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Brian Cleeve 1980

Watkins Publishing (No longer in existence.)*

Copyright information


A Note from the Author

19.1.2000

The purpose of the two books (The House an the Rock & The Seven Mansions) is to invite anyone who is interested to enter onto a new kind of life, that can be called the Path of Obedience – meaning obedience to God’s Will. But before you can sensibly obey any command or guidance you need to know who you are obeying, why you should obey them, and once you are satisfied as to who and why, then how to do it and what may be asked of you.

The only good way to find out is by question and answer – your questions and God’s answers: not a Church’s answers, or a guru’s or a Red Indian medicine man’s, but God’s. Is it possible that God would answer you? The Church will say “No”, because if it said “Yes” it would make itself redundant. It alone knows God’s Will and is eager to tell you. And of course very often what it tells you is wise and good. But also, often enough, it is neither, as many of its victims, from heretics to women, would tell you if they had survived.

In spite of the Church’s disapproval many people have been in direct communication with God; saints and mystics who have been willing to listen to Her. I say “Her”, not “Him”, not because God is a woman in any limited sense, but as a counter balance to the masculine prejudice of Christianity. And common sense should tell us that a mother is a better image of the Creator than a father.

But listening to God, to a silent Voice in your mind that answers your questions and guides your conduct and your life, can be very dangerous, which is one reason, the only good one, why the Roman Catholic Church disapproves. We can be misled. We can hear evil as well as good. And even more dangerous because it is so easy and so seductive, we can hear what we want to hear, and not what God wishes us to hear.

That is why we need to learn how to listen and how to ask good questions. We need to become ready to hear and accept hard answers as well as soft ones. We need to discard our prejudices and certainties as to what God must want, and what She surely cannot want. We must go to Her as children go to school, ready to learn, to be taught.

There is a theory that God is already within us and that all we need do is find Her. And there has to be truth in this. If God was not in some sense “inside” us we could not exist. Our souls are “the Breath of God”; God gives us life and that essential minimum of Grace that allows us to continue to live. But when the theory goes on to tell us that in reality we are God, that God is simply our own Higher or Inner Self, once again common sense says “No!” because what that is really saying is that there is no God. It is as though you were to believe that the light in your light bulb created its self; that there is no mains supply, no generator, no such thing as electricity.

There is another reason as well for rejecting the “I am God” theory. It involves the worship of self. There is a kindred theory that one needs to love one’s self before one can love anyone else. Why? Do you really, truly believe you are loveable? Do you examine your self, and say “I am wonderful!”? If you do, then nothing written here is for you.

Only if you believe that unselfishness is better than selfishness, and that the highest praise anyone can give someone else is to say that they are selfless, can you even begin to accept the idea of entering on a Path of Obedience to God’s Will. “Not my will, God, but Thine.”

To follow this Path means getting rid of self, selfish desires; even desires that seem to be good. Because we cannot know what is really good until God tells us. It is an old saying that the worst thing that can happen to us is to have our prayers answered. “Please God, give me…” Dear God, I need… I must have… I want…” “Please let Jimmy pass his exams.(even though he hasn’t worked for them)… please cure Aunt Mary’s arthritis (although her diet is crazy)…”

All these prayers assume that you know what is good. They also assume that God needs reminders and promptings, “Please remember Cousin Billy and let him get that job…”

If you think in those ways nothing in these pages is likely to appeal to you. But if you are ready to think differently, or to consider a different way of thinking, then the following suggestions may be of use to you.

God knows your real needs far better than you do. If you offer to obey God, She will teach you how to do that. But this means ceasing to obey your self, your own will and desires. You can’t have it both ways. And She will require your obedience seven days a week. You can’t make bargains, like saying “I’ll give you so much of my time but I want days off!”

You must not expect to be admired for what you are setting out to do. The best you should hope for is to be ignored. The likeliest result is amused contempt and a possibility is sheer hatred. When anyone sets out to obey God evil becomes very angry. You may have to endure some very rough periods.

Before all else you will need to cleanse your life. If you were inviting a lover to your house, you would clean it. (If you wouldn’t you are not the sort of person who is likely to read this.) If you are inviting God into your life it needs to be a clean life.

Finally, why should you do this? The best reason is because you want to. The next best is because you feel you should. And not for any reward, even your own salvation, but in order to offer God something, to become Her servant. Is there any better, greater ambition?

* Brian Cleeve did not accept any royalties from the original publishers of the two books which were subsequently priced accordingly.


 

 Back Cover

Brian Cleeve here continues the conversations with his Maker started in ‘The House on the Rock’, a bestseller in Ireland, which Tevor Huddlestone acclaimed as ‘a fascinating and exciting book, religious from start to finish but not the usual pious platitudes’. This new work is an even more urgent communication, a New Revelation for apocalyptic times. The message is that God is tired of ritual, hypocricy, and pilgrimages that have no meaning. ‘In the truest sence there is no need of a path to God, because God is here, and we are already with God, and God is with us. What we need is not a path, but a tearing away of veils’. If there is no change of heart among mankind, with mercy and charity taking the place of greed, its destruction is enevitable. The horrors already getting underway, wars, famines, and epidemics, are to be seen as a last call to sanity and spiritual wisdom. A remnant of humanity will survive, charged with the supreme task of creating another and true civilisation of the spirit.

Of Brian Cleeve’s last book Father james McPolin S.J. said: ‘I found The House on the Rock a serious, reflective work on our Christian experience, expressed in a new literary form. I also found it helpful to my faith. There was nothing in it that is contrary to Catholic doctrines. Of course there are things that seem startling at first sight. But on careful reading and on fully understanding the imagery, they can be seen to express profound Chritian values.’

 


 

1

Many spiritualists describe experiences of other worlds beyond, or parallel to this one. They speak of astral planes, lower and higher mental planes, of themselves and others possessing astral bodies capable of leaving their physical bodies and travelling in these spirit dimensions; of meeting other entities on those dimensions or planes, much greater and wiser beings than ourselves. They speak of an ability to obtain a vast wealth of information from them, or even from some form of spirit-library which they call the Akhasic record. Is there any truth in these claims?

Of a limited kind, yes.

How much truth? Do we, for example, possess astral bodies within or attached to our physical bodies?

Yes. But not in the way that spiritualists describe the matter. What they see as the astral body is your spirit, your reality. Far from being a part of you, an emanation from your physical body, it is your totality. Your physical body is an emanation from it, and merely a temporary one.

Some spiritualists and other adepts of occult knowledge speak of our possessing seven bodies. Is there any truth here, as well?

Yes, but again it is distorted. You know already that your spirit experiences seven existences of a physical kind. Although each of these existences is temporary, the essence of each existence remains with and within your spirit. It is a part of it. In that sense you might be said to possess seven bodies.

But these existences are not all as human beings?

No, of course not. You know that too. Your spirit’s physical experiences range through the entire physical creation, as plant, insect, animal, man. I have explained these things to you elsewhere. The spiritualists and occultists who speak of seven astral bodies have stumbled on, or heard of, this truth, and misunderstood it. They have done the same in their beliefs about reincarnation. I have told you that for a man or woman to live a second life as a human being is very rare, and usually because their first life was ended in early childhood by violent means, or because there is some important task that their spirit left uncompleted and that must be completed by them and no one else.

These instances are too rare to merit discussion here. The experiences which deceive the spiritualists into believing in reincarnation are of other individuals’ lives, of individuals who are closely connected with them in spiritual reality, although in a physical sense they may have lived a long time ago. I have told you in The House on the Rock that during your physical existence it is possible to make contact with individuals of your own Real Mind, that closest grouping of a thousand spirits, of which you form a small fragment.

In a very real sense their lives are also your lives. Your life is a part of what will eventually be their experience of physical life. When your Real Mind is fully developed, its thousand component fragments are fully integrated. It will form one being, one spirit, with the experience of a thousand human lives within it, like a library that contains a thousand biographies. You yourself will retain your sense of individuality, and yet you will share in and possess completely the entire thousand experiences. and your own individuality will be enlarged to possess the entire thousand individualities. It is as if you not only possessed a library of a thousand biographies. But had lived all those thousand lives yourself, were all those thousand individuals.

Naturally, it is easy to misunderstand this reality in terms of reincarnation. But that would be misleading. Many of these thousand Lives, to take a simple illustration of how a simplistic belief in reincarnation would distort the truth, are simultaneous. At any given moment during the span of a Real Mind’s physical experiences, several, and perhaps several hundred of its lives, are continuing simultaneously. Its total span is no more than six thousand years, which clearly requires many of its thousand fragments to be alive at the same time.

Where an adept achieves genuine knowledge of an existence outside that limited period of six thousand years, it will be because he has made contact with a fragment of, an individual belonging to, his Greater Mind, that includes a million human beings, or in other terms a thousand Real Minds among them his own Real Mind But even that Greater Mind spends only ten thousand years involved in physical existences Any spiritualistic or occult experience of an existence in a period much longer ago than ten thousand years arises from a different cause. The experience there will not be of a physical existence in the world you see round you, but of another type of existence, on the so-called astral plane, that you referred to in your first question.

For you to understand the nature of the astral and other planes or dimensions of existence, I must give you a metaphor. Imagine a large spool of film, lying on a table in front of you. What you are looking at is undoubtedly a film. But until you attach it to a film projector, and begin to show its contents on a screen, it is a film in only the most limited, technical sense. Its reality, its value as art or entertainment, is hidden from you. Now, that inert, silent and almost colourless spool of film, is the universe that you see round you with your waking, physical eyes. The most that you can do with it, lacking a projector and a screen, is to unwind a length of it and hold it up to the light examining it frame by frame.

That is the situation of a man or a woman who stumbles by accident on some ‘occult’ or spiritual experience. As you can imagine, the information that experience will give them about the film is very limited. Now suppose that the possessor of this reel of film obtains a projector, but an antique one, like a magic lantern, that can merely show the frames of the film one by one, distorting their colours in the process, a projector that is absolutely incapable of running the film through at the proper speed of so many frames a second that would give the pictures a true meaning. Also, of course, there will be no sound accompanying the pictures, no words, no music, no background noise.

That is an illustration of the experience of the universe obtained by most adepts of any occult system of belief and practice. Undoubtedly they are seeing more of the film than the man-in-the-street can see. But not much more, and that addition has very little meaning. For the adepts to flatter themselves that they have seen the “reality” of the universe is laughable. To do that one needs, to continue our metaphor, a projector capable of running the film through at its correct speed, and at the same time playing the sound track and the music track, in proper balance and with true and faithful reproduction.

Indeed, there is much more required than that. For the film of the universe is not a simple one, as earthly films are. To grasp its nature you must attempt to imagine a cinema film that contains seven layers of images and seven sound and music tracks, that tells seven stories and requires for its projection a machine capable of showing those seven layers or dimensions of the film all at once, on seven different screens. Beyond that, you must attempt to imagine an observer capable of enjoying those seven performances simultaneously, integrating them in his mind into one complex experience of sight and sound, story and colour and music.

Such a projector is not within the grasp of any spiritualist or human adept, and if it was, he could make no use of it. He would not be capable of absorbing what it showed him, and any serious attempt to do so would merely destroy his mind. A few adepts do obtain glimpses of more than one layer of reality, even of two or three of the seven layers of images of our metaphorical reel of film. They may even hear snatches of one of the sound tracks, but rather than enlightening them, this additional experience merely serves to confuse them more as to the real nature of the universe they are attempting to explore. That is not the way the universe should be explored, nor can anything truthful and significant be discovered about it in that way. It is like a traveller setting out on foot to discover the reality of China, without knowing a word of Chinese, and worse still, convinced that he has no need to learn anything of the language.

 


2

– How close are these images you have been giving me to the reality of the Universe?

If you can avoid thinking of the trivial nature and emptiness of the things you know as films, and instead can imagine a film of infinite beauty and meaning, then the image does come close to the reality. The seven layers or dimensions of the film are images of the seven planes of existence.

– Do You inhabit the seventh plane?

I inhabit all of them. I am all of them. It is a mistake to imagine these seven planes as simple steps towards Me. They can also lead to the Devil. They can lead down as well as up. And it is possible to find Me without progressing through those seven planes at all. As you can begin to see, the image of the complex, seven-dimensioned film that I have given you is, although accurate, incomplete. Within each of those seven dimensions of reality there are different levels, and true spiritual progress consists in rising from one of those levels to the next above it, regardless of which dimension of reality you are in.

To change our images, in order to illustrate this, imagine a vast, circular building, or rather, complex of buildings, each shaped like a ring, and the rings built one within the other, so that you have seven concentric rings. You may, if you like, walk through the ground floor of the outer building and find yourself in a courtyard leading to the ground floor of the next building. And so on until you reach the central tower. But you will still be on the ground floor.

Alternatively, as soon as you enter the first building you may begin climbing the stairs, and reach the upper floors. There are, you must imagine, seven such floors, and from any one of them an aerial walk-way will bring you to the next, inner ring of the complex of buildings. You can therefore climb to the first floor, and then walk inwards, or to the second floor, and do the same thing, or you may, in that first, outermost building, climb all the way to the seventh floor, and above that again to the roof garden. Once there, you will discover that the roof garden is common to all the buildings, and covers all of them, and that only from the roof garden can you obtain a total view of the entire complex and of the surrounding countryside. All other vantage points give you only a limited view.

Now, if you wish, you can determine how many ways there are of reaching the roof garden, and can begin to see how unimportant it is which path you have taken, once you arrive. But you must also bear in mind that there are not only stairs and aerial walk-ways above the ground level, leading you eventually to the roof garden. There are also stairs leading downwards, and subterranean passages, which will eventually lead those who follow them far enough to reach the lowest level of all, seven stories below the ground.
This is another image of reality, and closer to the truth, for with a film you are merely an observer but in these buildings you are an inhabitant, with duties to perform.

However, to complete this image you must imagine that this complex of circular buildings is surrounded by a park, also circular, and you must visualise this park divided into segments by high walls, and surrounded on the outside by an equally high wall. You should now have a vision of the entire ground plan of buildings and park as a wheel. The buildings at the centre form the hub. The outer wall of the park forms the rim. The dividing walls between each segment of the park represent the spokes. And the segments of parkland are the open spaces between the spokes of the wheel.

It is in one – and only one – of those segments that you must imagine that humanity lives, accompanied by all the forms of physical life that humanity knows.

Now look at the situation of mankind in this enclosure. It is surrounded on all sides by high and hitherto unscalable walls, one of those walls being the facade of the outermost building, or rather, a small section of that facade, pierced by a great number of windows, on many levels. Only on the ground floor of that segment of the facade which mankind can see are there any doors, and these are locked.

You know already mankind’s reaction to this situation. That portion of humanity that is religious believes that God lives behind the facade and looks out on mankind through the windows. Those who are imaginative as well as religious furnish the rooms behind the windows with many luxuries and imagine the souls of the dead who have behaved well during their lifetime living in those rooms in eternal bliss.

That part of mankind on the contrary that is materialist and scientifically minded, scoffs at these beliefs and claims that the facade is no more than a facade. That there is nothing behind the windows, except perhaps empty, infinite space. It claims that if mankind is to discover any ultimate truth, it will not be by concerning itself with those blank and deceitful windows, but by climbing the walls on either side of its segment of park and discovering what, if anything, lies beyond. It desires to find out if there are other segments, and if there are, to see whether they are inhabited. Those who are imaginative as well as scientific claim that there must be many other segments, and many other humanities, and even believe that representatives of some of those alien humanities have actually visited mankind in machines capable of flying over the intervening walls. Which, in parenthesis, they have indeed. But their visits have nothing to do with the questions we are discussing here.

Now, one of the few emotions that unite both the religious and the materialist portions of mankind, is a fear or suspicion of the three doors leading into the facade of the building. They have agreed on names for these doors and have labelled them. One is Death. Another is Mysticism. The third is Magic. Everyone in that segment of the park knows that eventually he or she must enter the first and largest door. All that they disagree on is what happens afterwards. But the vast majority of mankind, however it may disagree on that, agrees that the other two doors are highly dangerous or else useless even to approach – that those who do succeed in forcing the locks and entering the building by one or other of them are likely to come to a bad end, at the best deluded, and at the worst damned, or driven mad. Would you accept that as a fair image of mankind’s situation?

Yes, except that a great number of individuals have forced the locks, and many of them have returned to describe what they saw. Some claim even to have entered the first door, however briefly, and to have glimpsed the interior before they returned. And their reports disagree. Will You explain this to me?

Gladly. The three doors lead first into different rooms. If three people entered your house, one into the kitchen, one into the coal-cellar, and one into the hall, and none of them penetrated further, they would return outside with very different impressions of your house. But it would still be the same house. And you will notice, if you examine the reports of those who claim to have opened one of our three metaphorical doors, that they fall into three recognisable categories. The reports of mystics have a great deal in common, no matter what religion the mystics belong to. And the reports of magical initiates, adepts, caballists, sorcerers and so on, have also a similarity, a number of common factors. So have the reports of those people who have ‘died’ momentarily and returned to life.

These three broad types of experience differ because those who have had them have visited different areas of reality behind the facade. Nevertheless, if you look carefully, you will find that there are also common factors shared by all three groups. The rooms they have visited, to keep to our metaphor, may be different, but the atmosphere is the same.
You are now going to ask me why the rooms behind the three doors are different, and I will answer you before you can ask.

The three types of people entering differ in their motives, and in their goals. They are looking for different things, and they find them. In the case of those who die, it would scarcely be correct in most cases to say that they are looking for anything, except perhaps an end to sufferings. And unless they commit suicide they cannot be described as forcing the lock of their door. What they find, and what those few who do return commonly describe having found, is a waiting-room, or its equivalent. And in it, sometimes others also waiting, perhaps a being or beings who greet them and tell them that they have come too soon and must go back. They commonly describe a reluctance to obey, and great sadness at being obliged to.

But for the moment let us leave their experiences on one side, and consider the other two categories, the mystics, and the magicians, and consider how they differ. Broadly speaking, the mystic is seeking God, while the magician is seeking a personal benefit. And just as their goals differ, so do their methods. The mystic prepares himself, or herself, by a series of spiritual exercises, and then waits for God to come to him, or to her. The mystic knows that it is both wrong and useless to attempt to force matters, to summon God so to speak before God is ready.

The magician on the other hand prepares himself or herself by a series of psychic exercises, and then uses his or her developed psychic sensitivity to demand whatever it is he or she is seeking. It is the difference between the gymnast, interested in suppleness and health, and the wrestler interested in strength and victory. To an outsider, the exercises the gymnast and the wrestler perform in their training may appear similar. But this similarity is at most only apparent, and since the motives are almost opposite, the results are vastly different.

Before You go further, my Lord, there are two questions. Many people will not recognise the difference between psychic and spiritual exercises and abilities. And many magicians, or adepts of magical systems, will claim that their motive is a legitimate curiosity about the Universe, and that this curiosity includes a desire to know God. Will You answer them?

First, as to the difference between psychic and spiritual force or energy, I have explained this to you elsewhere. To explain it again here, briefly, let me compare the two forces to the spectrum of wave bands of physical energy. At one end of this spectrum lie the long Hertzian, radio waves that are harmless to physical life, and useful to man’s ability to communicate by means of radio messages. At the other end lie the very short cosmic and beta, gamma and X-ray bands that can, if misused, or if a human being is wrongly exposed to them, damage life severely, or even destroy it. In the middle of this spectrum lies the band of light-waves that you use for vision.

The man or woman who is neither mystic nor magician uses only the mental equivalent of the light-waves in the middle of the spectrum. The mystic uses the equivalent of the long, radio or Hertzian waves. But the magician uses the gamma and beta, the cosmic and X-rays and in doing so runs great dangers which will in the end certainly destroy him if he continues. He may know the risks he is running, yet he has no choice if he wishes to practice magic.

But I have just spoken of using only the mental equivalent of light-waves. Do not for that reason imagine that the so-to-say ordinary powers of the human mind are negligible. Many of the results which magicians obtain dangerously and wrongly by the misuse of psychic power can be achieved quite properly and safely by the right and full use of your own mental powers. At the moment men and women do not understand these powers, nor do they use one tenth nor even one hundredth part of them. All the so-called miracles of faith are in fact no more than expressions of these powers, brought about accidentally, at a moment of intense spiritual emotion. Instantaneous cures of supposedly incurable diseases or injuries, whether at a shrine such as Lourdes, or elsewhere. The levitation or bi-location of saints. Just as a doctor of medicine may cure a patient by one of several means, either by drugs, or surgery, or physiotherapy, so the mind can act on the body by psychic or spiritual or ‘ordinary’ means. And the full extent of those ordinary means is so vast that it would seem extraordinary even to a magician.

There is indeed no such thing as a miracle, in the sense that men have used the word, of a suspension of the laws of Nature. Those Laws cannot by suspended, for they are an expression of Me. It has been merely the case that you have not known their full reality. Even the miracles truthfully described in the Gospels, including the raising of Lazarus, and the multiplication a thousandfold of bread and fishes; the changing of water into wine; the curing of the blind and the cleansing of lepers; all these acts were within the Laws of Nature; and as Jesus promised, His followers could, if they possessed sufficient faith, perform still greater acts. For the body is made to be obedient to the mind, and matter to be subservient to the spirit. Matter is only an illusion, an emanation or image of the spirit, and images can be altered by the image-maker.

I have told you elsewhere, in The House on the Rock, that these powers of the mind, these achievements of mind dominating matter and the body, are not worth developing. But this will not always remain so. Until now it has not been necessary for men and women to develop them, nor right that they should. But a time is coming when it will be necessary, and it will be right. A generation has already been born which will practice them as a means to salvation, and a way to Perfection.

As to the second question, or claim, that the magician may be moved not by desire for power or wealth, but merely by a scientific, or para-scientific curiosity, and that this curiosity may embrace a desire to know God, the claim is simply untrue, and cannot be true. The magician may indeed be moved by curiosity, a desire to know as much as possible. But this desire cannot include a desire to know God. Knowledge of God cannot be included in anything, in the way that a tourist may include Jerusalem in his world tour.

The magician may indeed have a curiosity to know about God, in the way that the tourist might desire to visit the Wailing Wall or the site of Solomon’s Temple. But that is not a desire to know God, any more than the tourist’s curiosity is the same as desiring to become a Jew. If the magician truly desired to know God, he would cease to be a magician and become a mystic. He would give up his magical, psychic practices, and submit himself to spiritual disciplines. And desiring to know God he would desire nothing else, because God contains all things, and all knowledge.

Now, let us return to our imagery of the circular buildings, and the surrounding park, and let us imagine a mystic and a magician both about to force their entry through their respectively chosen doors. In the magician’s case, forcing an entry is the exact expression, because he is acting like a housebreaker. He is doing something which is against God’s Will. And when he succeeds in forcing his entry, or she if the magician is a woman, then the magician is an intruder, in a place where he has no right to be. He will bring an intruder’s, a burglar’s mentality and fears with him, a burglar’s greed for gain, even if that gain is merely knowledge.

And the legitimate occupants of the building will regard the magician as an intruder. In most cases they will treat the magician courteously, but they will tell him no more than courtesy requires, and show him no more of the building than courtesy obliges them to. He may wander into several of the buildings, but only on the ground floors. He cannot climb to any of the higher floors, and he will understand nothing of what he does see, nor any of what little may be explained to him in answer to his questions. And all the time he runs the severe risk of being treated as a burglar, and punished. He also runs the even greater risk of finding himself in the underground portions of the buildings, where courtesy is not the rule, and violence and cruelty are commonplace.

The mystic’s situation will be entirely different. He or she may be said to have forced their entry, but only by imploring permission to enter, by waiting so long at the door, that the doorkeeper at last allows them to come in. And once inside, their sole interest is to climb to the roof garden, where they know that God wishes them to be, and where they will be able to see Him and know Him most clearly and most fully. They have no interest in the other, inner buildings. They have no interest in the furniture of the rooms they pass, nor in the rooms’ inhabitants. Their sole interest in anyone they meet is to gain knowledge of where God is to be found.

And if they are true mystics, and truly ready for their entry into the outer building, they will not need to ask, for God Himself will have met them at the door. He will have acted for that moment as the doorkeeper, and will Himself bring them from level to level through the seven stories of the building, until they reach the roof garden. Their climb may, indeed it will, be very hard. It will entail great suffering, as they gain enlightenment and self knowledge, and knowledge of the immensity and terror of God’s love. It may, almost always it will, take a great length of time and many, many visits to the building, and sad returns to the grey and desolate park outside, but eventually the mystics will be granted a permanent home in the roof garden, the right to stay there always, except for the duties that God will impose on them, in the continuing struggle between good and evil.

Perhaps I have given you by now some understanding of the differences between the mystic and the magician?

– Yes. You have. But it seems to me that there is after all a fourth category You have not explained to me, that consists neither of the momentarily dead who return, nor mystics, nor magicians. These are the spiritualists, who are not mystics in any religious sense, and do not mean to be, but who are certainly not magicians, and who would indignantly refuse to have anything to do with magic. They are, they would claim, pure enquirers into the possibilities of an afterlife, and its nature. Or else they merely long for reassurance that those they loved and who have died, still exist on another plane, and still care for them.

These people do not enter into our discussion at all, because they are not attempting to enter our metaphorical building. They are simply waiting outside one of the doors, hoping for information. Nevertheless, the door they are waiting beside is the one labelled Magic. They themselves are not practising magic, but in their seances and enquiries they are employing magicians, in the form of mediums. You must not think that magicians are all of one kind, of which Dr. Faustus is the archetype – a sorcerer, trained in alchemy and magical techniques.

Many magicians are drawn to magic by their innate psychic gifts and sensitivity. Among primitive peoples they become shamans, witch-doctors. In your society they become trance mediums, fortune tellers and the like. The spiritualist who enquires about the afterlife, or dead loved ones, turns to a trance medium as a Stone Age savage turned to a sorcerer. There is no fundamental difference.

– Are the results reported about these kinds of medium truthful? Do they make tables rise in the air and trumpets appear?

Very often, yes. Although to say the mediums do these things is wrong unless they are frauds. The spirits they conjure up do them.

– And do these spirits inhabit the same building we have been discussing?

Yes. Or at least, they inhabit one particular part of it. What part that is, and what spirits they are, I will describe to you later, when we discuss the whole nature and mystery of these metaphorical buildings and their many levels. But before I begin to do that, I wish to tell you something else. Within the outer building of our imagined complex every human being already possesses a representative. Indeed, a representative in each one of the seven buildings, and not only a representative, but a guide and leader.

If you think in terms of a soldier in the army, you will quickly understand. A soldier has many officers set above him. A company commander is his direct and close superior, but above the company commander there is the battalion commander, and above him again, the commanders of the brigade, of the division, of the army corps; of the army group, and eventually the Supreme Commander of the entire army. Each one of these high officers is in a very real sense the commander and leader of the individual soldier we are imagining.

But naturally enough, in the day-to-day affairs of war or training or garrison-duty, the soldier will see very little and know very little of any of these officers beyond his company commander. There will be no occasion for it. And you can easily imagine that each of these higher officers will have a separate headquarters, each one more remote from the common soldier. Yet the common soldier has duties of obedience to all of them, and in extraordinary circumstances might be called on to appear before any one of them, to be reproached or praised or given special orders.

Now, combine this image of a soldier in the army with our image of seven circular buildings, each one surrounding the next like a series of hoops. Imagine the Supreme Commander of all the army groups occupying the central building of the complex, accompanied by his General Staff, his A.D.C.s and couriers and adjutants. Imagine the next building to be occupied by the four commanders of the four army groups that make up the entire army, each commander having his own staff of subordinates. Repeat this sequence until you reach the outermost building, and imagine it to be occupied by a very great number of company commanders, each with a thousand men and not only men, but also women under his command, and in his care. And of course, the commander, like any of the higher ranks again, may be a woman, and not a man.

Now imagine further, that these junior commanders’ soldiers are camped outside the building in the park. There are many, many companies each of a thousand men and women in the park, and every individual in the park, every single one, belongs to one or another of these companies, and owes it a particular loyalty, within his or her overriding loyalty to the whole army, and the Commander-in-Chief.

But imagine too that the men and women soldiers in the park are for the most part raw recruits. They know nothing of discipline, have had no weapon-training as yet, understand no more than the barest outline of the war in which they are to take part when they have been trained. Moreover, they are all conscripts, devoid, again for the most part, of any real sense of patriotism, or natural bravery. All they wish for is an easy life. Many of them claim that there is no war on at all, and they have been conscripted by trickery for no real purpose.

Others insist that they have not even been conscripted, that not only is there no war, but no army, no company commander, no Supreme Commander. Who has seen any of these officers? they exclaim. Corporals come running among us telling us that the Supreme Commander wants us to do this or that, but what do the corporals know about it? They themselves have never seen any commander, let alone the Commander-in-Chief, and all they possess is an army manual so ridiculous it must have been written by a madman. Or else they wrote it themselves in order to cheat and bully us.

And since the commanders seem never to appear in person, a vast number of the recruits cease to obey the corporals and cease to consider themselves to be soldiers. They set up as civilians, buying and selling, or amusing themselves, or speculating about what lies beyond the walls of the park. There are stories that occasionally a very great commander, who happens to be a woman, has shown herself to groups of recruits, and has begged them to observe military discipline, but these recruits, others say, were drunk at the time, or in collusion with the corporals and telling lies.

Above all there is a story that two thousand or so years ago the Supreme Commander Himself visited the park in order to beg the recruits to behave better. But if it really was the Supreme Commander, and not an impostor, some of the recruits soon dealt with Him. Since then nothing terrible has happened, which surely it would have done if the Supreme Commander had really been murdered by His own soldiers. And so the arguments continue, out among the encampments in the park.

But the facts of the matter are that all the individuals in the park are conscripts whether they like it or not. They are, every last one of them, soldiers, conscripted to fight in a war and with an obligation to learn how to fight as soldiers, how to obey their commanders, and how to serve their unseen Commander in Chief. No matter what they believe, or think, or do, they cannot escape these obligations And they must, eventually, submit, or else desert. There is no third alternative.

They may waste their time in the park and fail to learn anything. In which case, when at last they enter the building through the door marked Death, they will have a great deal of ground to make up, and will find it much harder than if they had used their time in the park more wisely and obediently. Of course, if they decide to desert, they will find those both in the park and inside the building, who are willing to help them. But only at a price, and they will discover, sooner or later, that that price includes fighting on the other side. They cannot escape the war.

Now let me add one more touch to this imaginary picture before we leave it aside for a moment. I have spoken of companies of a thousand men and women. But you must not imagine that the whole thousand of the company are in the park together, at one time. Nor that they recognise the other members of their company who are there. To them, to these raw recruits, the park is simply a vast mass of individuals, incalculably many, and to comfort themselves in their puzzling surroundings they bind themselves together in small groups, in many arbitrary ways, calling each other fellow members of the same family, or clan, or nation, or race, and separating themselves from as many others in the park as possible, by calling them foreigners and strangers.

They, these raw recruits, have no idea as yet that they are members of any particular company or battalion or brigade or division, and that that man or woman over there is in fact a fellow member of their own company, although he or she is a stranger to them, and that this man whom they call their brother or cousin or sister or friend, in actual truth may belong to a quite different company.

Still less do they recognise that X or Y or Z who died many years or even centuries or several thousand years ago, is in reality a member of their company and destined to be their close companion and comrade in the war. They believe that the dead are dead, and either turned to dust, or else idly enjoying themselves in Heaven, or suffering eternally in Hell. That the ‘dead’ continue to have duties, and far greater duties than the living, is unknown to them.

Yet this is the case. The reality of the park is this organisation of its inhabitants into companies, and battalions, brigades and divisions, army corps and army groups. And the most immediate reality, as it must be for all raw recruits due to be trained, is their company. In an earlier part of this book I have referred to this entity as a Real Mind.

Those who enter our metaphorical park, conscripted into life as human beings, already belong to a company. They already fall under the command of a company commander, who, quite unknown to them, watches over their activities in the park. He is not usually much concerned, at this stage, with what they learn, but only with their growing willingness to learn something; with their general bearing and attitude, their likeliness to make good soldiers. His duty is to weld them eventually into a fighting force, a formidable unit that can then be trusted to combine with many similar units to make a great force capable of withstanding the worst attacks of the enemy, and of counterattacking in its turn. The company commander has occupied his post, or hers, if the commander is a woman, for many centuries, several thousand years, watching the recruits to his or her company enter the park, one by one, or in small or large groups, watching over them, guiding them in many ways if they will allow themselves to be guided, and finally receiving them into the building for the next stage of their training.

And of course, while this company commander is preparing his recruits, and forming his company, a vast number of his fellow commanders are doing the same thing in the same building. When a company is fully trained and ready, its commander then leads it to the next building, to report to his superior, and receive his orders.

This, too briefly and too simply, is the reality that lies behind human life in the visible world. It is a metaphor, or analogy, and you must not ask too much of it, or strain it too far. But if you consider it in the right way, it will tell you a great deal.

Consider, for example, that quite clearly we have been talking of what concerns only one segment of the park, and therefore of only one segment of the outer building that overlooks that segment. We have concerned ourselves scarcely at all with the different levels of even that small portion of the outer building that we have dealt with, neither with those above the ground, nor those below it. Nor with what occupies the spaces between the concentric rings of buildings. Nor with the nature of the enemy nor the nature of the war.

Again, we have not considered how the mystics’ activities or the magicians’ fit in with the picture we have just been drawing of an army and a hierarchy of commanders. Still less have we considered who those commanders are, and how they are chosen, and how and why the recruits are conscripted. And least of all, the true nature of the recruits, and how it is that being conscripted they are left in such ignorance of their real circumstances. But all these explanations will require a different approach.

 


3

The image of buildings and park and roof garden has served a purpose so far, but there is now the danger that it will give you an idea of limitation. The vastest building is not very great in comparison to a mountain, and the greatest mountain is insignificant in terms of the distances between the stars. What we are talking of, what those circular buildings and that segmented park represent, is the whole universe. Not simply the world you live in, but the entirety of Creation.

Try now to grasp a picture of the universe that is similar to the picture I have drawn for you, of seven buildings surrounded by a park. The universe that you see, when you lift your eyes to the stars, is the equivalent of the facade of the building and the surrounding walls that would be all that the inhabitants of the park could see.

From what they see, how much could they appreciate of reality? They would be like a man looking at the cover of a closed book, and trying to guess its contents from its title.

After which last image I ask you to dismiss all images for the time being, retaining only such understanding as they have given you, and to attempt to grapple with the naked reality. The world, the universe, everything that you see, and apprehend with your senses, is no more than a surface. That surface conceals rather than reveals its interior substance. And that interior reality is highly complex, consisting indeed of seven layers of reality, each layer forming a universe of its own, the inner layers as great and as complex, in fact far greater, far more complex, than the first real universe whose outer surface is all that you see with your eyes. These seven real universes are the fractured substance of Creation. To return for a moment to images, they are like the ruins of a temple. And part of mankind’s task during Time is to help in the rebuilding of that temple, to help in the reconstruction of Creation, its return to Perfection.

Mankind is not alone in that task, and that humanity that you in your world think of as mankind is not the whole of mankind, or anything approaching the whole of it. There are many humanities, and all of them combined form only a fraction of Creation’s life. Nevertheless, mankind’s share in the task is not only important but vital. Man shared in the destruction. He must share in the rebuilding. And without his share, the rebuilding cannot be complete. For man is not only one of the rebuilders of Creation, he is a part of Creation. He is, as it were, rebuilding himself, along with helping to rebuild all else that makes up the totality of Creation.

And this rebuilding of himself is an immense and long and complex process. In the destruction of Perfect Creation, caused by the Fall – and here I must tell you again, as I have told you elsewhere, that it was not man alone who caused the Fall, mankind is not the entirety of Adam – in that destruction that shattered the Perfect Universe, man himself was shattered, into fragments. Into fragments of spirit as minute as atoms of matter. And since the Fall, man has been attempting to reconstitute himself into one great spiritual being, just as Creation in its entirety has been attempting to reconstitute Itself into one perfect Whole, of which Man will form a part.

In the physical universe the parallel to this process is the condensation of gaseous matter into stars and nebulae. The physical universe’s equivalent to the rebuilding, the reunification of the created Spirit in renewed Perfection will be the regathering of all the matter in the universe into that one vast and for man inconceivable mass of condensed and molten gas that existed before the physical universe exploded. An explosion that astronomers call its birth, and which in reality was its death.

There are indeed the closest parallels between astronomy and the spiritual reality of Creation. The physical processes which astronomers observe are the visible images of spiritual processes. But as I have warned you, all that astronomers can observe is an outer surface, and behind that surface lie the seven layers of reality I have spoken of. It is among those seven layers of reality that man’s true existence lies, and to find his way among them, to find reality, is each individual man’s and woman’s primary and simplest real task.

But I have just told you that in the Fall, and the accompanying destruction of the Perfect Creation, all spirit was fragmented into what may be called atomic particles of spirit, just as matter was fragmented and exploded into the thinnest of vapourised gases. And just as an immense duration of time was necessary for that gas to condense into stars, so an immense length of time has been needed for the scattered particles of Spirit to commence the task of assembling themselves into greater unities.

And man, small as he is in the vastness of the universe, has required all of time that has so far existed, to become himself; for the spirits which are the realities of individual men and women, to assemble and unify themselves out of fragments and particles of spirit.
This is the true evolutionary process. Exactly as the simplest forms of cellular life gradually give rise to more complex forms, so the simplest forms of spirit life give rise to higher forms. A man’s spirit is in fact a gathering together of a vast number of fragments of spirit, just as his body is a gathering together of a vast number of cells. And in particular, and of great significance for a man or a woman’s spiritual progress, a human spirit is a gathering of ten lesser spirits, in a manner of speaking his spiritual limbs and faculties, to which one may give the name elementals.
To return again for a moment to our image of a man as a recruit into an army, a private soldier governed by a hierarchy of commanders, one might usefully alter that image by describing a man or a woman not as one soldier, but a group of soldiers, a section or platoon of awkward, ignorant recruits. And the man’s and the woman’s task is not only to become trained soldiers themselves, but to teach their ten component spirits to act as one. You are used to hearing psychologists speak of someone as being well or badly integrated. This is the spiritual truth that lies behind that cliche.
Now, these elemental spirits that can, ten of them together, form a human spirit, can also, and often do, exist by themselves, as the spirits of animals, or in other ways. Many of them will never be called on to form portions of human spirits, but will progress towards the ultimate unification of all spirit by other paths, ascending through other spiritual hierarchies. And many, many elementals exist in a state of rebellious semi-independence, while an attempt is being made by some among them to gather nine more together in order to form a human spirit. This gathering is a long and painful process, and by no means finally completed even when the human spirit takes shape, and lays claim to humanity.
It is these rebellious, not yet integrated elementals, that often make themselves known to spiritualists and trance mediums. It is their voices, imitating human speech without fully under standing it, that occur on the so-called Raudive tapes, those midnight recordings of ‘voices out of silence’ that some people believe to be the voices of the dead. It is their voices that the Greeks of classical times knew as the twittering shades, and the ancient Hebrews as the gibbering ghosts of Sheol. There are of course occasions when trance mediums and others make contact with higher forms of spirit life, but these occasions are comparatively rare, and the simple nature of elementals explains the triviality and folly of most spirit communications at spiritualist seances.

But although I describe their communications and activities as trivial and foolish when they take part in seances, not all elementals are open to similar criticism. Far from it. Most would not concern themselves with such childish activities. And an elemental already represents a high stage in spiritual evolution. It is the result of the gathering together and successful integration of a great number of spirit particles, just as all animal, a dog or a monkey in the physical world, represents a comparatively complex and highly developed form of physical life.

The parallel between physical amid spiritual evolution is exact, with one cardinal exception. In physical life, the constituent cells of a body die after a brief period and are replaced. In a spirit body this process is unnecessary and does not occur. Cells of spirit life are indestructible. The evolutionary process consists in gathering together these indestructible cells, and creating more and more complex, higher and higher. forms of spirit life.

The process begins with the existence of nothing more than single cells, a vast, insentient mass of spirit life, inchoate and formless. Within this mass, certain cells are impelled by superior gravitational force to gather into small groups. And this process, which still continues, will continue until all the spirit cells that exist have been gathered and reintegrated into one great Being, the original Created Being.

This Being, although one, was in the beginning and will be again, a Trinity. You may give names to the Persons of this Trinity. Lucifer, Adam, Eve. And as in the Divine Trinity, of which this created Trinity is the Image, the Persons are of one nature and one substance one with the others. They differ only as Persons. And their substance and their nature are identical with the substance and nature of God. They can be nothing else, for there is no other substance, and no other nature. All that is, is God.

This is not to say that the chair you sit on, or the book you hold in your hands, is God. For these things have no eternal reality. They are merely expressions, reflections of reality, shadows. But the energy that keeps such shadows in temporary existence, that is God.

It was the Fall of this created Trinity that stands at the beginning of the physical, temporal Universe that you apprehend with your senses. All that exists in the temporal universe, and in the seven real universes I have told you of, is the ruin of that created Trinity. Not only the physical life that you know, but everything that you conceive of as existing, from the stones you walk on to the most distant stars. The reality of all that existence comes from the fallen Trinity. That entire reality must be regathered and perfected, purified once more, to reform the recreated Trinity. Nothing of it must be lost. Not one fragment. For every real fragment of it is a part of God. If one fragment should be missing at the moment of re-Creation, God will be imperfect, and evil will have triumphed.

However, you must not imagine Evil as a positive entity, an Opposing Reality in the created Universe, of the kind that the Dualists imagine, separate from God and eternally different from Him. Evil is negative. Its ultimate aim and destiny is non-existence. It springs from a misuse of our free will, and was born from the FaIl. It will die with the renewal, the perfection of re-Creation.

I will give you an image. If a perfect sword blade is misused, it will bend or break and become imperfect. Nothing has been added to it. Yet what was good is now bad. The badness is not a separate, positive entity. It is a negative condition of being not perfect. To restore the blade to perfection it must be melted down and reforged. But in melting and reforging there is no evil particle that should be discarded. All the particles are required for the reforged blade. If any particle is lost in the process, the reforged blade will be less than it was formerly, and therefore less than perfect.

So it is with Creation. And mankind is a part of Creation. No man, no woman, can be lost to God without the whole of Creation, without God Himself, suffering irreparable loss. Therefore this loss cannot be permitted. The Devil himself, Satan, who is the expression of all that is negative, all that is evil and nihilistic, all that is destructive in the created universe, and in ourselves – who is in process of creating Himself and His own anti-universe out of the desire for evil and the hatred of good, of Perfection, of God – the Devil Himself, who is gathering together century by century by century, aeon by aeon, all the rebellious spirit particles, all the rebellious spirits that exist; who is creating a vast army of evil, of hatred and destruction; He too must be won back for God. His army of evil spirits, of devils, of demons, of elementals inspired by evil – every particle of that army must be won back, and reforged into Perfection. Judas who betrayed God must be won back.

– And if they refuse? If they, or some of them, rebel to the end?

Then their substance and their nature, their mind and soul, will be taken from them, and they will cease to exist. Their selves will perish. For just as the created Trinity, like the Divine Trinity, consists of three Persons, three elements, so does each created being. You. The dog at your feet. The wasp settling on the window-pane. The mouse behind the skirting-board. The rock on that hillside. The hill itself. The stars in the heavens. All are in the form of trinities. They have substance, which in a living being you know as mind. They have nature, which you know as soul. And they have a self, which, in the Divine Trinity, you call the Third Person, the Son. God is Mind. The Holy Spirit, which is Mary, is Soul. The Divine Son is Self. The least creature in Creation reflects this Divine Pattern.

I have told you elsewhere how to attempt to grasp the mystery of the Trinity and its Threeness in One. I will tell you again. Think of fire, that gives heat, and light, and has its own appearance. Each of these three qualities seems separate, and can be conceived of without the presence of the other two. You can visualise light without heat. Imagine heat without light. See in your mind the appearance of the flames as mere shapes that give off neither light nor heat. Yet all three are one fire, and in reality each quality depends upon the other two and arises from them. It is not sensible to attempt to separate them. Yet even so, there are three qualities within the one fire. So it is with the Trinity. And so it is with Creation, that part of it that has turned to evil as well as that part of it that longs to become Perfect once again.

But if that part of it that turns to evil, persists in rebellion to the end, then its existence as a trinity must cease. It will in fact destroy itself. And in that destruction, its mind-substance and its soul-nature will return to their source, which is God, as raindrops lose themselves in the sea. But their selves, their conscious awareness of existing, that will cease to be. That cessation is what men have called being damned. It will last only an instant, but an instant in Eternity is eternal. Their consciousness of loss, of ceasing to be, will last for ever. And the pain of that consciousness is beyond man’s capacity to comprehend.

Perfection will not suffer because of it. The loss will be nothing, because the lost selves have become nothing, have entered nothingness, have entered of their own determination into the anti-universe of evil, which is the equivalent of the anti-universe of anti-matter which lies hostile and parallel to your own material universe.

Yet although the loss is nothing, it is a tragedy, a true loss, just as if a great singer fails to sing. The song she might have sung is lost. You cannot say anything positive and real has been lost, for it has no existence. Yet you feel the loss. So it would be for God and Perfection, for the re-Creation, if any self in the entire universe ceased to exist. Religious people speak of lost souls, and as an expression it is understood, and has its use. But you will see now that it is erroneous.

A soul cannot be lost, for it is a part of God, a fragment of the Holy Spirit, lent to a creature for the duration of time, in order that the creature may be linked to God, and may by care and effort maintain the beauty of the Divine fragment entrusted to him, or to her. Just as you might, if you were a rich man, entrust a priceless silver candlestick to a servant, or a poor friend, begging him to keep it safe for you, and to enjoy it during your absence, using it to light his study. You will eventually return and require it back from him.

If he has allowed it to become filthy, if he has maltreated it, you will take it away from him and cease to employ him or be his friend. If he has absconded, intending to steal your treasure, you will set the police on his trail and he will be arrested and punished, while the treasure is returned to you. In those cases it is the thief or the idle servant or the ungrateful friend who suffers. The treasure remains yours, and you will have it cleaned or repaired by someone more trustworthy, or you yourself will do what is necessary.

So it is with souls and selves and God. As for the minds, the real, spiritual minds of those who cease to exist, these are fragments of the substance of the Universe. They are emanations from God the Father, the Divine Mind, a part of the universal Substance, and can no more be destroyed than in physical terms matter can be destroyed. When you speak loosely of the ‘destruction’ of matter, you mean the disintegration of the particles that form a particular object, their reduction to formlessness. But the particles are not destroyed. They return into the general stock of the material universe, to be re-used in other forms. Just as you might speak of losing money. You may have lost it from your pocket, or in a gamble or a bad investment. But the money has not ceased to exist. Someone else now possesses it and will use it. Even if it is buried in the ground it still exists, and one day someone will find it.

Therefore neither soul nor mind can be lost, only the insubstantial self. Yet as I have said, this loss would also be a tragedy, a wound for the re-forged Creation. And Perfection cannot endure a wound. So the selves too must be saved. Every one. Every least self that has ever been, and is now, and ever will be. All must be saved. And it is that battle for salvation, that war to save those who seem determined to be lost, that is the whole and entire drama of temporal existence. Time and space are its stage. The shattered fragments of Creation are its characters, its heroes and heroines, its villains and villainesses. Its audience is God. And the images I gave you at the beginning of this conversation are descriptions of its scenery, or a small portion of its scenery, and of a few of its almost infinite cast of performers.

You yourself and all men and women are among the performers, but whereas your priests and theologians have taught you that you are the heroes and the heroines, and indeed the sole performers with speaking parts, you are in fact among the extras, and so long as you remain merely human, and no more than individuals, your share in the drama must remain insignificant. Many, many of you must combine together before you deserve and are capable of sustaining a speaking part, let alone an heroic role.

It is this process of gathering together that I have referred to many times in this conversation. Let us say that a hundred thousand particles of spirit need to be gathered into one being in order to form an elemental. And as I have told you, ten elementals must combine to form a human being, although again as I have told you, many elementals have other destinies which I shall describe to you later. Now with the combination, the cohesion and integration of ten elementals, you already have a unity formed from a million particles of spirit life. And yet the process of integration, of reintegration and reforging, has only begun.

A thousand human spirits must gather together, and forge themselves into one being, in order to form a Real Mind. A thousand Real Minds must unite to form a Greater Mind. And it is only then, with the Greater Mind’s successful unification and formation that you arrive at a being capable of sustaining a significant role in the drama of re-Creation; or if you prefer the metaphor of warfare, of fighting the enemy hand-to-hand; of supporting the shocks and terrors of the war without disintegrating as a fighting unit, and flying in a chaotic rout from the battlefield.

Yet even the Greater Mind is not very great, and there is a hierarchy of beings towering above the order of Greater Minds. Beings so powerful, so vast, that it is useless for Me to describe them to you. Beings created of a thousand and a million Greater Minds. When humanity speaks of angels and archangels, or of devils, it is beings of this order of magnitude that they are referring to, although they do not realise it. The nursery figures with wings or horns that men commonly think of when they speak of angels or devils are exactly that; nursery images, having no slightest connection with the reality.

But you will already have grasped a point that needs underlining; that this process of integration, this evolution of smaller into greater, is not necessarily towards good. It may not be an upward process from the worse to the better. It may be and indeed often is a downward progress from better to worse. The great entities that slowly form themselves out of the chaos of the Fall may be evil instead of good.

All that is certain as they form themselves is that they become more powerful. And the Devil’s ambition, as He forms Himself, and His legions of powerful beings that are in fact parts of His future self – His ambition is that His power shall come to be greater than that of God. That all Creation will come to pay allegiance to Satan rather than to God, forming an anti-Creation; which, just as anti-matter can destroy matter if the two concepts come into contact one with the other, will destroy Creation, and God Himself. It is an insane ambition. But evil is insanity.

Now perhaps you grasp the full significance of all that I have been telling you. And of the folly of the magician, the so-called adept, who insists on intruding into areas of this cosmic warfare, this drama of time and space and re-Creation, where he has no right to intrude, no part to play as yet, and no possibility of doing good. Where, in reality, he can do only harm, both to himself and others.

It is as though your friend took your gold watch, and opening the back of it, stuck the point of his pen-knife among the wheels and springs in order to see what would happen. To say the least of it, he will not have done your watch any good, and your friendship for him will suffer.

The mystic, on the other hand – still returning to our starting point – the mystic takes his own watch, that he knows to be in need of repair, and brings it to the watchmaker.
But we have reached a stage where I must explain to you how all the images I have given you, all the pieces of information about the real universe, fit together, and attach themselves correctly to the universe of your five senses.

 


 

4

I have told you that there are seven universes, lying or existing parallel to one another, and that what you believe to be the universe is merely the outer surface, the facade of the first of them. I have also told you that there are several orders of beings, forming a hierarchy of smaller and greater entities. There are in fact seven of these orders within the hierarchy, and each order possesses and inhabits its own universe. Your order, that to which humanity now belongs, is the least of the seven. And you may also conceive of ‘your’ universe as the lowest of the seven, or the outermost, whichever you prefer. You share ‘your’ universe with beings of the same magnitude as yourselves, or less than yourselves; elementals, and still lesser creatures, down to the mere particles and cells of spirit life of which they, and elementals and you yourselves, are formed.
But besides these, and yourselves, there are many other kinds of spirit life, equal in magnitude to you, but differing from you in their kinds and their purposes. They have other tasks to perform, other immediate allegiances, and may have very little or nothing at all to do with mankind at this stage of your and their evolution. Some are more powerful than you, but not greatly so. Some are less.

And like men and women, and elementals, and all spirit beings, some are good and some bad, and some undecided between the two paths to take, now entering one and now the other. Some are fully decided and are determined on pursuing good, and are far advanced towards it: some are equally determined on pursuing evil. But despite these differences, these shades of power and oppositions of intention or indecisions, it is broadly speaking a universe of equals, like a playground full of young children, none more than a few years old.

In such a playground there are babies who need protection from the rough play of their elder brothers and sisters, bad children who need to be watched and corrected, and good children who deserve praise. Nevertheless one regards the playground as a universe of approximate equals. This is the case with your universe.

But I must stress again for you that the word universe as I use it here means much more than the visible universe of your everyday experience. Your experience is of the surface only. I am speaking of the interior that that surface conceals or contains. That interior, the reality of your universe, is known, or rather very partially known, to adepts and spiritualists, as the ‘astral plane’.

This is a misleading term, because it conveys two wrong impressions. One is that of a lesser reality than the substance of your everyday lives, and the other is that of its being merely a part of something, as in solid geometry a plane is merely a two dimensional part of a three dimensional figure. The astral plane, to keep that term for a moment longer, is far from being two dimensional. It has four dimensions, as your world has, the fourth being duration, time. And possessing time, it possesses history, and chronology. It has a sequence of events. And your worldly history and your worldly events are related to the history and events of the astral plane, and form a part of them.

It is on this plane or rather in this real universe that your spirit lives when it is not undergoing its series of experiences and tests in the physical world. It has tasks and duties there and its life there forms a part of the real universe’s history. And shadows and echoes of that history, of your lives there, the great events that occur there, enter your physical world in a fragmented and distorted form as legends. Much of your world’s mythology is of this kind.

Your worldly history is in a sense no more than a series of shadows cast by the real events taking place on this so-called astral plane. Imagine an electric light surrounded by one of those large paper shades in the form of a transparent globe or sphere. Imagine a number of moths and flies and other insects flying about, or crawling inside the paper sphere. As they fly or crawl about their enclosed space they will throw shadows of themselves and their activities on the surface of the shade.

These shadows will in turn be visible to an observer outside the paper sphere. But the observer’s idea of the real activities within it will be very limited, and still more so if he does not understand that he is looking at shadows, and not reality. This is because he is in fact looking at patterns on a two dimensional surface, whereas the activities are three dimensional. Your situation in your world and universe is approximately of that kind. You are watching the shadows, and not the substance – the effects, and not the causes.
But of course, you must not let a metaphor mislead you. Whereas the human observer of the shadows thrown by flies on a paper shade is much greater than the phenomena he is observing, in your real case, you are much less, and the events whose shadows you dimly perceive are of vast dimension and importance, dwarfing the petty affairs of your physical world into insignificance.

And of course you are not merely observers. Without your being fully aware of it you are actors in the drama. As if, in a mysterious fashion, the observer outside the paper lightshade was intimately but unknowingly connected with some of the creatures inside the shade. This is your true situation. And the true relationship of your observed universe to its reality.
When a mystic or magician succeeds in laying down his bodily, physical limitations, and frees his mind to enter reality, it is this universe that he enters. And in it, he will find very much what he is looking for, although in the case of the magician he is not likely to understand its true nature. And again in the case of the magician, he will eventually be obliged to pay, in terror and self-destruction, a much greater price for his illegal entry than he wishes to pay.

This will be literally a thousand times more so if his folly drives him to enter the second, greater, real universe. For the entities of this universe are beings truly a thousand times more powerful than any individual human spirit, and if they are malevolent, they are capable of destroying a man’s or a woman’s spirit as a man destroys an insect. Only those human spirits that are under God’s direct protection may enter this second, greater universe in safety.

And what is true of this greater universe is true a thousand, thousand times over of the third. There is no need to speak here of the fourth, or fifth, or sixth, or seventh universes, in any detail. The dangers run by a magician forcing an entry into the third universe are terrifying enough, and in fact no magician could force a way beyond it and survive.

Even if he survives his entry into the third universe, and returns, apparently unharmed, he will have risked doing incalculable harm to his own, your own universe, both in its reality and in its physical, surface appearance. He is like a child who opens the gate of the playground while he ruins to buy sweets at the corner shop. Once he has opened the gate others who have no right to enter the playground can do so, and harm the children. Some evil-intentioned lounger beside the corner-shop may see the child, and follow him back to the playground and enter it with him. And the strongest child in the playground will be helpless in the grasp of the wicked adult.

You will ask how any of this can be allowed. Are there no guardians to prevent the child leaving the playground? To see that the gate is safely locked?
The primary answer is that the children, although they are only children, have free will. If they are determined to leave, they are able to do so.

Then, you will ask, are the other children, the good, obedient ones, not protected? Have they no adult guardians who will lock the gate behind the truant child, or watch over it until he returns, making sure that no wrongdoers enter before him, or with him?

Again, the answer lies in the realm of free will. For the playground is so arranged and organised that the children govern themselves. Their guardians, for there are guardians, are reluctant to intervene, for fear of injuring the children’s growing independence and maturity. And although the truant child is alone in leaving the playground, he is not alone in opening the gate. He can only do that with the active or passive cooperation of his companions. They do not leave with him, but they share in his intention, in one way or another, either by abetting it, or tolerating it.

Before you raise objections to this analogy, allow me to leave it aside and speak plainly. The magician who enters other universes by the use of magic may imagine that he possesses or controls psychic power. He does not. He is merely permitted to use it. And what permits him – enables him – to use it for a wrong purpose, is the accumulated store of wrongdoing in the world. He is, as it were, drawing on a bank account of evil to pay his expenses. And no matter how pure he believes his motives are, what he is doing is wrong, and requires evil for its performance.

That evil currency is provided for him by all those in the world, past and present, who have done evil. All who have performed wicked acts, thought wicked thoughts, have called evil into being. Men speak of white and black magic, of ‘good’ magic and bad. They are wrong. There are only shades of blackness. And the magician, little as he may recognise it, is the representative and momentary spokesman of the evil forces in his world. When he enters even the first real universe, his own, he enters it not as an explorer, but as a robber.
And when he goes beyond it, into the second and third universes, he goes not only as a robber, but as an ambassador of evil, a representative of the world’s evil. And for him to excuse his action by saying he does not understand what it means is no excuse at all. If he does not understand it he should still less be doing it.

Acting as the representative of the world’s evil, the world’s greed for power and wealth, the world’s wrongly directed curiosity, carrying this scent of evil with him, the magician will inevitably attract the evil forces that dwell in the universe he has entered. As sharks swim towards the scent of blood in the sea, these forces will make their way towards him. They may merely destroy him. Indeed this is almost the least harm that can result from his escapade, for they may instead return with him, or her, into your world. And worse still, into your real universe.

You ask how this can be allowed, when normally such powerful entities are confined to their own universe, to struggle there with their equals and opposites who are on the side of good. The answer is still the same. Free Will. For the magician, by the consent and aid of the world’s wrongdoing, has forged a link, built a bridge, however slender, between the two universes. And it is a bridge adapted only for the passage of evil.

Where the mystic and the saint build bridges over which the powers of good can pass into your world, the magician does the opposite. And the powers that use his bridge can be more certain of a welcome in your world and real universe than the powers of good who cross the frail bridges created by the mystics and the saints. It is a truism in your world that many who would do no evil themselves, welcome it when it comes to their door. Or at the very least tolerate it, and pretend it is not truly evil. I will give you an example from your recent history. Few Germans under Hitler actually murdered Jews. But very many knew that Jews were being ill-treated, and closed their eyes to it. And by closing their eyes, they permitted the few to continue murdering.

Nor is this a random example. Hitler and many of those round him were magicians. They practiced magic in order to obtain power, and they obtained it, for a time. But in doing so they allowed incalculable forces of evil to enter your world, and your real universe. The harm those few men did is far from ended.

They were indeed truly evil men, and powerful in their evil even before some of them began forcing their way into other universes in search of allies. What they did was deliberate, and they were the conscious allies of evil. I am not telling you that every ill-advised magician is evil, or wicked, or even merely bad, in his character and intentions, nor that he will bring the same terrible results to your world by his foolish experiments. But he will certainly do some harm, and that harm may be much greater than his triviality and folly may seem to warrant. And I shall, if you have patience, return to this, and to Hitler’s part in your world’s and your real universe’s history.

But now I wish to return to the question of the hierarchy of beings, and to explain to you how they form themselves. Because it is not a mere accidental coming together of cells and fragments. There is a plan.

 


 

5

The plan is Mine, and it is all-embracing. It takes account of all that exists, and all that will exist. Of all that is done, and all that will be done. No thought, even, good or evil, enters your head, or that of any other creature, but My plan makes use of it. For My plan makes use of everything, evil as well as good. Just as a chess player adapts his strategy to his opponent’s moves, during the game, so I adapt My plan to the moves of My Enemy. And as a good chess player may foresee the future moves of his opponent, so I foresee all the moves of My Enemy, all that will happen.

But that is not to say that I create those moves, or predestine them. My Enemy is free to move as He wills. As you are, and every other creature. It is simply that being outside time, I see all that happens within time. From My viewpoint it has already happened. Only from your limited viewpoint is there a future and a past. I am like a man on a hilltop looking down on a countryside crossed by many paths winding among deep and high hedges. To a man or a woman walking along one of those paths, what lies ahead of them is hidden, and they think of it as the future. While what lies behind them, that they have already encountered, they think of as the past.

But to the man on the hilltop looking down at them, their ‘past’ and their ‘future’ are both present and co-existent. For the hilltop observer the words ‘past’ and ‘present’ are meaningless as applied to the countryside below him. It is all there, in the one moment, now. This is how Time appears to Me.

Now let Me describe to you the groundwork, the outline of My plan. It is very simple. Faced with the shattered and dissolved, disintegrated particles of My Creation, I wish to rebuild it, as a man with a ruined garden would wish to bring it back to perfection. And just as that unhappy gardener will need to depend on the flowers themselves to grow back to beauty, so I choose to depend on the shattered fragments, the inchoate particles of My Creation to reform and purify themselves, to reshape themselves stage by stage into Perfection.
And as the gardener lays out his ground plan of flower beds and paths, rockeries and lawns, shrubberies and lily ponds, and then waits for Nature to assist him, so I lay out My plan, and wait for the force of good inherent in the broken substance of My Creation to assist Me. But whereas the best of human gardeners knows very little of Nature, or even of the soil of his garden and its capacities, or of the individual seeds that he sows, I know everything. No grain of soil in My garden is unknown to Me. No seed that I sow. I know each cell of every seed, of every rock and shrub. I know its abilities. And I love it. I love each grain of dust because I made it. Every leaf, even the most withered. Every bud. Every insect that works in My garden. Even those insects that work to harm My flowers. I love them all as you cannot conceive of love. As the sun loves the earth. I burn with love for all of you, for everything that I have made. And I suffer as I burn.

However, I have not brought you here to tell you of My sufferings, but to explain My plan to you. As I have said, among the particles of My ruined Creation I know the capacities of every one. And among them I choose the best to serve as nuclei for greater combinations of particles or cells. As if I was picking out one particle or cell to be the directing force of the group, its brain. And the duty of that directing nucleus is then to combine and guide the group of cells around it into a greater being dedicated to good. Once this has been achieved a group of these new beings will in their turn be gathered around a new directing nucleus, and the process will be repeated. Ideally, the process should be simple and straightforward, like gathering corn into stooks, and then into stacks, until eventually the whole harvest can be stored in the barn.

But this would be to calculate without the Enemy. And without the frailty that is as inherent in Creation as the will towards good; a frailty that derives from Free Will, the possibility of doing not good, but evil. You must understand that in the moment of the Fall, the three Persons of the Created Trinity were not of one unified determination in their rebellion against Me. Imagine the three provinces of a great country in rebellion against their king. Each province will not be exactly equal to the others in its determination to rebel, nor in its motives, nor its desires. And within each province the individual citizens will vary greatly in their attitudes.

Some will wish to remain loyal and will search for loyal leaders. Some will be lukewarm in their rebellion. Others will try to stand neutral, waiting to see who will win. Others again will be venomous in their rebellion and whole-hearted in it. But even among these there will be differences, as between those who wish merely to exile or imprison the king, and those whom nothing will satisfy but to kill him.

So it was exactly among the three created Persons, whom we have agreed to call Lucifer, Adam and Eve. Not each of them was of one single opinion with the others. Nor within themselves were any of them single-hearted in the matter, just as you or any human being has a complex of motives and opinions and hesitations about any important decision of your lives. You will not imagine that they entered lightly into rebellion.

As to the nature of their rebellion, it is beyond your understanding. Only imagine it as a turning away from Me, a determination in each to adore Himself or Herself, and one another; to drive Me out of My Creation, and possess it for Themselves. It was pride, and a hatred of dependence, and many other factors that moved the three of Them. But not equally. And as I say, within each of Them there were doubts and hesitations. In a real and true sense, parts of each of Them did not wish to rebel, and longed to remain loyal and loving. Parts hesitated, prevaricated. Parts were determined. Parts were filled with hatred. So that when the Fall came, when the Created Trinity disintegrated into chaos, there existed immediately within this chaos of particles the materials for two conflicting factions, the nuclei of two armies: those particles that had never desired the rebellion, and longed only to return to Me; and those driven by hatred, who wished only to continue the rebellion to its end, in My destruction. And between these two hostile, diametrically opposed factions, lay the vast mass of the undecided. You will find like situations in all human civil wars.

But since we are speaking of minute particles of spirit, the equivalent of the cosmic dust that floats in space between the stars, you must not imagine that these two factions, these nuclei of love and hatred, loyalty and rebellion, possessed conscious attitudes. They differed from one another as atoms of two different elements differ from one another; as iron for example differs from gold, in its atomic structure. Imagine, if you will, chaos filled with such particles, and with many others whose structure differed again, some being nearer to the one kind, and some to the other, and some evenly balanced between the two.

Now, a human chemist faced with such a medley of particles and wishing to recreate perfection from them would, I think, be tempted to separate the gold from the iron, keeping the former and rejecting the latter. Then he would attempt to refine the undetermined particles until he had extracted from them all the gold that he could. All that was not gold he would abandon as valueless.

But this has not been My plan, for to Me none of the particles is valueless. My wish is to gather them all together, and by My alchemy transmute even the iron and lead into gold.
To do this, I have surveyed the chaos caused by the Fall, and have picked out not only the nuclei of future beings, but those particles that are to be their subordinates. I have done this from the least to the greatest, and no particle that exists has been left out of My plan. And in each case I have balanced good with evil, gold with iron, and accompanied both with lead, with the neutral and hesitant, the cowardly and undetermined. For with right leadership the worst and most cowardly soldiers may be made brave and disciplined. With right alchemy, the basest of metals may be turned into gold.

Again, ideally, this would still be a comparatively simple process, of purifying and regenerating the faulty particles, making them good again, and bringing them into harmony with the remainder of Creation. But this would be once more to reckon without the Enemy. For instantaneously within the Chaos of the Fall, the worst of the disintegrated particles gathered themselves together, in the way that in human affairs bad men are usually swifter and more determined in their plans than good men. They formed a being that we must call the Enemy, although as yet He was no more than a forerunner, a foreshadowing of Satan, no more than an outline or sketch of what He would soon become. But even as that He was powerful enough to interfere in My plans. To seduce or terrify the hesitant. To overawe all but the best of the loyal particles. To attract them as a magnet attracts iron filings.
To combat Him I was obliged to do as He had done, to take immediately the very best of what remained to Me, and make Myself powerful servants. And the duty of those servants would be to combat Satan and His allies and to protect and persuade the remaining mass of particles, coaxing them towards good and defending them against evil, until such time as these particles too could form beings capable of serving Me.

Here broadly you have the situation as it stands at present. It is very like the nursery tales of angels and devils that you have been told long ago. But as you can see, it is more complicated than a nursery tale, and has other differences. One of the greatest differences being this matter of the building, the integration of particles of spirit into greater and greater beings.

Let us follow such a being from its commencement to its full existence. Imagine a vast area of space occupied by floating particles of spirit, cosmic dust as we have called it. Imagine within that vast area a myriad points of slight magnetic attraction drawing other particles towards them. And a lesser number of points of more powerful attraction. And fewer still of very great attraction. Imagine those of greatest attraction swiftly accumulating a ‘body’ of cosmic dust, becoming palpable and substantial, and in the process, acquiring consciousness and intelligence. And one among these palpable bodies, these nascent intelligences, finding itself greater than the others.

It realises that it is within its power to gather all the other bodies within its orbit into one mass, and to shape and influence them in the process. At that point, of realisation of its power, My hope is, My plan is, that that new formed intelligence will turn to Me, to ask My Will so that it may obey Me, and bring those soon to be under its control into obedience to Me. But the new intelligence has free will. In My plan, My scheme of things for the regeneration of chaos, it is possible for the new intelligence to decide either to turn to Me or to the Enemy. I will not force it to decide in My favour.

If it decides against Me, it will draw all the spirit particles in its orbit towards itself, but they too have free will, and may rebel against their leader, then or later, and these possibilities too are allowed for and counted upon within My plan.

But let us, for the pleasure of it, follow the progress of a being whose leader is loyal to Me, and turns to Me in obedience, as soon as he or she is aware of existing. And here let Me say to you, as you know already, that the terms ‘he’ and ‘she’ are meaningless in such a context, and I am driven to use them only by the poverty of your language. But as I say, let us imagine that the leader turns to Me. From that moment he or she will have My help and love and guidance, so long as they are desired. For again I will not force them on the leader, and even good leaders can fall away from obedience, grow weak or disloyal, and turn to the Enemy.

However, we will consider a leader who does none of those things, and for simplicity we will call this leader ‘she’. As a leader she has two fundamental tasks. One is to guide and form her myriad and still unconscious, unintelligent followers, first into a large number of minor but intelligent entities, and then into fewer and larger beings, and at last to integrate them with herself into one great being, of which she will be, as it were, the brain, or rather the pineal gland, the ‘third eye’ of the mystics’ doctrines. All this is one task.

Her other task is to gain experience of existence for herself. For she cannot guide others into existence if she has no practical experience of its difficulties. All that she demands of them, she must be capable of performing. Therefore she must at one and the same time enter various forms of existence, both spiritual and physical, and keep watch over her followers while they try, to imitate her.

This alone is not a simple problem to solve, but it is complicated by the fact that by far the majority of her followers are still unaware that she is their leader; are even unaware that she exists, and that she is guiding them. And she cannot force them to know, for I do not allow her to. This is so that for every creature free will may remain. If she was allowed to tell them too much, they might obey from fear and not love and choice. Therefore she must wait until they become aware of her, and ask for direct guidance. Until then she can be no more than a shepherd, whose sheep wander far afield. It is only when they turn to her freely and knowingly that she can become their teacher.

Those who turn to her first, she is likely to make her lieutenants, and to charge them with the formation of the subordinate beings that are the first stages towards unity. These lieutenants will themselves find powerful spirits in their own orbits that they are likely to choose as their sergeants and corporals, to assist them. And each of these spirits, from leader down to corporal, will already have undergone a process of unification within himself or herself and will have experienced many existences, as many kinds of creature, both physical and spiritual.

It is only when the leader has reached the level that is equivalent to a human spirit, that she can safely be chosen as a leader, and the same is true of each of her subordinate officers. And when they have reached this level of development, of a capacity to become, for a time, human beings, they must still undergo a series of tests, in their case, the case we are considering, a series of seven more physical existences, as creatures ranging from a plant to a human being.

I say, in their case, because there are other, different cases, where the spirits concerned will have a different immediate destiny, and will follow another path towards ultimate Unity and Perfection. They may become spirits charged with the care of places, or of species of plant or animal, overseeing and directing their evolution, attempting to guide them towards perfection – and you must remember that these species of animals and plants are in reality spirit and not matter. It is always an affair of spirits guiding lesser spirits. The forms that spirits momentarily assume are far less important than the fact of their being spirits.

You must understand that the world itself is a spirit in the process of development and unification. It possesses, and consists of, a myriad subordinate fragments, and only some of those fragments undergo the experience of physical existence, including that of humanity. All that you consider to be evolution, the emergence of life from matter, of more complex forms of life from simple beginnings, the appearance of higher species and of man himself; all this is no more than one part of the world’s own spiritual evolution.

And when the world’s spiritual evolution and unification is complete, when all the spirits existing in the world have become one with the world spirit, then that great spirit in its turn must unite with the spirits whose images are the planets, the sun itself, the stars of your galaxy, and ultimately with the entire Universe. This is the true meaning of evolution.

But here we have chosen to consider a spiritual hierarchy whose series of physical forms includes humanity. And the leader we are imagining is the nucleus, the pineal gland as I suggested, of a Greater Mind. In her care she will have a million human spirits, that her lieutenants are striving to form first into a thousand Real Minds before they can be unified into the projected Greater Mind.

From the moment that she is ready to commence her role as leader, to the completion of her task of unification, should take in terms of earthly time, as I told you earlier, about ten thousand years. During those ten thousand years she herself must undergo her own seven preparatory existences and will almost certainly choose to experience them as soon as possible, so that she may devote her entire attention to the task of unification. A central part of that task will be to guide and train her immediate subordinates, urging them but never forcing them, to undergo their own seven existences, as physical beings; and to choose the right kind of existence, for they will have a choice as she has had. Still more important, she must encourage them to live rightly during these existences. Even as a plant, growing in poor soil, and sickly, the spirit can strive to fulfil itself, or fail. Animals have a morality and code, and can obey them, or not. And much depends on what kind of existence the spirit has chosen, what vehicle for its experience – that of the tiger or the lamb, the oak tree or the ivy, the dove or the serpent. The most seemingly attractive choice is not often the wise or right one.

Now let us descend one level in the hierarchy of this Greater Mind – remembering that it is only one of many, many, similar Greater Minds, all engaged more or less successfully, more or less loyally, in the same task, and examine the role of one of the subordinate; officers, one of the leader’s lieutenants. There are a thousand of these under her command, each of them given the care and guidance of a thousand spirits capable of being men or women.

Let us take one of these lieutenants, and call him ‘he’. Like his superior, the leader of the Greater Mind, he will almost certainly have lived out his seven physical existences quite early in the cycle of six thousand years which his task requires. His task of course is to form the thousand spirits under him into a Real Mind, and make it ready for integration with all the other Real Minds of the group to become a Greater Mind. I say almost certainly he lived his physical existences early in the cycle, because some lieutenants, moved by anxiety not to neglect the care of the spirits under them even for the span of a human lifetime, leave their own existence until late in the cycle. But this is a matter for their judgement, and that of their leader.

Let us, in this case, imagine that our lieutenant has already lived out his physical existences, and proved loyal and worthy, justifying his leader’s confidence in him. His task, like his leader’s, is to care for those set under him, to guide them and so far as is possible protect them from their own follies and temptations, and the assaults of the Enemy.
And here I will tell you that if this lieutenant were caring for a genus of plants, or a group of insects or animals, or guarding a wood or a river, instead of gathering human spirits together to form a Real Mind, his task would be very similar, and the attacks on him and on his care identical. And it is always possible for such a lieutenant to fail. For his care to be seduced from their loyalty, or frightened and scattered. Or for he himself or she herself to be defeated. And just as human beings can turn to wickedness, so can types and species of plant, or animal, or insect. So can a place. Evolution is not a blind process, but one that is guided, and the guide may be good, or evil, or turn traitor, or recover loyalty.

But to return to our lieutenant. He will guide and encourage his thousand spirits through their seven physical existences. He will watch over them as they endure their trials and hardships, will long to help them and will be constantly tempted to interfere on their behalf, although this he must not do unless they turn to him for help. And between their physical existences, when they are pure spirits without a bodily form of any kind, he will attempt to correct their faults, to teach them to do better, and will set them to any of a number of tasks within their capacities, in the real universe.

And all the time he will be on the watch for any assault on them by a servant of the Enemy which may be beyond their strength to withstand. Ordinary assaults he cannot and must not try to prevent, and he can only give help to one of his followers if the follower turns to him to ask for it. But if as a result of some spirit’s folly or wickedness, too powerful a servant of the Devil gets among his flock, then he can and must protect them, even at the cost of his own existence. And can and must call on his leader if the business is beyond his own strength.

But his own unaided strength will be considerable, because he was to begin with, as you will remember My telling you, a powerful spirit, and his strength will have been increased and tempered by his own experiences, and the exercise of a shepherd’s care and authority. We are of course speaking here of a spirit devoted to good. There are spirits in authority devoted to evil, or lax and ineffective in the pursuit of good, just as there are bad officers in any army. There are indeed whole Real Minds and even Greater Minds that turn to evil, just as there are in many armies companies and even battalions that go over to the enemy, or else surrender from cowardice in order to save their lives.

Here, however, we are speaking of a good and loyal spirit, exercising wise care and authority, and over a period of six thousand years successfully forging a company of a thousand spirits into a unity that can serve good. He will have begun by entering a few of the spirits in his care into the stream of history. Perhaps he himself will be among this first few. As he gains confidence and authority he will send more and more of his company into the world to become human beings – because it is in this, its seventh and human existence that the greatest test of this kind of spirit comes – and he will have so guided and taught the spirits under him that some of those he sends into the world will become saints. Since we are speaking of a good company he will have done so himself. And here I must tell you that all saints are not recognised as such by their fellow human beings, and not all saints would be recognised as such even by the Catholic Church. There are saints of other religions, and of no religion. There are saints whose sanctity is won and achieved in a few splendid moments of an apparently ill-spent or undistinguished life.

Having said that, and turning to our lieutenant again, he will enter the last of his company of spirits into human life, and must meanwhile make good his casualties. Because there will have been casualties. In his company there will be the bad and the weak as well as the good and strong. Worse still for him, there will be the bad and strong, as well as the good but weak. He will not have been given a company of ready made heroes. He must grapple with potential devils as well as potential saints. And almost inevitably he will lose at least some of the worst of his recruits. They will desert to the Enemy, either by a swift determination, and hatred of his authority, or by a slow seduction of their weakness.

And when he has lost them beyond hope of regaining them, he must make the best of things and form up his reduced company notwithstanding, ready to present it to his leader. Some with the medals of sanctity, some still timid in the moment of danger, but all now trained and ready for greater duties. Ready to become one unit, and soon, to become one part of a greater unit still. As you will have guessed, what I have been describing is the reality behind the image I gave you of the seven buildings and the park, with its walled enclosure teeming with ignorant conscripts. Our lieutenant is one of the many commanders posted at the windows of the first, outer building watching over their companies below. Our leader is one of the higher commanders whose place is in the second building, a building whose very existence is hidden from the recruits in the park. And of course there are higher commanders still, in the third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh buildings, or rather, to leave down that image again, universes. But here I am concerned only to describe to you as much of reality as you can easily grasp, and we can confine ourselves to the first two universes.

You will remember that I told you that normally men and women are only aware of the exterior surface of the first real universe, and that they mistake that surface for the whole universe. But of course, abnormally, some men and some women do penetrate into the interior, into the reality of the first universe, and I reminded you that those who do often refer to it as the ‘astral plane’. They also report meeting wise and grave spirits there. These are in fact always senior members of their own Real Mind, their commander and his most trusted and experienced helpers, who have succeeded well in their own earthly, physical existences, and are capable of giving guidance and encouragement to their weaker comrades.

The same visitors to the miscalled ‘astral plane’, to this first real universe, also speak often of obtaining access to vast stores of information, which as you mentioned in your first question they sometimes call the Akhasic record, an inexhaustible reference library in which every fact of human and spirit life can be found by the enquirer.
But the fact that they are courteously treated by the spirits who greet them, and that they are allowed to consult the so-called Akhasic record, should not delude them. They are doing wrong, and are permitted to do it only because men and women must be permitted to do wrong. No. In order that they shall also be able to do right.

 


 

6

But we have considered this matter already, and I now wish you to look at our example of a Greater and of a Real Mind from the humbler viewpoint of one individual spirit, one human spirit, who is being trained and guided to form a small part of first the one, and then, with his thousand comrades, of the other.

I have told you that every human spirit consists of a million particles or cells of spirit, each particle with its own experiences of life; and more immediately of ten elementals, so that he resembles a section or platoon, rather than a single, individual soldier. And in order to weld and forge himself, or herself, into a human spirit, or more properly, a spirit capable of undertaking a human existence, this tenfold spirit has undergone many trials and hard experiences, as many other kinds of creature, and has lived six lives in the world as plant, and insect, bird and animal; gaining, it is to be hoped, a true sympathy with Nature, and a wide experience of Creation.

As a pure spirit, before entering human life, our spirit is aware of all its previous existences; of its relationship to a thousand of its equals in a Real Mind; its position of subordination to a commander; its duties towards that commander and its colleagues; to still higher authorities; and ultimately to God. It may not take those obligations seriously enough. It may even scorn or despise or resent them. It may be determined to betray them. But it knows them. And when its commander believes that it knows them well enough, he will direct the spirit to take on a human existence.

But what kind of existence that will be is very much the spirit’s own choice. Just as a man buying a suit of clothes will go into a shop and order the cut and the material that meets his needs and appeals to his fancy, so, broadly speaking, a spirit can obtain a life that it thinks will provide it with what it wants. You are not of course to imagine that a spirit is able to arrange for itself a life of perfect happiness and comfort; nor that it can ensure for itself the life of a millionaire or a film-star; but it can, by means that need not concern you here, arrange for itself a category of life; a life which will be dominated by certain qualities One of those qualities, and a dangerous one to choose, might be physical beauty. Another might be power. Another again, poverty, or suffering, or obedient service, or wealth, or health, or long life, or luxury, or hardship.
A spirit may also choose a combination of qualities, and here you will recall the folktales in which the fairy godmothers bring wonderful presents to the new-born child, and the wicked fairy does her utmost to ruin their value by her own malevolent gift. There is more in that folktale than you might wish to believe. Only that the fairy godmothers and the wicked fairy are aspects of the about-to-be-born spirit’s own character. And I too play a part. For while the spirit chooses the category, I alone know the life to which that category will lead. I know what ‘long life and wealth’ may mean for the spirit who chooses them. I know where ‘power’ will lead the new-born Napoleon or Stalin. And where ‘great beauty’ may lead its possessor unless it is allied with wisdom or humility. The wise and good spirits choose ‘poverty’ or ‘service’, ‘love of others’ or ‘suffering’, and ally those choices with ‘enlightenment’. The best spirits of all choose the category, ‘God’s Will’, and accept whatever I choose for them.

For although I leave great authority to all the commanders within all the hierarchies, I also take the deepest interest in all that goes on, and here and there, as a Supreme Commander has the right to do occasionally, I intervene; I pick out an individual spirit for My particular care, for some especial service that I require. And that spirit I treat with what many would consider great harshness, demanding from it the last ounce of strength, the last fragment of courage and endurance. But if that spirit succeeds, its reward will be great.

However, let us take an ordinary example. A spirit has reached the point where it must choose a category of human life, and has chosen with average wisdom; with some self-indulgence, but still with a sense of duty to its Real Mind, and a determination to do as well as it can in this new experience.

You might imagine, if you have studied Plato, that once the spirit is born into human life, it promptly forgets all that it knew as a spirit, but this is not the case. It does not lose awareness. It gains a human mind to supplement its spirit mind. But as the human mind develops, there occurs a conflict between it and the spirit mind which should direct it. And almost always, the human mind, absorbed in the physical world, is the victor in this conflict – not by any superiority of strength or quality, but by mere inertia and refusal to become aware, much as a stupid but fat and heavy wrestler may defeat a much more highly skilled and worthwhile, but less substantial opponent, by the sheer weight and blubbery mass of his bulk.
This inertia and grossness of the human mind, of the human aspect of the partnership, drives all spiritual awareness into that limbo area that psychologists call the subconscious. And it is only from there, and with great difficulty, that the spirit, who should ideally be in complete and open command of the human being, can give any guidance to the conscious human mind In day-to-day affairs the human being, this temporary, physical vehicle of the spirit, acts as if it were independent of any guidance. The most it is likely to admit to is the existence of a vague ‘conscience’ or of ‘instincts’ or sometimes, ‘a peculiar kind of inner voice that told me what to do.’

To offer you another metaphor, imagine a man on a journey who hires a taxi cab. He gets into the back and begins to tell the driver where he wants to go. But the driver closes the glass screen that separates him from the passenger and proceeds to go where he likes, and not where the passenger wishes. The passenger is reduced to knocking on the screen, and shouting, but the driver does not wish to hear him, and acts as if he was quite unaware that he had a passenger, who is indeed his temporary employer, and whom he ought to be obeying.

However, while that is indeed a picture of the too frequent situation between the human mind and the spirit that should be governing it, there are alleviating factors. The spirit, if it is determined enough, can influence the human mind. and slowly bring it to obedience. And this indeed is the spirit’s task in the world as a human being. To gain wise control of a recalcitrant partner and servant.

I am well aware that the image I have just given you is insufficient, and may even mislead you seriously as to the exact nature of a human being. But no image can be sufficient. A human being is himself or herself an image; a facade for the spirit. And the human mind is merely an image, a mask for the true mind, the spirit mind. An unsuccessful human being is one in which the mask governs the reality. A successful human being is one in which a wise and good reality governs, and moulds the mask into reality’s likeness. I say ‘a wise and good reality’, because of course the spirit behind some human facades is neither wise nor good and it is much better in some cases that the common-place facade or mask should govern, and imprison the Hellish reality. Psychiatrists encounter many such individuals, where the wicked reality is destroying the human mind in its attempts to assert its authority.

But again, let us return to our average exemplar. A human being neither very good, nor uncommonly bad, tending on the whole towards goodness, and desiring to be better. Aware of ‘conscience’, of ‘something inside’ that prompts him towards unselfishness and service. Even of a suppressed but recurring longing to find God, and serve Him. Aware too, at intervals, that the physical world seems to offer an incomplete picture of reality. Of a feeling that there must be something more.

Such men or women may live all their lives with no more spiritual awareness than that, and yet fulfil their obligations to the Real Mind to which they belong. And when they die, they will be met with no reproaches, but merely a sigh of relief from their commander that they did not do worse. They have passed the test, if not with Honours, at least with adequate marks, and they can be considered ready for greater duties, if carefully supervised. In those duties they will be with their comrades, and as every soldier knows it is easier to be brave and a good soldier when one is shoulder to shoulder with brave companions.

But some of the members of a Real Mind regain full awareness of reality when they are still living their human lives. These are the saints and mystics. And also the magicians. Yet although they become fully aware of reality, that is not to say that they can interpret it in human terms to other human beings. Or even that they understand it themselves in the way that it is set out here in this book. Far from it.

Each of the types of human being I have just mentioned will have a different interest in the real, spiritual world, and that interest will have little to do with that world’s organisational structure. The mystic as I have told you already is concerned only to find God. To him or to her, all else, all that is less than God, is irrelevant. The saint may also be a mystic and share the mystic’s concern to the exclusion of all that is not God. Or if the saint is practical rather than mystical, then he or she will concentrate on serving God in the physical world, with no time or energy to spare to contemplate the hierarchies of spiritual existence.

And both kinds of human being, mystic and practical-minded saint, will obtain their guidance and their awareness of reality, their enlightenment, directly from God, with no need for intervention by the commander of their Real Mind, or of reference to ‘Akhasic records’, or anything of the kind. Both will be making the fullest and best possible use of their human lives and will be in direct communication with Me, like private soldiers of great trustworthiness and merit, detached momentarily from their companies in order to perform a service for the Commander-in-Chief.

It is only when their lives are finished that they will be recalled to their own companies, and to their own commander, bringing him their greatly increased experience and wisdom and spiritual strength, in order to put those qualities at his disposal, and that of their comrades. Happy the company, the Real Mind, that possesses a saint in its ranks. And even though the saint is once more with the Real Mind, he or she continues to be in close communion with God, and through that communion brings God’s love and radiance to the Real Mind.

This leaves us to consider the magician. But we have already considered him and condemned him as a trespasser. You will, of course, ask why the magician who becomes aware of so much, does not become aware of more; of his or her own real nature; and the nature of the reality into which he or she is intruding.

The answer lies in the image I gave you of the passenger in the taxi. It is the magician’s human mind that enters the real universe, not his true, spirit mind. Or rather, although they both enter it, being bound together like mask and face, building and facade, with the magician it is the mask, the facade, the human mind that is in control, and his true mind, his spirit mind, is a mute and helpless, gagged and bound prisoner. The magician’s view of his ‘astral body’; of the silver cord that links his astral body to his physical body; his experiences of ‘out-of-the-body travel’; his meetings with spirits; all these things delude him instead of enlightening him, because he is, so to say, seeing them with the wrong pair of eyes, apprehending them with the wrong part of his mind. The taxi driver is directing the journey, and not the passenger who has hired the taxi.

Yet paradoxically, and deluded as he may be, the magician, the wrongdoer, the trespasser, may bring back a little more of the true picture of the lower levels of reality than either the mystic or the saint, just as a burglar peering through the windows of a house he wishes to break into, may be more observant of its furnishings and valuable ornaments than a more honourably intentioned visitor who goes straight upstairs to the owner’s study, and does not so much as notice the Rembrandt hanging in the drawing room, nor the gold candlesticks on the dining room table.

But this is not to praise the burglar. And just as the burglar runs the risk of being caught and imprisoned, so does the magician. It may not happen soon, just as a burglar may escape detection for some time; but it will happen more certainly than any earthly justice, if the magician continues. Again, just as the burglar may be caught, but not imprisoned the first time he is convicted, but instead put on probation, so the magician may not be punished immediately. That will depend, naturally, on his previous character and mitigating circumstances, as it does with the burglar. Yet like the burglar, the magician can very soon run out of such credit with the authorities. In a literal sense, every time he enters the real universe illegally, he is spending his credit of good character. And he may not have much to spend. Every action he performs in the real universe, every question he asks that is answered, is a spending, indeed a squandering, of his precious and extremely limited spiritual resources.

I shall return to this concept later.

 


 

7

Now that I have described the plan and organisation of that part of reality which concerns human beings, I must accompany it by a word of caution. You will know from human experience that to plan a hierarchy of command, to set out the scheme of an organisation, is one thing. To have the people who must embody it follow the plan exactly, is another.

You must expect the unexpected. Exceptional circumstances arise that require sudden alterations. Ad hoc committees must be set up to deal with emergencies, and these committees will for a time operate outside the planned framework of the original hierarchy. Exceptional individuals will need to be given exceptional tasks, or will begin to perform ordinary tasks in unforeseen ways, and will require independence from their immediate superiors.

Ambitious individuals in the hierarchy will attempt to go over the heads of weak superiors and may succeed in creating small organisational empires of their own within the greater one. Others will betray secrets of the organisation to a rival and their treachery will require a change of plans. I need not detail all the things which can and will affect the original scheme, and cause it to be altered. But you will know that often a casual observer would not even recognise the underlying plan in the apparently unplanned workaday reality. Yet the plan still remains, and governs the organisation.

This is the case with the real universe I am describing to you, except that the emergencies which have arisen, the violent shocks and sudden needs for alteration, have been and are beyond anything you can imagine, and the complexity is beyond your capacity to grasp. A better image might be a battlefield, that to the civilian observer is a mere chaos of apparently aimless and planless fighting, of thousands of desperate men struggling hand to hand; of bombs and shells exploding; individuals running here or there; companies marching in this or that direction; fierce combats taking place for a hill or a ruin or a trench; engineers struggling to bridge a river; vehicles and guns racing in fifty directions; cavalry charging; other formations breaking and running in wild disorder; the whole countryside in ruins and covered with drifting clouds of gun-smoke and the darker smoke of burning buildings.

The observer can make nothing of it. He cannot tell who is winning and who losing, how the day is going. There seems to him no plan, no order, nothing but a fury of killing and destruction. Yet there is a plan. On each side a Commander-in-Chief has given orders to his subordinates to carry out certain manoeuvres, and they have attempted to obey. Each Commander-in-Chief has in his mind’s eye an ideal situation for every given moment of the battle. Such a division should by now be in such a position on the field, ready to turn the enemy’s flank. That other division or brigade should by now be crossing the river. The corps held in reserve all day should at such an hour be moving forward to break the enemy’s centre.

But how far the real circumstances of the battle will allow these ideal plans to materialise is uncertain, to say the least. At every moment the wise Commander-in-Chief must be ready to improvise; to grasp sudden opportunities, to counter sudden failures. This is My situation. Yet bearing this caution in your mind, the plan, the scheme of spiritual organisation I have described to you, is accurate. And I now wish to tell you a little of the landscape, so to speak, in which that battle plan is being put into action; in which the hierarchies of command and obedience must operate.

I have told you that there are seven real universes, of which you are properly concerned with only the first. I have told you that the universe you see with your physical eyes is only the surface of that first real universe. And that your spirits, when they are free of your bodies, inhabit the interior of that first universe, which some of you have named the astral plane.

That first real universe is your true ‘home’, for a long time to come. There your immediate commanders and their helpers live. That is where you will go when you die, to be praised or corrected, and as I have told you, given greater tasks or set to further training. And do not think of it as a misty, incorporeal, ‘unreal’ landscape, inhabited by a few spirits in long robes, and dotted with Greek temples. There are spirits in robes. There are buildings you could mistake for Greek temples at first glance. But there is a great deal more than that. I have told you that it is a universe. Far greater than the universe you see every day. Your scientists, your astronomers, have scarcely begun to fathom the complexities, the immensities of the physical universe, and I tell you again, that is only the surface of reality. As if a man attempted to fathom the mysteries of a government by looking at the outside of the building which houses its parliament.

Within the first real universe there are landscapes and worlds, solar systems and galaxies. There is time. I have told you all this before in our conversation, but it needs to be repeated until you begin to grasp what it means. In passing from the physical to the real universe you are not passing from the complex to the simple, but from the simple to the complex. All that you find in the physical universe you will find there, only with greater depth, greater intensity. greater power. And you will find not one sole level or dimension of existence there, but many. For as I have told you in the image of the seven buildings, each universe has many levels, seven above the ground, so to speak, and seven below. And it is here that one may properly speak of ‘planes’ and ‘dimensions’. The ‘astral plane’ of your adepts and spiritualists is not the real universe. It is merely one plane or dimension of that first real universe, and one of many such planes. But I do not wish to tell you more of this complexity of dimensions now. You could not comprehend it, and it is outside My present purpose. What you must grasp now is that entering that real universe at your physical death will not mean an end to earthly problems, but a beginning of greater, spiritual problems.

Do not allow the apparent calm of the robed spirits, the tranquillity of the Greek temples, to delude you. Commanders in battle, if they are experienced, are calm, and the greater the crises they face, the calmer they seem, in order to hearten their subordinates. Also, the room in their battle headquarters in which they receive messengers, or civilian visitors, or new recruits, may well seem tranquil. The battle is elsewhere.

I do not intend to labour this point any further. Nor to attempt to describe for you an entire universe in a conversation. I wish only to warn you of one thing. It is possible for a spirit to become lost in that real universe. To lose himself. And here I am not using the word lost in the final sense of damnation, annihilation, but in the sense you would use it of an explorer or traveller who lost his way, and was unable to return home. Or who lost the will to return home.

In human warfare there remain oases of peace where even the rumours of war fail to penetrate, and to a soldier stumbling on one of these, the temptation to remain there can be very great. He may tell himself that this is how a man was intended to live, sowing and reaping, and not killing his fellow men. He may be made welcome by the peaceful inhabitants amid decide to remain there, and desert his army and his comrades.

The same thing can happen in the real universe. The spirit may stumble on just such an apparent oasis, and even believe that he has discovered paradise, that this is where he is meant to stay. The spirits he will find there will not disillusion him. That is not their task in existence. Or they may be evil spirits who are delighted to receive him into their company, and to conceal their real nature from him until he is fully in their power.

Or again, he may come on a place that he seems to recognise from his dreams during his lifetime. Perfect in every way, peopled by ideal companions, many or few or only one companion, according to his own desires. A garden of Eden made to his own ideal measure, a private paradise. And his case is the most dangerous of all, because he has created that paradise himself, out of illusion. It is unreal, and he has of his own will entered unreality, which is the antechamber of nothingness. He has withdrawn from hard reality into a soft dream-world of mindless enjoyment.

There are many such dangers in the real universe, and here I wish to tell you of the common factor that underlies all of them. They involve a wasting of your spiritual resources which you cannot afford. I have told you earlier of the way in which the magician squanders his credit when he enters the real universe by means of magic. The spirit who returns there legitimately at physical death can do the same thing.
Each returning spirit brings with it as it were a spiritual credit, like a bank balance, an accumulation of spiritual power. The true purpose of this credit is to help the spirit perform its future tasks, just as a soldier may be given money to buy rations, pay for his billet and travel on his duties. And of course this image of money is merely an image. You must think of this credit-balance as involving the spirit’s total resources in the real universe. Just as the soldier dispatched on a particular duty would not only be given money for his out-of-pocket expenses, and a travel warrant; he would carry with him his rifle, his equipment, his ammunition, clothing, iron rations and so on.

The spirit returning to the real universe is equipped on arrival in this fashion, having gained the right to such possessions by his conduct in the world. And the purpose of these resources, small or great, is to enable him to do what he is then ordered to do. But of course he may disobey his orders and squander his resources, like a bad soldier who goes into the nearest public house and pawns his travel warrant for a few pints of beer; or worse still, sells his rifle and ammunition and uniform to a criminal, and buying civilian clothes with the proceeds, deserts to live with a prostitute.

You can imagine as many variations on this theme of desertion as you like, and they will all be true. And they will all have this in common. That they must come to an end when the spirit’s misappropriated resources are spent.

The spirit must then surrender to its authorities and make amends. Or else it must turn to worse crimes in order to continue existing as an outlaw. In other words it must turn whole-heartedly to the Devil, in order to obtain further means. Just as a young man who has squandered his inheritance, that he should have used to set himself up in a career, may turn to crime when his money is gone.

But at least these foolish spirits know what they are doing and choose to do it of their own free will. The case of the magician entering the real universe is in its folly worse again. For he is spending his spiritual credit without knowing it. And may bankrupt himself without knowing it. And at the very least will find himself at physical death, when he arrives legitimately in the real universe, without any resources at all.

Imagine a recruit to an army who during his training is given all the equipment he will need as a trained soldier. The intention is that on a given day he should leave the training camp and report to his regiment’s barracks, to be assigned to military duties. But even before he arrives, even before he has left the training camp, he has simply lost all his equipment. Rifle, ammunition, everything. And he is so stupid that he is quite unaware of it. You can imagine the welcome that he will receive in the barracks when he arrives.

But such a case is almost amusing in the depths of its idiocy. A likelier, and far worse outcome, is that on his way to the barracks the recruit will at last realise what he has done. He will be afraid to report himself and will desert even before he arrives. And there will be those in the neighbourhood of the barrack gates who will be only too willing to help him. For a price.

This may easily be the situation of the magician. But here, having said many harsh things about magicians, about all those who use psychic means to discover aspects of reality, I will add a word of kindness. There is a place in your human lives for some of the psychic techniques that magicians use. The human being is indeed constructed to use such techniques and to benefit from them. It is the misuse of the techniques that is wrong.

They may be rightly used to maintain or regain your physical health, and if they were widely understood they would do away with the need for medicine. Although as I have told you, the mind possesses other means to such ends. Or they may be used to gain inner tranquillity, and peace of mind. To gain interior understanding. They may even be used to defend your self and mind against the evil designs of others, although only in defence, never in attack. They may be used to prepare your human mind for spiritual awareness, for enlightenment and understanding, in the way that exercises are used to prepare your body for an athletic performance. They may be used to communicate with others, and even to travel out of the body. But only in this physical world and only for a serious and good purpose.

Psychic techniques may be used for all these purposes, but only with the greatest care, and the wisest judgement of the need. And in fact when man was still a primitive being, psychic awareness was part of his natural, daily existence. Psychic abilities enabled him to survive. They linked him to Nature, reminded him constantly that he was a part of Nature. Helped him to find water and food. Warned him of dangers. Enabled him to communicate without speech. Made him aware of the spiritual reality behind all that he saw and experienced.

But with sophistication, with the discovery of speech, the control of fire, the assumption of clothing, the growth of larger communities than the family and the small, nomadic group of hunters and food gatherers of the early Stone Age, the link with Nature was broken, and many psychic abilities became atrophied, in all but a few individuals here and there, the forebears of your own magicians. And once what had been natural and universal became exceptional and divorced from its original and natural functions, it became dangerous. Poppies in a field of corn are beautiful, and serve a function in Nature. But divorced from that function and turned into opium they become deadly.

And today the possessor of psychic awareness must realise the danger of his or her gift, and treat it with the caution that dangerous gifts demand. I do not say that they must ignore their gift. Only that they must use it wisely, and principally as a path towards spiritual awareness.

 


 

8

Now let Me return briefly to My description of the real universe which is your own real home, as human spirits, and of the universes that lie beyond it. I have told you that the commander of your Real Mind, and his helpers, and your companions, inhabit that first real universe, and that you and they will have many and serious tasks to perform in it, and great dangers to confront.

But I have also told you that as well as belonging to a Real Mind, you, and your Real Mind, belong in turn to a Greater Mind, under the command of a leader whom we called ‘she’, imagining her as a woman for the sake of the description. This leader will have experienced all the existences that you and your companions have experienced and are experiencing, and will have progressed far beyond them, far beyond even the first real universe. She will have entered and set up her headquarters in the second. From there, she will be watching over your adventures, and those of your thousand companions in your Real Mind, and those of a thousand other Real Minds like your own.

But you must not imagine her as being like a high commander in an earthly war, dwelling far behind the lines, and safe from enemy attacks. On the contrary, she is like an advanced outpost of her battalion. Just as the commander of your Real Mind is exposed to far greater dangers and harder tasks in the first real universe, than you are in the physical world of your human life, so the leader of your Greater Mind, and her adjutants and staff who serve near to her are exposed to incalculably greater dangers and assaults from the Enemy.

She longs and calls desperately for help. For her subordinate lieutenants and commanders to hurry, hurry. To bring her trained reinforcements and supports. She is not safe in a remote and peaceful base. She is far in advance of the front line of battle, fighting even for her own existence, for she too is vulnerable to the Enemy’s attacks, unless she has already attained Perfection and is at every moment and in every thought and action obedient to My will. But she is fighting most of all for the safety of her followers.

And if these are her circumstances, then attempt to imagine those of her superiors, the commanders of brigades and divisions, army corps and army groups, each of them thrusting forward into a still more distant, still greater and more dangerous universe. Imagine the battles of this cosmic warfare, the defeats and victories, the countless casualties, the treacheries and desertions, the broken and routed fragments of defeated Greater Minds, the power of a Real Mind or Greater Mind that is serving not good but evil. Imagine the power of a million human spirits united in hatred of good. And then of a thousand and a million of such vast unities of evil, themselves united into one tremendous being, a gigantic army of the damned, burning with hatred and with malice. Your nuclear warfare is children’s silly play compared to this real warfare of good and evil.

And now that I have given you a glimpse of the cosmic warfare, of the tremendous destiny that lies ahead of human spirits, as it lies ahead for spirits of every other kind, I wish to tell you of one particular danger for your world. I mentioned Hitler and Nazism to you, as an example of the evil that the use of magic can bring into the physical world, and into your real universe.

For you to understand what I am going to say, I must first remind you of the existence of Servants of God and Servants of the Devil. You know very well that there are in the world men and women of exceptional and heroic virtue whom you call saints, and whom men often think of as servants of God. You should rather call them the friends of God, spirits who have won God’s friendship by their love of Him.

But as well as these men and women who have won His friendship, God possesses in the world His chosen Servants, as you already know, and you will give the word Servants a capital letter to underline their unique position, and the unique nature of their service. They too may be, they are, God’s friends, for He loves all who serve Him, as well as all who do not, but their relationship to God is as I say, unique. And so is their relationship to other men and women.

They are, by the time they are admitted to the status of Servant, highly developed spirits who could, in other circumstances, expect to take their place in the real universe, having done with physical existence. Some of them may even be equipped spiritually for the far greater demands of the second real universe that I have in a small degree described for you. Instead, they remain in the physical world, as men and women, serving God’s hidden purposes. There were never many of them at one given time. Never more than a dozen. Sometimes as few as two or three. Or even one. But there is always at least one. If you have read anything about Buddhism, you will recognise in what I am telling you a likeness to the Buddhist doctrine of Boddhisatvas, great spirits who reject the opportunity of entering Nirvana and attaining Buddhahood, in order to remain in the cycle of existence and serve humanity. There is, indeed, a link between the two ideas. But where the Boddhisatva is visualised as a great and incorporeal spirit, the Servants I am describing to you are human beings subject to most of the physical laws of Nature that govern humanity.

They do indeed live to a great physical age, and normally mix very little in the ordinary affairs of the world. And they live secretly, not necessarily withdrawn from the world, yet unknown to the world. But unlike the concept of the Boddhisatva, their power comes not from themselves, but from God. They use it only as God commands them, and not often in those instances where you yourself might be tempted to use it, if you had such power at your disposal. Their task is rarely to right ordinary human wrongs, to combat ordinary human evils, or to save men and women from the results of their own folly or wickedness.

They are not there to interfere in the ordinary course of the world’s spiritual evolution. They are there to perform extraordinary tasks for God and man outside the normal run of things, and in particular to defend man and the world – for let Me stress again that those two concepts are not synonymous, there are many other spirit forms in your world besides the human one – the Servants are there to defend man and the world from exceptional assaults by the Enemy. Assaults which otherwise would be beyond man’s power, or the world’s ability, to resist.

They have other tasks too, but these do not need to concern us here. We spoke some time ago of the world as a children’s playground, and you wondered why there were no guardians to protect the children against the results of childish misbehaviour. These Servants are in a sense such guardians. Or to retain the language of childhood and schools and playgrounds, you might think of them as monitors, set to keep an eye on the younger children, and required to call for help if it becomes essential. But bear in mind that that help will be given very sparingly, and as rarely and in as small a degree as possible, because the children are there to learn, and not to be cossetted, and made foolish by over-protection. The monitors must watch many childish tragedies take place without intervening. And they may call for help many times without it being granted.

Now that is the situation on the side of good, for there are of course two sides to this matter as to all others. And just as God possesses and employs a small number of trusted Servants to watch over His especial interests in the physical world, so does the Devil. He too has His Servants devoted heart and mind and spirit to evil. And these evil Servants too are powerful, highly developed spirits, far advanced on the path to Hell, and capable of taking their places in the first or second real universes, but remaining in the physical world to serve their Master in occult ways. They too live hidden lives, and intervene only rarely in the small affairs of the world. They too live to a great age, and unknown to the generality of mankind. They have no interest in the obvious trappings of power. Their sole interest is to serve the Devil, and injure the world and mankind in significant and terrible ways. Their aim, so to speak, is not to commit an occasional murder, but genocide, and they leave the small crimes to their inferiors, to men and women who may not even be aware that they are serving the Devil, or even that the Devil exists.

But while the Servants of God are bound by many restrictions, arising from the long-term interests of Creation, the Servants of the Devil are not. They will intervene wherever and whenever they see a worthwhile advantage for their Master, and whenever they call on Him for help it will be granted to them. What limits their power is humanity’s childishness, and the world’s, the earth’s, or rather its spirit’s, inherent goodness. But for this conversation let us leave the world-spirit and its subordinate spirits of place and Nature on one side, and consider humanity alone.

I have said that humanity’s very childishness is a form of protection. Men and women are, in the main, too undeveloped to desire great evil, just as they are too undeveloped to desire great good. And the Devil’s Servants, these few powerful human spirits dedicated wholly to evil, and consciously serving the Devil, can only exercise their power, can only call in the help of great entities of evil, when humanity creates the opportunity for them to do so.

As I have told you, the magician who penetrates wrongly into the first or second real universe creates such an opportunity, but only of a minor kind in the normal course of events. Hitler and his close associates created a vast opportunity. And Hitler himself and one or two of those with him, actually sought out and found one of the Devil’s human Servants, and begged and obtained that Servant’s powerful and active help. By what Hitler did, he released, he allowed to be released, a flood of evil into the world that remains and will remain for centuries, even though he himself perished in the process of releasing it.

You may wonder, if the power of evil is so great, and apparently almost unopposed, why Hitler himself did not succeed. Why the Devil’s Servants did not install him as world-dictator for example, giving him the world-domination he hoped for.

The answer is simple. That was not part of the bargain, and Hitler did not wish for it. What he and his chosen master desired was destruction. As much destruction as could he brought about with the physical means at Germany’s disposal.

Beyond that, Hitler desired and was promised power in the real universe, and that he now has. In this world his guide and master, the Devil’s Servant who took Hitler under his protection, desired to give affairs a tilt and push towards the condition they are in today, to speed up by a hundred or more years the coming catastrophe. For you should not, and I know you do not, imagine that the world’s dangers ended in 1945 with the defeat of the Nazis. In a sense it was only then that they began. Or increased to that degree that they could threaten the entire world’s existence. As a result of that war against Hitler’s Reich man has for the first time the capability of destroying not only the entirety of mankind, but the very fertility of the world; the capacity of the earth and the sea to sustain life of any kind.

Such a progress towards self-destruction was inevitable, but thanks to Hitler’s activities it has come sooner than it need have done. And what is threatened is not merely the destruction of all physical life, but with it, the prevention of all future physical life. Which means that all those spirits that depend on future experiences of physical life, in order to progress towards Perfection, will be denied their opportunity, whether as plants or animals or men, or the guardians of other creatures. Without physical life in this world of yours, for them to experience and to serve, their hope of achieving perfection is destroyed.

Here I know that you wish to ask two questions. The first is why, in this accusation and catalogue of disasters, do I mention Hitler alone, and not other modern men of great power and apparent wickedness, such as Stalin, Mussolini, and the evil dictators of many unhappy countries in the contemporary world. And your second unasked question is what role, if any, God’s Servants have played and are playing in all these events.

As to Stalin and Mussolini and their like, you must understand that there are categories and degrees of evil and wickedness, and that these cannot always be measured by the mere number of men and women killed by a wicked man or women. It is true that Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Hitler was. And that his slave-camps were vaster, and even crueller. And beyond question, Stalin was a wicked man, who served evil. But he did not serve it knowingly. His motives were merely a lust for power, and terror of assassination. Not the destruction of the world and the ultimate overthrow of all that is good. He was not concerned with good and evil. And on his smaller scale the same is true of Mussolini.

Very few men, even the most wicked, can truly be described as evil. To be evil means to be determinedly so, to choose evil knowingly, to reject and hate good knowing it to be good. To hate God and reject Him, and turn to the Devil in adoration. You may think, in a casual moment, that such an attitude of mind is easy. It is not. It is as difficult as sanctity, and as rare. But one among the many fearful achievements of Hitler was to create an atmosphere in the world in which it has become easier to achieve that opposite of sanctity, that devotion to evil. There is the true horror of what he did. He has made it easier for men and women to turn to the Devil, and easier for the Devil to reach the minds of men and women.

You might think that Hitler’s example would have frightened humanity into goodness. That knowledge of Belsen would have made new Belsens impossible. But you have only to look round the present-day world to see that that has not happened. Torture by those in authority has not become more rare. It has become more common. But it is not Hitler’s example that is his true legacy of evil. It is that opening of a door, that building of a bridge into the first real universe and beyond it. Far beyond it. A broad and almost indestructible bridge of evil across which the companies and battalions, the brigades and divisions of evil are still marching into your world.

Which brings Me to answer the second question in your mind. What are God’s Servants in the world doing to protect you? And indeed, what are all the great powers of good doing in this crisis?

The second answer is even simpler than the first. Almost nothing. You are astounded at that? Disbelieving? Do not be. To speak bluntly, you have brought this crisis on yourselves. Hitler was not a freak of Nature, a dreadful exception to the general goodness of mankind. He was an expression of one aspect of mankind, developed and prepared over many thousands of years. Mankind not only permitted Hitler to act. Mankind created him. And must, in large measure, abide by his consequences.

But there is much more to consider than the mere hard demands of justice. I have spoken to you again and again in terms of war. Of the war between good and evil. And you must hold it firmly and forever in your mind that this war is real. And that like human wars its outcome is uncertain. It can be lost as well as won.

Now, you know that in all wars there are casualties. And sometimes even a large force of soldiers, even an entire army, may be surrounded by the enemy and threatened with annihilation. And although the threatened force may call for help, desperately and repeatedly, that help may not be forthcoming. Either because it is not available. Or it cannot reach the doomed army. Or because there are even more urgent, more vital tasks for the remaining armies elsewhere. To defend themselves. Or the homeland, or to prevent the annihilation of the entire group of armies. In such circumstances the sacrifice of the one encircled army will become inevitable.

And if the encirclement has come about because of the indiscipline of the threatened army, the refusal of a large number of its soldiers to obey any orders at all, the inefficiency and cowardice of many of its officers, and the treachery of many others, the refusal of whole units of the army, to march when they were told to, the desertion of thousands upon thousands of individual soldiers and even high ranking officers, and a deliberate approach to the enemy by some of them, offering to surrender all those under their command to become prisoners of war; or even to place the whole army at the enemy’s disposal, to fight against its former allies; then in those circumstances the High Command of all the armies of good may well decide that that threatened army is expendable, and well enough out of the way. That to risk the outcome of the entire war in order to save it would be worse than folly.

And such a danger does exist, for the balance between the forces of good and evil is a very fine one. There are not infinite resources of good confronting a few cohorts of evil. Infinite reinforcements of good ready at a moment’s notice to help those in danger from the Enemy. The two forces are very evenly matched, and often the least addition to one side or the other could tilt the scales. Therefore mankind, and the world you live in and run the risk of destroying by your greed and ignorance, is truly in desperate and real danger. Not merely physical danger, but spiritual danger of the most serious kind.

And there will be immense suffering, unimagined hardships both for those who physically survive the crisis, and those who die during it. The forces of good which are at your disposal will be stretched to their limits and beyond them. Such help as does reach you, as can reach you, by means of the Servants of God, and the other Channels of Grace by which the world’s and humanity’s power of good is reinforced – that help will be severely limited. And now you have more questions, I know. What part does God play in this warfare? Is He not infinitely powerful? Could He not sweep away the Devil and all the Devil’s Servants and allies as a man brushes away flies?

Yes. He could. But with them He would sweep away half Creation. God does not hate the Devil and wish to destroy Him. He loves Him and wishes to bring Him back to loving obedience. That is God’s purpose in this war. And you must not destroy those whom you love, no matter how they attempt to injure you. So the Devil and His armies must be allowed to continue fighting, and even to win victories when they can. However terrible the cost. For to destroy them would be more terrible still.

But finally, before we turn to other matters, I shall tell you of one great means of help that the world and mankind do possess. The greatest that there can be, set in the world by Jesus, and maintained there by the power of the Holy Spirit ever since. That help, that tremendous Channel of Grace, is the Holy Grail.

 

 


 

 

PART TWO

THE HOLY GRAIL

 

The Holy Grail is a cup made of terracotta, in the Greek style. That is, a shallow bowl with two small handles, one on either side, in the shape of rings. But for fifteen hundred years it has been enclosed in a heavy crust of pure gold that gives it the form of a chalice.

The original cup belonged to Our Lord during His Ministry. John, the Beloved Disciple, carried it for Him as they travelled about Galilee and Judaea, and he brought Our Lord water in it to drink when they rested. Our Lord used it at the Last Supper, and afterwards, when Our Lord and Peter and Andrew, Matthew and Nathanael, went to the Garden of Gethsemane, John brought it with him to the house of John Clopas, husband of that Mary who was the cousin of Mary the Mother of Jesus.

After the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, John kept the cup always, until his death on the Island of Patmos in the year 90 A.D. He bequeathed it to Joseph, son of Joseph of Arimathea, who like John was an Essene, and who had been his secretary and friend, first in Jerusalem, and later in exile.

Joseph brought the cup with him to Rome, where he began to teach all the things that he had learned from John. These were the inner teachings of Jesus that could not be understood by the multitude, and Joseph soon found himself in conflict with the church at Rome, where these teachings were unknown, and where the people believed that they had received all that was to be known of Jesus from Peter and Paul.

Joseph was denounced to the Romans and he fled from Rome to Marseilles, and then to Avignon. There he found refuge with Jews who had been Essenes, and he taught them that Jesus was the fulfilment of the doctrines and prophecies of the Essenes. He converted them and formed a small community, living in a house outside Avignon. But the Christians who followed Peter and Paul again denounced Joseph to the authorities, and Joseph and his companions fled north to the coast and took ship to Britain.

In Britain they founded a community at what is now called Glastonbury. This was already a place of great spiritual significance and power and Joseph was drawn there for that reason, with his companions. They arrived in the year 99 A.D. and in the following year Joseph died. He was buried at Glastonbury and his companions remained there, preserving Joseph’s teachings.

The community remained at Glastonbury for almost four hundred years, until in the year 470 A.D. a Visitation from Rome declared its doctrines and traditions to be heretical and ordered its closure. The civil authorities supported the Papal decision and the members of the community withdrew to Wales, to a property they possessed near Cardiff. The chief treasure they brought with them was the Cup, and to preserve it they enclosed it in a massive gold chalice, melting down all the community’s gold plate to provide the gold.

Papal hostility followed the community into Wales, and the members went north to the mountains near Mount Snowdon, where they were given protection by a local king. There they re-established their community on land given to them by the king, and they built a chapel and a monastery after the Eastern tradition, like that of Glastonbury.

In North Wales they came into contact with another group whose members were in disagreement with the Church. These were spiritual descendants of followers of Mithras, who had brought Mithraic beliefs into their version of Christianity. The origins of this group or sect lay in the Roman camp at Chester, where many soldiers worshiped Mithras in the second and third centuries, secretly maintaining their beliefs in the fourth century, when Christianity was declared the State religion throughout the Roman Empire.

Members of the sect, combining Christianity and Mithraism into a form of Gnosticism, with military overtones, created an Order of Knights, or mounted soldiers, that placed itself in the service of the Christian chiefs of North Wales and North West Britain, against the Saxon, pagan invaders who attacked Britain after the Roman garrisons withdrew. These Christian chiefs customarily elected a supreme war-chief, and gave him, among other titles, that of ‘Arthur’, a name originally belonging to a pre-Celtic bear-god, and later applied to the Celtic war-god. Since many of the chieftains’ followers remained pagan, this title helped to secure their loyalty.

The Mithraic-Christian order of knights, preserving the traditions and training of the Roman cavalry, were the most valued of Arthur’s soldiers, becoming his bodyguard, an elite corps. Here lies the origin of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The name adopted by these Knights for their Order was that of the Royal Blood. For outsiders the name referred to the royal blood of the king whom the knights served. But for initiates the name referred to a false legend attached to the community from Glastonbury and encouraged by their leaders as a protection for their true secret that instead of the Cup, Joseph had brought with him a phail of Our Lord’s Blood There was too a confusion with the orthodox Christian opinion that at the Last Supper the cup had contained Our Lord’s mystical blood.

Soon the monks and knights combined in a single order that contained seven grades as Mithraism had done, and as indeed the Christian priesthood still does. The grades within the order were Squire, Knight, Pilgrim, Enlightened One, Messenger, Priest, and Chief Priest or Fishermen, recalling St. Peter’s title of Fisher of Men. This title was to live on in later legends as the Fisher King.

After the Battle of Badon in the sixth century, and the loss of the greater part of Britain to the Saxons, the Order of the Royal Blood was confined to North Wales It centred on the chapel where the Cup was preserved and guarded. And during the long period between the Battle of Badon and the coming of the Normans into Wales in the eleventh century, the Order declined still further in membership and wealth. By the year 1086 A.D. only one member was left, and he belonged to the lowest grade but one, that of Knight. His name was Bedever, and so that the traditions of the Order and his and his family’s share in them should not be lost at his death, he had them embodied in a concealed form in a long poem. This was composed by a bard attached to his family, and already aware of the existence of the Order, and of the Cup.

When this had been done, Bedever hid the Cup in a secret place in the ruins of the community’s chapel, and went to the Holy Land on the First Crusade. There he died, but he left a nephew, and from that time to this day, his descendants have been the guardians of the Cup, passing the secret of its existence and whereabouts from father to son, or grandfather to grandson, or uncle to nephew, through nine hundred years.

During that time the Cup, enclosed in its massive gold protection, has been kept in its original hiding place in North Wales – except for one comparatively brief period before the First World War. It was then brought to London and protected there by a newly formed Order of Knights of the Royal Blood. In 1913 it was returned to Wales and to its hiding place, and it has remained in Wales ever since.

This, in brief, is the physical history of the Cup of Our Lord known as the Holy Grail, from the Norman-French words for Holy Blood, Sang Real. But besides a physical history, it possesses a spiritual one, of infinitely greater importance. The Cup is not a relic, it is a store of Grace. As a relic it would have no more significance than the stones on which Our Lord trod as He went about His Ministry. Even where relics are genuine they have no value. A store of Grace is an object in which the Holy Spirit chooses to dwell, either momentarily, as in a Communion wafer, which becomes a Host, or for longer periods. The Cup is the greatest of all such objects, and on its preservation the safety of the Church in the world depends.

The need for such a physical means of transmitting spiritual Grace derives from our nature as physical beings. It comes to each Catholic at baptism in drops of water. At Communion as a fragment of bread. At death as drops of oil. The Cup is a continuing Witness to God’s love for His Church, and for the world, and so that its Grace may be effective, it must be used on certain occasions for its true purpose, as a chalice at Communion. A priest must use it to say Mass.

From the time that St.. John received it from Our Lord to the time that the Knight Bedever hid it in the ruins of the chapel in North Wales, this presented no problem. It was used by the community on all the great feast days of the Church. But during the last nine centuries, it has been necessary for the guardian of the time to bring a priest to the Cup’s hiding place, and offer it to the priest so that he can say Mass with it. The Cup must then be hidden again. This duty occurs approximately once every hundred years, at a moment of great danger for the Church. The virtue of this Mass preserves the Church, and through the Church, the world, from destruction by the powers of evil.

Wales was chosen as the hiding place for the Cup because it was the safest. The Eastern Empire would fall to the Moslems. Most of Europe would be torn by wars of religion, or would fall away from Christianity altogether. In Wales, except for the one brief period mentioned earlier, the Cup could remain undisturbed by political events.

This will not remain true for much longer, and then the Cup must be brought elsewhere.

 


PART THREE

A NEW REVELATION

 


 

THE FIRST REVELATION
Man has existed for three million years and for all but a fraction of that time he lived as part of Nature, a higher animal among animals. His state was fallen, as that of all Creation is fallen, yet he possessed, not a perfect, but a natural innocence. He lived in harmony with Nature. He was aware of this harmony, and of the dangers of disharmony. When he killed other living creatures in order to live, he did so with a recognition of what he was doing. He was humble before Nature and Creation.

To our eyes he would appear a brute. To his eyes, if he could comprehend us, we would appear monsters and devils.

If we looked for a fundamental difference between his state and ours, it would be that he did not possess language as we understand it. The sounds he made were emotional rather than rational, sounds of joy or anger or fear or urgency. We would call them exclamations.

His communication with his fellow humans was like his communication with Nature, an inner awareness, that we would describe as telepathy. An awareness of what the other was thinking. And this “thinking” was by images, and not by concepts; by pictures, and not by words. These images could be transferred from one mind to another over great distances, and were of necessity principally concerned with the supply of food, with the movements of game animals, with the existence of water, the threat of danger still far off but approaching.

Man was in complete harmony with Nature. He could interpret her moods, he was aware of her not as rocks and trees and animals, but as Spirit. he could see the spirit reality behind the material appearance, and he was aware of the guardian spirits that have places and species in their keeping. And for more than two million years he remained in this harmony with Nature, living as he had always lived, until three quarters of a million years ago a burst of radiation from the sun of exceptional violence and power combined with radiation from deep in space, altered man’s genetic structure.

The most important result was the great increase in the size of man’s brain, giving him new capacities and powers. But for a very long time, more than seven hundred thousand years, these new possibilities, which included speech and reason and all the powers of man’s mind today, and more besides, remained dormant, as some still do. The immediate effect was less obvious, and very gradual. Man began to lose his close harmony with the world in which he lived.

This effect was not equally distributed among all men and women. Some individuals retained their psychic awareness and sensitivity to a far greater extent than others. But by so doing they became exceptional, and were themselves separated from their fellows by reason of their psychic gifts. They became shamans, witchdoctors, the interpreters of Nature for their tribes-people, who now needed an interpreter whereas before they had understood Nature as they had understood one another. Some of the shamans used their powers for evil, and became sorcerers, workers of harmful magic, in order to gain greater power over their fellows, or over Nature.

Here and there this new type of man that we call Homo Sapiens came into contact with other kinds of man that had not been genetically altered, such as Neanderthal Man, still primitive and naturally innocent beings who had not broken their link with the spirit world round them. When these contacts took place Homo Sapiens used his greater brain power to destroy his simpler cousins. But there was still no speech, and without speech, nothing that we would consider to be rational thought. Although their psychic abilities had lessened, except for a small minority of individuals, the new men still used telepathy among themselves, and were still close to Nature, although no longer an unthinking part of her.

Meanwhile they had spread slowly across the Old World, as far north as the Arctic ocean, as far east as China, as far west as the lands that would one day become Europe. Until 35,000 years ago, in East Africa, in the cradle of mankind from which, three million years earlier, the primitive ancestors of all types of men had spread, speech was invented. It was created by magicians, by sorcerers, who used it for secret communication among themselves. Where all men could still use telepathy, thoughts could not be secret. But speech could. And so it was invented by the magicians to conceal their thoughts from the uninitiated.

It gave them added power and prestige and they became conquerors, and missionaries of their own power, bringing their knowledge and their magic north out of East Africa into what one day would become Egypt. Language ceased to be a secret belonging only to magicians, and slowly all their followers adopted it. Living in denser communities along the fertile banks of the Nile, telepathy ceased to be practical, there were too many minds too close together. Telepathy had been the ideal means of communication for tiny and scattered groups of men in the vast plains of East Africa and the Sahel, and still was, elsewhere in the world. To almost the present day its use survived among the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the last remnant of primitive African man, although even the Bushmen had long ago learned speech.

But in the lush forests along the Nile where game and fruit were abundant, men increased in numbers and created the first almost permanent settlements. Telepathy disappeared from among them, except for the few individuals who had the gift of it in a higher degree than most, those who were by nature preordained to become shamans or magicians. Only in this new form of society, dwelling in large groups, and using spoken language, the shaman’s role changed to that of priest. The difference between shaman and priest is that the shaman is still a part of Nature. The priest is self-conscious and separate from what he worships. He may worship Nature, but he is not a part of Her.

In time these priests brought their language and their religion north again, to the Euphrates and Tigris valleys. They went looking for new areas of authority, and new converts. Their religion was not greatly different from the religion of the shamans of the primitive groups that still existed everywhere. It was a worship of Nature, of spirits, of unseen forces, of wind and storm and sun and earth. But the difference was that the priests made images of what they worshiped.

Shamans had sometimes made images and pictures. But these were not of gods. They were fetishes, into which power was drawn from the unseen spirits, and when the occasion for asking for that power was over, the fetish had no more value. The picture could be overpainted by another when a new occasion for needing power arose. The statue could be abandoned. Their equivalents are the designs the Australian aborigines used to make with coloured stones and sand for a spirit dance or festival. They were temporary things. The priests’ images were permanent. They were homes for the gods. And in the eyes of simple converts they became gods. From being homes for spirits, they became objects that themselves needed homes. They required temples. They required food. They required servants. They required slaves. They required sacrifices. They required the best of everything, and the priests were their guardians and their storekeepers. The Chief Priest became the god’s earthly representative, himself divine. He became a Divine King.

The priest no longer, as the shamans did, joined man to God He separated man from God. He stood between man and God and interpreted Him according to his own will. Man was moving further and further, faster and faster away from his natural and primitive simplicity. By the year 4000 B.C. he had already reached the threshold of modern civilisation. He had created cities and agriculture. He was discovering the use of metals, of sailing ships, of writing. A few more discoveries, and all that has indeed followed would become inevitable, unless man purified his ambitions He would not only sever his last links with Nature, but would so injure the earth and its natural harmony, that he would risk destroying all life, including his own.

It was therefore at this moment, when it was still possible to redirect man’s ambitions and desires that God granted to mankind the first Revelation, of His own true Nature, and of the reality of Creation. The Revelation was granted to a young shaman in a mountain valley of what was later to become known as Luristan, in western Iran. His name was Krishna, and he was a worshipper of the spirit of the earth, which he regarded as the Mother Goddess. He regarded the sun as her husband, fertilising her in the spring, but inferior to her in power and importance. He believed the Mother Goddess to be the Creatress and Mother of All Things. He, like men and women throughout the world, worshiped her in certain caves, that he and they regarded as her sexual parts, and in other places on the earth’s surface that men recognised as being especially charged with the earth’s power.

Priests and priestesses or shamans guided this worship and it was not entirely a false worship for the earth is a spirit and a great one, to which all the spirits of Nature and men as well are subordinate. But the Revelation told Krishna that although all his beliefs were not false, they were insufficient and distorted. The earth is not greater than the sun which is a spirit of immense power and majesty, far greater than the earth. And the sun itself, the Revelation told, is no more than one star among the many millions of stars in the heavens, while those stars, like the sun, are no more than the servants of the Creator. The Creator, the Revelation told Krishna, is the All-Pervading Spirit, All-Powerful, Invisible, who has created all that is and ever has been and ever will be.

The Revelation went on to teach Krishna that within Creation there had been a rebellion against God, and that mankind had shared in this rebellion, and in the Fall from Perfection that was its consequence. He was told also that man’s whole task and purpose is to find his way back to God, and to help God recreate Perfection. Within the space of a few years God had taught Krishna all the spiritual truths that are contained in these two books, The House on the Rock and The Seven Mansions, with the exception of those that concern the Chosen People, and Jesus. God also taught him that those places on the surface of the earth which men already knew to be centres and lines of spiritual and psychic power might be made yet more powerful in the service of good if men erected great stones on them in certain patterns.

These were the patterns marked in the sky by the movements of the planets and the stars, and the sun and the moon, over periods of time, and to discover and recognise them with sureness would take all Krishna’s remaining lifetime and many other men’s lifetimes after his death. But this study, lasting for generations and even centuries, could in itself be a healing for mankind and of great benefit to the world, saving it from the dangers man had begun to bring to it.

It is not that the patterns in themselves, the ellipses and ovoids, the flattened circles, and the pentacles, drawn in the night sky over the years by certain stars and planets in relation to the earth and the sun or moon have a mystic or spiritual value by themselves, simply as patterns. Drawn on sand or clay or paper they are no more than geometrical figures, just as musical notation or the choreography of a ballet are no more than lifeless marks when written down. But when the music is played, and the dance is performed, then the value of the marks becomes apparent.

This is the case with the geometrical patterns outlined by the movements of the stars and planets and the sun and moon. They represent the movements of the cosmic dance by which the universe praises the Creator. When those patterns were reproduced with great stones on the surface of the earth at vital points they would serve to generate incalculable spiritual and psychic power, which could help man and earth to reach Perfection.

God commanded Krishna to teach all these things to disciples, and then to send them throughout the world, so that they might teach others, and eventually the Truth might reach all mankind.

This Krishna did, and his disciples, and their many generations of disciples in their turn, reached every corner of the earth during the next two thousand years. The physical monuments of those missionary journeys are the stone circles and alignments, the passage graves and single stone pillars which belong to what archaeologists call the Megalithic Culture. One may include among them the ziggurats and pyramids of Mesopotamia and Egypt and central America, for the intention in building them was identical with that which led to the building of all the megalithic monuments; to conduct the power of the sun and the stars and planets into the earth at what may be described as one of the earth’s nerve centres.

But during those two thousand years the message of the Revelation became garbled and distorted, by accident and forgetfulness, or deliberate design. In many instances the builders of the megalithic circles and alignments became absorbed in a study of secondary, physical truths, ignoring the spiritual significance of what they were doing. They turned more and more to mathematics and geometry and astronomy, which were indeed necessary for the building of the monuments, but which should have been kept in perspective as minor means to an all-important end, instead of themselves assuming vast importance and being credited with spiritual significance, where in fact they had none. The megalith builders, or designers, created hermetic schools and associations of initiates, devoted to what we know as astrology, and to the mystic significance of numbers and geometrical figures. These initiates considered themselves superior to the commonalty of mankind by reason of their secret yet virtually worthless knowledge. Instead of seeking God they sought influence and power in this world. They became Magi, magicians, men whom later ages would call Chaldeans from a centre of their power and studies in Chaldea in Mesopotamia. Their chief claim to influence was that they could, they boasted, foretell the future from the movements of the stars. In all this, the Truth was neglected and abandoned.

Meanwhile, man had entered the Bronze Age, and the Age of Warfare and Warrior Empires. The last chance of a return to simplicity and purity of life for mankind as a whole, of a return to harmony with Nature, was lost. Therefore God gave man the second Revelation.

Once more He gave it to a man whose homeland was Luristan, but this man had gone to live in a Sumerian city called Ur of the Chaldees. He was a Chaldean, a Magi, learned in astrology and astronomy, in mathematics and geometry and all that the Magi knew. But he was also pure in heart, and he desired to know God. His name was Terah.

God came to him and told him all that had been told two thousand years earlier in the first Revelation, correcting Terah’s false or distorted and insufficient knowledge of it. God told Terah also that he was to leave Ur of the Chaldees and go north to a town called Haran. From there not he, but two of his sons, and their families and servants, were to travel westwards to a land that God would give to one of them and his descendants. God promised Terah that those descendants were to be the Chosen People of God, chosen to preserve the Truth for ever. In their promised land there existed a great centre of the earth’s power that would be their holy place, and there they must build a temple to God and worship Him. Although all mankind might turn away from the Truth, or refuse to accept it, they were to remain faithful.

To help them, and to help mankind, God had appointed Servants of God, who would always act as Channels of Grace into the world, as once the megalithic structures had done. There were very few of them, scattered throughout the world, but there would always be one of them near to the Chosen People, to save them in their worst times of danger. And among these Servants of God, these Pure Ones, there would sometimes be one set apart even from them, who would be a Teacher of Righteousness. When God should choose him to be a Servant, and the Teacher, he would instruct him in the whole of the two Revelations, and would command him to teach such parts of the Truth as were lost or forgotten, and that needed teaching again at that especial moment in history. Besides this Teacher of Righteousness there would also sometimes be an even greater Servant of God, who would often be unknown to mankind but who would suffer for mankind’s sins, atoning for them to God by his own sufferings. He should be called the Suffering Servant.

Finally, Terah was told that as his sons journeyed westwards, they should avoid worshipping in the holy places where stone circles had been built, or single great stones or grave mounds erected, because these centres of the earth’s power were now contaminated and corrupted by men’s false use of them. But where they found a centre of power where men had not built a stone monument, but on which oak trees grew as natural conductors of the power of the sun and stars into the earth, they might worship there until they had gained possession of their Promised Land, and its great centre of power. Terah himself was not to go with his sons, but he was to teach them the Revelation, and to be the first Teacher of Righteousness.

All this happened soon after the year two thousand B.C. The names of Terah the Chaldean’s sons were Abraham and Lot.

The descendants of Abraham occupied their Promised Land, but only as one tribe of nomadic herdsmen among many. And three centuries after the time of Abraham they were driven south by famine with many other similar and related tribes to invade Egypt and to conquer it. The name adopted by this confederation of tribes was the Hyksos, the Shepherds, and for a brief period they ruled northern Egypt. By then the Chosen People had forgotten almost every detail of their Revelations, except that they themselves were a people set apart, and that a promise had been made to them of the land they knew as Canaan, by their God. Only a few among them knew more than that, and as generations went by, and the Hyksos lost their power in Egypt and were driven out or enslaved by the Egyptians, even that remnant of instructed and faithful believers almost vanished.

Two hundred and fifty years after the invasion by the Hyksos the Chosen People were no more than slave labourers among the many slaves of the Egyptians, distinguished from their fellow slaves and their masters only by their appearance, which was that of northerners, bigger and stronger than the slender men and women of Egypt. One of these slaves became the lover of one of the Pharaoh’s concubines, herself born in Luristan, as the remote ancestor of the Chosen People, Terah, had been. She gave birth to a boy child, and for fear of the consequences had him placed in a small boat made of reeds and pitch, and set afloat on the Nile. This was a practice of palace women with unwanted babies. They hoped that some kindly man or woman would find their baby and save its life.
It happened with the concubine’s child. An Egyptian woman found him, and she and her husband adopted him and named him Tutmosis. When Tutmosis was old enough he was sent to the priests of Ra to become a physician. With them, he learned not only medicine, but something of the first Revelation, which they and their predecessors had preserved for more than two thousand years.
Their possession and preservation of the first Revelation came about in this way. As has been said, missionary disciples of the first man to be taught the Revelation by God travelled far and wide to teach it to others. One of their successors came to Egypt, and it was his teaching, received by the priests of the sun god, Ammon Ra, which led to the building of the pyramids as a means of uniting the powers of the sun and stars with those of the earth. The pyramids were also built in such a way that their measurements, both externally, and in the passages and burial chambers, reflected and concealed much astronomical knowledge, and prophecies of the future. But the Revelation itself became misunderstood and garbled in Egypt, as elsewhere, until late in the eighteenth century B.C., three hundred years before the birth of Tutmosis, another man from Luristan arrived in Egypt. He was a Teacher of Righteousness, the next to be chosen by God after Terah, and he was sent by God to teach the Revelation again in Egypt, to prepare for the coming of the Chosen People. He did this, and the Egyptians named him Senu Hotep.

So that the Revelation should not again be lost, Senu Hotep instructed his Egyptian disciples to write down all that he taught them, in cryptic symbols, and make copies of the book and distribute the copies among the temples of Ammon Ra in Egypt. This was not because the priesthood of Ammon Ra as a whole accepted his teaching. Most of the priests of the Sun God rejected it utterly, believing that their own distorted and corrupted knowledge of the Revelation was perfect. They regarded Senu Hotep as a blasphemer against their god. But a few of the priests of Ammon Ra recognised the Truth in Senu Hotep’s teaching and they carried out his instructions, hiding copies of The Book of Revelation in several temples of Ammon Ra. Senu Hotep also instructed them to take a copy and bury it in a chamber deep in the foundations of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and to have the essence of the Teaching carved in hieroglyphics on the walls of the chamber. In this way the Teaching would be preserved for as long as men would exist on earth, even though the copies hidden in the various temples of Ammon Ra should be lost, or destroyed. But in fact, although all those copies except that preserved in the Great Pyramid were destroyed, long ago, a strange remnant, or derivative of them, still exists, in the pack of cards we know as the Tarot.

It was one of the copies of Senu Hotep’s Book of the Revelation that instructed Tutmosis, and in this same period he realised his kinship with some of the Hyksos slave labourers in Egypt, whose physical appearance was like his own. He went among them, and from one of them learned the substance of the second Revelation, that they, and he with them, were a Chosen People, destined to occupy a Promised Land, where they would worship and serve the One True God.

Tutmosis became physician to the Pharaoh Amenhotep III and in the hope of securing the freedom of his slave kinsmen, the Chosen People, he taught the two Revelations of God to the Pharaoh’s heir, who was to be named the Pharaoh Akhnaton. This prince accepted the teaching that there was only one God, the Creator of All Things, wholeheartedly, and determined to force all the priests of Egypt, and the common people, who worshiped many gods and goddesses, to accept the Revelation.
Akhnaton made Tutmosis his close adviser and helper in converting his subjects to what for them was a new and alien religion, and he granted freedom and favour to the Chosen People.

For a number of years the religious struggle between Pharaoh and priests and people tore Egypt apart and brought her near to ruin. Then the people led by the priests rose against Akhnaton and his followers, the Chosen People among them, and massacred all those they could find. Akhnaton killed himself with many members of his family, and the rule of the Revelation in Egypt was over. Tutmosis himself escaped with his life, and with only a few companions, freed slaves of the Chosen People who had become his friends and servants. Together they escaped into the deserts of Sinai from the soldiers of the new Pharaoh who were hunting them, and they were taken in and protected by a Bedouin tribe which was related to the Hyksos shepherd tribes. This tribe claimed descent from Terah’s son Abraham, although it knew nothing of either the first or the second Revelation, and that therefore it too was of the Chosen People.

In the desert God revealed Himself to Tutmosis, and told Tutmosis that he was to become the third Teacher of Righteousness; that he was to teach the Revelations to the tribe that had given him and his companions hospitality, and was to lead them to the Promised Land. The name of the tribe was the Khabiru, but God told Tutmosis that its members were from that time onwards to call themselves the Israelites, after their ancestor Israel. Tutmosis himself was to be called Moses, and each of Tutmosis’ companions was to become the leader of one of the clans into which the tribe was divided, and to give his name to the clan of which he became leader. The Israelites were to know God as Yahweh.

Tutmosis, now named Moses, was to write down the Revelations, and the Laws by which the Israelites were to live, so that they might be preserved, and the Israelites saved from falling into error. There was no papyrus in the desert, and Moses took clay and wrote on it and baked the clay in fire. These were the ‘stone tablets’ of the Law. Moses also taught his followers how to construct a Channel of Grace that they could carry with them in their wanderings. It would serve the same purpose as a pyramid, or a megalithic circle, concentrating the power of the sun and the stars and joining that power to the power of the earth. He called this the Ark of the Covenant, from God’s Covenant with His Chosen People, whose survivors the Khabiru were.

Traditions of all these things, written and rewritten through many centuries, and revised and edited by many priests and scribes who added to them or subtracted from them, or altered them, according to their prejudices or ignorance, or what they thought of as the needs of their day, became the Pentateuch, the Five Books supposedly written by Moses himself. Many features were introduced into them that were utterly opposed to all that the Revelations had taught. The Revelations themselves were almost lost, and most of the Chosen People abandoned the worship of Yahweh and followed the gods and goddesses of their neighbours.

Therefore in the eighth century before Christ God granted a third Revelation to one of the Chosen People, the prophet Isaiah. He was chosen by God as a Teacher of Righteousness and told to remind the Chosen People of the essential truths of the two previous Revelations, and to tell them also of catastrophes to come if they did not listen. At the same time he was to promise them that a Saviour would be born in Israel, of a young woman of the House of David. who would redeem Israel, and renew the Kingdom. Again, new catastrophes would come if Israel rejected the Saviour. And Isaiah’s prophecies of destruction were to apply far into the future, not only to the time of the Saviour, but to other periods, of which our own is one.

Then, in the year that we wrongly call 4 B.C., God was born to Mary the Virgin. She was filled with the Holy Spirit and gave birth to Jesus. The Holy Spirit remained with her throughout her life, and so burned away her humanity that she became one with the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit one with her.

Jesus Himself, when He was old enough, went to study with the Essenes of Qmran beside the Dead Sea. They were a community of pious Jews, the faithful remnant of Israel, who had rejected their Greek-influenced rulers and High Priests and had fled from all contact with alien culture and religion to live by the strictest rules of the Mosaic Law, as they understood them. The community included men and women and children, the uneducated as well as the educated. The uneducated lived simple, industrious lives, serving the inner community of the piously educated Essenes, the Pure Ones. And within this inner community there was a hierarchy of ranks, rising from neophyte to elder. Jesus became a neophyte, and during his young manhood rose in the hierarchy to a position of great honour.

The elders of the Essenes knew the whole Truth of the three Revelations, and they knew also of the existence of the Servants of God, those few men and women scattered throughout the world who always, in every generation, serve as Channels of Grace between God and man. And they knew too of the occasional existence among the Servants of a Teacher of Righteousness, and of a Suffering Servant. Their belief was, and it was true, that the founder of their community, almost two hundred years earlier, the priest Zadok, had been a Teacher of Righteousness, and they looked forward to and prayed for the coming of another Teacher of Righteousness, and also of a Messiah, a Suffering Servant, who between them would redeem Israel as Isaiah had foretold. It was granted to this innermost leadership of the Essenes to recognise that both the Teacher of Righteousness and the Suffering Servant, the Messiah, were present among them in the person of one man, Jesus, and when He was thirty years old they sent Him out of the community into Galilee and Judea, to teach, and to be crucified for Israel and for the world.

In Galilee Jesus gathered disciples, and among them there was one who was an Essene, and who had been a student in Qmran. This was the Beloved Disciple, John. Only John among the disciples understood all Jesus’ teaching, and when Jesus had been crucified, and had risen from the dead, God chose John to be a Servant of God, and to preserve the fullness of Jesus’ teachings. He was to be a Teacher of Righteousness, and was to write down the essence of the Truth for those to understand who could understand it. This he did in his book, Revelation, and in his Gospel, and in his Epistles. He was also commanded to teach the Truth in all its details to a few disciples. These disciples of St. John and their followers formed within the early Church a body of believers that later was condemned as heretical, along with the so-called Gnostics, the men and women who claimed a secret, inner knowledge, not shared by the multitude.

In the beginning it had been God’s wish that the disciples of St. John, and their successors, should form a leaven within the Church, a guiding light of Truth, informed and directed by the Holy Spirit. But very soon others who did not possess the entire Truth, but who only possessed fragments of the Truth that they had inherited from Pythagoras and Plato, or from the Greek Mystery Cults, or from Zoroaster through Mithraism, or from Egypt, or Phrygia, or even from India and from Buddhism, or from any other of the hundred and the thousand byways into which the first Revelation had been carried and distorted; these self-proclaimed ‘Gnostics’ divided into a hundred squabbling sects, claimed each of them that their sect, and their sect alone, knew the whole Truth, and they thought themselves superior in wisdom to all others, and above all to the leaders of the Church, the successors of St. Peter and the Apostles. Their activities and indiscipline threatened the very existence of the Church, and therefore the Church drove them out, and perforce drove out the true Gnostics, the followers of St.. John, along with the false.

This created the danger that some portions of the Truth might be lost to the Church, those portions which only St. John had been permitted to teach to the few, and accordingly God appointed a new Teacher of Righteousness to teach again the whole Truth to a few. This man was a porter from the docks of Alexandria, named Ammonius, and nicknamed Saccas, the sack carrier. He was a Christian, but God commanded him to teach some disciples who were pagans, as well as some who were Christians, and to choose two of them, one pagan and one Christian, to write down his teachings. The Christian disciple he chose was Origen, and the pagan disciple Plotinus.

From the books written by these two men those essentials of the Truth that had been in danger of being lost re-entered the Church’s doctrines, for the neo-Platonists, as the followers of Plotinus were called, had a great influence on Christian thinkers, and in particular on St. Augustine; and Origen’s writings, although sometimes condemned, have continued to influence the Church to this day.

A hundred and fifty years after the death of Ammonius Saccas a new Teacher of Righteousness was chosen by God. This was Jerome, who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic into Latin, and purged the text of many corruptions. He also translated Origen’s Greek writings into Latin and made them more widely know in the West, although he condemned some of his teachings. But above all Jerome defended the Truth against many heresies, and in particular against the Pelagians. The Pelagian heresy denied the existence of Original Sin and the need for God’s Grace to redeem man, and by so doing struck at the heart of the Truth. This heresy, under other names, is still powerful today, and growing more powerful, and even more destructive of the Truth.
Five centuries after the death of St.. Jerome, another Teacher of Righteousness was chosen and commanded by God to recall the Church to the Truth, and to the Way, at the moment when the final Schism between East and West in the Church was approaching. This Teacher was named Odilon of Mercoeur, and he became abbot of Cluny, the great reforming monastery that for two centuries served as the heart and centre of reform within the Church. Five hundred years later again, the Church was once more in need of purification, and God chose as a new Teacher of Righteousness the German priest and scholar Erasmus. One of the many who were influenced by his writings was Martin Luther, but instead of reforming the Church, Luther and his followers set out to destroy it, and to replace it with what came to be called Protestantism.

A factor which helped the Lutherans and the other Protesters against the Church was the continuing existence within the Church of many Gnostics, although that name had ceased long before to be used by them. They had adopted or created many heresies, of which Catharism or Albigensianism is the best remembered. They influenced the Templars, and were influenced by them and the Eastern doctrines the Templars brought back to Europe from Palestine and Syria. They existed within the Church like a secret army of enemies, hostile to the Church’s authority, and convinced that they alone possessed the entire Truth.

They did indeed, many of them, possess particles and fragments of the Truth, and sometimes these were particles and fragments which the Church Herself had once more forgotten or neglected, or ceased to understand. And when Luther challenged the authority of the Pope and the Hierarchy, this hidden army became his ally. Its members were to be found everywhere in medieval and Renaissance Europe, both among the nobles and the new middle classes, but particularly among the small trades-men and artisans of the growing cities. They were in the Orders of Chivalry, and in the Guilds, such as the Guild of Free Masons, and above all among the men who printed books, and who made the paper on which books were printed. The paper makers and printers used the water marks of their paper and their colophon designs to spread their doctrines, and support and encourage one another in resistance to the Church’s authority, using symbols that carried hidden mystical teachings recognisable only to initiates.
These initiates, spiritual descendants of men and women who worshiped the Truth, and who themselves believed that they worshiped it, were to have as their spiritual descendants men and women who would deliberately turn away from the Truth, and attempt to destroy it, the so-called Illuminati.

Now, in this age, the whole Truth in all its details must be taught again, this time not to the few, but to all those willing and able to receive it.

 


 

THE NEW REVELATION
– All that you have been teaching me, in ‘The House on the Rock’, and now, appears to be leading further and further from all that I ever understood as Christianity and as Catholicism. Is this Your intention?
Yes. You have utterly misunderstood Christianity. So have most people for two thousand years. The Church adopted the ways and rites of paganism, the thinking of paganism. It was necessary to do so in the beginning, but it is no longer necessary or wise. I am teaching you the true nature of Christianity, the right way to worship God. In ‘The House on the Rock’ I taught you the nature of Reality. I told you everything you needed to know in order to turn to Me. Now I am showing you the Way.
– Jesus said that He was the Way. Was He right?
Of course He was right. He was God. He is God. He is My Self. He is the Way. All that I have been teaching you to discard are the accretions and corruptions that have attached themselves to His Teaching. Can you imagine that if Jesus stood beside you now, He would wish you to pray to St.Anthony, or sprinkle yourself with Holy Water, or make the Sign of the Cross?
– Not even the Sign of the Cross?
Do you not understand what that Sign means? What it means to Me? It is like having My Name on your tongue at every instant. The Cross is the greatest Mystery of existence. To make that Sign as it should be made is to crucify yourself. Not to touch your forehead and your breast and shoulders in thoughtlessness. Do you think also that Jesus would be happy to enter churches filled with expensive ornaments and gilding? That He would concern Himself with relics? With the supposed bones and pieces of Saints’ bodies? With supposed splinters of His Cross? All that is paganism, the religion of children and a disgrace to intelligent children. The religion of the Spirit was first revealed to men six thousand years ago, and you still worship the body. You think that God is pleased with gold. That the Virgin will be delighted with jewels. That God wishes to listen to endless chanting. That He is pleased with ceremonies. That He respects Hierarchies and imposing titles. That He wishes to see His priests dressed in purple. I tell you that these things will be destroyed. They are valueless. Abandon them. Worship God as He is. Worship God as Spirit.
Must we not think even of Jesus? Of Mary?
They are contained within God. They are God. Think of Them. Think of their lives on earth. Think of their humility. Has that humility a place in Cathedrals? With bishops and archbishops and cardinals? I tell you these things are coming to an end. Abandon them.
– What must we put in their place?
Humility. I wish My priests to be My servants, not princes.
And then?
After humility, purity. I wish My Religion to be pure and uncorrupted.
– Are we to have no churches?
Have caves. Have the open air. Have holes in the ground. Have the woods and fields. Have a room in a poor man’s house. But not buildings bought with the offerings of men and women who had not enough to eat.
They were glad to give.
Then now let them give to one another. I do not want their offerings of money. I do not wish My Son’s sacrifice to be interrupted by the rattling of men collecting offerings. Let men and women give their lives to Me instead. Let them give Me themselves.
– Are we not even to bury the dead in consecrated ground?
All ground is consecrated. All ground is holy. The earth is holy. My Son said, let the dead bury the dead. Let those who are blind and dead to the spirit concern themselves with bodies. A dead body is carrion to be hidden away. It is like last year’s leaves. Let it rot in the earth and share the earth’s holiness.
– People will stone me in the streets if they read this.
Run from them. Run from them like a man running from the plague. But write what I tell you to write.

 


THE PROPHETS
– You have asked me to write about the prophets, and prophecy. What am I to write?
Put down again what you have already written. That in the prophet Isaiah’s book there are prophecies that concern today. People will find these prophecies in another part of this book, with the interpretations that I shall give you. And you will add to Isaiah one chapter of Daniel, and I shall interpret that for you. When you have written down all that I tell you about Isaiah and Daniel, you are to write down what I tell you about The Book of Revelation, written by St.John the Beloved, the Evangelist.
– And the other prophets? Ezekiel and Jeremiah? Amos and Hosea?
They are to be read as all the Bible is to be read, with intelligence and understanding, and at leisure. What you are to write here is what it is urgent for people to know now, today, and not to be left until tomorrow. When a man goes on a journey, or runs out of his house when it is burning, he takes with him only what is essential to him. This is so now, for you, and the faithful, with the Bible. All the Bible, all the prophets are valuable. But only the few chapters that I shall interpret for you are essential to men now, at this moment of history. And for a long time to come. When I made the prophets prophesy, I made them prophesy not only for their own days, but for other days to come. One of those days is now here, and you must understand the prophecies that apply to it. Also I have given you new prophecies, that are contained in ‘The House on the Rock’, and in this book. I have made you prophesy, although that is not your real function. And the things I have made you tell of the future will apply not only to these coming years, but to other times far in the future. So will the books of the Hebrew prophets apply to the future as well as to now, and I shall make other men re-interpret them then.

 


ISAIAH
In the first chapter of his book Isaiah warns Israel that it has rebelled against God. Therefore it will become desolate, laid waste by famine, disease, civil wars. Only a few will survive.
This warning that Isaiah wrote in the eighth century before Christ, for his own people, applies today. The whole world has rebelled against God, and will be laid waste. Only a few of all the millions and the thousands of millions in the world will be left. There will be only a remnant left to turn back to God.
God commands that future remnant to listen. He tells them that He is tired of ritual and hypocrisy, and pilgrimages that have no meaning. The world has bathed itself in blood. Until it learns to do good and cleanse itself, God will not forgive the remnant. Mercy and charity must take the place of greed. Then God will relent. If there is still no change of heart, then there will be worse destruction, until the remnant repents and gives itself utterly to Him.
In Chapter 2 Isaiah foretells the teaching of Jesus, as the Messiah. And he tells of a time of peace to come when God will rule the world and the world will obey Him. But before this time of peace can come, God must intervene in the world’s affairs, with terrible effect. “Human pride will lower its eyes, the arrogance of men will be humbled.” Men will hide among the rocks to escape the terror of God’s Majesty.
This applies to the coming forty years, just as it also applied to the years that immediately followed Isaiah’s prophecy. All the things that men have taken most pride in, the idols of today; these will be broken and thrown away, become useless. The machines, the aeroplanes, the rockets, the luxuries; all these will become rubbish to be thrown away.
Chapter 3 elaborates the warning of ruin to come, and describes the signs of its coming; the insolence of the young towards the old; the contempt for authority and everything that should possess dignity. It describes the injustice of the rich towards the poor, and the lustful fashions of women. Isaiah warns that lust will be punished by humiliation and shame, and injustice by death. There will come a time when once rich and beautiful women will walk in sackcloth and stink with filth, their heads shaven. Their men will be dead. To this one must add the prophecy of Chapter 8, verses 21 to 23. This shows the survivor of a massacre wandering mad and starving through his country, blaspheming his dead leader, and God Himself, seeing nothing but misery and darkness.
But Chapter 4 promises once more that a faithful remnant will survive, purified by suffering. And God will come to them and comfort them. Next one must read the second chapter of Daniel that tells the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue made of gold for the head, and silver for the chest and arms. Its belly and thighs were made of bronze, its legs of iron, but its feet were a mixture of iron and clay. Daniel interprets this image for the King, as meaning a succession of Empires which will follow on Nebuchadnezzar’s own golden age, each less perfect than the last, until the feet of iron and clay crumble when a stone falls on them.
This is also an image of the coming years. For modern man there has been a time of golden prosperity that has ended, as has ended a brief period of silver, still prosperous, but rapidly declining. Now there has come a time of poverty, again not long. This is the bronze belly and thighs. And following on its small number of years, will come the time of iron tyranny, and starvation. This period too will be very short, and will be followed by anarchy, the iron crumbling because it no longer possesses the strength for tyranny. Men will hunt one another, and kill one another in order to have food.
After that vision from the Book of Daniel, return to Isaiah, Chapter 5. Isaiah once again warns Israel. comparing it to a vineyard that despite its owner’s care, yields sour grapes. This also applies to our world, that has exploited the earth’s riches to create vileness, pollution, misery for hundreds of millions of people.
And our world, like Isaiah’s Israel, is to be punished with destruction. Isaiah warns different kinds of sinner within Israel, and this is to be applied to the same kinds of man within our world; the greedy capitalist who does not care what ruin he brings to how many people so long as he makes a profit; to the idle, and the drunken, and the corrupt, whether they are rich or poor; Isaiah tells them of their punishment to come; ruin, and death. These things will come to them by war, and by invasion.
In the Sixth Chapter, Isaiah tells how he volunteered to serve God as God’s messenger, and how he was told to bring a warning of destruction to Israel. He was told that the people would hear but not understand. Would see, but not perceive what they saw. Isaiah asks God, “Until when will this blindness continue?” And God answers, “Until only a tenth of the people remain.” This also is to be the case with our world. Only a tenth will remain. Less.
In Chapter 8 the Messiah is prophesied again, and in this age of ours there will be a Messiah; not God, but a Servant of God. But before he is grown to adulthood civilisation will have collapsed. It will collapse because it rests on materialist foundations, and these will betray it.
Even so, God will save His faithful remnant. God commands the prophet to trust in Him, and not in the world. The prophet does so, and tells his disciples to follow his example.
In Chapter 10, Isaiah warns a ruler who is chosen by God as His instrument to punish faithless Israel, but who goes far beyond his orders, and believes that he is his own master and not God’s servant. God therefore allows the faithful remnant to recover their strength, and strike down the oppressor, because they now put their trust in God.
This is an image of what is to come soon. A tyrant will oppress and hunt down the remnant of the faithful, but God will save them when they have been purified by suffering, and the oppressor will be broken.
If you go forward to Chapter 24, you will read how the earth itself will be destroyed in the coming years. It will become a desert, ravaged by earthquakes and disasters. The earth has become defiled, because man has broken the everlasting Covenant. Man has finally and utterly broken the Laws of Nature by which he himself must live, and without which he must die.
Again, the chapter tells that a remnant will be saved, but the earth has been brought to the edge of destruction. Only then will God reveal Himself and rule openly.
– What am I to tell people about the meaning of these warnings?
That they are warnings, and that they are true. The threatened destruction is almost here.
– In how many years?
As you write this the age of silver is over.
– And the age of bronze? How long will that last?
Within five years from this day you will have entered the age of iron. Of tyranny, of starvation, of wars, of persecution of the faithful, of millions dying by famine.
How long will that age last?
Three and a half years.
– And the age of iron mixed with clay? Of anarchy and final ruin?
Another three and a half years. Within twelve years from now, as you write these words, your civilisation will have reached its end. Only God’s mercy at that moment will save the remnant from complete destruction.
– How many will survive? In the whole world? A tenth?
Not even a tenth.
– A hundredth part?
Not even a hundredth. And those who survive will envy those who have died. The remnant, those who are faithful and those who are not, will live like wild beasts in the desert, in holes in the rocks, in the remains of forests, gathering shell fish by the shores of polluted seas. And the shell fish will poison them and the deserts reject them.
– But a remnant will be saved?
A remnant out of that remnant. And some will believe, and turn to God for mercy.
– Only some?
Only some. Others will strive to build again those things that caused the destruction and they will regard the faithful as the enemies of mankind.
– How long will this time last?
Thirty years. Then God’s Servant, the new Messiah, who is not God, but His messenger, will lead the faithful remnant towards salvation.
– Salvation of the spirit?
And of the body. He will teach the faithful remnant to begin again, in a world that slowly heals itself. For a thousand years the descendants of that remnant will live as all men and women are meant to live, in love and harmony and belief in God and obedience to God.
– And will there still be those who do not believe?
Yes. They will be the bitter enemies of the faithful and will still seek by every means to destroy them. But the faithful will be protected. They will possess within themselves great spiritual strength. Until some of them, even some of the faithful, become proud again, and rebel again. But blessed are those of the faithful who shall live and die during that thousand years.
– The Messiah who is to come? You say he is already born?
He is already born.

THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN
So that you may read the Gospel as St. John intended it to be read, you must rearrange the first eleven chapters, and at one point you must insert the fourth chapter of St. Luke, changing the order of some of the verses, while in several places it is necessary to insert brief passages that are not to be found in The New Testament. The correct arrangement of the chapters and verses of St. John, and the one chapter of St. Luke, and of the hitherto omitted material is as follows:

St. John, ch.1, entire (v 45, for Joseph read Mary)
ch.2, vv 1 – 12
St. Luke, ch.4, vv 1 – 15

ch.4, vv 31 – 41
ch.4, vv 16 – 30 (for Joseph ‘s read Mary’s)
St. John, ch.2, vv 13 – 25 (in v15 delete phrase making a whip out of some cord)

ch.3, vv 22 – 36
ch.4, vv 4 – 54 (but at the beginning of this passage one must insert the words, Jesus then went back to Galilee)
ch.3, vv 1 – 21
ch.6, entire (except in v9 delete and two fish and in v11, he then did the same with the fish)
ch.11, vv 1 – 54 (after which one must insert a passage not to be found in The New Testament; see below)
ch.11, vv 55 – 57 (but for Jewish Passover read The Feast of Tabernacles)
ch.7, vv 1 – 13 (delete v 2, As the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles drew near. In v10, read it as However, when his brothers left for the Festival etc.)
St. John, ch.5, entire (only deleting v1)

ch.7, vv 16 – mid 19 (beginning in v16, at My teaching is not from myself: and ending at keep the Law!; to be followed by a passage not to be found in The New Testament: And because his teachings seemed to them like blasphemies, many of the leaders among the Jews desired that he should he killed, but they were afraid of the people. Jesus knew this and said to them,)
ch.7, mid 19 – 24 (beginning at Why do you want to kill me?)
ch.8, V 12
ch.8, V 59
ch.7, vv 14 – 15
ch.7,vv 25 – 27
ch.7, V 16 (the first three words only, Jesus answered them:)
ch.7, VV 28 – 52 (beginning in v28, at Yes, you know me. In v37 delete the words, On the last and greatest day of the festival,)
ch.8, vv 1 – 11 (after v11 insert, The words he had written were, ‘Tabitha, you are saved from death’, Tabitha being the woman’s name. Then insert, He went with his disciples into a lonely place outside the City and)
ch.9, vv 1 – 41
ch.10, vv 22 – 25
ch.10, vv 1 – 21 (to follow v21 one must insert a further passage not to be found in The New Testament; see below)
ch.8, vv 13 – 58
St. John, ch.10, vv 25 – 42 (beginning in v25 at the words I have told you).
There follows a passage not to be found in The New Testament, for which again see below, and one should then turn to Chapter 12 and continue to the end of the Gospel as it stands in The New Testament, except ch.21.

There are three substantial passages which are not to be found in The New Testament. The first to be inserted in Chapter 11 after v55, reads:

Now Agrippa had heard about Jesus and had been wishing for a long time to see him. He hoped also to see some miracle worked by Him. Therefore he gave orders that Jesus should be arrested and brought before him, for he was a great man in that country.
When Jesus was brought to Agrippa’s palace in Capernaum, Agrippa questioned him himself at some length, but without getting any reply. And meanwhile the chief men of the Jews were also there, violently pressing their accusations against Jesus, that he was a blasphemer, and an enemy of all authority. They wished Agrippa to order that Jesus be stoned to death, but Jesus escaped out of the judgement chamber by means of his friends among the Jews, and out of Capernaum in disguise, because he was afraid. He withdrew into the desert and there he gathered his disciples and taught them.

The passage to he inserted after Chapter 10, v21 reads:

Jesus fell asleep and in his sleep God spoke to him and commanded that he tell the people clearly that he was the Messiah, that he had come to suffer for them, and to pay for their sins with his own blood and his life. God told him that he might no longer hide himself, nor seek to escape from the vengeance of the Jewish authorities who sought to kill him. With that he woke, and stood up, and went to the Temple.
There he told the people that he was the Messiah for whom they had been waiting. That he was of David’s royal line and that the Scriptures foretold his coming.

The third passage, that is to follow Chapter 10, v42, reads:

Jesus dwelt with the Essenes at Qmran, where he had studied and dwelt as a young man, before his ministry began, and lived again among them as their brother, and one of their brotherhood. The disciple John was with him, alone of all the disciples, for John too was an Essene. But Jesus knew that he might not stay there beyond a Certain time, and that he must go back to Jerusalem to die, to be taken by the leaders of the Jews and lifted up and crucified. His other disciples came to seek him out in Qmran, to beg him to be with them again, and to teach them, and grant them the immortal life of which he had spoken. He knew then that his time was come.

In the remaining chapters there are other inserted or altered details that are incorrect, but none of consequence except one. In the final chapter of the Gospel, vv 33 – 37, there is the description of a soldier piercing Jesus’ side with a lance. This did not happen. The incident was invented by a later editor of the Gospel in reference to two passages in The Old Testament, Psalm 34, v20, and Exodus Chapter 12, v46. In fact neither of these passages is prophetic in the way that the Gospel editor understood them, and they do not refer to the Crucifixion. In accordance with this deletion, delete also the words in ch. 20, v25, and unless I can put my hand into His side. Again, in v27 delete the words Give Me your hand, put it into My side.
Finally, delete the whole of ch. 21, which is a spurious addition.

 


 

THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

In the first chapter Jesus, transfigured into the Judge of the World, appears to John on the island of Patmos. He tells John to write a book, that will contain an account of present happenings and things still to come.

John is to write to the seven churches of Asia to warn them, and praise them where to do so is just.

These warnings occupy the next two chapters.

In the fourth and fifth chapters, God gives the future of the world into His Son’s hands. In the sixth chapter, His Son, the Lamb of God, breaks the seals on the scroll of the future, and four horsemen appear, Victory, War, Famine, Plague. At the fifth seal’s breaking, all the martyrs of God appear, crying for justice against the world that martyred them. At the breaking of the sixth seal there is a violent earthquake, and the sun turns black. The moon becomes red as blood, and the stars fall. The sky itself vanishes. All the inhabitants of the earth from rulers to the poorest take to the mountains and try to hide among the rocks and caves.
But in the seventh chapter the faithful remnant of Israel are marked on their foreheads for salvation, before the seventh seal is broken. And all the persecuted faithful of the past are before the Throne of God, praising Him.

In the next chapter the Lamb breaks the seventh seal and there is a great silence in Heaven for about half an hour. After which an angel throws down fire from Heaven on the earth and there is thunder and lightning and the earth shakes.

There is hail and fire and blood falling on the earth and a third of the earth and all that grows on it is burnt up.

A third of the sea turns to blood and a third of all sea creatures and of all ships on the sea are destroyed.

A third of all the fresh water in the world turns to bitter poison.

The sun and stars darken by a third of their light.

In the ninth chapter there is a plague of giant locusts that sting like scorpions. They are like horses armoured for battle. After the plague of locusts there is an invasion of horsemen, led by devils who kill one third of the human race that still survives. Even so, those left alive do not repent.

In the tenth chapter, John hears and learns secrets he is not to write.

Much of what is written in these first ten chapters is an imagery of what was soon to happen to Israel during the Roman war. The book was written in 60 A.D. In 70 A.D. Jerusalem itself would be destroyed, and Israel would be scattered to the four corners of the world. Pious Jews could look forward only to a new Exile and a more terrible servitude.

But much else in these chapters applies to our own time, and the coming years. It describes the catastrophes that threaten us. And the next three chapters describe the sequence of tyrannies during which these catastrophes will happen. Under the rule of these tyrants there will be wars and famines and plagues and earthquakes, and the sea and earth will be poisoned. The faithful will be hunted and persecuted, and only a remnant will keep the Faith.

Again, the prophecies of these chapters are cloaked in imagery.

The eleventh chapter tells you that the world is to be warned again, by two prophets, of all that is to come.

The twelfth chapter tells how a Woman appears as a great sign in Heaven. She is giving birth, and is attacked by a red dragon. But God takes Her child and the Woman escapes into the desert.

Then there is war in heaven between the angels and the dragon. The dragon is driven down to the earth, and there he hunts for the Woman, but fails to destroy Her. Instead, he makes war on the remainder of Her children, who are God’s faithful.

In the thirteenth chapter, a beast comes from the sea onto the land and the dragon gives his own authority in the world to the beast. The whole world pays homage to the dragon and to the beast. For three and a half years the beast is allowed by God to make war on His faithful, and to have authority over the world.

A second beast comes from under the ground and becomes servant to the first beast, and increases his authority by working miracles on his behalf. A great statue is made of the first beast and every human being is obliged to worship it, on pain of death. Every one is to be branded with the name or number of the beast. Its number is 666.

The interpretation of these chapters is as follows.

In the eleventh chapter the two prophets symbolised by the two olive trees, the two lamps, are two books, of which this is one. The other is The House on the Rock.

In the twelfth chapter, the Woman crowned with twelve stars is the Church. The Communists will hunt Her into the desert and attempt to destroy Her. In the thirteenth chapter, three tyrants are described. One will follow the other, at intervals of a few years. The third tyrant will demand that every man and woman and child carry the tyrant’s sign on his hand or his forehead, or on hers.
All this I have been told to write.

 


THE GOSPELS
Matthew was written first, by a disciple of the apostles, in A.D. 50, in Aramaic.
Mark was written second, by a disciple of St. Peter, in A.D.64, in Greek.
Luke was written third, by a follower of St. Paul, in A.D.68, in Greek.
John was written last, by St. John himself, in A.D. 90, in Greek.
The Acts were written by Luke in 51 and 52 A.D.

There was an earlier Gospel written by St. James, cousin of Our Lord, in A.D. 40, in Hebrew. This contained the Sayings of Our Lord. It also contained a true account of Our Lord’s childhood and his education by the Essenes. These latter accounts were suppressed or altered by ‘Matthew’ ‘Mark’ and ‘Luke’, who thought then’ discreditable.

Revelation was written before St. John’s Gospel, in A.D 60. St. John believed then that Our Lord would return soon, and that the prophecies he was writing concerned the next few years. Therefore no “Life of Jesus” would be necessary. Thirty years later Jesus revealed the truth to him and he then wrote his Gospel, shortly before he died.

Other men here and there wrote down sayings and recollections of Jesus but these were not sources for any of the Gospels.
Our Lord was born in B.C. 4 according to our erroneous chronology and He died in A.D. 29. St. John was ten years younger.

 


 

JESUS
– In all that You have told me, in this purification of religion, is there still room for Jesus?
Yes. He is the centre of this purified religion. He is God. I have told you so.
But I am thinking of Jesus the man. You told me that Jesus was still in the world as a man, in the form and shape of a living man. That one might see Him and touch Him.
That is still true.
But what place is there for Him in this religion stripped of prayers, of everything that simple people hold dear, and that serves to protect and encourage their Faith? They will not recognise it as theirs.
They must recognise it. It has become not more complex, but simpler. A child could grasp its essentials in half an hour. Men turned away from God, towards death. God sent His Son to save them, to tell them how to find God again. His Son is still there still showing them the Way. That is the whole of religion. That is the whole of its doctrine and its theology.
I do not understand this about Jesus I do not understand anything You tell me a bout Him. How can He still be in the world?
He is everywhere. He is God. He is still a man.
– And I could find Him?
You must.
When the veils You have described as separating the spirit from God when they fall away –
It is Jesus that you find, behind the fourth veil. He will not seem to you like God. He will seem to you like a man.
Like a man I can touch and see?
Yes.
– And is this a vision, or a physical reality?
It is a physical reality.
– Then I am in despair. If it was to be a vision I might hope for it. But this!
You must wait and see.
– And this is true for everyone? For all the mystics who have seen You? St. Theresa, John of the Cross?
Everyone. From St. John the Beloved, the Evangelist, until today.
– And it has been not a mental, but a physical experience? Of flesh and blood?
Yes.
– I cannot understand this.
Because you do not understand the nature of flesh and blood. I have explained it to you and it has meant nothing. Flesh and blood is an illusion, an image of reality. When the spirit sees God, it sees Him as God wills Himself to be seen. For the Christian mystic God wills this experience of Himself to be an experience of Christ, of Jesus, in terms the mystic’s spirit can understand and will find most immediately convincing. For someone who approaches God by another path it would be another form of reality. But for the Christian, Jesus is in the world. He is there. And for the simple who do not need to trouble their minds with talk of other paths and image and reality, that truth is enough. For them, and in truth, Jesus is a man, and they must find Him, and kneel in front of Him, and touch His hands. Indeed, they do not need to find Him. When the time is ready, He will find them.
May I ask more questions about this?
Yes.
Was Jesus a man? In the sense that I am a man? In the sense that You have told me all men are, with other lives already lived as animals, as creatures, and with more lives still to live, as spirits?
Yes. He was. He is.
And the Virgin Mary?
Yes. She too. Both He and She were human in all respects.
Did They leave this humanity behind Them?
No more than you will do when you die. They brought it with Them, to Me. But it still exists. Their humanity, their human forms are still in existence, as yours will be. Yours will change, be purified. Become perfect. Theirs had no need of change being already perfect in Their lives But is was and still remains humanity. And what They were before Their human lives still exists, perfect of its kind. And Their lives as spirits still exist but as Spirit, as Perfection, as God. I have told you, a man is not one, but many things. So is God.

 


THE LAW
– You have told me to write of the Law. What do You mean?
I mean the New Law for the New Church. The rules by which the New Church is to be guided. They are simple, as the New Church is to be simple. Keep the commandments, to love God, and to love your neighbour as yourself. Pray to God as I have taught you, in private. Go to Mass when you can. If you can go often, do so.
– Every day?
No.
– Every week?
Yes. On Sundays when that is possible.
– Is the Mass to be simple?
Very simple. It is a sacrifice, not a ceremony.
– Is there to be music at any Mass? Or singing?
No.
– But people have loved music, and choirs, and the new Folk Mass with young people playing guitars.
Let them play music and sing at other times. This is My sacrifice. Nothing should distract from it. Not music. Not ceremony. Not vestments. Not choirs.
– How should the priest he dressed?
Simply.
– In white?
In his ordinary clothes.
– This seems to be failing to do You honour.
I wish you to honour Me in your hearts and in your minds and in your manner. I wish you to be quiet. I wish you to pray, silently. I wish you to think of Me, who made you, and of what I have suffered for you, and am still suffering.
– What words is the priest to say?
No words. He is to take bread and wine, or any substitute if bread and wine are not available, and when he and you have prayed in silence and you are ready he is to give them to you, in both kinds. A little of the bread. A little of the wine. To each of you. Let everyone take a little.
– Are we to fast before Mass?
No. If you live as you should, if you eat and drink as you should, there will be no need of fasting.
– Are we ever to fast? To observe meatless days? Lenten fasts?
You should not eat meat on any day. All your days should be like Lent. You should eat to live, for health, not for pleasure or greed. You should enjoy your food as My gift to you. But not take great care and pains about it.
– You say all our days should be Lent?
Yes. You are preparing to meet God.
– Should we be sad always?
No. The opposite. You should be filled with joy always. Do you need too much to eat and drink before you can be joyous? But not irrational joy. Not the mindless happiness of the drugged body. Your joy should spring from knowledge of God, and of Perfection and of the possibility that you can become perfect, and that that is God’s plan for you.
– The Church long ago abandoned this practice of the laity drinking the wine, for reasons of hygiene I believe. Are we to restore it, and ignore the risks of infection?
Yes.
– But if someone has an open sore on their mouth? A vile disease? Or even a severe cold that could he passed on to others?
When people drink in public houses and cafes, do they worry about who has drunk from the same cup before them? Do they imagine that rinsing the cup in dirty water as cafes and public houses do is hygienic, or prevents infection?
– How long is this Mass to be?
Ten minutes. Five. It is not to be made a parade of devoutness by people praying for a long time. They should be prepared before they come to the Mass. Their devoutness should be shown to Me, in private. At the Mass they should need to do no more than compose their minds.
– What is the priest to do to consecrate the bread and wine?
What he has always done, but silently. Those who are priests know what to do.
– Is there to be confession? In private, to a priest?
No. Only to Me. As you write this, while there are still priests in plenty, let people confess to them. But not in the future.
– And how will the penitent know that he or she has received absolution from You?
I shall tell them unmistakably.
– But people deceive themselves, and never more than in religion. People will say that I am deceiving myself in all this.
If they deceive themselves it will not matter. The sacrifice will not be of benefit to them. It cannot be.
– Are they ever to confess to one another?
No.
– May anyone but an ordained priest distribute the bread and wine?
No.
– Is there to be any preaching?
No. Let people read the Gospels. Let them understand them.
– But if they misunderstand?
Let them read this book. And The House on the Rock. Let them read St. Theresa of Avila.
– Nothing else?
For pleasure, yes. Let them read anything.
– Are there to be forms of marriage, of baptism? The Last Rites?
Marriage and baptism, yes. The Last Rites, no.
– Are marriage and baptism to be as simple as the Mass?
Yes. The priest will know what is needed, what is essential. Let there be no more.
– What kind of churches are we to have? Are they literally to be caves? Or places in the woods and fields?
If necessary. Otherwise let them be the simplest possible. No statues, no altar, no holy pictures, no Stations of the Cross. A place to kneel.
– And a Crucifix?
No.
– A plain cross?
No.
– How are the bread and wine to be served?
On a dish. In a cup or a glass. I do not need gold and silver to improve My sacrifice. Let them only be clean.
– Are we to take the bread in our hands as some people do today?
No. Only the priest is to touch the bread or the cup with his hands once the bread and wine, or whatever other substances may be used in their place, have been consecrated as vehicles of Grace. When the mass is ended the cup and the dish are to be washed like any other cup or dish, by anyone.
– Are the Host and the consecrated wine ever to be preserved after the Mass, or for a period, as in the Adoration of the Sacred Host, or the Exposition or Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament today?
No. Let them be consecrated whenever and wherever they are needed and consumed then.
– If any are left over?
Let them also be consumed.
– Suppose a renegade priest were to consecrate a great quantity of bread and wine. Would this matter?
Only to him.
– Could he or others practice a Black Mass with it?
No one could prevent him. Nor should they try. He is damning himself.
– Would he not gain wicked power by it?
No. It would be an obscene charade. Nothing else.
– Are there to be special days of obligation to hear Mass, or rather, to attend it?
No. Sundays, if that is possible. Or when you and the priest can manage, safely.
– Are there to be special times of the day for Mass?
Any hour will do.
– Are there to be bishops, and archbishops?
No. Only priests.
– And are priests still to be celibate?
Yes.
– Are they to say an Office of the Day?
No.
– What duties are priests to have?
They are to guide the people. To be their servants.
– In a literal sense? To sweep floors? Nurse the sick?
No. In a spiritual sense. Let good lay people help one another in physical things, and help the poor, and the sick.
– How are priests to be ordained if there are to be no bishops?
One priest will ordain another. He will lay his hands on the head of the priest-to-be and the power of the Holy Spirit will ordain the new priest.
– Is this to be in front of others?
Yes. At a Mass. After the sacrifice.
– And the Apostolic Succession?
The Apostolic Succession does not exist, in the way that the Church describes, by one bishop laying his hands on another, from the time of the apostles until today. There have been boy bishops, and even boy popes, appointed by great families to strengthen their political influence. There have been magnates who have bought bishoprics for their sons as they would buy them an estate, to set them up in the world. There have been popes who appointed their illegitimate sons cardinals and women who have obtained the papacy for their lovers. Do you imagine that the Holy Spirit can be conveyed by such hands? I alone convey the gift of the Holy Spirit, when and on whom I choose.
– Is it to be the priest’s choice alone, whom he ordains?
No. The people must suggest names. Two or three. The priest must then choose one.
– The people of the parish?
There will be no parishes. Only groups of the faithful who follow and surround one priest, and are served by him.
– How is the priest to be recognised as a priest if he wears ordinary clothes?
The people will know him.
– And a stranger priest?
He will identify himself. It is not the clothes that make a priest.
– What training must a priest have in the New Church?
He must have read this book, and The House on the Rock, and done his utmost to understand them, and to put their teachings into practice. He must experience a call from God. He must be unmarried and willing to remain celibate. He must be thirty years old, or older.
– Only those things?
Are they not enough?
– Is all this for a time of persecution?
It is for all times. But times of persecution are coming, when priests and people will be hunted down like foxes.
– How are Christians to identify one another? Is there to be any sign or gesture?
None. They will tell one another, ‘I am a Christian.’
– And if they are being persecuted? Are they to acknowledge what they are to the authorities?
Yes. If they are asked. A Christian may never deny his Faith, no matter who questions him, nor what the danger may be in answering truthfully.
– Even a danger to his family or friends?
No matter what the danger. No matter what the circumstances.
– And if they are asked to identify their priest, or other Christians?
They must refuse.
– To death?
To death.
– What must the attitude be of followers of this New Law to those who still follow the Old Law, of the present Church?
One of welcome and love.
– And to those of other Churches?
The same. They must love all men, and women, and welcome all men and women who believe in God. Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Pagan. All.
– Must they preach this New Law and Revelation? Must they, or their priests, be missionaries?
No. Their example must be their preaching, and their teaching, and their mission. Books will tell all that needs to be known about them and their Church.
– And this is the same Church that has always been?
The same. It is Mine.
– But within it there are to be no hierarchies?
No. Only the priests and the people. And the Servants of God.
– Not Cardinals, nor a Pope?
No. As you are writing this Pope John Paul II has begun to reign. After him there will be one more Pope. Then none. There will be a Servant of God to guide the Church.
– And he will be a priest?
He will be a priest.
– And all priests are to be men? Always?
Yes. I have told you so.
– Is this the whole of the New Law?
Yes. All of it is in this book and in The House on the Rock.
– There must still arise many questions in the future that are not answered in these pages?
No Law can answer in advance all detailed questions that will arise later. When such questions occur, the faithful must use their reason, and their humility. They must pray for guidance, and it will be given to them.
– How must they pray?
They must listen. The priest must listen. And they must be humble and intelligent about what they hear.
– I see great danger in this. Of the unintelligent and the arrogant and the hypocritical attempting to impose their wishes by claiming them to be the Will of God, revealed to them in prayer.
The priest must decide. And in questions that affect all the faithful, the whole Church, the Servant of God will decide.
– He will be known to everyone?
To those who need to know him.
– And the other Servants of God?
They will maintain their secrecy.

 


THE SACRAMENTS
– Should baptism be given to infants?
No. Not in the future.
– What age should a child be before he or she receives baptism?
Children should not receive baptism. A girl or a young man must be old enough to understand what baptism means, and to choose to be baptised of their own free will. They must also be able to continue as practising Christians. Baptism involves the making of promises, and these promises must be kept. No one can make these promises for someone else, nor be sure of their being kept by someone else.
– Suppose a child is mentally handicapped, and can never understand the meaning of baptism? Is that child ever to be baptised?
No.
– This seems to go against all the teaching of the Church on baptism.
Yes. The Church has been wrong in this.
– And the other sacraments? Does the same rule of understanding apply to those? Even to Communion?
Of course. To believe otherwise would be to regard the sacraments as acts of magic. A sacrament possesses value in accordance with the degree of understanding with which it is received. If there is no understanding there is no value.
– Then is an imbecile ever to receive communion?
No. The imbecile will never need it. There are other ways for him, or for her, to receive Grace.
– Are we to alter our beliefs about the sacraments in other ways?
Yes. Not all the sacraments are necessary. The only sacraments Christians require are baptism, when they can understand its meaning; marriage, for those choosing that state; ordination, for those who choose to remain celibate and become priests; and above all, Communion.
– We are to do away with confirmation?
Yes. If young people accept baptism of their own free will and in full understanding of what they are undertaking, there is no need for it to be confirmed at a later time.
– And confession? Penance?
I have told you so already. Confess to God.
– The consecration of bishops?
There are to be no bishops.
– The Last Rites?
They are unnecessary. Communion is enough if the dying person can receive it with understanding.
– And if he or she cannot?
Then it would serve no purpose to give it to them.
– What kind of instruction should a young man or a girl receive before baptism?
The example of their parents or those near them.
– Should they receive any formal teaching?
No. If they ask questions they should receive answers, but that is all. Nothing should be thrust on them. Or on any non-Christians.
– Does this mean the end of missionary work?
Yes. All your teaching must be by the example of your lives, as I have already told you. I will repeat it, and emphasize it. Do not offer your knowledge or your faith or your beliefs unasked. And be sure that those who ask do so from a true desire to be informed. To others, tell the least you can. Do not lie, but do not volunteer information.
– This seems a selfish practice, the keeping of the Faith as a secret for those lucky enough already to possess it? Did Christ not tell us to go out and preach to all nations?
All the nations have been preached to, for many centuries. And this teaching that I am giving you now is not for the present day. It is for the time of troubles that is coming. When it is time to preach openly again, the faithful will told.
– Who will tell them?
I shall.

THE EUCHARIST
– You have told me that in the Eucharist the bread and wine are ‘vehicles for Grace’. Are they only vehicles? Do they not turn into Your Body and Blood? Become mystically but entirely changed into You? Into the Body and Blood of Jesus?
No. I have said. They are merely vehicles. Channels of Grace.
– But is that not what Christ’s words meant, at the Last Supper? When He said “take it and eat; this is My Body.” and “Drink all of you from this, for this is My Blood…”?
He did not say those things, in that way, with that meaning.
– But all the Gospels say that He did.
Not all. Only two. John does not mention it, nor Mark, as a rite to be repeated. It was inserted in the remaining Synoptic Gospels, of Matthew and Luke, for two reasons, both propagandist. One reason was to persuade the faithful that Jesus approved of wine drinking, and that therefore He could not have been an Essene. This was of vital importance within the early Church, because it was already divided, even then, within a few years of the Resurrection, between the mainly gentile followers of Peter and Paul, and the strictly Jewish and puritanical followers of John the Beloved Disciple and James the Just, cousin to Jesus, who were both Essenes, as Jesus had been. Most gentiles could not and would not accept the austerities of the Essene teachings and Peter and Paul, and their disciples, wished to offer to gentile converts a version of Jesus’ teaching that did not demand asceticism in His followers. Peter hesitated about this, as the Gospels show, for he had known Jesus well. But Paul had not known Jesus in the flesh, and of course the followers of these two great leaders of the gentile Church had not known Jesus at all, except through the descriptions their teachers gave them. All three Synoptic Gospels were edited, if unequally, to put forward the Pauline, gentile view, that Jesus was not an ascetic, and had not preached asceticism, nor taught any secret doctrine, nor higher doctrine, such as the Gnostics claimed to possess from Him through John, and on which they based their own ascetic practices and world-denying beliefs.
It was on the one hand a struggle between two sincerely held views of the entirety of what Christ’s teaching had meant and what He required of His followers, and you must remember that Christ’s teaching was not written down until years after His death and resurrection, and in the cases of Mark and Luke at second and third hand. On the other hand it was a struggle for authority within the Church, the new born Christianity, for control of it, and as well as the memories of Christ’s teaching, sometimes uncertain after the lapse of years, there was on the side of Paul a natural born great leader’s vivid consciousness of what is possible for the generality of mankind. While on the side of John and James the Just there was a prejudice against what is too easy and too popular; a too great readiness to insist that what was possible for an inner circle, a puritan elite of followers, must be imposed on all who would become Christians.
Ideally, the two factions should have complemented one another, for in any movement there must be those who are more intellectual and those who are less; those who are austere in their ways, and those who are more easygoing. It is not a case of virtue opposed to vice, or better opposed to worse, but of two ways to God. There was room for both within the Church, but if for any reason one faction had to be sacrificed then the minority must be that one, leaving the field to the popular party, the majority. It was not by My desire that it should happen, but given the circumstances of the time, and the extravagant pretensions of some self-proclaimed followers of John, some pretended, false Gnostics who challenged all authority within the Church except their own supposed inner light and secret knowledge, and by so doing created anarchy wherever they were listened to; because of all this it became my reluctant Will that the Gnostics should be expelled, the good and devout with the reckless and the silly and rebellious. I have told you some of these things before.
– Then are all the references to Jesus drinking or offering wine, or eating or offering fish, inventions?
There are none to His drinking wine, even now. That would have been too great a blasphemy. But those that exist which show Him offering it, or creating it from water as at the Wedding Feast of Cana, or allowing fish to be distributed to the hungry along with bread as in the feeding of the many thousand, or of cooking fish as in the spurious final chapter attached to John’s Gospel, all these passages are inventions, or distortions of real events. In the case of the feeding of the thousands, the forgers were not content with distorting the true miracle; they doubled it by inventing a second, almost identical miracle, only varying the numbers of the fish and loaves and baskets later filled with scraps. They did this to emphasize their argument.
But their alteration of the story of the Last Supper had a second motive. They wished to appeal to those of the faithful who had once been initiates of one or other of the pagan mystery cults, and to those pagans who were still initiates and followers of such cults but who might be persuaded to turn to Christianity instead. By describing Jesus as offering His actual Body and Blood to His disciples, in the shape of bread and wine, the Gospel forgers were inventing a ritual, a mystery, which exactly paralleled ritual elements within the Mystery Cults. All pagans were familiar with the idea of a god who died and was resurrected, who was a sacrifice for the continued prosperity and fertility of the earth and Nature. Many of them were familiar with the idea of eating the sacrificed god’s body and drinking his blood as a sacrament of union with him, a promise of immortality. Jesus Himself used such imagery, such a metaphor, in his preaching to the multitude after the miracle of the feeding of the thousands with a few loaves of bread. By doing so He shocked his orthodox Jewish hearers, but the poor men and women of Galilee, who were as much swayed by pagan and Greek ideas as by Judaism, were not shocked. They understood.
Therefore, in creating this ritual and giving to it the authority of Jesus’ own words, the Gospel forgers hoped to broaden and succeeded in vastly broadening the appeal of Christianity. For while the pagan Mysteries were exclusive, and hard to enter, the Christian Mystery was all-embracing, open to all who wished to join; slave as well as free, women as well as men, gentile as well as Jew, barbarian as well as Greek. It was a Mystery for the multitude, and all at the expense of a few lines entered into manuscripts, a few words altered, a few ideas distorted. And in the end it did not matter, for I made use of the inventions.
– But it is not only in the Gospels that the story of the Last Supper and of Jesus offering wine and bread to His disciples occurs. St. Paul says in his first epistle to the Corinthians, in Chapter 11, that he received the description from ‘the Lord’, from Jesus, in a vision of revelation. That on the night He was betrayed He took some bread and broke it, and said “This is My body.” Was Paul lying when he said that he received this story from Jesus?
No.
– Then I don’t understand. You say St. Paul’s story is true, yet the same story in the Gospels is false. How can that be?
Because you have not read the stories carefully enough. Does Paul mention wine? Or offering the bread to the twelve?
– No. But he does make Jesus say “This is My body.” Surely there can be no two meanings there?
There can indeed be two meanings. Does Jesus, in Paul’s account, say of the contents of the cup, “This is My blood”?
– No.
Exactly. Jesus was speaking in metaphor as He broke the bread, exactly as He had done after the miracle of feeding the thousands. He spent His whole teaching life speaking in metaphors. He said on another occasion, “I am the true vine.” Do you therefore worship every vine as the Body of Christ? Or any vine? No. You accept that for what it was, an image, a colourful expression containing an inner, spiritual teaching. He said again, that He is the water of life. Do you worship water as His blood, or pay mystical homage to wells and springs as pagans used to do?
In that same chapter of I Corinthians Jesus states clearly and absolutely His intention and expectation with regard to the breaking of bread and drinking from the cup. He said that you were to do this as a memorial of Him. And you were to do it, not offer it to others. Do it yourselves. Break the bread you have, and in eating it, remember Him. Drink from your own cup, and in drinking, remember Him. Which is what the earliest Christians did. Read the passage in I Corinthians which immediately precedes the verses we have been considering. St. Paul describes the Christians of Corinth eating the Lord’s Supper in such ugly haste and greed that before one had fairly begun another was almost drunk, and some even went without anything to eat because others had eaten too much. Does that sound to you like the description of the Holy Eucharist? At which a priest or elder offers bread and wine in small quantities to a congregation? Your present-day Gospel commentators claim that this was merely a preliminary feast, an agape, to be followed later by the Eucharist. What kind of Eucharist could it have been when some were drunk, and some overfed, while others were fasting not from choice but from being forestalled at the table by the stronger and greedier?
– But surely this is why St. Paul is reproaching them? For greed?
It is. And he is reproaching them for that, and that only. For their gluttony and irreverence, nothing else. Not for holding the wrong kind of ceremony. Not for omitting from their ceremony the most essential, the only essential part. In the year 60 A.D. when he wrote that epistle he did not expect them to carry out a Eucharistic ceremony because no such ceremony existed, either in Rome or Corinth or Jerusalem or anywhere else within the Christian Church. The practice of the earliest Christians was to hold an agape, a love feast, which was an imitation of and memorial of the Last Supper, not a mystic sacrifice. At this feast the broken bread did indeed symbolise Jesus, and the drink in their cups reminded them that He had shed His blood for them. But it was a memorial, such as He had recommended to the disciples, nothing more. Nor did anyone at such a feast play the role of Jesus, nor offer the bread or the drink to the others. They served themselves or were served as happens at every gathering for a meal.
But as I told you just now, some early gentile Christians had belonged to Mystery Cults before they became Christians, or else they were familiar with the practices of such cults, where a priest did offer bread and wine to the initiates, not as symbols or memorials, but in the pretence that they were in some mystical way parts of the sacrificed deity’s flesh and blood. It was in fact a relic of a more savage and distant past in which annually a chosen victim had been sacrificed and eaten in reality. Such ex-initiates, or those familiar with the pagan rites, were prepared to believe that the agape, the memorial supper, was exactly such a mystery, and as I have told you, the Gospel forgers seized on this readiness and made capital out of it.
And by so doing they struck a further blow at the Essenes and the Gnostics, the followers of St. John and St. James. For they created that paradox, a popular elite, a mystery which all could enter and understand, a Gnosis which the humblest slave could grasp, whereas the Gnosis of St. John, the ‘mystery’ of the Essenes to adapt that word to the Essenes’ body of teaching – these things required hard study of mind and severe discipline of the body and the senses.
– Then why did those who altered the three Gospels, of Matthew, Mark and Luke, not alter John as well?
They did. They inserted into John the miracle of creating wine from water at Cana; the distribution of fishes at the feeding of the thousands, the final chapter in which Jesus is made to cook and offer fish for some of the disciples, after His Resurrection; they altered the order of many passages in the first eleven chapters of the Gospel as you know; they inserted references to Joseph as being reputed to be Jesus’ father. They altered many things, but that one thing I did not wish them to alter and I prevented it. I wished a testimony to remain to the true story, which is that at the Last Supper Jesus spoke of the bread and wine only as a memorial to Him, and not as a Eucharist. And the only ceremony was that He washed the disciples’ feet before they ate and drank.
– Then the whole idea of the Eucharist is false? It is nothing?
No. It is the centre of the Christians’ faith, the means by which the Christian receives Grace and spiritual strength. By which he receives Me.
– Then I am utterly lost. After all You have just told me, how can this be?
Very easily. I made use of what came to exist. Since men and women were willing to believe in the bread and wine as a means of receiving Me, I made it true. You may say that man created the Eucharist, but God sanctified it.
– And You enter into the bread and wine?
Yes.
– But they do not become Your actual Body, Your actual Blood?
I have no Body in your sense of the word, and no Blood. Do you imagine Me a man like yourself?
– But Jesus was a man as well as God?
Yes, but He spoke not of His human body and blood. He spoke in spiritual terms, and in those terms the Body of God and Spiritual Grace are identical. You will remember that St. John describes Jesus saying “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.” Jesus said this immediately after the feeding of the thousands with the five barley loaves. He had indeed just told the crowd that if they wished for eternal life they must eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood. But by going on to say the words I have just quoted to you, that it is the spirit that gives life and that the flesh has nothing to offer, Jesus made it abundantly clear to those willing to understand Him what kind of flesh and blood He had meant, and that he had been speaking in metaphor. That His words held a spiritual and not a material, literal meaning.
– Yet the Eucharist is a material thing, or things. Material bread and material, physical wine. Do You still tell me that the ‘things’ are important?
In one sense they have no importance. They could be grains of rice and drops of water, as I have told you elsewhere. Any food that is not animal food, any liquid that is not harmful. The whole ceremony could have been different. It could have been the washing of feet. It could have been any practice that involved some physical reality. All that is vital is that there should be some physical substance present, and regarded with reverence, which can serve as a vehicle for the Holy Spirit to enter into the communicant.
– Surely the Holy Spirit entered the disciples without any physical means being present?
The tongues of fire were physical. They were the purest expression of matter that there can be, for the disciples were holy, and close to God. Yet even so, a physical expression, a physical channel of Grace was necessary. More than that, when Jesus Himself was baptised and received the Holy Spirit, it descended on Him in the form of a dove, as you may read in the Gospel of John. Because God had become man, had become Jesus, and had become enclosed in a physical, material envelope, physical means, a physical channel for Grace to enter Him was essential. Even for God. How much more for ordinary men.
– No Catholic will believe these things. They will imagine I am possessed by the Devil, or am a heretic.
If the Catholics you speak of are devout and good that does not matter. Despite your belief that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is an essential truth and doctrine of the Church, it is not. It is a detail attached to an essential truth. What matters, and what a devout Christian must believe, is that the Eucharist is important, and that It conveys Grace to those who receive It. How it does that need not concern those who might be troubled by such knowledge. But there are many others, willing and eager to receive Grace, if only they could persuade themselves that the means of receiving It are real, and not the inventions of charlatans or credulous simpletons in a remote and credulous past.
Many such people know of the influence of the pagan Mystery Cults and pagan beliefs and practices on Christianity, and they are tempted to believe that Christianity is really no more than another Mystery Cult, made respectable merely by historical success. Others are held back from accepting the Faith and receiving Grace because they cannot believe in the doctrine of the Eucharist as the Church teaches it. Others again who do possess and accept the Faith do so reluctantly because certain doctrines repel their intellects. Under stress they could easily turn away altogether from the Faith, thinking and believing sincerely that they were merely liberating themselves from an irrational and worn out superstition.
Remember again and again, as you write these words, and all else in this book and The House on the Rock, that you are not writing for people of simple and unquestioning belief in the teachings of the Church as they are today, but for those who are searching for the Truth in bewilderment, and sometimes in despair, longing to find It, yet demanding that It satisfy their intellect as well as their emotions, their mind as well as their spirit. And above all you are writing these words for those who will come to believe in Me in the future, and the far distant future, when the controversies and minutiae of today’s churches and their arguments will have no meaning, and men and women will have deeper insights and greater understanding.
– After all You have told me, I wonder if even the priest is necessary to give the Eucharist to the faithful. Could they not give it to themselves?
They could. And in future circumstances they will have to, on occasions. But while priests are still available to you, you must take the Eucharist from a priest, and gladly.
– How can we give the Eucharist to ourselves?
Now, you must not. But in the future, when by reason of wars and famines, and persecutions, and all the tragedies that are to come, no priest is available to a community of the faithful, or else some individual cannot reach a priest without unreasonable effort or too great danger, then indeed let such communities and such individuals do as the first Christians did, breaking and eating their own bread, or any suitable food, in memory of Jesus. When they do that with true reverence I shall be there, and with their food I shall enter into them to give them Grace.
– But even now, is the priest truly necessary? You have told me that in times to come we should confess ourselves direct to You, that You do not really approve of confession to a priest. I wonder now if you approve of priests in any role? Can we not all be our own priests, as some of the Reformers of the sixteenth century desired, and claimed was Your Will?
No. Priests are essential. They are the leaven within the bread of the Church. They are channels of Grace between God and man. They are living vehicles of Grace. Where the bread and wine of the Eucharist are ephemeral vehicles of Grace, the priest is such a vehicle of Grace for ever. Just as the Servants of God whom I have described to you are even greater and more powerful vehicles of Grace. And a time is coming when priest and Servant will be one and the same, the two names will have the one meaning. There will be no more than twelve Servant-priests in the entire world, and no other priests who are not Servants. This will be because of the destruction that is coming. You cannot now conceive of the extent of it, of how few will survive. After those days the faithful must do as I have just described, holding their own Eucharistic suppers and receiving Grace direct from Me, unless one of the twelve Servants is able to visit them.
– Surely it is better to receive It direct from You?
Yes, if the individual is very strong, and already near perfection. Then he or she will have no need of any intermediary. But for others the priest will bring not only the celebration of the Eucharist. He will bring with it human comfort and love, and teaching, and all the Grace that is within him, to strengthen those who are not yet strong enough to receive all they need direct from Me, whom they can neither see, nor touch, nor even hear very often.
– And confession?
I have told you, I do not wish it to remain as a sacrament. Confess to Me. If you feel the need of human advice and a priest is near you, go to him and ask his advice, ask for his teaching. Ask for comfort.
– Turning again to the Eucharist, You have also told me that only a priest may touch the bread with his hand when it has been blessed to become the Holy Eucharist, the Host. How then can an ordinary individual give it to himself in the absence of a priest? He or she must touch it with their hands?
No. Before the bread is blessed and sanctified it is merely bread. I will only sanctify it in such a case, use it as a vehicle for Grace, when the communicant has already placed it in his mouth, or in hers.

 


 

THE TRINITY
– In ‘The House on the Rock’, have You explained the Trinity fully?
No. It cannot be explained in full. To understand the full meaning of the Trinity is to understand everything, the whole of Creation, the whole meaning of the Universe, and of existence. But I will explain more of Its meaning to you. I have told you that Its image is a fire. The flames ate one part of it, the heat another, the light a third. And yet these three are inseparable. They are a trinity of qualities, a trinity of expressions, a trinity of natures, in the one reality of the fire. So it is with God and the Holy Trinity. God the Father can be likened to the flames. The Holy Spirit can be likened to their heat, their burning force. And God the Son to their light.
So much is easy to understand. But you must go beyond that to grasp that although the fire of our example is threefold, in essence it is one. It is not three separate things but one thing. It is the fire. So it is with Me. I am not Three but One. I am the Father. I am also the Holy Spirit, Mary the Mother of God. And I am the Son. But these are descriptions, not realities. I am My Self. In Me, Mind, Soul and Self are One. Within Perfection there can be no differences, no separate parts. Each part is the Whole. If you were to possess a fragment of Me, as you do in your own soul, you would and do possess the Whole of Me. All this you already know from the Eucharist.
Therefore it is meaningless when men or women say, “I will pray for this to the Virgin, She will hear my prayer.” Meaning that I the Father might not. It is meaningless to have a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, or to imagine that Jesus possesses some especial sympathy towards men that God the Father does not. All distinctions between one Person of the Trinity and another are meaningless and harmful. They lead back to paganism, to cults, to devotion to statues and private gods and intercessors. Worship God as God. Know and be grateful that He became man as Jesus and woman as Mary. But worship Him as God.
– When men sing hymns to Jesus, and recite litanies to the Virgin, does this offend You?
No. But it does not please Me. I told you that it is necessary to recite some prayers by rote in order to learn to concentrate your mind on Me. The Rosary is familiar, and therefore serves the purpose. But if a man is lame, and needs crutches, the crutches do not please his doctor. His doctor is only pleased when the man learns to do without them and can put them away. Therefore, keep the Rosary as an exercise for novices and beginners, but do not imagine that by reciting it you are praying. As for the rest, all these recitations are rubbish.
– There are saintly priests conducting Rosary crusades.
Let them. They are doing no harm. But neither are they doing any good. They have not understood the Gospels. There you are told not to recite many prayers, nor to pray in public, but to go into your room and lock the door and pray in secret.
– But in ‘The House on the Rock’, when we spoke of this, You told me that the ultimate aim was to pray together, to be united in prayer, many of us together.
Yes. And so it is. But real prayer, not recitations. When you can pray in silence, when you can join yourself to Me without words, without thoughts, without effort, but by complete surrender of your self and mind and soul to Me, then you will be ready to pray in unison with others, and their presence will mean nothing to you, nor yours to them. But your being many together will have its significance for Me.
– If we are to do away with prayers to the Virgin and to Jesus, are we not to call on them in any way?
If you call on Me, you call on Them. Re-read what you have just written. There is no Them. There is only Me. I am Them. They are Me. There is only one God.
– Are we not to use Their Names?
Not in prayer. When you think of Me, think of Me as God. God the One, the Indivisible, the Holy. All else is paganism.

PRAYER
– You have told me that it is only the Lord’s Prayer that we should say, and “Lord, Thy Will be done.” Are we also to practice meditation, and contemplation?
No. Forget the names of them. They become empty of meaning. Think of God. Think of the sufferings of His Son. Love God. Think of your duty towards others. Love others. You have been told long ago. Love the Lord your God. And love your neighbour as you love yourself. In these are contained all the Law and all the prophets. Do these two things as they should be done and you need do nothing else to reach perfection.

GOD
God is the vital force of the Universe. It does not proceed from Him. It is Him. It is a part of Him. It is the tangible expression of His being. It is the connection between God and Man, between God and Creation. God is Creation. He holds it in Being.
The energies which we know as electricity, electro-magnetism, light waves, radio and gamma and X- and cosmic waves; energies of all kinds; psychic and spiritual forces; all these are God Himself. They are not emanations from God. They are God. He is in all things. Without Him nothing could exist. All that is not God is illusion, it is God’s thought. The reality is within the thought. The thought is an image of reality, and if God ceases to think it, it ceases to exist. We, our selves, the material world that we see, all that we see and know with our temporal minds, is this kind of illusion. All that is real is the energy which created the illusion and holds it stable in existence.
The scientist begins to realise this truth through physics. He is learning that matter is an illusion, and that energy alone is real. The scientist’s error is in believing that Reality has no Will, that energy is mere undirected force, waiting for him, the scientist, to harness and understand it. The scientist believes that only humanity possesses will, and intelligence. This is to say that what is created, the illusion, possesses will and intelligence, and that what created the illusion possesses neither. It is to say that the Creator is at the disposal of the created, that it is not the artist who paints the picture, but the picture that controls the artist.
The only Reality is God. The scientist is beginning to explore that Reality, like a penguin exploring the Antarctic, and deciding that there are no men, and that penguins alone exist. That the whole world consists of snow and ice.
We are no more than God’s thoughts, but He has given freedom to His thoughts, to remain with Him, or turn from Him. That turning from Him, away from Reality to unreality, away from true existence, is the beginning of evil, of non-existence. God is light. Evil and non-existence are darkness. God is heat. Evil is cold. God is life. Evil is death. God is energy and being. Evil is nothingness.
God not only spans and interpenetrates the universe. He is the universe. We dwell in God because there is nowhere else to dwell. All that is, all that ever can be, all that ever has been, is God. What is not God does not exist, cannot exist. It is illusion. As we relinquish God, we cease to exist. Evil is temporary. God is eternal. When time ends, evil will end.
Time and space have no real meaning because they are contained within God. God being everywhere, in all places at once, no place is ‘far away’, or farther off, or nearer. All places are here. To God every place is here, as to a man all thoughts produced by his mind are here, within his mind. A man does not say “That thought is in a distant part of my mind, this thought is nearer.” As soon as he thinks a thought, it is here, now. So it is with God, except that for God all thoughts are simultaneous. All His Creation, all His thoughts, are here and now. To God every place, every event, is here, within Him, within His Mind. There is therefore no time, because there is no need of time to travel from one place to another, or for one event to succeed another. All that happens is occurring within God’s Mind now. This ‘Now’ is not a moment of time. It is Time, all of it, but real time, eternal, and in our sense of the word, timeless.
Human time is a convention created for limited minds to permit them to become aware of events successively. Space is a necessity for limited minds to become aware of what is not themselves. But for the Self of God there is no need for the concept of Space. For the Mind of God there is no need for the concept of Time.
Here one can understand the possibility of travel faster than light, in both space and time. Thought is faster than light. And thought is an energy that is God. We are given and lent the capacity to think by God. We think therefore we are. We think, therefore we have been created. But the power to think is not ours, but God. Not God’s, a power belonging to God, but God Himself. God in us. When we misuse the power to think, by thinking not of God, but of evil, we injure God, we recrucify Him. He who thinks of evil, does evil. A mind thinking evil is a wound in God’s Being, open and hideous. It is not necessary to do evil to wound God. Thought is more real than action, more powerful than action. It is by thought that we are in tune with spiritual. and psychic power. The world of physical action is temporary and illusory. The world of thought is real, and eternal. The great souls, the saints, use thought to reach God. One cannot walk to Him. One cannot reach Him or touch Him with one’s hands. But by thought one can be with Him in less than an instant, because He is here. He is in our minds. He is our minds. He has lent us the use of them. Our minds proceed from God. They are part of the breath of God.
Here is the terror of using psychic force. We are using God Himself to obtain material benefits. We are not merely asking for them, which would be bad enough. We are obtaining them by robbery, by a kind of violence. To use other forms of energy, to use radio and television waves, to use all the kinds of energy of the universe, is to use God. All these forces should be treated as holy, whereas we neat them as a convenience, for childish ends, like a jeweller’s child who uses precious stones for toys.
But if the jeweller’s child throws those ‘toys’ away! If he takes a hammer and smashes diamonds and sapphires into fragments, if he gives them to evil companions in exchange for vileness, what will his father say and feel?
And of all these forms of energy, all these ‘toys’ that we misuse, psychic energy offers the greatest possibility of evil, because it offers the greatest possibility for physical effects. It is more powerful than all other forms of energy which we have begun to believe that we understand. But if we truly understand even those others, if we truly understand that they are God, that we are using God, we must fear them as we fear Him. We must treat them as we should treat Him. And if this is true of the energies of which we are already aware in the material universe, which we think we understand in part, how much more must it be true of psychic energy, which links the material universe to the Reality behind it?
When we recognise what psychic energy is, its effects and dangers become intelligible. As for its effects, to obtain information from far off in time or space is nothing, child’s play, because the information is here, now. All the information that exists, that has ever existed, or can ever exist, is here and now. Because God Himself is here.
To move objects at a distance, to bend metal by thought, to dissolve an object and make it reappear elsewhere, to do the same with one’s body, or to make one’s body appear both here and there, simultaneously; these things are tricks of no more intrinsic difficulty than creating a television picture. The under-lying principle is the same; the fragmentation and reconstruction of particles of matter, or of images. Since matter is an image, and not a reality, the process is identical. But psychic energy is far more powerful than the waves of energy used by television. It is closer to the inmost energy of God. And travel, for an object being decomposed and recomposed elsewhere, is instantaneous. Because in reality every object, every image is already everywhere, being in God, being of God. To us, here and there appear distinct. To the Real eye, they are one. Such transitions are no more strange than it would be for us to lift an object from one part of a table to another. For an insect on the table, aware of the object, the object would seem to disappear, only to reappear out of nothing elsewhere. But we know that that is not the truth of it. We have moved it through space and time. The psychic practitioner moves it through God.
At an advanced level of psychic practice, the practitioner can travel vast distances, not only in thought, but in his own person, physically, and bring with him large objects, and he can travel in time in the same fashion as he can travel in space. The power used by the UFO travellers, covering distances to be measured in light years rather than in miles, is fundamentally psychic. But it is psychic power bolstered and supported by forms of physical power which these travellers obtain from uranium. This explains their need to exploit our world.
Such activities are not the true purpose of psychic power. If they are not evil in the beginning, if the intentions behind them are innocent, or even good, they involve misusing God Himself, and they must end in evil. The greater the misuse, the greater the evil. The purpose of psychic power in our lives is to enable us to become aware of God It should be used only in ways that please God, and that bring us closer to God. Primitive man, who was still innocent, was made aware by psychic power of the oneness of Nature and himself. Of the wonder and majesty of the world, and Creation. Of the holiness of all life and existence.
When man lost this innocence, psychic power became dangerous for him, exactly because it is so powerful. The temptation to use it for material profit is enormous, and becomes irresistible as the practitioner advances in skill. The dowser is innocent, playing with the fringe of this power to find water, or minerals. To find water is more innocent and necessary than to find gold or iron. Both are more innocent than to conjure up spirits, or influence other minds. From these first steps, the path to absolute evil is clear. Even where the dowser uses his gift in the service of others, to find lost property, or to find the body of the victim of a crime, there is grave danger, and it should not be done. When God wishes such knowledge to be given to individuals, of lost property or missing bodies, He has no need of such methods or mediums.
The man or woman who is a dowser is by nature the same as the shaman or witchdoctor of primitive societies, and in God’s plan such natures are meant to guide their companions towards an awareness of God by themselves becoming aware of Him. They are meant to be teachers and guides, not magicians. The difference between religion and magic consists only in this. Both use the same forces. Religion uses them to become aware of God. Magic uses them to gain material benefits.
Since we have lost the innocence needed to use psychic force as it should be used, to obtain visions of God and His Creation as they really are, we have been granted the privilege of using spiritual force for the same purpose. Spiritual force is allied to psychic force, but is of a different frequency, as gamma and beta waves differ from radio waves.
Spiritual force is not a path to God. It is a means of becoming aware of God. And in the truest sense there is no need of a path to God, because God is here, and we are already with God, and God is with us. What we need is not a path, but a tearing away of veils. The dance of the seven veils is an enactment, an image, of the approach of the soul to God, and a truer image than is that of a path leading through deserts and mountains.
As with veils, we need to strip ourselves of all that separates us from God.

 


UNION WITH GOD
First, we must free ourselves of all desires for all that is not God. This is the easiest step, and yet it is infinitely hard for us. We must pray for and desire only that God’s Will be done and that we may do God’s Will and not our own. We must desire nothing that He does not desire to give us. We must do nothing that He does not desire us to do. We must do all that He desires us to do. And this self-abandonment, this obedience, must not be a matter of now and then but of always. Of every waking moment of every day. When we sleep we must sleep in obedience to God’s Will for us. When we wake we must wake to do His Will. And that is no more than the first step, the shedding of the first veil, of willfulness.
The falling of the second veil allows us to become aware of our selves. Of what we have done, and become. Of our failure to be what God intended us to be. Of our vileness. And this must be complete self-recognition, without excuses, or hypocrisy.
Swift on the falling of this second veil, the third must fall, which allows us to become aware of what we should be. And this is infinitely harder than what has gone before. To look up from our littleness and vileness to what should be our greatness and our splendour. To see from our darkness the light that we were meant to be.
The pain of this for those who achieve it must be immense, immeasurable, as the distance between the two states is immeasurable. To know how we have offended God our Creator, our Father. To know how we have insulted Him. To know what objects of horror we have become. It must be like looking down into a pit of corruption, where worms crawl in and out of carrion.
In the second stage the mind has seen this corruption with human eyes, and it was horrible. But in the third stage the mind must see it as the angels see it, and how infinitely more terrible that must be. To shed this veil must be a Crucifixion for the mind.
The fourth veil falling away allows us to become aware of God, not as an abstraction, not as a mere knowledge that He must exist, but as a real awareness of Reality. Only those who have been blessed enough to experience this could describe it, and even for them it must be beyond description. How can the finite describe the Infinite? This stage must have both infinite pain and infinite joy within it. Pain at what we have been, and still are. Joy at God’s Glory, and at the wonder of being made to see a part of It.
The fifth veil falling allows the mind to share God’s vision of Himself and of His Creation. To see Reality. Not a part of it as in the fourth stage, but the Whole. To see and be aware of all that is.
When the sixth veil falls, the mind is free to dwell always with God in this Reality. To share in God’s work. To serve God as a messenger. To be one with the angels. To become angelic.
Until with the falling of the seventh veil the mind and soul and self become one with God, and enter Perfection.
But this can only be when all Creation is again Perfect, and there is no longer any imperfection. When all evil has ceased to exist and has vanished into nothingness. Then we shall be again as God intended us to be from the Beginning. We shall be His companions for Eternity.

 


 

THE FIRST VEIL
I will teach you the meaning of the First Veil, the Veil of personal desires. You must understand why you are to rid yourself of desire. To desire anything that is not God is to desire less than God, to desire imperfection rather than Perfection It is to desire what is created rather than the Creator Who created it. To desire a small part rather than the Whole. What is the object of desiring less instead of more? To desire things which fade and vanish instead of a treasure that remains with you for ever? You have been told this in the Gospels. But you have not understood it. You must desire nothing. No thing. Only God who made all things. And if you possess God then you will possess everything.
But to possess God is very hard. He will not come to you if you desire anything but Him. Again and again you must say, I desire nothing but God. I desire nothing at all. If I need anything, God will provide it for me.
This does not mean that you should not work, or earn money, or spend it on necessities, or even on innocent pleasures. It does not mean that you must not take joy in such pleasures, or in food, or sleep, or warmth, or love, or any good thing. But it does mean that you must not desire these things. If God gives them, take joy in them. If God withholds them, do not regret them. Do not think of them. Do your duty by others. Let God care for you. If you surrender to Him utterly He will see that you receive all that you need. This is the meaning of the saying, “Take no thought for the morrow.” It does not mean, be careless. It means that God will take care for you, since you are His, since you have given yourself to Him.
In this absence of desire, the Buddhist who tries to free himself of desires has only half the truth. He learns to desire nothing, but does not learn also to desire everything by desiring God. Your aim is not to achieve Nirvana, nothingness, but its opposite. Your aim is to achieve union with the whole of existence. So that your lack of desire is only one side of the coin. The other side is a burning, all-consuming desire, to return to God.
But even this desire must submit to God’s Will, and it must not attempt to go against God’s Will. You must not say, “I desire to join God now”, or soon. You must say, “God’s Will be done. Thy Will be done in me. When it is time let me join You. Until then, I submit myself wholly to all You desire of me.”
When you have understood these things. and practiced them, and found joy in them, and freedom, then the first veil of mortality has fallen away from your spirit.

 


 

THE SECOND VEIL
I have told you that to strip away the second veil you must see yourself as you truly are, without self-deception. But that is only the beginning. You must then see yourself as you should be. And as you can still be. This is not an exercise in self-humiliation. It should be a swift cleansing. All men have been vile. All men have betrayed God and each other. That is past and done. Look at it. Know it. Turn away from corruption towards perfection. Not God’s perfection yet, but your own. What you should and could have been. What God meant you to be. And what He means you to become. You must look at every act you perform and ask, how could that be made perfect? You must examine every word you say, every thought, and ask the same question. You must become like an athlete who studies how to run faster, be more supple, jump higher, lift heavier weights, and who measures his performance not against what he did yesterday but against what the greatest athletes do already. You must not accept the least failure as trivial, or unimportant, or inevitable. Failures are inevitable. No one can live a day as an adult without failing many times. But you must not accept that it is inevitable to fail. Every second of the day you must be on the watch for failure, you must be stretched to the limit to achieve perfection. It should bring pain, as an athlete’s exercising brings him pain. But beyond that it should bring great joy, as his achievements and growing strength and speed and suppleness bring him joy.
And when this veil has fallen away you can face the ordeal of knowing how you seem in the eyes of God.

 


 

THE THIRD VEIL
As I have told you, this ordeal follows and must follow close on that facing of your own self and imperfection, and of measuring it against what you should be. You have seen your self and failure with human eyes, with human self-indulgence no matter how severe you have striven to be.
Now you must see yourself as God sees you. And the first shock is terrible. Like re-opening a wound.
And then there is such healing as is past imagining. For you will come to realise God’s infinite compassion for wounds, and failures, and corruption. You will realise that the worst that you have done is nothing to what God has seen. That you are no more than a child playing in the mud. That your worst evil is no more than squalor. That God is not horrified at you, but only pained for you, ashamed for you. And your feeling will not be a black tragedy of wickedness and damnation, but only shame, a longing to crawl away and hide. And the worst pain is that there is nowhere to hide. No thought that can be hidden. No corner dark enough. The shame is like fire.
And after that, the healing. The knowledge that in your shame there is nothing exceptional, nothing at all worth remembering. The knowledge that God does not mind, so long as you turn towards Him. That shame and humiliation do not matter, they belong to humanity like flesh and bone, you cannot live without them, but you can rise above them, put them behind you at the end.
Shame will remain with you, humiliation will remain with you, will pain you every day at your new failures, but like pain they serve a purpose, they warn you of danger. Without them you would be lost for ever. You must learn to welcome them as friends and allies. As the helpers to bring you towards Perfection.
But they must not cripple you, you must not depend on them as crutches, or cling to them as necessary. You must strive to do without them even though this is impossible. You are like a lame man who must learn to run. And if you give yourself completely to God, shame and humiliation will fall away like crutches, and you will forget them. They will fall away like another veil between you and God, and having learned to endure the knowledge that God sees and knows our inmost reality, we are ready to become aware ourselves of God’s reality. To know Who it is Who made us.

 


 

THE FOURTH VEIL
The Fourth Veil is the heaviest, and the most difficult of all to tear away. It separates man from God, and with its falling the spirit becomes safe with God, is held by Him in safety for ever. There may be, there will be many sufferings, many pains, but the spirit supports them gladly, with great joy, because it knows that it belongs to God, and that God will not let it go. The spirit is safe from the Devil. The Devil may still attack it and cause it great pain, but this pain will be of a different kind to every pain that has gone before. The spirit is now like an athlete who sees the winning post ahead of him and knows that with one more supreme effort he will have won. The pain itself of his burning muscles urges and drives him on, and he is filled with the foretaste of triumph and lifted forward by it as if he was more than human.
This is so for the spirit with the tearing away of the fourth veil. It feels itself to be already more than human, and capable of super human endurance. It is drawn onwards by God with a rush of joy and triumph. It is going home and already sees the gateway opening and God holding out His arms in welcome.
With this level, this stage of progress, you cannot speak of the spirit doing anything. Nothing that a human being can do will achieve awareness of God. All that the spirit can do it has already done. It has purified and cleansed itself as one would with a house when one is expecting an honoured guest. When these preparations have been made, the spirit must wait. It must keep the house purified and ready. And this waiting may be the hardest test of all. It may last for years, because God will not be bidden. Or it may last a day, because God is impatient to take possession of His property. For the house and the tenant who has cleansed it and made it ready are His property. I have spoken of a guest. But the guest is the owner, He is the King.
The house, the body, is His. The tenant, the spirit, the soul and mind of the body, are His also. His servant. When He comes, it is to take possession of His own. All this you know already, you have been told many times. But to hear it told to you, and to experience its reality are very different. To sit waiting and to know that God will come cannot be told in words. It can only be experienced, and even those who have experienced it cannot tell about it to convince others.
I have said you may wait years for this to happen, or a day. It can also be that this fourth stage will precede all the others. That God will be so impatient to possess you that He will come to you before you know that you belong to Him. And you will be overwhelmed with shame that your house is filthy and unfit, and that you are totally unprepared to receive Him. He may come to you in the very moment that you are insulting His Name, or denying His existence. And you will have the pain of all the preceding stages to endure with the added shame of knowing that God is with you at every moment, that He is watching your humiliation. But the privilege of this is so immense that it makes the pain nothing and turns the humiliations into joy, into ecstasy. And yet with the ecstasy there is the constant fear of failure, of offending God, the worse for this spirit because it is already aware of God, of what failure means, of what offending God means. It must purify its house under the eye of the King.
But however it happens, after long waiting, or swiftly, or before the spirit is aware of anything, with a sudden overturning of its existence, the falling of this fourth veil brings the spirit, the mind and soul and body, into God’s possession, into awareness of God. Like a hare lifted up by an eagle, and looking down in terror at what it has left behind. And also with the hare’s terror at what is still to come. For within this level of ecstasy there is terror. At what the spirit sees and learns of Reality, of the Power of God, the horror of evil, of the still greater horror of seeing all the spirits who are still in the grip of evil, in danger of falling into nothingness.
And all this is still no more than a preparation.

 


 

THE FIFTH VEIL
Until now the spirit has seen God, and Creation, as a man can see them, with human eyes and a human mind. When the fifth veil falls away the spirit sees Reality as God Himself sees it. It is lifted up and sees with God’s eyes, and knows with God’s mind. The spirit is given a foretaste of perfect union with its Creator.
Nothing that it will see can be described in human terms. This is the ultimate Revelation. The spirit sees and knows all that is, and all that ever was, and all that ever will be. It sees and knows the whole of Creation, and God Himself. For that moment, of that vision and knowledge, the spirit is one with God. It is God. There is no difference.
But this is only a vision, it is only knowledge. It is a vision of Reality, it is not Reality itself. That is still to come. The spirit is still being prepared to serve God and at last to join God in fullness.

 


 

THE SIXTH VEIL
When the sixth veil falls, then preparation is ended, and Reality begins. The spirit is now perfect within its self. It is fit to dwell with God and to serve God, not as a novice but as a true servant.
Until now the spirit’s service towards God has not been real service but only a preparation of itself for real service. It has been a practising of virtue, it has not been virtue. Now with the sixth veil fallen away the spirit is virtue.
It is fit to share in God’s work, to be one with the angels, with all the perfect souls that have reached God already. Its work is to protect Creation, to help God make Creation perfect once again as it was in the Beginning. At last the spirit, the soul and mind and self, have reached their purpose in existence. The spirit has achieved Sanctity.
I have told you that the spirit of a man, of a woman, is not alone, it is not the whole of what it should be. It is one small part of what I have called its Real Mind. I have told you that the Real Mind consists of a thousand individual spirits, individual minds and souls. Each one of those individual spirits can become perfect, must become perfect by itself, must reach God by itself. But individual perfection is only the first step towards True Perfection. When the individual has achieved Sanctity and has reached God and dwells with God, then it must turn back towards the earth and help its fellow spirits to achieve the same perfection. It cannot rest until all the individuals of its Real Mind, all its brothers and sisters have reached perfection. It must guard them from the Devil and their own follies and weakness. It must rescue them from evil. And its duties concern not only them. For the Real Mind is itself only a particle of a far greater whole, as I have told you, of a Greater Mind, and only when all of the Greater Mind is perfect, all the thousand thousand spirits within it have reached perfection, can the Saint rest for a moment. The Greater Mind has become an Angelic Being, and he or she is part of it, and the whole of it. For as I have explained to you, the smallest particle is equal to the Whole, and the Whole is contained within the smallest particle.
And after that moment’s rest, in the Peace of God, the Angelic Being, the many-Saints-become-One, must set Itself to serve God with even greater strength, against the even greater enmity of the Devil. Now at last the spirit will understand the true meaning and terror of evil. And the True Glory of God.

 


 

THE SEVENTH VEIL
The Seventh Veil can fall only when every man and woman, all Creation is again perfect. And for this the Devil Himself, Satan, must be brought back to God, in humility and splendour. Judas must come with him, contrite and filled with love, and every spirit that exists must welcome them. The devils must come and kneel to God, and glorify Him, and He will lift them up, and love them as His dearest children. Then Creation will again be Perfect, and all of us, every one, will enter Perfection and be One with God.

 


 

THE SAINTS
– You have said that we should not pray to the Saints for their intercession and help. And yet in the falling of the sixth veil You have told me that the task of the Saints is to serve You by helping us, to bring us to perfection.
Yes. That is their task. But not to find lost objects, in the way that people pray to St..Anthony. Nor to be troubled and insulted at every instant by absurd petitions, and made the subject of special cults as if they were pagan gods, their images paraded through the streets or decorated with flowers and offerings in churches. This is not to be done even for the Blessed Virgin. The Saints and the Virgin are humiliated by such folly, and hindered by it.
The Saints are to serve mankind not as mankind wishes to be served, by giving material benefits, but as God wishes it to be served, by protecting men and women from evil, and bringing them from folly towards wisdom. The Saints are not Man’s servants, but God’s. To pray to them and through them as men and women do is like attempting to seduce a King’s servants from their loyalty to the King. To pray to the Virgin for favours is like attempting to persuade the Queen to act against the King’s Will.
It must not be attempted. None of this is religion. It is folly and superstition and childishness.

MIND AND SOUL AND SELF
Just as I have given you a deeper explanation of the Trinity, I wish to deepen your understanding of the real nature of Man. In The House on the Rock I explained to you the relation between Mind and Soul and Self. I told you that I first created Mind, as unconscious Being, and then breathed a Soul into it, an energy with which the Mind could become conscious. I told you that the Mind-become-conscious used the energy of the Soul to create a Self.
I taught you that this Self had many aspects and appearances and expressed its nature in many forms, at first simple, and then complex, becoming at a certain stage the form that you call human. And I told you that beyond that stage of humanity the Self would have other, spiritual forms. Yet all these varied forms would remain in real existence as part of the Self’s ultimate and perfect reality.
I now wish to explain to you that just as within the Trinity the ultimate, inner Reality is not Threefold but One, so it is with a man, a human being. Mind and Soul and Self are not three separate substances, but one substance, that you may call Spirit. They are My Spirit. It is My Divine Substance that forms your mind. It is My Divine Force that gives it consciousness. It is with My Divine Force that the mind creates its self. Mind and soul and self are no more than three descriptions of one substance, the spirit, the Holy Spirit. All men, all women, have been created by and formed of the Holy Spirit. They are held in being by the Holy Spirit. And the coming of the Holy Spirit to a saint, is the saint’s recognition that he or she is of one substance with Me. As iron is drawn to a magnet, as gravity draws the lesser to the greater, irresistibly, so the Holy Spirit in the saint, freed from imperfection, is drawn to the source of its being. It longs and strives to return to Me as the river longs and strives to return to the sea, and pouring into it becomes one with it.
But this complete oneness of Creation and Creator can happen only when all Creation has once again become Perfect. When all imperfection has fallen into nothingness. As with a great river pouring into the sea, that carries sediment with it, so that for miles out into the ocean you may still recognise the river by its different colour and its lack of salt, so it is with Creation striving to become One with Me.
The Saints within that spiritual river are already perfect, but they are perfect in human terms. They are cleansed droplets of an unclean river. Just as from this metaphorical river, soiling the ocean with its dark sediment carried out from the distant land, you might draw out a cupful of pure water, so you will find the pure spirit of a saint within impure humanity. But Perfection in My terms will not be until the whole of humanity, of Creation, of this metaphorical river is pure, and indistinguishable from Me. Until the last particle of sediment, of imperfection and impurity, has vanished away.

 


 

SATAN
– You have told me that all that is is You, is held in being by You. Does this mean that even Satan is a part of You?
Yes. The reality of Satan is a part of Me. His spirit is Me. The corruption that He imposes on it by His will is not Reality. It is like the rust on iron. The substance of the rust is iron. Its corruption is caused by oxygen. To keep this analogy the corruption of Satan’s spirit is caused by nothingness, by Satan’s will to turn away from Me. And since I am everything and everywhere He can only turn towards nothing and towards nowhere. If His corruption were to become complete, if He succeeded in so corrupting the spirit that I gave Him that it vanished completely like a piece of iron rusted into nothing, then Satan would become nothing, He would vanish utterly. But you must pray that that may not happen.
– We must pray for Satan?
And for Judas, and all the souls, all the spirits in danger of damnation, in danger of nothingness. It will be a tragedy if the least one of them is lost.
– How must we pray for them?
By saying many times a day, with the deepest intensity of meaning, the deepest and truest sincerity, “Lord, Thy will be done.”
In the morning at waking and at night before sleeping you should say with equal intensity the Our Father, once. But several times a day you should kneel and say. “Lord, Thy will be done.” Each time, say it once only. And do not make a parade of it. Do not turn it into an empty formula. Offer yourself to God, surrender to God. In that way only can Satan and all those in danger of being lost be saved. No spirit that has ever existed must be lost.
– Not even Judas?
No.
– But Judas was the greatest of all human sinners?
Yes.
– Because he betrayed Jesus?
No. All men betray God in some way or another. The saints have done so. Judas’ true sin came after he had killed himself. Jesus offered forgiveness to the spirit of Judas, and Judas’ spirit refused it, out of pride and hatred. It could not humble itself before God. That was its real sin, its real moment of rebellion. It was the same sin, and the same rebellion, as Lucifer’s, and since then Judas has become Satan’s lieutenant in the world, the ruler of the world’s evil spirits. For this world Judas is the Devil, Satan’s viceroy on earth.

 


 

THE FUTURE
– You have told me many things about the future. Does this mean that the future is already there, and that it cannot be changed, no matter what we do?
No. It could be changed. It is not likely, but it could.
– Then all the prophecies you have told me to write might be untrue?
I have not told you to write prophecies. You are not a prophet. You are a witness. A prophet warns of what will happen if men do not change their ways. A witness tells of what he knows, of what is already certain.
– Then the future is unchangeable?
We are using the word future in two senses. There is the immediate future, of the next few years. About that there is no doubt, and no possibility of change. And there is the more distant future, which may be changed, if men change.
– But why can even the immediate future not be changed?
I will give you an example. A drunken man gets into his car with some passengers, and begins to drive very fast along a narrow, winding road. A few hundred yards ahead there is a tree lying across the road, hidden from sight by a sharp bend. You can calculate exactly the point at which it will cease to be possible for that driver to avoid hitting that tree. But you cannot calculate exactly the effect of the accident on the driver. He may die. He may recover. And if he recovers he may give up driving when he is drunk, or he may not. That depends on his force of will and character and common sense.
Your civilisation is now in the position of that drunken driver speeding towards a tree lying across the road. You have already reached a point at which it is no longer possible for you to apply the brakes in time, given your speed and state of drunkenness. I have told you to serve as a witness to the inevitable crash. This has two purposes. One is to remind the driver, and also his passengers, to say their prayers before the crash comes, in case it kills them. The other is to help the driver learn from his folly if he recovers.
– Even so, could we not avoid some of the disasters? Could we not avoid famine, for example, by a wiser distribution of food from the rich countries to the poor? Many scientists claim that the world can grow far more food than it does, and far more economically. That if we gave up our obsession with eating meat, and obtained our proteins from vegetables and bean crops, we could feed two and three times as many people as live in the world now.
That might be if men became wise and generous overnight, and if the climate of the world remained unchanged. You can decide for yourself how likely the first possibility is. As for the world’s climate, it is already changing, very much for the worse.
– But changes of climate are surely very slow? And the prophecies of disaster suggest that it is in the next few years that the famines will come?
I tell you again, you do not need prophets to foretell famine and famine of terrible proportions before many years have gone by. Great changes in the world’s climate happen slowly, but only a slight change will be enough to destroy your agriculture. You are too dependent on too few crops. You have interfered too much with the world’s surface. With the forests that act as the earth’s lungs, with the water and the air that feed all growth, and worst of all with the ozone layer in the outer atmosphere that filters sunlight before it reaches you, and protects you from harmful radiation. You have interfered with the crops themselves, with the nature of grains and seeds, so that they can no longer resist changes of climate. You have come to depend on massive applications of chemical fertilisers to make your crops grow, and these are destroying the natural fertility of the soil. You are treating the soil you live from like a man who drives his body to work twenty-four hours a day by the use of drugs, and who neither sleeps nor eats. How long will that go on before he collapses?
– So that famines are inevitable?
Yes. They have already begun. You are not fully aware of them because you live in a rich country. But within a few more years even the richest countries will experience famine. And earthquakes and floods and epidemics will make no distinctions between rich and poor.
– Will these things happen before the war of Armageddon, or after?
The famines will accompany the war. The war will prevent the distribution of food, and the manufacture of fertilisers. Famine, and the diseases that accompany famine, will kill many more people than will the war.
– And the earthquakes? The floods? At least these will not be our fault?
You are not completely right even there. The floods will be partly your responsibility. By injuring the ozone layer you are allowing the earth’s atmosphere to become overheated. And this is happening at a moment when the surface of the earth itself is cooling and the climate is therefore worsening from mankind’s viewpoint. The natural result of this cooling should be an expansion of the polar ice caps. Instead they are decreasing in size and depth, and at a faster and faster rate, particularly in Antarctica. This in turn is releasing a great volume of water into the oceans. The final result must be a raising of the sea level throughout the world. Since most of the world’s great cities are at sea level and on or near the coasts, you can foresee the inevitable results.
– The earthquakes?
They are caused by movements of the earth’s crust, and therefore are beyond your control or influence. But you will, and have already influenced their results. If you combine earthquakes and great volcanic disturbances with a raising of the sea level, you will obtain tidal waves of immense size and power, beyond anything that mankind has imagined. Floods will drive far inland, up the great rivers, and across low-lying plains. And often they will not recede. Even the outlines of the continents will be changed. Whole areas of land, whole countries will disappear.
– And all this is to happen within the next few years?
Within the next few years.
– Will it continue for a long time?
No. But the effects will continue. Mankind, having come close to destruction, will continue to decline in numbers. And I have told you of how he will live. Tyrannies. Persecutions. Attempts to rebuild the civilisation that destroyed him. He will have learned nothing. There are brutal, ignorant centuries to come.
– Faced with these horrors, people will say, what is the point of existence? Why go on trying to achieve anything? Why study, or work, or attempt to create beautiful things? Why not give up in despair?
The answer lies in everything that I have ever told you. This world is not your permanent home. This life is not your real life. The ambitions you have had for physical luxury in this world are not worth having. These horrors, as you call them, are an ultimate mercy to you, a last call to sanity and to spiritual wisdom. It is not possible for your present civilisation to continue. Its few works of art and beauty do not justify its cruelties, its greed, its waste, and its squalor. Your alternatives are utter self-destruction, the final and total disappearance of all physical life, and with it the opportunities for your spiritual development that physical life offers; or this coming period of regeneration, with its hardships, but its chance for a new kind of life for men and women. A life in which the spirit governs the body, instead of the body ignoring the spirit.
I have promised you a remnant will survive, and that within that remnant there will be those who possess great spiritual gifts and qualities. They are mankind’s hope for the future. Everything that you do, from now until your deaths, should be done to ensure that those gifted ones survive, and bear children, and teach them by example, so that far in the future mankind may create another and true civilisation, of the spirit. As for you, as for all those who will die in the catastrophes of the coming years, you have known always that you must die. Only the how and the when have been hidden from you. To have warning, is that not a blessing rather than a terror? So that you can prepare yourselves for your real lives, in the real universe of which I have told you?
– But those who will come after us, my Lord? How long must they endure these things? before that true civilisation of the spirit is created? You speak of centuries. Must so many generations endure so long?
Until now I have made you write as a witness, of things that are inevitable and can no longer be altered. Shall I make you write as a prophet also?
– If You will.
You can have nothing good to prophesy. Even that far-off civilisation of the spirit may not be as you imagine, an earthly Utopia. This earth of yours may not see it. The remnant of mankind will have a thousand years of trial, ten centuries in which within the remnant a few faithful ones survive to give meaning to survival, while the others strive with all their strength to rebuild the very civilisation that almost destroyed everything. And while they lack the numbers and material resources of the present day, they will have instead great powers to use in whatever way they choose, for good or evil; to join the faithful few and approach perfection, or to seek to master their environment, as they imagine to be possible, and gain material wealth and luxury and psychic influence. What way they will turn, what path they will choose, I shall not tell you. Only that if they choose wrongly, then once and for all mankind will have entered headlong on a path that leads straight downwards to destruction and Nothingness.
– And the faithful few? And the Servants of God? Will they not remain?
They will come to Me, to be in My Service for ever.
– Do You mean You will abandon all the rest? Even their descendants?
They will have abandoned Me. And their descendants will consist only of those spirits not yet born as human beings that will already have determined to abandon Me.
– Yet once born as human beings they might repent? If they did, where should they turn? What help would there be for them? Would there be no Channels of Grace, no faithful remnant to welcome them and offer them love?
I shall leave one Servant behind.
– And the Church? Jesus promised that His Church would remain for ever.
Where did He promise that? He said, until He should come again.
– When will that be?
At the end of the thousand years. It will be then that all must choose.
– But the children, and those not yet born, how can they choose?
I have told you. And one Servant shall remain.

The End
 

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