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Synposis

Part One of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“Our Early Political Leaders Warned Us Against the Banking Interests”

Early U.S. statesmen, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson worked to free the nation from control by the bankers who had been behind the establishment of the First and Second Banks of the United States. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln implemented a true democratic currency by spending Greenbacks directly into circulation without borrowing from the banks. These measures allowed the U.S. to develop for much of the 19th century largely free from bankers’ control. By the end of the century, this had changed, and the bankers were taking over.

Part Two of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Federal Reserve System: The Bankers Take Over”

President Lincoln’s Greenback system worked but was undermined and replaced by the financiers who got Congress to pass the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, then the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The United States now became a nation dominated by the financial elite, the banks, and a debt-based monetary system. Consequently, the 20th Century was one of constant cycles of inflation and deflation resulting in the economic chaos we see today.

Part Three of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Collapse of the Financial System”

The collapse we are seeing today began in the financial system, not the producing economy. The crisis started with the housing bubble which the Federal Reserve created by cutting interest rates and then brought own by raising them. The trigger of the 2008 bank meltdown was refusal by European banks to purchase any more “toxic” U.S. debt based on mortgages and sold as securities. Now, with the decline in equity values, the burden of debt in our economy has grown even larger. Thus a renewal of bank lending will not solve the problem, while the economic stimulus program of the Obama administration is likewise insufficient to restore economic health.

Part Four of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“What is Credit and Who Should Control It?”

Fractional reserve banking is the process by which banks create credit out of thin air. But despite abuses of the system, credit is still a crucial part of modern economics. An enlightened concept of governance would view credit as a public utility. This means that government must take back the control of credit from the private financiers.

Part Five of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Gap Between Prices and Income”

One of the most important and least understood concepts in modern economics is the existence of a gap between prices and purchasing power. This gap results when a portion of prices must be set aside as business and private savings. The money is then used by the financial system for lending and speculation. Keynesian economics takes control of some of the savings through government deficit spending but is still a compromise with control of the economy by the financiers. In fact Keynesian economics has helped cause the collapsing debt pyramid. A better system would be to provide consumers with a National Dividend as a way to monetize the continuous appreciation of the producing economy.

 Part Six of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Greenback and National Dividend Solutions”

The U.S. should convert to a system where the money supply is created by the federal government by being spent into circulation without government borrowing or taxation as was done with the Greenbacks. The Federal Reserve should no longer be a bank of issue. Additionally, a National Dividend should be paid directly to the people. The “Cook Plan” calls for the initial distribution of vouchers in the amount of $1,000 a month plus a new system of community savings banks. Greenbacks combined with a National Dividend will create a non-inflationary democratic currency and transform the economy of the United States.

Unfortunately, secular education in the Western nations is not based on spiritual truth. Instead, it is controlled by ideologues who work for the wealthy and powerful controllers of society.

These ideologues are the core of the intelligentsia. Within the United States, their principal bastions are the Ivy League universities and related fascio-elitist institutions like the University of Chicago, Stanford, my alma mater, the College of William and Mary, etc. They also inhabit such bastions of conceit as the foundations set up to assure the perpetuation of elitist power by wealthy donors like Carnegie, the Rockefellers, Ford, Gates, etc.

One of the prime tenets of these ideologues has been that humanity is evolving. This myth was put forth by British professors of the 19^th century who taught that mankind arose from a primitive state in certain “cradles of civilization.” Combined with Darwinian ideas that humans “evolved” from apes through “survival of the fittest,” this theory of history elevated “the war of each against all” to the status of theology.  

The academic ideologues thus teach that over the last 6,000 years, various groups of “cave men” were transformed into the Western geniuses of today. These and other Masters of the Universe revel in the supposition, not that they are pygmies standing on the shoulders of the giants of history, even very ancient history, but that they are of the utmost importance in their own right.

Of course the more we learn of the past the more we see this is simply not so. The idea of a progression in human affairs is based on one phenomenon only: the development of science and technology.

With respect to the history of art, music, poetry, literature, and even the general level of spirituality or state of consciousness, the typical modern man–us– is revealed as a brutal and vain sensualist, unable to think or act freely, and afraid of the slightest fever, skin eruption, or subcutaneous pain. We are told where to live, what to eat, and what material possessions to covet.

In other words, we modern men, though divine in our essence, act as weaklings and cowards, pathetic in our manifold needs and desires, yet only too ready to conquer other nations, even torture and kill for supremacy, in order to enhance our own tenuous sense of security that disappears like a mirage at every moving shadow.

In fact, man today has not progressed at all when compared to humanity of the past. Rather, he has degenerated by every definition that matters. It is the chiefs among these degenerates who are the controllers of society today.

It is the most angry, cunning, dishonest, grasping and ruthless among us who rise to the top of every institution. They run the governments, the corporations, the institutions of higher learning, the intelligence agencies, the military forces, and above all the banks and investment houses, particularly the central banks that create money at will. In fact money was invented for one purpose only: control.

The present-day objective is obvious: total control of human populations through genocide.

In this respect the leaders of the Western nations are the descendants of the rulers of imperial Rome. There is a direct line of descent, physically or in spirit, from the hierarchy of the ancient Roman Empire to the ruling castes of all Western nations, including the United States. In fact the British ruling class from whom America’s counterparts obtained their self-image consciously modeled themselves on the ruthless ruffians of “classical” times.

We should remember the deep abyss of violence and cruelty by which Rome ruled the world. If you went along, you might get a piece of the action. If you did not, you, and many like you, would be crucified on the nearest hilltop or along a public highway.

If there were thousands of you in revolt, you all faced the same fate: a lingering death, preceded by the most abject humiliation. They even did it to the Son of God. Then they rewrote the scriptures, scapegoating the Jews for His death and putting words in His mouth to “render unto Caesar.” These words still provide the justification for clerics to support the violence of the state against any and all threats.   

Of course the early Church sold out when, in the fourth century C.E., it acquired great privilege by allowing itself to become the official state religion. The controllers and their official clergy have been crucifying Christ and those created in God’s image ever since.

And they are doing it today, often, perhaps, through less obvious means. One of these means is cutting budgets for public services, the current outcry among those who seek to exploit the fear people have of losing what they imagine they have to the have-nots.     

In reality, the average person, brainwashed through the mass media, including the pablum on popular internet sites like Yahoo and MSN, hasn’t a clue about what the controllers have in store for him or her.

Since the fraud known as 9-11 was perpetrated, the number of individuals with top secret clearances within the U.S. government has exploded. Shouldn’t we be asking these people with no visible means of support or legitimate work to do what they are planning?

Part of the plan is clearly totalitarian control of all the world’s resources and processes, with the U.S. military the action arm of those who pull the levers behind the scenes.

Being secret and military, the one thing that is certain is that their plan is one based on death to all who stand in the way, which is likely a majority of the world’s population. It is the only way the controllers can think of to solve what they see as the main problem—too many people for the resources available.

The obvious solution to this is to get rid of most of these people. It makes perfect sense.

But the truth is that all these people are creations of God, a Being the controllers do not believe in, even though He is the very Self of all.

Under the delusion of ego, the controllers believe they are God. This is the definition of “Satanic” and points to the original rebellion of “the one who fell.” This Fall opened the door in turn to the Fall of Man, the insane idea that a human soul is self-creating and superior to God.

This is why the controllers themselves are so deeply asleep in their essence, though they too will someday experience the resurrection along with those they persecute, for all will return in time to the Source.

Until then they have created a hell-of-a-mess on planet Earth. This planet occupies a special and unique place in creation. It has the greatest diversity and natural beauty of any planet, so is viewed by the heavenly hierarchies of Gnostic lore as “the Jewel of the Universe.”

True, it is dense and the abode of a deep and abiding materiality. Yet it is said in certain esoteric sources that every created soul in the entire Universe must pass through the Earthly experience for at least one lifetime in order to take a major step on the pathway to balance.

But most end up trapped here through identification with a physical body that is planetary, not cosmic, in its nature and so metaphysically illusory. So they stay in the Earth’s vicinity, coming and going in the long and tedious process of births and rebirths the Buddhists call samsara.

This is the real explanation of the population explosion. Technology has made possible the physical maintenance of all those souls trapped in the ether who now have flocked to physicality in one gigantic effort to complete their Earthly sojourn and move off to the next stage of their evolution, eventually to go back to their origin. This evolution involves passing through many other existences besides that of Earth.

What the controllers should be doing, instead of trying to exterminate these people, is to aid their evolution by helping them have all the experiences of peace, joy, abundance, learning, etc., to which their status as Sons and Daughters of God entitle them. Earth can and should be a Paradise.

By seeking to hasten the departure of ordinary people from physicality through poverty, war, genocide, epidemics, etc., the controllers are condemning them to a lengthy period of quiescence where they are warehoused in the etheric realms, awaiting a rebirth that may not take place for thousands of years or longer.

This creates an immense bottleneck in the evolution of souls throughout the Universe. In other words, the Earth and its etheric surroundings within the Solar System have become like a train station crammed with passengers, many shunted off to local hotels and boarding houses, where the outgoing trains have ceased to run, leaving the whole operation in a state of confusion, overcrowding, misery, and stagnation.

The controllers, in their Satanic delusion, have failed to understand all this. They believe they are in a game that can only be won by keeping other human beings from enjoying the bliss to which they are entitled.

But if they permitted this bliss, and helped usher it into existence, they too would benefit. They too could move off to their next adventure. They too are trapped in materiality from which they cannot escape.

And because they must bear the consequences of their blindness and cruelty, they will be even worse off after death than those they persecute. They will have to wait even longer than their victims for release, being confined to some dense and faraway places, where getting a ticket back to Earth involves a very long wait. Places like this are literally “hell.”

This is the future which those who hold the top security clearances the controllers dish out are preparing for themselves by persecuting their brothers and sisters in Christ. They have sold their souls to the devil in a Faustian bargain.

So for those who read these words, please think long and hard about what you are doing to yourselves and your offspring and realize it doesn’t have to be this way. Understand  that the time has come when it is all about to change.

The Higher Powers, known in Gnosticism as the Aeons, will not allow the present catastrophic situation to continue. As you know, they are gathering to make their will known as they last did 2,000 years ago.

It is time for you and your extraterrestrial allies to become part of the solution by getting with the divine program. I will be describing this program, to the extent I have been able to learn of it, in my new book, The Coming of the Aeons.  

One thing I know for certain is that those who are coming come in peace. Meanwhile, those who love God and His Son need have no fear. The guidance and protection of the Holy Spirit are ever present. Heaven on Earth is also possible. Indeed it is inevitable. In truth, it is here and now for those with eyes to see.

Part II: Gnosticism As the Esoteric Blueprint

By Richard C. Cook

© 2010 by Richard C. Cook

Part II: Introduction; The Gnostic Revelation; The Vision of Edgar Cayce; Cayce on Atlantis; The Gardens of Eden; The Fall of Man; God Sends Saviors; Background of Esotericism in the Hebrew Tradition; The Mission of Jesus Christ; The Early Growth of Christianity; Christianity Becomes Official; Esotericism Goes Underground; The Christ Spirit Today; Prophecies of Rudolf Steiner; Bulgaria?; Additional Esoteric Inspirations; The Gnosticism of Gurdjieff; What Is Esoteric Christianity Really Telling Us?

Introduction

This is the second of a three-part series on “Esoteric Christianity and the Signs of the Times.” Part I began with a discussion of organized Christianity’s largely ineffectual response to the contradictions of the scientific/technological era. Next came a discussion of the many prophecies from around the world of huge changes in human consciousness which are nevertheless said to be coming. Part II now delves into history, starting with a look at the ancient teachings of the Gnostics and what they may mean for us today.

The Gnostic Revelation

The ancestors of much Western esotericism are the Gnostic schools that flourished from around the time of Jesus Christ to about three hundred years later, when the Christianity of the emerging Catholic Church became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The Gnostics never tried or wanted to compete with the Church. But most saw the human accessibility of the Christ-Spirit or attainment of something called the Christ-Mind as the decisive factor of spiritual striving.

What organization the Gnostics possessed revolved around particularly gifted teachers or small communities remote from the cities. Egypt was a place of considerable Gnostic activity, along with Palestine, Phoenicia, Syria, Asia Minor, Persia, and Italy.

Many of the Gnostics were Jewish, but not all. Gnosticism was also a movement quite distinct from Neoplatonism and other schools deriving from the philosophy and religion of ancient Greece and Rome.

The Gnostics avoided politics, both secular and ecclesiastical. The exception was the 4^th century C.E. Manicheans, whose doctrines resembled those of the Gnostics.

Most Gnostics cared above all for individual freedom in conducting one’s spiritual search. This naturally made them suspect to guardians of the established order.

The Gnostics did not believe in doctrines of sin, guilt, and punishment or threats of hellfire and damnation. They believed instead that man was created in a world subject to error yet retained within a spark of God. So they sought a radical reorientation of consciousness based on direct experience of the divine light within.

Until the end of the 19^th century, the only version known to most Westerners of how Christianity originated lay in the dogmas of the Christian churches and their interpretation of the canonical books of the Bible. Meanwhile, the intellectual classes of Western society, particularly in Europe, had ceased to take organized religion seriously. Christianity was viewed by them as largely a prop for political conservatism or a rationale for middle-class conformity.

Yet something new was stirring. Through the discovery and translation of ancient texts and the findings of archaeology, there was the growing availability to scholars and the public of alternative renderings of Christian origins. A key event came in 1900, when G.R.S. Meade, a graduate of Cambridge University and influential member of the Theosophical Society, published Gnosticism: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten.

Meade’s book reflected a tremendous upsurge of interest, particularly among the English-speaking public, in new spiritual ideas. Meade’s book threw open the doors to widespread public awareness of a mass of literature from the first three centuries after Christ which the Catholic Church had long suppressed as heretical. The discoveries would continue, including the surfacing of additional texts in the 1940s with the discovery of Gnostic writings at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and of related Essene works at Qumran on the Dead Sea.

As to doctrine, a key to the Gnostic viewpoint was the concept of the Logos, the divine Word. What became the Bible as we know it today had strong Gnostic elements, especially the Gospel of John. The term Logos was used in its majestic opening: “In the beginning was the Word.”

The Gnostics identified the Christ-spirit as it was embodied in Jesus as an emanation of the Logos. As Meade wrote:

“The claim of the Gnostics was that a man might so perfect himself that he became a conscious worker with the Logos. All those who did so became ‘Christs,’ and as such were Saviors, but not in the sense of being the Logos Himself.”

At the time Meade published, such a vision no longer existed in Western Christianity, Catholic or Protestant alike, which had become watered down to a mere set of formulas: go to church and partake of the sacraments; believe and do good works; fear going to hell; and obey the ecclesiastical and civil authorities.

In their studies, Gnostic devotees of the ancient world led disciplined lives and resisted the temptations of the world, though they were accused by the Catholic heresiologists of dissipation and license. The Gnostics also believed that help from higher spiritual levels was available.

At the head of the spiritual hierarchy was the Creator God, the Unknown Father. Spiritual beings known as the Aeons existed at the next level as a source of mystical inspiration. In his remarkable book Gnosticism: Mystery of Mysteries, Dr. James J. Hurtak defines the Aeons as:

“Originally ‘age,’ in the sense of a long period of time; then used of space, or the spiritual being governing a vast space either in the Pleroma above or here below.”

Hurtak defines “Pleroma” as “the totality of the highest Aeons.” In his book he uses such concepts for specific Aeons as “Silence,” “Intelligence,” “Grace,” Love,” “Wisdom,” etc.

After the Aeons came, according to Meade:

“…the great intermediate hierarchies, archangels, angels, and powers; the several creative spheres and their rulers; the builders of the universe and the fashioners of man. There were numerous inimical hierarchies and their rulers, and a scheme of regeneration, whereby a World-savior in the apparent form of a man, though not really a man, brings about not only the defeat of the evil powers, but also rescues all who have the light-spark within them.”

But where had the Gnostic teachings come from? History does not have a definitive answer to this question. Gnostic-type ideas, involving hierarchical cosmoses that man could ascend through contemplative practice, may be found in ancient teachings from the Druids in Celtic countries in the far west of Europe, through the Greek Mystery religions, to Persian Zoroastrianism, to the Vedas and Upanishads of India.

In other words, these ideas were very old. But the Gnostic teachings of the early Christian era were a phenomenon that burst forth suddenly, around the time Jesus lived and taught.

Gnostic doctrines were identified by Meade as arising in Egypt, whose political, intellectual, and spiritual center was Alexandria. More recently researchers have traced at least some of the roots of Gnosticism to ancient Hebrew mysticism, possibly even as far back as Abraham and the Patriarchs.

Whatever the sources, something amazing, powerful, and transcendent took place in the Eastern Mediterranean region that changed the history of mankind. It was within this milieu that Jesus Christ lived and taught.

The early Church Fathers condemned the teachings of the Gnostics as satanic. So the Gnostics were censored, persecuted, and eventually exterminated. But it was not before many achieved transcendence in one of the greatest periods of spiritual accomplishment in history, an era of which the rich overtones still reach us.

The Vision of Edgar Cayce

Now, over a century later, whole libraries of books have been written on the general theme of esoteric religion, Gnosticism included. This literature has proliferated with the arising of the internet.

So I will proceed simply by providing a short synthesis. Along with the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?-1949), whom I discussed in Part I, central to this synthesis is the ideas of Edgar Cayce (1877-1945).

Cayce was a far more important spiritual figure than most people realize. In addition to his trance readings pertaining to health and human history, Cayce spent his adult lifetime teaching courses on the Bible and on spiritual development. His teaching center was at Virginia Beach, Virginia, a few blocks from the thundering surf of the Atlantic Ocean.

Cayce said he received his spiritual gifts through visitation from an angel when he was a boy, an encounter he described in convincing detail. Though extremely self-effacing, Cayce is viewed as one of the founders of the New Age movement. He may also be viewed as a 20^th century Gnostic.

Cayce on Atlantis

Cayce’s history of humanity starts in earnest with Atlantis, as did Gurdjieff’s. Cayce’s account of man’s early journey is found in a trilogy by Robert Krajenke: A Million Years to the Promised Land, Man Crowned King, and Man the Messiah.

According to Cayce, the souls of humanity were created by God and had incarnated on Earth but in Atlantis developed in the wrong way, becoming prone to pride, power, and materialism. According to another source, the Atlanteans violated the natural order of nature by “experimenting medically to enhance the sexual experience between male and female.” Many Greek myths may be cultural recollections of Atlantis, with the attempt to alter sexuality being reflected in the myth of the Minotaur.

Also according to Cayce, a series of disasters was visited on the Atlantean civilization, the most devastating of which was recorded in history as “Noah’s Flood.” Of course Cayce’s readings are unproven, as well as being completely unacceptable as sources of historical data to official scholarship. Yet millions of people have found Cayce’s material plausible and inspiring.

Gardens of Eden

From Cayce’s trance readings, we hear that before the Flood, the Higher Powers, knowing what was coming, created new centers of civilization at five separate locations. People were settled at these, with the hope they would be humbler, kinder, and simpler in their ways than those from Atlantis.

These centers, said Cayce, were situated in what are today the Carpathian and Caucasian Mountains, the Gobi Desert, India, the Andes region of South America, and the western plains of North America. Thus there were actually five “Gardens of Eden,” five “Adams,” and five “Eves.” Note that except for India, these do not correspond to what academic history calls the “cradles of civilization,” which actually seem to belong to a later stage of history.

By the time Atlantis was destroyed, Cayce indicated, adepts had also migrated to Egypt, where they became the forerunners of the Egyptian priests and pharaohs known to history. There, around 12,000 years ago, they built the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx, with Egypt remaining the world center of esoteric knowledge for millennia.

The Fall of Man

Unfortunately, the new experiments at the five Edens ran into serious trouble when the inhabitants began to believe they had a choice of whether or not to experience themselves as one in their essence with God or, alternatively, to imagine themselves as “other.”

Thus they identified with the external symbol of “otherness” which was their physical bodies, thereby falling into a deep metaphysical sleep. Psychologically, instead of feeling themselves to be Sons of God, which they were in spirit, they began to see themselves as separate and mortal.

We can see from this and related accounts of human spiritual history how error was born and, along with it, what American spiritual master Joel Goldsmith (1892-1964) said are our false beliefs in “sin, lack, limitation, disease, and death.”

These errors arise, said Goldsmith, from a state of “universal hypnotism,” and it has been this hypnotism that has ruled mankind ever since in all its infinite permutations of tortuous confusion. According to Goldsmith, “Something there is that does not want man to be free.”

This “something” was identified by the Gnostics with lower orders of spiritual entities who oversee material creation, symbolized by what St. Paul called, “the Prince of this World.” In common parlance, this may be called “Satan” or “The Devil.”

In coming to see ourselves as separate from God and neighbor, we feel compelled to compensate from a perceived lack in ourselves by taking from our fellow man, symbolized by the story in Genesis where Cain slays his brother Abel.

“The Fall” is central not only to Cayce’s explanations, but is also how the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions explain the fact that there is something deeply wrong with the disturbed psychology of human beings. In far-off India, Buddha sought to identify the psychological roots of human suffering, finding it in “desire.” The Gnostics had their own detailed metaphysical explanations of how the primal error began.

In modern parlance, what causes our perceptions of ourselves and the world to be so distorted is considered to be the ego, to the extent that the ego is an effect of an original psychological disaster. Life under the separated ego was literally hell on earth and remains so.

Modern esoteric thinking, mirroring the Gnostic emphasis on “error” vs. “sin,” states it is a hell we ourselves create by perceiving ourselves amiss, believing the lies of the serpent within. The serpent in this interpretation symbolizes identification with the world of the senses and loss of connection with our inner spiritual core.

God Sends Saviors

Again, says Cayce and other mystical teachers, mirroring Gnostic beliefs, God took measures to heal and save mankind. According to esoteric tradition, the Holy Spirit was sent to reconcile humanity with the Father and has been working to do so ever since.

A plan was set in motion to bring into incarnation one or more World Teachers who could help sleeping people recall their true source of good, which is oneness with God.

This was the esoteric meaning of Atonement—At-one-ment. The message: “Wake Up” to who you really are.

The teacher, Cayce said, who would eventually appear through the Carpathian/Caucasus culture, by way of the emergence of the Hebrews deriving from Abraham, would be Jesus. Further east, the Indian “Eden” would produce a series of incarnations of Vishnu, including Buddha. Other teachers would appear in China and the Americas, such as Quetzalcoatl, whom the Mesoamericans revered as their cultural hero and savior.

Jesus Christ and the other saviors around the world would work for the same goal—attainment of the original state of God-consciousness from which the separation occurred. According to esoteric tradition, the word “Christ” is a universal designation of this higher consciousness to which anyone may aspire. Esoteric teachings indicate that while Jesus and figures like Krishna and Buddha got there first, they showed us the way.

The Carpathian-Caucasian civilization from which Jesus emerged had developed along several different lines through the cultures of ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome, with the Persian Zoroaster, actually a line of spiritual teachers, not a single individual, playing a central role. To all these, the much more ancient civilization of Egypt was always a presence in the background.

But the culmination, at least for Western civilization, would take place in Palestine, where the Hebrews would follow an up-and-down course lasting almost two millennia before Jesus was born. Throughout Hebrew history, the flame of esotericism was kept burning by the School of the Prophets which existed in Palestine from the time of Moses.

Background of Esotericism in the Hebrew Tradition

It can be deduced from the Pentateuch (the Hebrew Torah) that Moses brought two distinct teachings: the exoteric, which was the teaching of rituals, animal sacrifices, and the social ethics of the Ten Commandments; but also the esoteric: the teaching of the divine science of Being. Moses was heir to the Hebrew traditions coming down from Abraham but also an initiate of the Egyptian mysteries.

Both the exoteric and esoteric were based on the words and acts of Yahweh, whose essence was expressed through the Tetragrammaton: YHVH. The esoteric side explained how the meaning of the Tetragrammaton was rooted in the formulation derived from the words through which Yahweh described Himself to Moses on Mount Sinai: “I AM THAT I AM.”

Another element of Moses’ secret doctrine may have consisted of some form of the Kabala, the ancient Tree of Life. This depicted the stages of creation from God downward as well as the path of return. The Kabala anticipated the later Gnostic teachings.

It was the School of the Prophets where “I AM” was first realized. It had its main location on Mount Carmel in northwestern Palestine. Today the home church of the Carmelite Order encompasses a shrine at the location of the reputed cave dwelling of the prophet Elijah.

The School of the Prophets was a forerunner of the Essenes, the sect that is credited with writing the Dead Sea Scrolls and hiding them in caves when the Romans advanced to crush Judea in the Jewish War of 68-70 C.E. According to some esoteric teachings, Mary and Joseph, the parents of the one they called Yeshua, were Essenes from Mount Carmel. Yeshua was called “the Nazarene,” or “the Nazorean,” not because such a town as Nazareth existed, which it likely did not, but in possible reference to a religious designation recalling the “Nazirites,” who were ancient practitioners of a form of Hebrew asceticism.

Both G.R.S. Meade and Edgar Cayce spoke of the Essenes long before the Dead Sea Scrolls were even discovered in the late-1940s. Some of the Essene scriptures had previously been found by Edmund Bordeaux Székely (1905-1979) while a young scholar seeking in the depths of the libraries of the Vatican in Rome and that of the Habsburg emperors in Vienna.

Working from the early 1920s onward, Székely translated these scriptures from Aramaic and Old Slavic into several volumes, including the Essene Gospel of Peace. He wrote that the teachings of the Essenes blended the ancient Hebrew teachings of the Patriarchs and Moses with the stream of Zoroastrian ideas which the Hebrews imbibed in Babylon during their exile.

While Székely does not use the term “Gnostic,” the cluster of mystical teachings that existed in Babylon and elsewhere under that name later became part of Christianity. The Zoroastrians postulated a Universe where good and evil were locked in combat, an idea the Gnostics generalized into a conflict between spirit and matter but at a level below that of the ultimate Godhead.

Such teachings have a powerful personal appeal, because the conflict between spirit and matter is evident to every spiritual seeker, then as now, in the inner struggle between identification with the desires of the flesh vs. the higher aspirations of the soul. Reconciliation, said the Gnostics, comes only when the third force of Christ-consciousness is applied. Székely’s translations are filled with the beauty of this spirit of reconciliation.

The Mission of Jesus Christ

The mission of Jesus, or Yeshua, lasted only three years and began with his baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist, who was also believed by some researchers to be an Essene from Qumran. Another Essene location was in Syria, while another was near Lake Mareotis in Lower Egypt, to which, it is said, the Holy Family fled to escape the persecutions of Herod. Coptic churches in Egypt today retain legends of the Holy Family’s sojourn.

In The Secret History of the World, Mark Booth, who derives many of his interpretations from the teachings of Austrian esoteric master Rudolf Steiner, writes of Jesus’ mission that it was “a great turning point in the history of the world…” Booth writes that Jesus “created the interior life” of mankind and says his life was “the decisive event in the process which has led to each of us experiencing inside of ourselves a cosmos of infinite size and variety.”

Through his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus proved that no one could kill a fully-realized Son of God. The Gnostics say that while the body of Jesus suffered, the Christ within was untouched. After his Ascension, as recorded in Acts of the Apostles, a small community of Jewish followers in Jerusalem kept his teaching alive in its purest form.

According to Annie Besant (1847-1933), who succeeded Madame Blavatsky as head of the Theosophical Society and published a book entitled Esoteric Christianity in 1905, the ideas taught by Jesus had a secret Gnostic dimension—what Besant called “the Mysteries of Jesus”—given only to initiates.

The Early Growth of Christianity

As knowledge of Christianity was spread throughout the Mediterranean world by Paul of Tarsus and his successors, the original esoteric ideas became mixed with Greek and Roman myths, the emphasis now being placed on the image current at the time of a god allowing himself to be killed as a sacrifice. This concept came from ancient vegetation myths and the changing of the seasons.

Paul was a curious figure in the history of Christianity. He was doubtless a member of an esoteric school affiliated with the Gnostics.

Paul mainly visited Jewish congregations in Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece but with a message that also eventually resonated with non-Jews as well. According to G.R.S. Meade, while Paul lived and taught he evidently had little knowledge of the stories of Jesus’ life and sayings that later became the basis of the New Testament.

But Paul knew about the crucifixion and resurrection. He spoke of direct spiritual experience—attaining “the mind that was in Christ Jesus.” This was pure Gnosticism. Yet the broader movement to bring the teaching to the Gentiles exposed it to social and political forces that would alter it significantly.

It was the distorted idea of Jesus’ identity as God Himself that formed the basic doctrine of the Christian churches as they developed in the West. The purer teachings of how Jesus paved the way for Sonship that anyone could replicate, though seemingly taught by Paul, later was confined to the heretical sects, including the Gnostics.

Another sect with similar beliefs was the Nestorians, who were driven out of the Roman Empire toward Persia after Christianity became the official state religion in the fourth century C.E. It was the Nestorians who preserved the Essene scriptures Székely eventually found in Rome and Vienna. There is a tradition that Mohammed, the founder of Islam, was raised in a Nestorian community in Mecca.

Christianity Becomes Official

The doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church were set in stone at the Council of Nicaea, convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325 C.E., and the Council of Constantinople called by Theodosius in 381 C.E. At the Council of Constantinople, the Church affirmed the doctrines of Jesus’ divinity that Theodosius had already decreed as mandatory beliefs for all citizens of the Empire. The Theodosian Code XVI.1.2 stated (Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, 1943):

“It is our desire that all the various nations which are subject to our clemency and moderation, should continue to the profession of that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter, as it has been preserved by faithful tradition and which is now professed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic holiness. According to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe in the one diety of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity.

“We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title Catholic Christians; but as for the others, since in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of divine condemnation and the second the punishment of our authority, in accordance with what the will of heaven shall decide to inflict.”

Making a doctrine official through governmental decree is the kiss of death for a living idea. Through this remarkable dictate, anticipating the Inquisition by 800 years, the Catholic Church became the instrument by which Theodosius crushed dissent and consolidated imperial power. The Roman emperor had also once been declared a god himself and now was obviously able to assimilate himself to the Christ figure.

For the next several centuries government and church authorities launched a holocaust of murder and destruction against anyone who adhered to either the old “pagan” religions or to Gnostic-type teachings. By this time, what was viewed as “Gnostic” had become wildly diverse following three centuries of elaboration by hundreds of sects.

What had happened was that religion was taken over by politics. After the seat of empire shifted to Constantinople in the 4^th century, the Pope in Rome gradually became the ecclesiastical  overlord of Western Europe. The rule of the Emperor in the East and the Pope in the West was total.

Esotericism Goes Underground

From Roman times until today, established Christianity, whether Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or otherwise has been unable to escape the expectation of acting as a bulwark for official political authority and serving as a backstop for the rule of dictators. Yet appearing side-by-side with the Christian churches historically, and often persecuted by it, were figures such as the Knights Templars, the Cathars, Giodorno Bruno, Jacob Boehme, Christian Rosenkreutz, Nostrodamus, Paracelsus, St. Germain, Swedenborg, and others who kept the flame of mysticism burning over the centuries.

But as the 20^th century approached, the mystical side of religion returned to the West, starting with Germany, Great Britain, and America. Gnostic-type ideas depicting life as a struggle between good and evil had also been brought forth during the European Enlightenment.

As discussed in Part I, word of the Eastern mystical teachings had reached the New England transcendentalists by the mid-19^th century. Ideas with mystical overtones reminiscent of Gnosticism were appearing in such American religious movements as Unitarianism, Christian Science, New Thought, and Unity.

The first American mystics had been the Quakers. Similar to the Church of the Brethren, Mennonites, and Amish, the Quakers derived from a movement of contemplative spirituality arising in 17^th century England and Wales.

Also coming into vogue during the latter part of the 19^th century were books about the lost continent of Atlantis and topics related to clairvoyance, reincarnation, channeling of spirits, etc., that were of burning interest, if not to scholars, then to the general public. Gradually there began to emerge a different perception among many intelligent people of what religion was about and what it could do for its adherents, based on a vision of history different from that of orthodox scholars.

For the last century-and-a-half, Earth has been a battleground between the dark forces of matter and the divine light of Spirit. On the side of matter is the war machine, international banking, global capitalism, and communist and fascist tyranny, all of which have tried to harness organized religion as their servant in keeping the masses under control or simply to obliterate spirituality altogether.

On the side of spirit is the entire panoply of Gnostic-type teachings working within the soul of mankind for inner peace and a higher level of compassion and understanding. It has been this spiritual warfare that I believe to be the visible reflection of “Armageddon.”

The Christ Spirit Today

Now, in the 21^st century, I believe that the Christ spirit is alive in the world and working actively, despite the growing appearance of social, political, and economic chaos. In former days, the Christian churches had attempted to confine this spirit within walls and dogmas, but it escaped into the surrounding world, becoming available to anyone who took time to sit quietly and experience his own inner sense of “I am.”

Matters have come full-circle, for the type of contemplative practice that is being spoken of and demonstrated by many teachers and spiritual groups today is, in fact, Gnosticism for modern times. This is why so many people identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”

We want to experience the joy and peace of divine consciousness directly, in our own hearts and souls, not indirectly through churches, rituals, or priesthoods. We want to experience our own holiness, not be told it can only be found through something or someone outside ourselves.

A new round of persecution, however, has been launched by the secular controllers of society who seek to establish their own New World Order based on war and economic control. But materialism will never succeed in stamping out spiritual aspiration, because at bottom man is a spiritual being.

Prophecies of Rudolf Steiner

The central role of the Christ spirit in our age was prophesied by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who offered a series of profound teachings on the exalted place of the Christhood whose presence, he said, would be basic to the human heritage for thousands of years to come.

Of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, Steiner said at a 1913 lecture in London that:

“…the mystery of Golgotha was a unique event in the whole history of the Earth. In the evolution of mankind on the Earth it was a mighty impulse which had never before been given in the same way and will never be repeated in a similar form.”

Steiner reached his conclusions through study, philosophy, clairvoyance, and initiation. The latter took place starting in his early 20s when he met a mysterious figure he referred to only as an “herbalist” on a train ride in Austria on his way to the university where he was studying.

Steiner wrote that the 20^th century would see the beginning of a renewed presence of  Christ in the affairs of mankind under the direction of the exalted being known as the Archangel Michael. Steiner said further that materialism had become so dominant, starting with the Renaissance, that by the 19^th century it had literally crucified Christ in consciousness as sleeping humanity had done to Him in his physical body two thousand years previously. But he also said that under Michael’s guidance a new awakening was at hand.

This new phase of spiritual evolution, Steiner said, would gradually override resistance from the spirit of materialism presided over by the dark spirit he called Ahriman. Steiner viewed Ahriman, not as a swashbuckling maniac of evil, but as an extremely boring and pedantic adherent to bureaucratic order who would crush individuality in an endless round of forms, procedures, regulations, and credentials.

I believe that exemplary Ahrimanic institutions are government agencies, public schools, banks, prisons, and concentration camps, as well as much of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. This deadly matrix is what the New World Order is all about.

Regarding the other major aspect of evil, the fiery one, Steiner identified this with Lucifer. Both Ahriman and Lucifer can be viewed as symbols of differing aspects of human egotism and their cumulative effects.

But again, while the hypnotic effects deriving from these lower orders of existence are formidable, they do not contain any law of God, so are not “real.” And they do not touch the divine spark within.

Bulgaria?

Steiner, at first a Theosophist, then founder of his own school of Anthroposophy, is sometimes viewed as a latter day adept of the Rosicrucians, who, with the long list of individuals like Bruno and Paracelcus mentioned previously, carried the torch of the ancient Gnostic-related esoteric teachings in Europe from the Middle Ages onward. But was it the out-of-the-way country of Bulgaria where the fountainhead of the Christ-spirit in the 20^th century could be found?

According to esoteric history, St. John of Patmos, reputed author of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, carried the deeper teachings into what is today Bulgaria, where, almost two millennia later, the Great White Brotherhood eventually surfaced under spiritual master Peter Deunov (1864-1944) and his successor, Omraam Mikhaél Aivanhöv (1900-1986). Both have had a profound effect on modern thought.

Deunov was a spiritual hero to none other than Albert Einstein, who reportedly said, “All the world renders homage to me, and I render homage to the master Peter Deunov.” According to a statement attributed to Krishnamurti, whom the Theosophists tried to deify, “I said to them that I was not Maitreya….the World Master was already incarnated, in Bulgaria.”

Omraam Mikhaél Aivanhöv was Deunov’s successor, who left Bulgaria for France at the start of World War II. Because Bulgaria was part of the German Reich, the French authorities cast him into prison, where he gave esoteric teachings to his fellow inmates.

After he was released he stayed in France for most of the rest of his life. The honorific title “Omraam” came after a trip to India, where he was said to have received initiation from the legendary Babaji.

A year after his death in 1986, I visited one of Aivanhöv’s pupils at a house in Connecticut, where the master had stayed during his sole visit to the U.S. She gave me some of his books consisting of transcripts of his talks at his study center in France.

Aivanhöv’s teaching was heavily imbued with the symbolism of the Kabala. I had already read several of Aivanhöv’s books, which were actually transcripts of his lectures to pupils.

One of these books was entitled The Splendour of Tiphareth. In the Kabala, Tiphareth stands for the Sun. The book introduces the reader to what Aivanhöv prophesied as the coming solar-inspired civilization; i.e., one that will be fully under the direction of the Christ-mind.

Additional Esoteric Inspirations

Other sources of esoteric Christian sources may be found in connection with literature from the world of Orthodox Christianity, including Mt. Athos in Greece. In these teachings the path to awakening had definite Gnostic roots. It was called the “Royal Way” and may be found today through organizations like the Praxis Institute.

Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), discussed in Part I, was one of those who most fully explained the difference between the esoteric path and what may be found through orthodox teachings. Along the way, Ouspensky said it was a great mistake to think that the world today is like any other historical era. He believed in enormous changes that would be ushered in through a rebirth of esoteric ideas.

Expressing his views in a manner similar to Steiner’s depiction of Ahriman, Ouspensky wrote that the devil was not at all a powerful, imposing figure. Rather he was “a seedy little man in a bowler hat.”

The Gnosticism of Gurdjieff

In a manner similar to the Gnostic teachings, G.I. Gurdjieff, Ouspensky’s mentor, produced a complete cosmology along Gnostic lines that depicted creation as an emanation from the Absolute-One down through the Absolute-Nothing.

Gurdjieff called it the Ray of Creation and gave extremely detailed explanations of the laws by which all existence was manifested. These laws were expressed mainly through the Law of Three and the Law of Seven, combined in the symbol known as the Enneagram.

Gurdjieff’s depiction of the Enneagram also figured in the digestion within the human body of food, air, and impressions taken in during the course of everyday life. Through spiritual effort, these substances could be transmuted and “higher bodies” formed within the organism. These bodies would then be a bridge to the divine spirit within.

Gurdjieff said that any being within the Universe can be defined by what it “eats” and what eats it. For instance, flies eat feces and are eaten in turn by birds.

Within human life, ordinary people eat a limited variety of cooked and raw foods, while their energy is eaten, according to the Gurdjieff system, by rather crude cosmic entities at the level of the Moon. But people of a higher level of consciousness can consume substances at the level of the Sun—“fire”—and be “eaten” by archangels.

In such cases they retain their individuality but live forever after in the world of divine being; i.e., “heaven.” Failing to reach this level, one may assume, the person must reincarnate over possibly very long periods of time.

What Is Esoteric Christianity Really Telling Us?

What, then, are we to learn from all this? Returning to the Old Testament, it is said repeatedly that the religion revealed by Moses was a teaching, not to worship dead idols, as with the pagan cults of the time, but “the living God.”

The worst “sin” against Yahweh, one even King Solomon committed, was to pay homage to idols of wood or metal which, as stated in the Book of Chronicles, literally “are nothing.” Many of the Christian churches, of course, have come perilously close to making Jesus Christ himself into such an idol.

We in the West, similar to many apostates among the Hebrews of old, also continue to bow down to empty idols when we worship the acquisition of a high position in life or material possessions, both of which eventually turn to ashes and dust.

The ashes and dust mirror our own inner state, where our finer etheric energies are dissipated through identification with such ephemera. But our idols may also be ideas, especially outdated or dead ideas about who we think we are, ideas that glorify the nation-state, or ideas of domination of one religion over another. Above all we idolize our egos, the ultimate illusion.

What comes next then becomes the question, which brings us, at the end of this essay, to what may have been the downside historically of Gnosticism and of mystical philosophies in general. This downside has been a tendency to reject ordinary life as unworthy, beneath contempt, or even inherently evil.

In other words, a Gnostic-type philosophy can lead to a kind of spiritual snobbery, a holier-than-thou attitude. For all their faults, the organized churches have at least recognized throughout their history the need to provide their members with some ability to cope with or even transcend the demands, sufferings, and disappointments of everyday life.

So it is now that a new approach to spirituality in the world is needed, one where a person can be free inwardly of identifying with life but still not reject it. For is God not to be found as well in the beauty of nature and the fulfillment of human relationships?

Joel Goldsmith said wisely that the world “does not need a new religion.” Rather it needs healing.

I would add that, as anticipated in Part I of this essay, an accounting must also be made of the vast impact on humanity of science and technology, both its peril and promise. As part of this accounting must come attention to major social problems. An expanded list to what has been mentioned previously in this essay includes such things as global overpopulation, depletion of resources, constant warfare, genocide, economic injustice, the lies and aggression of governments, and pollution.

And with all the hurting and pain today and in recent decades the world also has an overwhelming need for understanding and forgiveness, even as the religious and secular authorities are desperately trying to hold on to what they imagine they possess. But the world is changing in ways that we, and they, cannot even imagine.

And changes are indeed necessary. Could an impartial visitor from outer space, looking at Earth today, avoid an opinion that humanity has failed miserably in organizing its collective life? So have God and the Higher Powers abandoned us? Part III will explore that question.

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, now a writer on contemporary spiritual, economic, and political issues. His books can be ordered from his website at www.richardccook.com.

Part I: Christianity’s Dilemma and Its Coming Rebirth

By Richard C. Cook

© 2008 by Richard C. Cook.

Part I: Christianity and the Scientific/Technological Era; Did the Spiritual Revolution of the 20th Century Leave Christianity Behind?; Reaction of the Controllers of Society; The British Petroleum Debacle as Signature Event; Crackdown and Prophecies; My Own Spiritual Search.

Christianity and the Scientific/Technological Era

The Christian churches have not been particularly effective in reconciling themselves to the modern materialistic epoch of science and technology which may appear to make many of their doctrines quaint and out-of-date. An example is the longstanding debate over human evolution vs. creationism, where fundamentalist Christians make their point using accounts in Genesis that are obviously written in a kind of metaphysical shorthand rather than being completely literal.

Understanding the meaning of this shorthand, along with other scriptures written millennia ago, requires a key which this article will attempt to clarify. The Christian revelation may then be seen in a different light through its more “esoteric” interpretations. “Esoteric” in this sense means the act of seeing things more through the eyes of the soul than through outward rituals and doctrines.

Without such a key, how else can Christians effectively address the danger that the technological revolution, whatever its benefits, may continue the march it embarked upon during much of the 20th century of destroying the world that Christianity helped fashion over the previous two millennia?

Two technological innovations in particular have produced both immense progress and tragic turmoil in the landscape of the secularist modern world. One was the transformation of industrial production by application of electricity, the latest phase being the cybernetic revolution. The other was exploitation of the huge deposits of coal and reservoirs of petroleum in the Earth’s crust and the total dependence of the world’s economy on the burning of fossil fuels. A third innovation, space travel, will be explored in Part III.

For now let us simply look at the fact that the world that electricity, coal, and oil have created has provided the material support for enormous growth of the human population—now approaching seven billion, but at the cost of out-of-control consumption of resources and the pollution that has resulted. Control of these resources is also the basis of most of the world’s wealth.

Many thought that technological advances had the potential to free us from the drudgery of working so hard for a living—the famous “leisure dividend.” Among the logical results should have been a renaissance in the arts and a surge in our ability to devote more time to spiritual pursuits. Both have happened to a degree.

But the Christian churches might have been expected to take more advantage of such an opportunity by strenuously promoting the widest possible distribution of the economic bounty technology makes possible. Unfortunately they have not. Instead this bounty has passed increasingly under the control of the rich and powerful.

The churches have been upstaged, not only when faced with technological progress, but also on the spiritual level. For instance, most of them never got comfortable with the idea of a New Age marking the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. They also seemed taken by surprise by the major shift in “spiritual geography” that took place during the early to mid-20^th century, when the immense concentration of esoteric knowledge that was harbored and hidden in Tibet and India for millennia seemed to radiate outward.

Did the Spiritual Revolution of the 20^th Century Leave Christianity Behind?

Starting with the appearance of Swami Vivekananda at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, a number of Eastern spiritual figures traveled to Christianity’s Western turf to transmit a different order of ideas. These included such now-familiar names as Swami Yogananda, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Meher Baba, Krishnamurti, Shivabalayogi, Chögyam Trungpa, the Dalai Lama, and many others.

The Theosophical movement, founded by Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891) in New York City in 1875, was an important attempt to integrate Eastern pathways into the consciousness of the West. Theosophy became a major force, not only in the West, but also in India, where Annie Besant (1847-1933), an Englishwoman of Irish descent, led the movement after Blavatsky’s death. Paul Brunton (1898-1981), a British journalist who traveled to India and recorded the teachings of the sage of Arunachala, Sri Ramana Maharshi, made a notable contribution, as did other Westerners like him who searched in the East.

Many of the Western followers of the Eastern masters gained in enlightenment. Together they created a lexicon, published books, founded schools and study groups, and introduced an array of meditation and other spiritual techniques, including Yoga, that today are deeply embedded into our mentality and culture.

Many Christians more advanced in their thinking did in fact welcome the Eastern revelations, starting with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other New England transcendentalists over a century-and-a-half ago. Also deeply influenced was American poet Walt Whitman.

The era also saw movements among some Western Christians toward greater consciousness, including the Quakers, Unitarians, Christian Scientists, and proponents of Unity and New Thought. And many of the mainstream churches have also been affected positively, though perhaps to a lesser degree. Also becoming a spiritual force by the mid-20^th century were Alcoholics Anonymous and subsequent “twelve-step” programs with a strong Christian orientation but open to Eastern ideas.

Reaction of the Controllers of Society

But in the face of this broad spiritual awakening, there was a reaction by the controllers of society, who seemingly have not wanted humanity to become more happy, joyous, and free unless it produces a profit. Worse, the benefits of science and technology have often been woefully perverted, putting spiritually-minded people of all persuasions on the defensive.

We see, for instance, that the “knowledge explosion,” resulting from exponential growth in the power of electronic communications, has opened a gateway to the inner world of thought and consciousness never before accessible to such large numbers of people. An individual living today has almost immediate access to the sum total of recorded information from the beginning of history. The technological factor, which can be dated to Gutenberg’s first printed Bible in 1454-55, has aided immeasurably in the diffusion of spiritual knowledge.

But how effectively can a person utilize and gain from that knowledge when the waters of enlightenment have been fouled by horrendous displays of greed, selfishness, and aggression resulting from the use of technology to produce ever more horrible weapons of war? Technology has polluted the Earth so much that whole species of flora and fauna are being wiped out and has diverted an ever-increasing portion of the world’s wealth into the hands of the rich who own the banks and corporations that control the global economy.

For the wealthy elite, the expansion of consciousness has meant refining the techniques of controlling or neutralizing individual awareness through propaganda or mass-media indoctrination expertly targeted at producing in the psyche of people such emotions as greed and fear. Does addiction to TV and video games produce greater consciousness or its opposite? Such pastimes lock people in to habitual patterns of brain waves that make perception of spiritual reality impossible.

And even with communism supposedly defeated, what of the massive national bureaucracies instituted to manage every aspect of modern life, with their mountains of paperwork, forms, accounting systems, tax documents, licensing, and regulations? What of the layers of national, state, and local governments, each with their own  overlapping codes of law that grow by the day?

What of the growing reach of the modern police state with high-tech surveillance methodologies, stun guns, arsenals of sophisticated weapons, and SWAT teams always on alert? And it’s all paid for by the public through taxes or by overhead on the cost-of-living. Do these things enhance or destroy the freedom of the human spirit, human dignity, or human self-respect?

Here neither the Christian churches nor their New Age counterparts have been particularly helpful in calling out or rolling back these excesses. Many spiritual professionals find it safer to support the dominant military-political-financial paradigm, or at least to acquiesce in it.

Within the churches, many are bound to rituals whose origins few have effectively translated into modern relevance. Others may be uneasy about the drift of events in the world at large but, while trying to uphold their spiritual ideals, lack clarity and conviction.

Others may only be able to counsel their flock on how to endure pain and suffering. Others pray for peace in the world but with what result?

Within the Catholic Church, the search for expanded spiritual experience among both the priesthood and laity that grew out of Vatican II under Pope John XXIII was attacked by reactionaries from within. So was the Catholic liberation theology movement that appeared most strongly in Central America, where the priesthood joined with impoverished peasants in demanding land reforms. Priests, nuns, and lay leaders were murdered by death squads.

The Catholic Church today has retreated from both its liberalizing tendencies and concerns with social justice and is reverting to strict doctrinal interpretations and “safe” social issues such as the anti-abortion crusade. On the Protestant side, many evangelicals have also become vehemently conservative, viewing as inspired by “the devil” anything not conforming to their literalist interpretations of scripture.

The more liberal churches doubt that such a thing as “the devil” even exists, as do most New Age advocates. Psychologists with a spiritual outlook identify the devil as a projection of our own separate, competitive egos that we dare not see and accept.

So we project it onto another, often a person of a different race, religion, or political persuasion. When the ego is in charge of religion, little can be expected but more anger, violence and confusion. It’s the same for Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or whatever.

The god of the given religion, personifying the frustrations of the faithful,  may then be seen as angry and vindictive, even one who demands outright warfare between its adherents and whoever the outsiders are perceived to be. How can peace on Earth ever be possible unless our idea of God changes?

The British Petroleum Debacle as Signature Event

A recent example of the way science and technology have failed and religion gropes for an answer is the British Petroleum oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Through the horrendous pollution and destruction of the natural environment that has taken place, America’s Bible Belt South, base of the Republican Party for decades, has been threatened economically, socially, and ecologically.

The BP tragedy shows that no matter how much money you have or how powerful you think you are, no one, including the elite, can negate the Law of Unintended Consequences or the Law of Cause and Effect.

One of the world’s largest and most profitable and powerful companies, BP is as much an American corporation as a British one. It has played a major role in U.S. politics through the lavishing of campaign contributions on Democrats and Republicans alike. BP supplies a huge amount of the petroleum products that fuel American military operations worldwide.

Since the 1954 overthrow by the CIA and MI-6 of the elected government of Iran that was in the process of nationalizing BP—then called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—has relied on the military might of the Anglo-American empire to keep the world safe for its business interests.

Ironically, there are credible published reports that the U.S. government knew about and pressured BP to conduct these particular drilling operations in the Gulf for purposes related to current war plans against Iran. The on-line Wayne Madsen Report, an authoritative source based on news leaks from intelligence insiders, says the government influenced BP to shift drilling operations to the Macondo site in the Mississippi Canyon off the coast of Louisiana, because the enormous size of the oil deposits could supply American needs if, during an attack on Iran, the Strait of Hormuz were closed to oil traffic.

No doubt many Christian churches, as well as the Vatican Bank, are investors in BP or related companies that provide support to the war machine. Few that I am aware of have taken a public stance against the possibility of war with Iran. Large numbers of American churchgoers serve in the armed forces or work for military contractors, so are obliged to go along with official policy, whether or not they have reservations.

The point the oil gusher illustrates is that side-by-side with growing spiritual awareness among ordinary people, the world seemingly is becoming both more and less conscious at the same time. While more people are waking up to their spiritual potential, those who remain asleep at the helm are becoming more desperate to hold on to what they perceive as control.

This control is maintained by economic leverage carried out by those in power against the larger populace. The world at large has a deeply divided mind over being in thrall to the controllers while conditions are getting worse for so many people. So the world is in a constant state of tension that is increasingly becoming unbearable.

Crackdown and Prophecies

When officialdom began to notice over the past several decades that an epochal change of consciousness was underway, they cracked down. For instance, the idea of a New Age became trivialized as a component of pop culture not to be taken seriously.

The concept of the Age of Aquarius became a song in the platitudinous Broadway musical Hair only after being shorn of its revolutionary implications. The creative burst that manifested in the popular music of the 1960s and 1970s by artists such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, John Lennon, Donovan, and many others dried up after official corporatism took over and shifted the focus within the music industry to the depression, triviality, and nihilism so evident today.

While the appearance of hallucinogenic drugs had opened the eyes of many young people to a new way of seeing the world, their overuse, along with a flood of opiates and other addictive substances, crippled the minds of many. Allegations persist and evidence has been presented that the drug abuse that has devastated so many people over the past two generations has been in part a covert “psy ops” attack and/or money-raising scheme by Western intelligence agencies. A similar attack was the way right-wing think tanks and pro-corporate institutions like the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations gained dominance in publishing and higher education and rooted out writers and teachers unwilling to parrot the party line of the corporatocracy.

There is even a published account that the greatest and most ancient of Tibetan monasteries, one that survived the Chinese takeover, was destroyed and its monks murdered through an assault by covert operatives in the early 1990s. It is said this monastery was the inspiration for the rumor that somewhere in the heart of Asia was a place of peace and harmony under a higher form of law, the place known in legend as “Shangri-La.” Persons familiar with its destruction say the event had been prophesied and that once it took place, the end of our so-called civilization became assured.

What we may be seeing, though, is the Butterfly Effect, where infinitesimal changes in consciousness produce major outcomes. Many believe this is about to happen.

Many, myself included, have written of the “end of the age.” A Google search on “Armageddon” brings 12 million entries. Hundreds of internet websites, and a huge number of books, are devoted to attempts to define the changes to come.

Many of these speak of UFOs or the coming to Earth of extraterrestrials. Such possibilities will be evaluated in Part III of this article. The point for now is that the end of our age, if it happens, also implies a new beginning, as indicated by the ancient spiritual symbol of the ouroboros, the snake swallowing its tail.

Among Native Americans, the recurring live births of white buffalo calves are fulfillments of their own prophecies of an end and a new beginning. The predictions of doom implied by the termination of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012, have inspired books, articles, and motion pictures. Though the Mayan elders themselves say much of the hype is the fantasies of non-native popularizers, they still affirm something profound is going on.

Another auspicious event may be the unexplained appearance of gigantic crop circles based on extremely abstract principles of higher mathematics such as the Julia or Mandelbrot sets. I also spent several years working with a guru from India, who said it is common knowledge that the Kalki Avatar, the 10^th incarnation of Vishnu, has been born in India and resides there incognito, preparing for his mission. And in the U.S., a recent poll indicated that an astonishing 40 percent of those asked said they believe the Second Coming of Christ will take place within the next half-century.

My Own Spiritual Search

Is there a deeper spiritual meaning to such prophecies that are accessible to us today? If so, how can we find it? And can Westerners find truth within the traditional Christian religion?

The existence and importance of the hidden aspects of Christianity have been a major preoccupation in my life, since, as a boy growing up in Michigan, I imbibed the soothing peace in a basement chapel in the Episcopal Church my family attended.

In my twenties my life was transformed by the teachings of P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) and G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?-1949) in a group in Washington, D.C. Ouspensky was a Russian esoteric philosopher and Gurdjieff a Greek-Armenian spiritual master. Just as World War I was breaking out, Ouspensky met Gurdjieff in Moscow, where the latter was teaching a system of ideas based on his travels through Eastern Europe, Egypt, the Near-East, and Central Asia.

Gurdjieff called his system The Work and used the term “esoteric Christianity” to describe it. In his writings, Gurdjieff describes periodic visits to Earth from highly-conscious beings from other parts of the Universe whose job is to oversee and assist with situations arising here, though sometimes the “help” has unexpected consequences.

From there I studied under a Sufi master named Abdullah Dougan, reading the Koran and other teachings of Islam, and learned much from the practical study of Buddhism, Hinduism, Yoga, Taoism, and Native American lore. I then spent almost a decade learning and practicing meditation with gurus from India, including the beloved figure we called “Swamiji.”

But I was yearning to return “home,” always having felt that my spiritual ideal was Jesus. He was not, however, the Jesus of the Christian churches, most of which seemed too stuffy, superficial, conventional, dogmatic, and gloomy for my tastes.

At times I toyed with the idea of attending a seminary and becoming a minister but couldn’t face a curriculum heavy on church history, ritual, and doctrine. For I was, and will always remain, a spiritual seeker at heart.

Over the years I consistently fought off temptations to dabble in the occult or in magic, especially after a potentially disastrous encounter with an ouija board. I was helped by warnings from my Sufi teacher about how easily aspirants could fall under the influence of malignant spirits he called “goaffadh birds,” entities that he said were known as “djinn” in Islam.

Eventually, after a series of personal crises involving a divorce and retirement from a career spent working for the federal government, I began to think and write without restraint. New horizons opened. I became a student of a teaching called “The Infinite Way” that was created by an American spiritual master, Joel Goldsmith.

This teaching, which saw Jesus Christ as “The Master,” turned much of my thinking around on what constituted perception and reality. I saw clearly, as Goldsmith pointed out, that nothing we perceive that does not have the Law of God maintaining it can possibly be real. This included poverty and physical illness.

Goldsmith (1892-1964) was born to a non-practicing Jewish family in New York City and become a Christian Science practitioner. The founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), had been driven to a deeper consideration of Christ’s teaching through her puzzlement that the ancient art of spiritual healing had seemingly become lost. Thanks to her, spiritual healing is now practiced as a regular discipline in the West, despite mainstream attempts to ridicule or suppress it.

Joel Goldsmith took the practice to deeper levels, which he described in his books and  tapes, including The Art of Spiritual Healing, Practicing the Presence, and The Thunder of Silence.

In 2009 I married a woman who was a lifelong churchgoer and had been part of the Charismatic movement during the 1970s. Her father was a church deacon. She was, like me, still searching.

As I wrote about economic and monetary matters and published books on the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the economic crash of 2008-9, my wife and I embarked on an intensive study of the ancient Jewish sect of the Essenes and the teachings of Edgar Cayce. We were initiated into the Order of Melchizedek, founded by a group based on knowledge derived from the near-death experiences of an American named Tom Sawyer, described in the book What Tom Sawyer Learned By Dying by Sydney Saylor Farr.

My wife and I now attend church every Sunday, where visions of Jesus come to me regularly. This has helped me to see that whatever its shortcomings, the quiet and modest local church devoted to worship, the liturgy, spiritual music, and good works has been the one institution keeping many communities throughout the Western world somewhat safe and sane through the ages.

This is particularly so today for churches that have started contemplative prayer groups or that recognize and encourage that sort of prayer and meditation. The touchstone for authenticity seems whether a church fosters the attainment of individual inner peace through the “still small voice.” If so, it is working for truth.

One day, my wife came across a book in a used bookstore that introduced us to one of the most profound sources of human spiritual evolution I had yet encountered, through a teaching that claims to date from the time of Atlantis. This book, entitled The Children of the Law of One and the Lost Teachings of Atlantis, provided some crucial links.

Finally, we encountered what may be one of the mother lodes of esoteric knowledge that is transforming the world in preparation for the truly incredible changes in world consciousness that we are confident are about to occur. As a spiritual master told me, “You have no idea of the spiritual forces at work today.”

One thing is certain: the Christianity of the modern-day scribes and Pharisees is dead. Is the next phase about to be born?

For there must be a next phase. Humanity is not going to be allowed to destroy itself, which it will do if it fails to embrace the revelations to come.

Conclusion

This concludes Part I of this article. I intend to devote Part II to a concise account that explains, as best I can, how esoteric Christianity interprets the history of man. This is essential, because, as Gurdjieff pointed out, only if we have authentic information about humanity’s past, can we live meaningfully in the present.

But the account of the past the esoteric teachers offer is much different from most of the notions of “official” academic or religious thinking. The scope of this difference is often staggering. This is because the authentic Christian teachings really derive from the movement the organized churches suppressed which we know today as Gnosticism.

Finally, Part III will identify what I feel to be the “mother lode” and elaborate on its implications, including the topic of “Extraterrestrials and Christ.” I invite you to stay with me on this most interesting journey.

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, now a writer on contemporary spiritual, economic, and political issues. His books can be ordered from his website at www.richardccook.com.

The work of prophetic thinkers like Rudolf Steiner makes clear that the history of humanity proceeds through the evolution of consciousness, where changes take place in the psyche of people well in advance of their outward manifestations. Thus an understanding of what is happening before our eyes is never simple, nor can it be taken at face value. Discernment requires a level of knowledge that can only be achieved through study and insight.

But only an approach that penetrates deeply into human nature allows us to see the real inner causes of events. Such causes can be positive or negative, constructive or destructive. It is the genius and dilemma of man that we can choose which influences we serve. As Steiner prophesied almost a century ago, we appear today to be at a pivotal point where how we make such choices can determine the fate of the world.

It is perfectly clear that we are living in an era of technological achievement that, historically speaking, began just a short time ago. Steiner said what today is accepted as a truism: that the present era arose from discoveries in the 15^th century that marked the beginning of the Renaissance, when the intellect of Western man became able systematically to apply the scientific method to phenomena of motion and matter.

The invention that made all else possible was operational by the 1450s: the printing press, first made practical by Johannes Gutenberg of Germany. Over the next four-and-a-half centuries, until the dawn of the 20^th, technology surged in every field, but exploded with the near-simultaneous harnessing of electricity and the widespread exploitation of fossil fuels.

The latest phase took place long after Steiner’s death: the use of electrical impulses for high-speed data processing, such that computers are rapidly taking over the human workload. With only slight exaggeration, it can be said that humans are needed less all the time, except to program the computers and keep them humming or to carry out the leftover menial labor that machines cannot yet perform.

The unsolved problem lies in the fact that no one knows how, with declining need for employment, to continue to deliver purchasing power to the jobless masses that businesses require for them to purchase the products which machines can increasingly manufacture on their own. Until now, such purchasing power was delivered through debt-based money creation—consumer lending, mortgages against inflated home prices, etc. The collapse of this system is the cause of the current global recession and has set the stage for the huge disruptions that may come next.

Not all nations have been equal participants in the forging of the modern world that is now in crisis. The best at it have been the British and Americans, whose hegemony was established through several centuries of ruthless empire-building, followed by two world wars during which their Eurasian rivals—mainly Germany, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire—were smashed.

The Anglo-American combination, now with America supplying the muscle, is intertwined with a powerful Zionist element centered in the state of Israel but aligned with dominant domestic influences. What can accurately be called the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire is reaching today for total global domination.

The Asian nations of Japan, India, and even the somewhat restless China, have largely been incorporated into the imperial order. Latin America has long been within the American sphere of influence, and Africa is being re-colonized commercially. The Islamic world has been under imperial attack since Britain and France dismembered the Ottoman Empire after 1918.

Only the enigmatic Russians seem to stand today on the outside looking in, their nation oddly still alive and increasingly powerful after the furious financial assault from the West, leading to the “collapse” of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. This took place when a fall in world oil prices was engineered, causing the Soviet Union to lose access to hard currency.

How have the Anglo-American-Zionists come so far in what is historically such a short period of time? Two features stand out.

The first is state violence: the absolute lack of restraint in the use of weapons of destruction against non-English-speaking peoples, including the ships of war natural to seafarers and genius in the invention and utilization of guns, bombs, airplanes, and missiles. They also pioneered nuclear weapons, which only they have used against a live enemy.

The second is financialization: their ability to generate vast amounts of money through a banking system unrestrained by law, custom, or conscience, one that exercises the power to capitalize phenomenal economic and institutional growth. The basis for this power is a symbiotic relationship between big banking and big government, whereby the former can create money literally out of nothing and charge interest for its use, while loaning the latter sufficient funds to wage its wars and keep the domestic population docile and dependent through spending on social welfare programs.

The impetus for the U.S. government to spend huge amounts of fiat money for financial system bailouts, economic stimuli, etc., skyrocketed after the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-8. The collapse led to the ongoing worldwide recession which is not and cannot be overcome through conventional means such as Keynesian deficit spending.

The rest of the world has failed to keep up with Anglo-American-Zionist proficiency and were overthrown in the wars cited above. The primary regions that might have challenged the Empire were continental Europe, with its strong historical investment in the rules and procedures of law and government, and Asia, with its spiritual traditions unsuited to unbridled commerce and warfare.

The Anglo-American-Zionists have had no such constraints, ever since King Henry VIII’s epochal break with the Roman Catholic Church in the first half of the 16^th century for reasons related to his six successive marriages.

This eliminated the chief obstacle in the Western world—a unified Catholic Europe—to the elevation of greed for gain to the status of a socially-approved imperative for action. The title of the celebrated book published in 1904 by German sociologist Max Weber—The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—documented the link, if not the identical psychological sources, of the two ideologies.

The Reformation came at a key moment of history, when the technological age was receiving its formative definition. With the Reformation having a geographic base in Great Britain and Northern Europe, the rulers in those regions were able to form lasting alliances with powerful banking families who now were entirely free of the traditional Catholic opposition to usury.

Oddly, Martin Luther also was strongly against usury and other predatory trade practices but did not prevail. With the Reformation, religion as a factor in defining the morality of economics was swept away. The symbol of what now transpired was the Bank of England, established in 1694 with the aid of bankers who had come over from the Netherlands with William of Orange at the time of the Glorious Revolution.

Thus did trade and commerce backed by military might take over the world, with Great Britain at the helm. The industrial revolution made that nation a manufacturing powerhouse as well. When Britain’s power declined, the U.S. was able to step in by rescuing the “Mother Country” from destruction during World Wars I and II.

After World War II, especially with the creation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank assuring the replacement of the pound with the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. maneuvered itself into the driver’s seat. But it was the same Empire, with the same aims and characteristics.

Rudolf Steiner wrote extensively about the three major elements of human life that throughout history have contributed to a balanced and sane existence whenever it could be found. His core idea was known as the Threefold Social Order.

The first element is the economic, defined as the production and distribution of commodities, which obviously prevails today as the controlling force for most societal action.

The second is the legal/governmental, where, says Steiner, the rule of law should have as its first priority the protection of human rights and of fairness and competition in manufacturing and trade.

The third is the spiritual/intellectual/cultural, allowing for the free development of individual human capabilities.

Each of these elements, said Steiner, should function independently within their own spheres. The economic sector should not try to control the government or spiritual institutions, government should not operate businesses, and the spiritual/intellectual/cultural sector, including education at all levels, should be free to propose principles and ideals for the economy and government to implement.

Unfortunately, this model has failed to be observed or even noticed by the vested interests that profit from social paralysis and breakdown.

People today are seeing their rights disappear, not only among nations over which the Anglo-American-Zionists rule politically or commercially, but even among their own domestic populations. The alliance between big banking and the government leaderships it controls throttles the legislatures and the courts where human rights should be defined and protected. Documents like the Magna Carta, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights have been shredded. The legal profession, which should be the social guardian of human rights, sells itself to the highest bidder or acts as the prosecutor for the corporate-owned imperial state.

In the area of spiritual/intellectual/cultural life, we see the increasing standardization of government-run school systems and the suppression of all non-collectivist ideas. We see domination of higher education by corporate-sponsored foundations and think tanks, the co-optation of churches by political players who support the Empire’s wars, and the push for Zionist interests in every policy area. The dumbing-down of the population by financier-owned media have turned the population into the “sheeple.” Such half-human, frightened, and heavily-medicated creatures are fit only for zombie-like obedience to the imperatives of consumerism and militarism.

The importance to human life of efficient economic development, especially given the current world population, cannot and should not be denied. But the problem is not economic development per se. The machine is here to stay. Nor need we be too sentimentally concerned about the rate of consumption, as economic output is naturally self-limiting based on resource availability.

Waste and abuse have their own built-in consequences if people are ignorant enough to brush them aside, and we all have choices in this regard. Perhaps of greater concern should be engineered scarcity, where corporations limit availability of goods and services to root out competition and fix prices.

Even more serious, Steiner wrote, is the lack of balance among the three major aspects of human endeavor, causing the destruction of human dignity and decency everywhere. If anything, conditions have gotten worse since Steiner’s day.

It is the lack of balance that is pathological. It invites control of society by people completely unsuited to exercise it, due to their level of immaturity and lack of truly human qualities. In fact, many of those in charge of the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire seem anti-human in character and have been that way for a very long time. One could even hypothesize, as did Steiner, that many of them are sociopathic or even demonically-possessed.

Steiner pointed out in lectures from the early 1920s that in Great Britain and America these possessed people were managing affairs from behind the scenes through secret societies. From this observation we recognize such organizations contemporary with Steiner as the Round Table and the Society of the Elect, founded in Great Britain by Cecil Rhodes and Lord Nathan Rothschild, and the Council on Foreign Relations, established in the U.S. after World War I by Colonel Edward M. House using Morgan and Rockefeller money. House, we recall, was the power behind the throne during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, practically becoming Wilson’s “familiar spirit.”

The trajectory the Empire embarked upon almost a century ago has not changed. Today the denouement is at hand. The present situation, unless sufficient numbers of people wake up to the way in which they must act immediately to ensure a balanced social order, including at least some of the controllers themselves, can end only in catastrophe, which Steiner in his writings foresaw.

In my opinion, there are four ways this possible catastrophe could come about–alone or in combination.

One is a third world war, where Russia, China, Iran, and/or other nations would make a stand against the obliteration of what remains of world culture by the Empire.

The second could be a violent worldwide revolution of the masses against all forms of economic injustice.

The third would involve a comprehensive enslavement of mankind by the imperial controllers, using advanced technological means to suppress all remaining vestiges of free thought and independent action.

The fourth may be a widespread collapse resulting in breakdown of economic systems, social anarchy, disintegration of infrastructure, and return to primitive conditions.

The elite of the Empire clearly prefer the third option and are rapidly moving toward it. But they are also well-advanced in preparing for numbers one and two. Number four is more problematical. We see those with available resources now stockpiling supplies, purchasing country property, creating arsenals of weapons, etc. Big business and big government have drawn up elaborate contingency plans, with the military prepared to institute martial law.

Many people, including so-called progressives, make the mistake of believing a fifth option lies in more control of economic, legal, and cultural matters, including education, by government. This puts them at odds with so-called conservatives, who want to reduce government funding for programs that benefit the lower- and middle-income sectors, while augmenting spending on the police and military.

Rudolf Steiner was an opponent of socialism, which as an economic system has been thoroughly discredited. It should also be clear that government involvement in any economic activity means more entrenched bureaucracy, standardization, taxes, court action, accounting overhead, forms, paperwork, police power, and stifling of innovation and initiative.

These are complicated issues, but my own view is that looking to government to rescue us is a historical dead-end and is often just an excuse for the controllers to extend their power. Many believe this is the hidden meaning of the Barack Obama phenomenon.

How else to explain how this unknown Chicago politician with a murky background came out of nowhere to attain the heights of power by repeating a one-word slogan: “Change”? Much of his campaign funding came from the financial sector that benefited when he continued Bush administration programs to bail them out after the crisis of October 2008.

The one major area where I believe government should do an about-face would be to break the monopoly held by big finance on the creation of money out of thin air which they then exploit by lending at interest. This government-chartered privilege is the bedrock of elite control.

I have written about the ways this system should be reformed, including facilitation of mutual credit clearing exchanges and acceptance of local currencies in payment of taxes. But the best way for governments to combine greater human freedom with concrete economic benefits may be through an international basic income guarantee as a means of promoting human dignity while introducing much-needed consumer purchasing power.

Fortunately for humanity, the hellish materialistic ideology that the Empire espouses, from which the tragedies of the 20^th and early 21^st centuries have proceeded, may be peaking. Today, increasing numbers of people have grown to feel that their being consists of more than their physical bodies or than the mere sum of their lives, in Steiner’s words, “between birth and death.”

The masses worldwide increasingly do not want war and oppose economic exploitation. It may therefore be hoped that what is now unfolding is close to the last wave of the horrible disturbances that take place between epochs.

Thus my own view is that a sixth option exists, which is divine revelation arising in a universe where the loving Creator in which a majority of mankind believes does not abandon His children. It would appear, from many indications, that the revelation Steiner forecast is already in progress. But for individuals to benefit, they must seek and find it, as it does not announce itself on billboards or in infomercials.

Steiner spoke of this revelation as a Second Coming of Christ in the Etheric. I believe this revelation is reflected in the proliferation of teachings and movements that focus on individuals entering within themselves through prayer or meditation in search of inner peace or consolation.

This new revelation may be working its way in the world in very practical ways, but always starting with changes in the psyche. Gradually a new attitude can come alive to displace a viewpoint where people worship the idols of their imagination—money, houses, bodily adornment, the people they want to posses—rather than observe the holy injunctions central to all religions to love God and to love their neighbor as themselves.

The new revelation shows up wherever people are aspiring to assure that what is produced in the area of economics does not belong just to the money-masters but to all people.

It would show itself when the world of law and government minds its own business except to assure equal rights for all, along with fairness and competition in the marketplace.

It manifests through spiritual, intellectual, and cultural striving, where the highest goal is unfettered individual expression of Self- and God-consciousness.

Again, according to Steiner, it is the spiritual sector that should give guidance to the economic and legal ones. Someday it will. A sign this is happening is the rapid growth of instantaneous communication through the internet. Whether spiritual revelation can prevent more disasters from taking place remains to be seen and may depend on how many individuals eschew despair and choose to respond to the signs of the times in new and positive ways.

The world is indeed changing, in ways different from what the imperialists have planned. They may try to wreck the world to prevent these changes, but it won’t work. As Steiner and other prophetic thinkers made clear, at-one-ment is here and now. Nothing else in fact has ever really existed.

Richard C. Cook is a former federal government analyst who writes on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com. His latest book is “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He is preparing major article two-part article to appear this fall in New Dawn magazine on “Esoteric Christianity and the World Crisis.”

While skeptics mockingly point out that the “end of the world” has been prophesized over and over again for centuries with nothing happening—the latest being Y2K, they say, and another likely bust coming up when the calendar hits 2012—it’s obvious that mankind faces an increasingly unsustainable future.

The world’s economic, technological, agricultural, and political systems are breaking down. While the causes are debated, it’s certain that the human assault on the natural world has wiped out vast numbers of species and polluted the land, the air, and the oceans. After the past 100 years of history, with two world wars and low-grade but vicious warfare going on almost continuously somewhere in the world since World War II ended, it seems impossible for human beings to live together in a state of harmony either among ourselves or with the planet we call home.

Are we at “the end of the age?”

In social life, the overriding characteristic of our era is the increasing division in the world between haves and have-nots, masters and slaves, controllers and controlled, rich and poor. The power of the wealthiest class of people has never been so great. The weapons of mass destruction they–and the armed forces who work for them–monopolize have the force to destroy the earth many times over.

Teachings of peace, tolerance, charity, which have always received lip service, lack efficacy. Such teachings increasingly count for nothing. Organized religion, done in by its own transgressions and lack of transformative potency, rarely even attempts to make a stand for justice or persuade nations to forego war.

The people at the very top of the heap have been those Western financial magnates, especially from the Anglo-American-Zionist empire and the European Union, who control banking, industry, investment, and credit. The world is run by an international financial elite and their subordinates in government, corporations, academia, the military, and the media. This elite have plunged billions of people and the nations they inhabit into astronomical levels of debt. They are the controllers who live off the fat of the land, skimming the cream of science and industry through usury on money they create out of thin air through financial monopolies granted or at least tolerated by the politicians whose strings they pull. No longer leaders of the popular will, the political classes of all Western nations, most particularly the United States, are servants of private financial and corporate interests.

The controllers realize how tenuous stability has become. So they seem to have embarked on a worldwide consolidation of power, using every tool available from the fields of electronic surveillance and social engineering to enhance their dominance. Nations not entirely under their control, such as Russia and China, are tagged as adversaries and surrounded with military bases. The controllers are suspected of having vowed among themselves that the existing world population of almost seven billion human beings cannot be allowed to continue. A large portion of the human herd must be culled, an action that now appears to be underway with the world’s resources increasingly passing into the hands of centralized financial interests.

But this will not necessarily fend off the even larger disaster that threatens mankind. For the controllers themselves also inhabit the earth. No man is an island. What threatens the least of God’s creatures threatens them as well.

The perspective of the controllers is therefore incomplete. What it leaves out are human freedom, aspiration, and spirituality. It also leaves out nature and nature’s laws. Further, it leaves out God, whatever we mean by that word, still knowing that there is “something” or “someone” who is the ultimate creative force. Perhaps these most materialistic elements of humanity are not quite as sharp as they think they are in trying to erect a fortress against the universe in order to save themselves.

For instance, they have not yet found a way to negate the law of cause and effect: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” An example is the BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico caused by negligence in addressing pre-existent problems in a manner reminiscent of the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986. Both events exposed the pride of man as mere dust. Disasters may also be lying in wait due to genetically-modified seeds laced with pesticides where crop failures or the appearance of super-resistant insects could lead to mass starvation.

The controllers desire to rule from their glitzy world capitals of glass and steel while maintaining “safe” suburban, rural, or island palaces and retreats. Many, though not all, are the physical or spiritual descendents of those who rejected God by rejecting Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago, though according to some traditions their genealogy may be much older. Though the Christian churches offer many confusing and contradictory interpretations, it was Jesus Christ who prophesized the end of the age and sought to prepare mankind for it. Christianity is first and foremost an eschatological religion, especially as it hearkens back to such Old Testament prophets as Isaiah.

But in recognizing that the size of the human population is an overriding issue, shouldn’t we ask why are so many people alive on earth at this time? Where have they come from? Is it simply a result of improved sanitation, more productive farming methods, or the reduction in infant mortality? Or is there a hidden cause? The planet today resembles a train station at rush hour. Perhaps for the sake of discussion we should look at it from a somewhat mystical perspective. Should we consider, for instance, that the huge increase in the world’s population has taken place because all the human souls from the last several thousand years of history have been allowed to incarnate in order to give them one final chance to develop spiritually and move on to higher planes of being?

It could also be that a side-effect of the large earth population has been the emergence of the critical mass of information that has led in turn to exponential growth in science, technology, and economic productivity, the latest phase being the cybernetic revolution. Has man, in his vanity, attributed this apparent progress to his own stellar qualities, while failing to guard against the temptations deriving therefrom and their potential for binding him to the material plane? Perhaps man has surrendered his soul through a Faustian bargain based ultimately on the illusion which science promotes of someday attaining physical, as opposed to spiritual, immortality. In his delusion, man has viewed the earth as his true home rather than a place to reside temporarily for learning, experience, and eventual transcendence. The great parable of modern man may have been Goethe’s Faust, published in 1808 and prefiguring the spiritual crisis of the modern age.

We should note well the fact that due to social and political upheaval, combined with modern methods of communication, every person alive has been exposed to teachings of spiritual evolution, not just from Christianity, but from other religions such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, as well as spiritual teachings such as yoga that cross religious lines. All have taught that our true home is in the spiritual realms, not in the rounds of earthly life and death. (Judaism is excluded from this list, as there are so many different Jewish sects, including so-called “secular Judaism,” that it is difficult to isolate a specific teaching on spiritual development.)

Why else have we seen in the past century so many enlightened teachings coming from all parts of the world, existing side-by-side with organized political, financial, and military horror? Doesn’t it seem that each and every soul on the planet is being tested? As indicated above, perhaps each of us is being given one last opportunity to attain enlightenment before the curtain comes down and the theater is closed for the season. This may be one way to look at the concept of the “end times.”

So what are we waiting for? Shouldn’t we be coming together to work in every way possible for the furtherance of truth and the enhancement of being? Shouldn’t we be creating centers of light to prepare ourselves and each other whatever lies ahead? Indeed, some are. But are we doing enough?

Time appears to be running out, with dire changes having already begun. Who knows, maybe there is only a year or two remaining of relative freedom of movement before the controllers reveal their deep affinity with the dark side by setting up what seems to be their planned world dictatorship, world government, and world currency. They have learned how to manufacture crises and disasters, such as 9/11, as a means of seizing more power. The signs that they are springing the trap will be the increased bureaucratization of all aspects of life, wartime measures like rationing and transportation checkpoints, centralization of financial institutions, control of populations through un- and under-employment, elimination of freedom of speech on the internet, and continued growth of computerized systems containing personal identifying information. As has happened before, the majority of people will likely be so sick of the rising tide of chaos the controllers have helped engineer they will willingly trade their autonomy for the shackles of totalitarian order.

To accomplish their ends, won’t the controllers also try to stamp out the last vestiges of spirituality on earth? They have already attacked many spiritual teachers and movements since the epochal change of consciousness that emerged in the 1960s. The rebellious flower children were seduced by dangerous drugs developed and distributed by covert operatives. Other examples were the engineered reaction within the Catholic Church against Vatican II and the liberation theology movement, as well as the takeover of Protestant Christianity by Zionists among the Evangelicals. A friend points out that militant Zionists also took over and subverted the Reform movement within Judaism. And it has been the Western intelligence agencies, going back over a century, who helped create radical Islam in order to declare the Middle East a base of “terrorism” so that war against the Islamic world could be rationalized and their oil resources seized.

The controllers engineered these and other reactions because the only way they can rule is to eliminate the naturally-occurring hope of free individuals for a higher level of consciousness and a more humane world. Other methods include mind control through TV programming and the continued dumbing-down of the population through an educational system now based entirely on learning by rote and government-mandated standardized tests. As 1984 and Brave New World showed to previous generations and the cynical manipulation of political reporting by Murdoch-owned Fox News indicates today, the masses are easy to control. Fox News is doing it by co-opting the Tea Party movement and goading it into a phony rebellion that ignores the real issues of elite control. All these elements hide the fact that it is the controllers who are the real terrorists in the world today.

Now embedded microchips, along with automated administration of pharmaceuticals to individuals by nanotechnology, appear to be on the way. The first step toward the microchip in the U.S. could be the national ID card as proposed by U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) in connection with immigration reform. According to published reports, the card Schumer proposes would contain a person’s social security number, along with biometric data such as retinal scans and fingerprints. Such a card could easily be expanded to include credit and criminal history, DNA sequences, and medical history, all linked to a central database.

As cited in Politico, Sen. Schumer has stated his belief that “Hashem”–Hebrew for “the Name”–has appointed him the guardian of the state of Israel within the U.S. Senate. He has also spoken of himself as a potential presidential candidate. As events move forward, particularly with politicians like Schumer on the rise, many seemingly innocent people will be faced with difficult decisions of whether, and how far, to “get along by going along.”

But whoever accepts the chip, it is said, will wear the “mark of the beast”—by choice, because the conscience within will have cried out against it. The post-World War II Nuremburg trials established that no one is innocent because they were simply following orders, a ruling that should apply to victims as well as perpetrators. Of course “the chip” can take many forms, making self-deception and rationalization easy.

Yet God is not mocked. Every human being on the planet has a God-given conscience which allows us to distinguish between right and wrong–if we listen to our conscience. Some say we have an individual guardian angel who is the guide to our conscience. How many of us seek the counsel of this guide?

And is the time also at hand that the “earth changes” which have been prophesied will manifest on an increasingly vast scale? How will the planet cleanse itself? It has been prophesied, for instance, by Edgar Cayce and others that as part of this cleansing, New York and Connecticut will one day be under water. Such predictions seem less preposterous today than 60 years ago, now that scientists are discussing the increased potential for extreme climatic events through alterations in the earth’s magnetic field or in connection with earth temperature changes.

Without a doubt, the time must also come when the United States will no longer exist in anything resembling its present form. How can a nation as heedless, violent, prurient, complacent, and materialistic as this one possibly continue on its present course when the earth is purged of falsehood? How can objective justice tolerate a nation that sadistically tortures prisoners of war and routinely kills civilians with unmanned drone strikes halfway around the world?

G.I. Gurdjieff was a spiritual master from the Caucasus who studied in the most remote parts of Asia and spent his mature years teaching pupils in France. In the 1920s he visited the U.S., spending most of his time in New York. He reportedly said, “America will rot before it ripens.” The causes, he intimated, would be America’s obsession with “dollar business,” its diet of processed foods, and its dissipated lifestyle. 

Gurdjieff was right. Regarding “dollar business,” today’s “Big Six”–J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley–are the most rotten and corrupt institutions on the globe. They have sold America down the river by creating and destroying gigantic investment bubbles, feasting on massive bailouts paid for by taxpayers, and spending the last two generations shipping workers’ jobs to low-paying foreign labor markets. Then they turn around and use America and its passive population as the world’s policeman to protect their investments.

Just as bad are international institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of International Settlements, and the European Central Bank, as well as national central banks like the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Deutsche Bundesbank, etc. While Hitler allegedly killed millions, the world’s bankers make life or death decisions that affect billions. They do it through control of the money spigot, which gives them power over every business and industry in the world that utilizes any form of credit. And credit is as essential to most businesses as breathing is to a human being.

When the dust settles, will there still be communities of human survivors in America? That may depend on the Americans themselves and how successful they are at reclaiming their freedom. Whatever survivors there are may be spiritually-minded and will of necessity live close to nature. But the scale and appearance of any future civilization is an unknown. Europe’s future could be as tenuous. Maybe Russia, China, and selected locations in Latin America, Asia, or Africa will do better. We don’t yet know.

What we should know is that the time is up for humanity. We have had our chance to decide what we value, whether service to a false conception of a separate self or service to God and neighbor. Now we are likely to find out for certain what measure of truth we have imbibed and incorporated into our being during many lifetimes.

The testing has come, but it has been foreseen for a long time. The Master came two millennia ago and showed the way. Why do we think someone else is coming now to save us? We were given the tools and the time to learn how to use them. Now we have no more excuses.

Rather than promote war, conflict, and conquest, anyone with a genuine spiritual sense will do everything possible to encourage peace, justice, and harmony among peoples and nations. Nevertheless, the “end of the age” seems imminent. As the Shivapuri Baba said, as recorded in the book Long Pilgrimage by John Bennett (Dawn Horse Press, 1983), “We are at the end of a 6,000 year cycle.”

We should strive not to be confused or complacent. It is time now for individuals to make a decision on where they want to be for the challenges ahead, with whom they want to spend their time, and exactly how they intend to devote their energy and commitment. The best advice is to choose wisely and choose well but not to wait any longer.

Jesus said: “Ye know not the day or the hour.” So why do we wake up every morning still thinking we know what the day will bring? In fact we do not know. The processes we are looking at herein could take a day, a year, or a century. So what is to be done? Following are some suggestions:

• Find a teacher or group that can guide you to spiritual enlightenment and where you can help others do the same.
• Teach yourself to act considerately to all those around you, including people you consider “evil.”
• Start viewing the natural world as alive and conscious, not an inert mass of dead matter.
• Get out of debt, get off the grid, and learn to live with only what you really need of a material nature.
• Learn to love work and do that work with reverence and gratitude.
• Stop watching TV; instead watch your health and diet.
• Develop your mental, emotional, and manual skills.
• Be honest with yourself and others.
• Refuse the “chip,” no matter what.
• Never stop learning.
• Grow food.
• Laugh a lot.
• Be at peace.
• Be happy.

Richard C. Cook is a writer on public policy issues. His website is www.richardccook.com. Sources for this article include the teachings of Edgar Cayce, G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, Abdullah Dougan, Jon Peniel, Omna Last, and many others.

From Globalization To Re-Localization

By Megan Quinn Bachman

23 April, 2010
Ecowatch Journal http://www.countercurrents.org/bachman230410.htm

Using less, cutting back, saving resources, conserving energy, reducing impact—such actions, though vital responses to our planetary peril, conjure up images of a strictly proscribed and rather austere future.

When our only goal is minimizing consumption, it’s easy to imagine the imposition of draconian government measures—ones where every energy-consuming action is monitored, controlled and limited. For some, this approach is tolerable as long as it forestalls dangerous climate changes. For others, a centralized, authoritarian “dictatorship of sustainability” is a worse fate yet.

If a singular focus on cutting carbon dioxide is mistaken, what then, is the environmental movement to do? Thankfully we can save the planet while strengthening autonomy of our communities by re-localizing vital goods and services.

By meeting our most essential needs closer to home our communities will be more resilient in the face of global economic and ecological shocks. Being more self-sufficient means we will be less dependent upon centralized, energy-intensive industrial infrastructure and energy-devouring long-distance transport.

In this way, individuals and communities will also be more sustainable and more in control of their destiny, and less at the mercy of manipulated global commodity prices, corrupt CEOs, inept politicians and marauding Wall Street bankers.

But how exactly do we re-localize our economies after several decades of fast-growing economic globalization fueled by cheap energy, easy credit and mushrooming debt? According to economist and author Michael Shuman, it is by creating more locally owned, import-substituting businesses in our towns.

At a workshop in my community of Yellow Springs, Ohio last year, we designed a host of new business opportunities, including a local delivery company, small business loan fund, venture capital fund, energy services company, local farm and garden cooperative, business incubator and wellness center. These local businesses would help to keep money circulating within the community, instead of flowing from it.

While all import-substituting businesses reduce the transportation energy used to deliver goods and services, some more specifically cut energy consumption, like a renewable energy cooperative. In the Austrian town of Gussing, a council decision ordering all public buildings to stop using fossil fuels led to the development of 50 new renewable energy businesses, now employing more than 1,000 people while dramatically cutting its carbon dioxide generation by 90 percent.

In the midst of a global financial crisis, calls to re-localize finance are gaining ground. One recent example is the “Move Your Money” campaign, which is aimed at encouraging those banking at those too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks to move their accounts to community banks and credit unions.

According to its website (www.moveyourmoney.info), “Community banks are typically more conservative about how they manage their money, they’re more closely connected to the people and businesses who live near them, and they’re more inclined to make loans they know will get paid back.”

So instead of investing in the global economic growth system which is undermining its own ability to continue by devastating the natural environment on which we depend, we could be investing locally in the people, businesses and technologies that directly sustain us and will sustain generations to come through import-substituting businesses.

Re-localization has another benefit as well. Instead of a restricted and hapless low-consumption future, we can have a happier healthier existence as we fill our lives with valued relationships instead of valued possessions.

In fact, the last few decades focus on wealth accumulation has come at the expense of close, fulfilling relationships. Today we have less intimacy with our friends in addition to having fewer friends. A study done in the U.S. and published in the American Sociological Review showed that from 1980 to 2004 the number of “close confidants” people had had dropped from three to two and the number of people without any close confidants has more than doubled.

Re-localization is about finding a more sustainable way to provide for our needs as a global industrial system based upon diminishing finite fossil fuels crumbles in the 21st Century. It’s about building community so that “when things get hard,” as deep ecologist Joanna Macy has said, “we won’t, in fear, turn on each other.”

Apocalyptic scenarios of either a devastated planet or an authoritarian world government both disintegrate in the face of neighbors growing food for one another.

Megan Quinn Bachman, a freelance environmental writer, speaker and consultant, writes from Yellow Springs, Ohio. She can be reached at megan@ecowatch.org

Following is the Dedication:

“This book is dedicated to the memory of Jefferson Jackson, Lincoln, and those venerable Americans who opposed economic slavery and foreign domination, and who taught that the Government should use Constitutional money for the common welfare of all Americans. It is dedicated to their followers who oppose today’s economic slavery (boom-bust economy and State Socialism) and who oppose foreign domination (America-Last [groups] … giving America away) as well as to those who believe that their servants in the nation’s Capitol should support the Constitution in its entirety—including that section which gives to Congress the power to issue money and regulate its value.”