevens’ Tao to Earth and Earth to Tao; Shepherd Hoodwin’s The Journey of Your Soul; The Michael Game by The Michael Digest Group and The Michael Handbook by José Stevens and Simon Warwick-Smith. Below are tables that outline most of the Michael teaching’s basics

Soul role for earthbound souls	% of human species	% of America	How roles view the human world
Artisan	20	30	The world is their artistic model
Server	30	10	The world is their guest
Warrior	20	30	The world is unconquered territory
Scholar	15	15	The world is their object of study
Sage (artisan exalted)	8	8	The world is their audience
Priest (server exalted)	5	5	The world is their flock
King (warrior exalted)	2	2	The world is their realm

Role	Positive Pole	Negative Pole	Primary Delusion	# of Karmic Ribbons Created and Burned
Artisan	Creation	Artifice	My creations are real	500
Server	Service	Bondage	I am forced to serve	500
Warrior	Persuasion	Coercion	Might makes right	2,000
Scholar	Knowledge	Theory	My theories are correct	1,400
Sage	Expression	Oration	I am always worth listening to	2,000
Priest	Compassion	Zeal	I always know what is best for all	3,000
King	Mastery	Tyranny	I should always be in charge	4,000

Goal	Mode	Attitude	Chief Feature	Centering
Discrimination	Caution	Skeptic	Self-Destruction	Emotional
Acceptance	Power	Idealist	Greed	Moving
Re-evaluation	Repression	Stoic	Self-Deprecation	Intellectual
Growth	Passion	Spiritualist	Arrogance	Instinctual
Submission	Perseverance	Cynic	Martyrdom	Higher Emotional
Dominance	Aggression	Realist	Impatience	Higher Moving
Stagnation	Observation	Pragmatist	Stubbornness	Higher Intellectual

Soul Age	Positive Pole	Negative Pole	Theme	Life is About	Relationship to Nature
Infant	Innocence, openness	Terrified inhibition	Let’s try it, but life is scary	Survival	Connected with nature
Baby	Structure	Rigidity	Let’s do it right, or do not try	Following the rules	Controls nature
Young	Accomplishment	Self-centeredness	Let’s do it my way. I win, you lose.	Winning	Conquers nature
Mature	Emotional depth	Melodramatic	Do it someplace else. Life is intense	Emotions	Preserves nature
Old	Love and acceptance	Laziness, “I am better”	You do it your way, I’ll do it mine	Love	Lives with nature
Transcendental	Social revolution	“You can call me master”	We can make things better
Infinite	Mastery, love	None	We are one

Michael’s Soul Ages	Rough Correspondence to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs	Less “age” oriented terminology
Infant	Survival	Stage 1
Baby	Safety	Stage 2
Young	Social	Stage 3
Mature	Esteem	Stage 4
Old	Self-actualization	Stage 5
Transcendental		Stage 6
Infinite		Stage 7

Life Monads	Age of Monad	Planes of Existence, Tao is Source of all	Body Types
Birth		Physical	Lunar
Awareness as individual	2	Astral	Venusian
Leaving “nest”	18-22	Causal	Mercurial
Mid-life crisis	35-50	Akashic	Saturnian
Reflection on life lived	65-70	Mental	Martial
Realization that death is coming		Messianic	Jovial
Death		Buddhaic	Solar

These tables give only a bare outline of the Michael teachings. Joya Pope gave me a reading in the early 1990s, and read me as an Old (level 2) Artisan, an Idealist/Skeptic with a goal of Growth, in the Observation mode with a strong slide into Perseverance, with Emotional centering complemented with a Moving part, a chief feature of Impatience and about 65% feminine energy. I have a Saturnian body, which is rugged on the positive pole and gaunt on the negative pole, and I have experienced each in this life. I am one of those “slow learners” who has lived more than 160 physical lives, most on earth as a human. Joya’s impressions (done over the phone) and glimpses of my future were extremely accurate in many ways. This web site is a classic Old Artisan undertaking, but Old Artisans also leave behind many unfinished works. This site was largely completed in September 2002, overcoming the flagging inspiration that Old Souls are vulnerable to. Since love and being of service to others is the royal path, Servers complete their incarnation cycle with the fewest lives and incur the least amount of negative Karma. Violating another’s free will in a way that harms them creates negative Karma. It can be paid back in eye-for-an-eye fashion, but that is the least enlightened way. If I murder somebody in a life, them murdering me in another can pay it back, but can also lead to a new round of Karma. Saving their life can also pay it back, and can lead to creating Philanthropic Karma, which is a positive Karma. Kings incur the largest Karmic burdens as they play tyrant when acting out of their negative pole (“off with their heads!”). Hitler was a priest, as was Gandhi. The Transcendental and Infinite souls rarely manifest on the physical plane. Transcendental souls usually initiate great social changes, and in history there have been few, such as Socrates, Muhammad, Zoroaster and Gandhi. The Transcendental soul often paves the way for the Infinite soul to manifest. The Infinite soul manifests through final incarnation priests and kings, and history’s have been: Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tzu, Krishna and Ra. There have been others that history has not recorded. The Great Peacemaker of the Iroquois, Deganawidah, may have been a Transcendental soul, or perhaps Infinite. The early soul stages easily fall prey to their “false personalities,” which is essentially herd conditioning: having attitudes and beliefs indoctrinated by society and not from direct experience. The false personality is generally founded upon fear- and scarcity-based beliefs. Setting aside the false personality and bringing through one’s “essence” (soul) is the Great Goal of all sentient species, and it can only be done through love.

In the soul cycle, the first three stages are outwardly focused into the physical world, the Late Young stage being the apex of outward focus. Societies at that stage are materialistic, nearly anti-spiritual, and that is the stage where ensouled species that can manipulate their environment can destroy their planet, by either warfare or environmental destruction. Michael says that ensouled species do it a third of the time. If a species makes it past the Young Soul stage, it begins the inward journey, and Mature Souls explore their emotions. The final stage is Old Soul awareness. While love is mainly what matters to them at that stage, they can also fall prey to their particular foibles. They can be lazy, sloppy and think their experience makes them better than the younger souls, and toleration and acceptance are their great lessons. They can be intolerant of the intolerance that younger souls often display. In humanity’s upcoming transition from Young to Mature Soul awareness, there may be several Transcendental and Infinite Souls manifesting during my lifetime, and they might mainly be women.

[35] On those themes, see Lyssa Royal and Stephen Davis’ Future Sex, Royal and Priest’s The Prism of Lyra, Visitors from Within and Preparing for Contact; Gina Lake’s ET Contact and The Extraterrestrial Vision; Barbara Marciniak’s Bringers of the Dawn, Earth and Family of Light; The Ra Material; Dolores Cannon’s The Legend of Starcrash. Robert Shapiro and friends’ The Explorer Race and Shining the Light series. There are many other excellent works on those themes, but those are a good start.

America

Primary Delusion

# of Karmic Ribbons Created and Burned