8

Catastrophobia and Extraterrestrials

 

The Nature of “Accidents,” Fear of Death, the Cley Hill Enigma, the Power of the Gun, and Poseidon’s Arrogance

The collision on the driveway of Viscount Weymouth’s estate Longleat was not a serious accident. No one was hurt and the two cars were barely damaged. There was even something humorous about the inevitability of the slow slide and the drivers’ utter helplessness to do anything but watch in bemusement.

I have chosen to focus on this incident because I wanted to explore the deeper currents of meaning beneath so-called accidents, which most of the Western world appears to dismiss as magical thinking, or simply as unrealistic and silly.

There are small incidents that occur every so often during a mortal’s life that can be thought of as true accidents. By a “true accident” I mean an event that isn’t intended or anticipated by the human participants and, more importantly, an interaction falling outside the guidance of the specific angels involved. For most people accidents such as these are relatively infrequent, invariably minor, and never life-threatening, because the pattern of your life tends to be straightforward from the viewpoint of the angels.

As you discover your true soul path and start to align yourself with your higher purpose, you will progressively find yourself “in the right place at the right time.” These are the synchronicities you’ll observe, the meaningful coincidences that help guide you along the spiritual path. Accidents will effectively cease to occur, because any unexpected interaction will then be viewed as feedback and can be usefully mined for meaning and information.

If an accident can be broadly thought of from a subjective point of view as the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, then such accidents will occur to people to the extent that they are out of alignment with their soul’s true path. Should such feedback be ignored or dismissed, there will likely be further, more serious incidents until that person is shaken awake.

There are also occasional situations that result from conditions completely outside a person’s control. Although these are extremely rare, they are almost invariably extremely serious or fatal: A part of a defunct satellite, for example, that fails to burn up on reentery and strikes a Canadian trapper dead. The one chance in three trillion of this occurring is an apt illustration of the rarity of this sort of accident. Yet it’s in such accidents that makes it paradoxically easier to see the workings of your invisible allies, because the time and situation of a person’s death is a matter of great significance to that person’s companion angels. In the case of our Canadian trapper, for example, while the exact manner of his death may not have been written into his life plan, the fact of his death will be predetermined to occur at a certain point. This is because any one person’s death will affect any number of people who know that person.

You can appreciate that this is an extremely subtle business. Midway angels will never reveal their presence unless specifically authorized. So, in my hypothetical example, deeper research will likely reveal that the trapper may have ignored his intuition to stay in his camp that day; or equally possible, the trapper might have been guided to that precise spot by a dream he’d had the previous night. Each possibility demonstrates a level of intentionality. But more significantly, the trapper’s death will indicate that he has completed whatever the purpose of his incarnation had been.

Mein Host reminds me that two of his closest friends, Genesis and Lady Jaye, both by nature extremely sensitive and intuitive people, were due to attend a health club in one of the towers of the World Trade Center early on September 11, 2001. However, that morning was so clear and beautiful, an Indian summer day, they felt like staying in bed longer and luxuriating in the love they were making at their home in Queens. It was only when they were finally getting out of bed did they see the second tower falling on TV.

This was not an isolated incident. The total number of people in the towers that morning was less than half of those ordinarily present. There had to have been a lot of small “miracles” that quietly kept people away.

You can believe the angels were busy that morning.

My ward asked around his wide circle of New York friends whether they, or anyone they knew, might have had an experience similar to that of Genesis and his wife. There were five other situations in which friends or acquaintances had chosen, for one reason or another—and in two cases they were irrational, last-minute decisions—not to be in the towers on that fateful day.

A materialist would dismiss these as lucky chances; a religious man might thank his God for saving those people; an atheist would write off such events as coincidences, just as a bean counter might discount the miracles as the inevitable result of statistics. “Some people are always going to find reasons to stay away, whatever day you choose,” a statistician might reasonably claim. And he’d be correct in principle. Yet, like much statistical thinking, he would entirely miss the range of subtlety within the personal responses of those who chose to stay away.

Materialist responses may well satisfy their particular devotees; however, they overlook the far deeper spiritual significance of the choices humans make over the course of their lives. By ascribing an event to luck, or coincidence, or to a statistical inevitability, the materialist will fail to derive any real meaning from such an event. It will remain a close shave for those who avoided the towers that morning, as those going to work that day in September would then have to be thought of, when viewed in this way, as spectacularly unlucky.

Those people who chose to believe they were saved by a direct intervention of God, although perhaps being able to glean more meaning from such an event than the materialist, put themselves in the unfortunate position of having to rationalize to themselves why God didn’t intervene to save those who’d died in the disaster. And nobody really wants to go down that road. The answers simply make no sense. “If God stepped in to save me, does that mean he just allowed the others to be killed?” Or, “If God wanted to save me, did he therefore want the others to die?”

And, of course, the old faithful “Why me, Lord?”

I suppose it’s inevitable in a society that neither gives credence to the real existence of angels nor ascribes any deep spiritual meaning or purpose to an individual’s life that such a society would believe in the concept of accidents. This myopia is due both to the people’s limited perspective on the true nature of mortal life and the very human propensity for irresponsibility. How much easier it is for people to blame the tree for hitting their car than it is for them to accept that it might be their responsibility for driving into it! And how regrettable it is that the driver, by taking no personal responsibility for the car crash, will miss the true significance of the incident and will thus learn nothing of real value from it.

However shocking it may seem to some, there really are no real accidents. The angels aren’t that sloppy. Accidents, you could say, happen on purpose. Every action has its inevitable consequences, as every consequence in turn will have its further consequences. A poorly adjusted brake assembly on a car made in Japan might result months later in an “accident” on an interstate in California that kills the woman driver.

Is that then an accident? And if you knew the dead driver had chosen the path of self-sacrifice prior to incarnation, and as a result more reliable brake adjustment policies are instituted, would this cast the so-called accident in a different light?

Let’s look at the contributing factors: a careless mechanic in Japan, lackluster quality control, a dealer under pressure for higher profits, a salesman working on a percentage of sales too busy and ambitious to check the brakes before selling the car to the woman; and a woman who knows nothing about engines, or brakes, or anything about cars in general for that matter.

So here is a line of consequences. Each one in itself can barely be called accidental. Irresponsible, lazy, fearful, greedy, and indifferent, yes, with each person in the line creating a lesson to be learned, until the automobile finally reaches the woman and she drives it innocently to her death.

Written off as a road death statistic, one of thousands of such fatalities a year, the woman’s death becomes simply another accident. Its only purpose can be in its aggregation with other such accidents to force changes on the automobile manufacturer.

However, when an incident such as my example here is examined through less-sentimental eyes, questions about the woman need to be more penetrating. Did she, for example, have a weakness for giving away her power to authority, and had she bought the car for the wrong reasons? Had she ignored her intuition’s advice to avoid that particular car? Might she have been so insouciant to not bother to have the car checked over by an independent mechanic? Was the car purchased under false pretenses? Did she buy the car for the wrong reasons? These will be the sort of questions the driver will be likely presented with for her own learning at her after-death life review.

However, whatever the driver’s particular issue may have been, it can be thought of as part of the mise en scène of the ensuing drama, her life script, as I previously suggested, which was agreed upon prior to incarnation, and will include a death that would benefit others in the longer run. The manner of the death might not be specified in the agreement, but the woman’s life, as she nears the time of her crash, will be moving her inexorably toward the fate.

Of course, all this will be happening beneath the driver’s level of conscious awareness; the true value of her self-sacrifice will only emerge when she’s with her angels at her after-death review. It’s there that she’ll be able to appreciate the meaning and purpose of her life. And if she has caused unnecessary harm or pain to others she will have the opportunity to experience her own feelings and reactions as well as feel the pain or harm she caused others.

A human being’s capacity for absorbing information is so minimal compared to the amount of information available in the Multiverse. It could be said that the Multiverse itself is pure information. This vast information gap means it’s inevitable that human beings lived in the virtual dark. Information has to be absorbed and processed to distill it into knowledge, and knowledge has limited value unless it can be used with wisdom.

This is a tall order to expect of any mortal on a third-density world. To use the vernacular, given the limitations of the flesh, you are all dancing as fast as you’re able. You learn what you can, what you’re able to deal with under the circumstances. However, the deeper reality is closer to life as a theatrical piece, performed by actors who’ve lost or forgotten their lines, on a stage that constantly shifts beneath their feet, with a cast some of whom are friendly, some unaccountably hostile, and subjected to intermittent shocks and surprises if their performance gets too boring.

Each learns what they can in the process of trying to improve their earthly lives, but the true and deeper lessons derived from a mortal life are only fully available during your afterlife review. This is when you’ll have the opportunity to study, evaluate, and more fully understand the many layers of information embedded into the way you’ve lived your life.

This is how mortals learn and grow in spirit as they ascend through the countless levels of the Multiverse.

The weather had cleared by the time Brother Joab and my ward reached the outskirts of the town of Warminster in the English county of Wiltshire.

Warminster was founded in Anglo-Saxon times, with its name first appearing in the tenth century, although human occupation was already ancient when Stonehenge was built close-by. It’s an area of England long believed to have sacred or magical qualities. It was in this region that crop circles were first observed and photographed in the early 1970s, although simple circles had been appearing occasionally for some years. It took the advent of small, low-flying, private aircraft and sufficient curiosity on the part of pilots to look out for the formations in the crop fields for them to be discovered. A few have been relatively obvious hoaxes, but apart from them, the circles continued to manifest in progressively more complex formations over the ensuing years, with an unusual concentration of these circles in the fields of southwest England.

This isn’t the place to digress on the subject of crop circles. I will discuss them further in a later volume, when my ward is back in England and free to spend some time in an authentic crop circle. Besides, on that chilly winter’s night in 1969, as the two Processeans drove slowly around the deserted streets of Warminster, crop circles hadn’t yet emerged as the enigma they remain to this day.

In the 1960s, it was all about UFOs.

The newspapers had called it a “UFO flap,” with large, silent, cigar-shaped UFOs seen by numerous witnesses in the Warminster area. There’d also emerged a single daylight photograph of an unidentified craft taken in 1965 that, despite much examination by experts, has stood the test of time.

This much Mein Host knew as he and Joab drove around talking about UFOs; that and the unusual name of the person who had published a book about the paranormal phenomena occurring in the Warminster region. Peering at his watch—it was 10:30 p.m.—Joab suggested looking in a phone book for the author Arthur Shuttlewood’s address. It was there, of course. This was England.

At around 11:00 p.m., the Rover drew up in front of a small suburban house and the two Processeans were welcomed in by a tall, thin man in his sixties with a twinkle in his eye. He appeared unfazed by the unexpected arrival of two such outlandish-looking beings at a time when all good people should be tucked up in bed. But then Arthur wasn’t tucked up in bed either, was he? It was almost as if he was expecting them. When I saw my ward’s sly wink at Joab, I knew that was what was in his mind.

After seating the pair in the cramped living room and pouring them each the customary cup of tea, Arthur Shuttlewood launched into the story of his investigations of the weird, unidentified sounds that had been frightening and puzzling the good townspeople for the past four or five years. Arthur was on the case.

Originally a journalist with the local paper, Arthur’s spiel was peppered with quotes from newspaper articles going back to the mid1960s. This was when he’d started reporting on the odd sounds that were being heard at night. By 1965, UFOs had been seen; one craft, so Arthur told them, remaining silent and motionless for more than half an hour just south of the town.

The book Arthur Shuttlewood published in 1967, The Warminster Mystery, a battered copy of which was found beneath a pile of newspapers and shown around. In it he retraced the phenomena that revealed how the unusual sounds had led to the UFO sightings in August of 1965. Grabbing another cutting, Arthur showed them the photograph Gordon Faulkner had taken of a UFO over the town in broad daylight. This was the one my ward knew about. It had been published in the Daily Mail, a national newspaper, and would have reached a readership of millions.

This had led to UFO enthusiasts from all over the country descending on the small town, soon to be followed by what Arthur called “a press circus,” with him in the middle of the ring doing his best to play ringmaster. He was the expert, after all—the man who’d brought the phenomenon to light. A televised public meeting about UFOs was held in the town, bringing even more people pouring into Warminster.

It was at that point, according to Arthur, that the problems started. The excitement with which he’d initially greeted the Processeans changed, and simultaneously he seemed both resentful and crestfallen. It wasn’t difficult to see why. He reckoned he’d written the book that had started and then stoked all the interest in UFOs, and he now found himself being sidelined by Faulkner’s photo in a national paper.

As Mein Host said afterward, “It was hard to know whether Arthur was genuinely angry or just plain baffled by what’d happened.”

In fact, I could tell from the Arthur’s emotional body that the state of his mind was mainly one of confusion. He was not a particularly sophisticated man. He clearly never expected that his lonely crusade in the face of considerable ridicule would turn into such a ridiculous charade.

However, his mood soon changed when my ward told him about his bumping into an extraterrestrial on a London street a few years earlier. He positively beamed when he heard the ET had said they could pick rockets out of the sky, “Just like that!” with a snap of his fingers in my ward’s face, before he slipped past the stunned lad and continued up the street.

I believe that Arthur must have recognized the reality and authenticity of my ward’s encounter from his own unusual experiences, because it seemed to have answered an unresolved question in his mind. I’d no doubt it was the issue that troubled everyone in the 1960s: What were the intentions of the UFOs? If they were negative, what was going to be done about them? If they were benign, would they save humanity from its own foolishness?

“Have you a car outside?” Arthur suddenly asked as he was clearing the newspapers aside. “How about some UFO spotting? It’s getting toward midnight—best time for seeing ’em.”

Without waiting for an answer, Arthur Shuttlewood, renowned UFO chaser, reached for his coat and led the way out into the frosty night. He was sure they were going to see UFOs, “considering the present company!” This last said with a conspiratorial grin. Whatever could that have meant?

Arthur made no secret of having been depressed over the past couple of years. Not only had he been hurt by being unrecognized by the alien true-believers at the conference, just as he’d been scorned by the non-believers, but after all of his initial excitement, the sightings seemed to have dropped off.

Arthur Shuttlewood was a man (and a writer) who dearly needed something spectacularly out of this world to happen.

*  *  *

In a society as preoccupied with violence, for example, as contemporary America, the gun has become a dominant symbol for the fear of death. Although some gun owners might want to deny it with their “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” guns certainly make it a lot easier. I believe that it’s surprisingly difficult to kill with bare hands, yet in spite of the multitude of people killed throughout history by the bare hands of their murderers, hands have never become quite the symbols of death that guns have. Yet hands can do many things, some good, some not so good; a gun does only one thing, and it does it implacably well.

In its iconic role, the gun has assumed a deep religious significance: it is now the gun, and not God, that giveth or taketh away life; it is the gun that has become the ultimate decider, the way conflicts can be finally settled. There is now seldom thought given to an afterlife; little consideration of consequences; and apparently, even less understanding of the spiritual consequences of taking another’s life.

This has led to memorable hypocrisies such as President Clinton preaching to the nation after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, stressing how violence was never a way to solve conflicts while simultaneously sending in cruise missiles to destroy an aspirin factory in Somalia. The abortive attempt to kill Osama bin Laden was an embarrassing failure, killing innocent workers and demolishing a chemical plant producing a valued medicine, while creating a firestorm of criticism at home and internationally.

In spite of the furor that this shocking error created in the United States, the iconic power of the gun—in this case a cruise missile—being used in an attempt to kill a terrorist thousands of miles away was never questioned. The very concept of violence being no way to resolve a conflict that the president was touting, the next moment he was flouting. And yet Mein Host assures me that however critical the comments, he saw no reference whatsoever to this obvious hypocrisy. He says this myopic attitude toward gun violence was also appropriately demonstrated by the owner of a small-arms factory close to Columbine High School. In Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine, the owner seemed quite unable to comprehend that there could be any connection between the proximity of his gun factory to the site of the deadliest high school gun killing in America.

Without wishing to belabor this observation, I wouldn’t be completing my analysis if I didn’t mention a couple of the most serious consequences of this pervasive and collectively repressed fear of death.

On a more obvious material level, the fear of death drives an American military establishment larger than the military forces of every other nation combined, and at a price that is bankrupting the nation. Of course there’s a perfectly natural fear of death in all mortals, but here I’m choosing in the main to address my American reader. Much of this you will have observed for yourself: that the manipulation of the fear of death has created an arms industry that exports military hardware to other nations, thus ensuring that hostilities continue. And not surprisingly, this permits, even encourages, more and more gun deaths and injuries in robberies and domestic rows that otherwise might have petered out before someone reaches for a gun. And, of course, this lethal combination of a profound (but largely unacknowledged) fear of death, and the ease of acquiring the means to end life, can only continue to result in more gun violence on the streets of America than in the cities of any other Western nation.

However, even this situation fades in light of the far more insidious effect that the gun has had on the American national psyche. The very threat of a gun can produce a fugue state in many people—a state of hypnotic stasis—in which the iconic power of the weapon is enough to induce an immediate fear of death. And there is the reciprocal by-product of this blind belief in the authority of the gun that sends homeowners off to buy guns to protect their homes and families. And they’ll do this despite common knowledge that it’s far more likely to be used in a flare-up of domestic violence than ever to shoot an intruder.

When a cultural anthropologist of the future comes to analyze the deterioration of American society from its position of global dominance after the Second World War to the situation in which the nation finds itself in the early years of the twenty-first century, our future academic will be free, hopefully, of the cultural trance of gun worship. I’ve no doubt she’ll be able to chart the progressively destructive influence of this unholy and spiritually debilitating veneration of guns and the sanctity of gun ownership.

There are many aspects of a so-called free society that require individuals to make responsible choices. Buying a gun, let alone using one on another person, in any sane society, should have to meet the highest levels of personal responsibility. It shouldn’t therefore be surprising that so many people find themselves unable to rise to the challenge demanded by common sense when it comes to owning guns. (Having said I would not belabor the point, my ward is warning me not to test the reader’s patience much longer. Or resolve the gun issue from a Watchers point of view.)

Common sense suggests that the actual reality of such a permissive approach to gun possession actively encourages people to place their faith and security in their weapons. Rather than using their intelligence to talk or think their way out of potentially harmful situations, or indeed by placing their faith in God to keep them safe, relying on a gun will automatically reduce the options to shooting or not shooting.

The iconic power of the gun replaces the need for a more nuanced or intelligent response to danger. By depending on guns for self-protection, gun owners can freeze themselves into their base chakras. The very presence of a gun presupposes a threat to their survival. It’s this powerful thoughtform lodged in the base chakra that reduces a person’s options. By relying on a weapon, the owner has no reason to resolve a threat in a more constructive manner.

Please don’t misunderstand me. My observations so far about guns and the position they occupy in contemporary American life have focused on the practical implications of gun ownership. If you can make some use of my insights, so be it. But as a Watcher, it may surprise you to know I am bound to support the reasonable availability of guns in America. Human advancement ultimately depends on individual responsibility and guns also carry the potential to awaken gun owners to more fully consider their actions and the consequences during what may be life-threatening situations.

If my approach appears paradoxical, consider this: Life is largely about making choices, and it’s often necessary to make poor choices as part of the learning process before the correct choice is made. Guns, with their potential to take life, are at the extremes of personal choice. While common sense demands certain obvious restrictions on gun purchase, owning a weapon will hopefully sooner or later alert the owner to the way a gun invites violence while removing the option for a more intelligent response to a threat. Although the person who forsakes the gun might be living in a difficult neighborhood he or she will have a greater chance of growing more emotionally and spiritually mature from having to defuse situations without having to resort to shooting someone.

A decision such as the one I’ve implicitly suggested—to forsake the use of a gun, not for some ideological reason but as a result of an intelligent appraisal of possible consequences—would allow an alignment of the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual intelligences into one coherent operating system.

I’ll take this one step further, if I may, because the skeptic is bound to argue that if other irresponsible people own guns, well what then? Doesn’t that justify owning a gun?

My answer won’t satisfy the skeptic, but it will introduce the less-obvious dynamic that will be recognized by those familiar with the esoteric principle of like attracting like. A person who has fully resolved his or her own propensity for violence will be unlikely to attract the violence of others. This sort of active pacifism will be tested, as happened a number of times to Mein Host, but as he has proved to himself that he can respond to life-threatening situations appropriately and without fear, he no longer needs to attract violence into his life.

On a world such as this, I’ve come to appreciate that deep self-knowledge is often activated and most thoroughly absorbed under extreme conditions. Much of this understanding I owe to observing my ward over the course of his lives, his willingness to challenge himself by walking into difficult or dangerous situations as a way of learning about himself and how he responds in the face of danger.

I’m going to jump ahead to 1980 for a timely example drawn from my ward’s life, to a warm summer’s night in New York City. It was well after midnight, and Mein Host was using a public phone booth on the curb of a side street in the mid-50s, on the West Side of Manhattan.

My ward had left the Process community a couple of years earlier, in December of 1977, and was continuing to live in the city. He had already started a small business that I’ll cover in more detail later in my narrative. However, running a small business in Manhattan was keeping him ridiculously busy, every day and most of the night, which is why he was using a public phone on the curb of a deserted street at 2:00 a.m. on that warm summer night.

This then is what I observed: At some point in his telephone conversation, with the booth enclosing his head and shoulders, he evidently hadn’t noticed a heavyset man appearing out of a darkened doorway. He sidled up behind my ward and stuck a revolver in the small of my ward’s back.

Before I continue—and to accentuate the point I’ve been making about appropriate responses to dangerous situations—I should add that as a result of his near-death experience seven years earlier in 1973, my ward lost any fear of death, although he didn’t fully realize this until he was tested in a number of life-threatening situations.

He has written elsewhere that he was immediately aware that the pressure in his back was a gun. Yet I could see he neither felt nor showed any fear or surprise whatsoever. There was no startled response, no sharp intake of breath, no obvious reaction at all. He barely stopped speaking on the phone while gesturing to the mugger to be patient. Perhaps it was this that flummoxed the man. The mugger just stood there, obviously bewildered, pushing the gun into my ward’s back.

Then my ward smiled back over his shoulder in such a relaxed and confident manner while continuing to speak on the phone, that the mugger evidently believed he had no choice but to wait, so he pressed the gun harder into Mein Host’s back and did just that.

After a minute or so my ward hung up. Then, turning slowly on the spot in a counterclockwise direction, he must have surprised the man who’d been holding the gun in his right hand. This allowed my ward to gently push the gun out of his back with his left arm as he was completing his turn. Before the man had a chance to react, my ward completed his turn by throwing his left arm affectionately around the mugger’s shoulders. In paying no attention to the threat implied by the gun, he had effectively disarmed the thief.

My ward spoke quietly and reassuringly to the deflated mugger, asking questions and listening attentively, while they walked together along the street, chatting like old friends.

I didn’t overhear what they were saying before they parted on reaching Seventh Avenue, but from the way the mugger had tucked the gun out of sight behind his back, I assumed lessons were being learned by both parties.

Lest this be dismissed as a lucky chance, in the five acts of mugging that my ward experienced during his twenty years of living in Manhattan, the three involving weapons were disarmed just as adroitly as the one described. The aggressive young man who rushed at my ward throwing punches with fists and feet was effectively fought off, thanks to having been taught boxing when he was five and six years old.

The only mugging in which my ward lost a few dollars occurred when he was confronted by more than a dozen teenage street kids, some with zip guns, others with sticks. They swarmed him late one night in the deserted stairs to the subway, close to the cathedral in northern Manhattan. There was another kind of learning in this, the fourth attempted mugging: keeping his cool during this purposely confusing aggressive attack, during which the boys were poking at him, pushing him up against the wall, shouting insults and jumping nervously around.

My ward’s cool and unfamiliar reaction must have spooked the kids, who ran away after grabbing a few dollars from one of his pockets. They entirely missed the wad of notes in his shoe, and, more importantly, they didn’t even notice the leather briefcase that he’d tucked behind him when they pressed him up against the subway wall. So they didn’t steel his camera, his small tape recorder, his natural double-terminated quartz crystal, his journal (the most valued of all his possessions), his house keys, or sundry other items that would have been wretchedly inconvenient to lose.

It interested me to observe that none of these incidents disturbed my ward’s emotional equilibrium in a way that being threatened with a gun would have terrified him at any time prior to his near-death experience.

This brings me back to my original point: angels have a different understanding of mortal death than do most human beings. This is not simply because angels are immortal beings who have no direct experience of death, but for the very same reason my ward discovered for himself as a result of his NDE, and then subsequently confirmed it for himself as a result of the muggings. To quote another American president, one who knew about fear and danger from his own personal experiences: “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” However, this is evidently much easier to say than to do—and to do it without repressing the fear, resorting to a stiff upper lip and putting on a brave front.

What I hope I’m demonstrating in relating Mein Host’s narrative with all its ups and downs is how life itself will become the spiritual teacher if due attention is paid to the true nature of the challenges faced. Mein Host will tell you himself that none of his actions in dealing with the muggers were consciously planned. Nor did he consider that he was rash or foolish, or for that matter, that he was being particularly brave. He would say that his reactions just came naturally.

The truth of it was that my ward wasn’t threatened by the gun’s promise of death and so was free to respond to the thief with human kindness without a second thought. The mugger, in turn, was so convinced in the magical power of the gun he was wielding that he found himself unable to deal with my ward’s apparent indifference to the threat. In doing this, said mugger gave his power away to my ward and effectively became the victim of his own mugging.

My coauthor is now insisting that I have “milked this extended digression” (his words) for as much as I’m likely to draw out of the mortal fear of death.

I can only say in response that if he gets impatient with my digressions, I remind him I’m writing for my own illumination, as much as I am for his. There are aspects of the mortal experience that are novel to me yet will be all too familiar to him. So if he believes I am becoming tedious in focusing excessively on mortality and the human fear of death, he needs to understand he’s in the unusual situation of having actually experienced the afterlife realms, only to choose to return a profoundly changed man. It’s precisely this factor—that I’ve been able to observe the same person both before and after such a profoundly transformative experience as an NDE—that is allowing me the luxury of my brief analysis.

I suppose I consider my ward as my self-contained control group. I, in turn, return the favor by telling him what I’ve observed and supplying information he will need for his spiritual growth.

*  *  *

I’m sure the perceptive reader will have realized it was my thoughts of Atlantis that carried me, not unnaturally, to what is currently occurring in the modern world. Yet if there are certain similarities between nations in decline, there are also some intriguing differences.

My brief explication on the fear of death and the role it plays in the American national psyche, and now, through the global reach of the U.S. entertainment industry, most of the rest of the world, serves to demonstrate one of the main contrasts between the two historical periods. I’ve raised this issue because the thoughtform of the fear of death is by now so prevalent and so firmly embedded in the modern psyche that it’s almost impossible for the contemporary mind to identify with such fatalism in the face of death that characterized most ancient cultures.

It may help contribute to a deeper understanding of those cultures to know how opaque is the lens of self-concern through which the modern mind attempts to gaze into the distant past.

A human being of the Atlantean era was not only more familiar with the facts of death, but he or she also would have possessed an absolute conviction in the reality of an afterlife. Prior to the more recent introduction of the concept of a punitive afterlife, antediluvian cultures universally believed the afterlife occurred in a far finer place than a mortal lifetime. Due to minimal medical intervention there were many fewer natural NDEs in ancient times, but those rare ones who did return from the realms of the dead would have likely reported on the wonders they experienced in the afterlife realms.

This overwhelmingly optimistic view of a glorious afterlife, together with the unenviable conditions in which most humans throughout history have eked out their short lives, fed a fatalism that welcomed death as a liberation from a wretched life. It was this pathology that defined and shaped much of existence in the ancient world, when its denizens faced the disasters, natural and man-made, that they saw as being their lot to endure in life.

This pathology also worked to the advantage of the ruling elites and their military forces, who discovered that the promise of a better life to come could be endlessly manipulated in service to their own ambitions. An extreme form of this in modern times can be found in the atavistic beliefs of the suicide bombers who are prepared to blow themselves up, having become convinced they will then find themselves in paradise.

Clearly, martyrdom in the Western world has diminished since the Industrial Revolution in inverse proportion to the progressive secularization of society and its rejection of an afterlife. With this change came the escalating fear of death, which is what makes the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, for example, all the more disturbing for the nonbeliever.

In the antediluvian world human beings were not so bowed down by the fear of death for the reasons I’ve already noted. It would take the religious authorities of a more recent time to discover that in concocting a fictional hell as a place of eternal damnation, they could temper the promise of heaven with the far more effective threat of hell.

Thus it was that the world seemed to be closing in on the islands of Atlantis. It was a time of ravaging storms, of floods and darkened skies, of an erupting Earth and boiling hot steam exploding out of volcanic fissures. It was a time when rocks fell from the skies, bringing death from fatal diseases that swept through the islands. All these calamities were faced by the Atlanteans with a stoicism almost entirely foreign to the modern mind.

For those of us who observed Atlantis during the first of its three massive upheavals, it seemed as though the Atlanteans who were killed had given themselves over willingly to death. I saw tidal waves sweeping thousands of people into the ocean without a sound; not a scream or a cry from them—not even a whimper out of the children as they surrendered themselves to their inevitable doom.

I believe it was toward the end of this long period of natural disasters that I realized a truth that, at the time, cut deeply into the way I was thinking about the consequences of the Lucifer Rebellion on this world.

There was a terrible repetitive tedium to the disasters, a numbing sameness to the way the Atlanteans submitted themselves to death like automatons. Whether they valued their human existence, or if their lives were a drudgery, they all had the same reaction when facing death.

I found I had the strangest reaction to watching this horrifying passivity. Although it was obvious that no one could do anything to prevent the natural disasters, it was the manner in which the Altanteans gave up all hope and simply waited for death to take them away that I found so disturbing. Even the impala had run from the fire! Yet it wasn’t that I would have wished people to run screaming from the flames and the floods, no, it certainly wasn’t that. I’ve never taken pleasure in the pain or terror of mortals.

It is only now, when I’ve had the opportunity to analyze my experience in retrospect, that I realize what so distressed me. At the time I believed it was solely the people’s passivity that was so upsetting. I can now appreciate that my aversion was related to a prescient sense of my future mortal incarnation, which I was unaware of at that time.

Yes, something I hadn’t felt before had stirred within me during my encounter with the dolphin. It was perhaps the first glimpse of the scale and reach of what I now realize was MA’s program of personal redemption for those of us who choose mortal incarnation. It’s now clear to me that my distress at observing the passivity with which the Atlanteans gave themselves so willingly over to death must have felt so wasteful. My talk with the dolphin had alerted me to the very real possibility of a mortal incarnation, but it must have seemed so personally improbable at the time that I didn’t pay it the attention it deserved.

So this is how I felt: the Atlanteans were throwing away their lives; they had no idea of the true value of a mortal life. I was surprised how strongly I felt this without knowing the reason why.

Now, however, having had the chance to observe Mein Host so closely over the course of his current lifetime, I’ve come to realize I somewhat misinterpreted what was going on with the islanders. What I had taken for passivity, what had so peeved me, wasn’t the indifference I took it for at all. Now I understand that their apparent passivity was due to their Atmans, their Indwelling Spirits, having taken leave of their mortal hosts. This had left the Atlanteans with only the most rudimentary animal instincts with which to respond to the onrushing disaster. It was this that made me think they were in a hypnotic fugue state, but it wasn’t quite that.

If mammals are threatened with impending death they might fight if the threat is a predator or flee if it’s brought on by a fire or flood. But there’s a third reaction, which you will see in dogs when they roll over on their backs and surrender to a stronger force. In human beings this reaction can manifest as a sudden freezing of cognitive abilities. On Atlantis, people tended to move as one, like zombies, free of personal will and following an overwhelming collective desire—in this case, a desire to submit to the inevitable.

Thirteen millennia ago, human consciousness was more firmly lodged in the nondominant hemispheres of the Atlantean brain than it is in the brain of the contemporary human being. It was this factor that rendered the Atlanteans all the more vulnerable to being carried along by the collective. When this occurred in a mass of people, as when facing a tidal wave, and if their fate was clearly inevitable to them, they would indeed appear from an external viewpoint to be moving as a single, collective automaton.

I can see as I’m completing this necessary digression on death that the confusion in my mind as I watched the disasters striking Atlantis and most of the Middle East was actually more of a species misunderstanding. This was compounded with what I now realize was all the disinformation and rumors floating around the circuits following the Lucifer revolution that I hadn’t yet sorted out for myself. The truth is, I was feeling as confused and heavyhearted in my mind as those poor dispirited and apathetic Atlanteans must have been in theirs. It was one of my lowest periods in all the half-million years I’ve been present and observing life on this world.

It’s somewhat humbling to realize how little I understood at the time of what was developing behind the scenes.

*  *  *

It was a dark and moonless night as the navy blue Rover Saloon, with its delicately bruised front bumper, crept slowly up the narrow lane toward Cley Hill. Arthur Shuttlewood sat in the backseat leaning forward and pointing excitedly ahead to where they’d be sure to see a UFO.

Parking the car, they walked the rest of the way in the freezing cold to the top of the hill, Arthur chattering happily about all the weird phenomena going on the past few years. Lots of strange sounds, he was saying, but no real UFO sightings since back in ’65. He was evidently proud of all the interest he’d stirred up with his book and his articles in the local paper, and yet beneath all this ebullience was the barely repressed fear that he’d missed his moment in the limelight. His shtick had been usurped by those with louder voices and more refined deliveries.

He gave a clue to his delicate state of mind when he complained about how Patrick Moore—long well-known in England as “the Television Astronomer”—had come down to Warminster the previous month and made a fool out of poor Arthur. He said he’d been humiliated; Moore had even suggested he was a hoaxer!

They neared the summit of Cley Hill, which rose like a soft green breast from the landscape. The local people had shown enough aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty to avoid building houses on its gentle flanks. It had functioned as a fort during the Iron Age and, as with so many features of the landscape in southwest England, over the centuries Cley Hill had gained its own inevitable unsavory reputation. It was where medieval witches gathered to hold their sabbats.

It should be evident to those following my narrative that at least some of those drawn to practice magic or sorcery throughout the medieval era all over Europe would have been incarnate rebel angels. And this is true. It was one of those periods in the Western world when the Christian religion, whether Roman Catholic or the recently created Protestant faith, dominated and controlled the minds and souls of the people they purported to serve. In a pattern I’m only now appreciating, this infusion of rebel angel incarnates was chosen to play their roles in maintaining the more ancient belief in a direct personal contact with the unseen realms.

There were few trees gracing the hill. The thick layer of chalk beneath the hill’s grassy flanks provided little purchase for anything larger than the few shrubs that the three intrepid UFO Watchers were stumbling into on their way up the slope. As a hill, Cley wasn’t very high, some eight hundred feet, so reaching the summit seemed reasonably effortless for the two priests. This was less so for the older man who, by the time they reached the top, was panting out a mist that hung around his head like a ghostly aura in the faint light of the stars.

It was evidently extremely cold that night, the snow clouds from earlier in the day having cleared to reveal a sky alive with stars. The three of them stood for a while, stamping their feet to keep warm, peering up into the starlit sky for any discernible movement. Nothing. Not even a shooting star.

Arthur was growing steadily less talkative as his enthusiasm waned. He had obviously pinned his hopes on a sighting with his two strange visitors. It had been some years since he’d had anything firm to report, and now he was determined to be vindicated in the public’s eyes, if not in those of the treacherous Patrick Moore.

After fifteen minutes—the last five having been spent in a teeth-chattering silence—it was my ward who suggested they return to the car and warm themselves up. Maybe they’d be able to see something from there.

“At least we won’t be so cold!” Mein Host was saying as they stumbled back down the hill. “Don’t you find, Arthur, that sightings happen when you’re least expecting them? I’ve never had any luck the few times I’ve gone out ’specially to see them.”

Arthur didn’t have much to say to that. It must have been obvious he’d spent many a fruitless night up on Cley Hill watching for spaceships. He’d already told them about what he named “the Warminster Thing” and how he’d become convinced it was associated in some way with UFOs.

“Isn’t there a lot of military activity around here?” Joab the Practical asked him, as the car loomed up in the darkness ahead of them.

“Yes, quite close to Salisbury Plain,” Arthur replied, pointing east ward, back over the town.

Brother Joab pounced. “So how can you tell all those weird sounds and lights in the sky aren’t experimental military craft? Aren’t they doing all that kinda stuff over here, like in the States?”

Arthur sputtered a bit at this. He clearly didn’t want to believe he might have been so cruelly deceived. That the “UFOs” were government craft was always a possibility; the issue had been raised on numerous occasions by skeptics back in 1965, when the flap was at its height. For the reason of national security, this debate had evidently never been resolved, which had left the reporter free to think and write whatever he believed true.

Climbing back in the car, my ward turned the engine on, and a few minutes later, the heater. They sat quietly for a while, Arthur in the rear seat still craning his neck to gaze at the sky through a side window. Minutes passed as limbs unfroze and appeared to painfully unfurl. It would have been obvious to anyone less preoccupied than Arthur Shuttlewood that the Processeans were courteously waiting for him to call it a night.

Apart from Mein Host’s self-evident encounter with the extraterrestrial in London six years earlier, and his strange experience in Nassau when he’d received what he called an “extraterrestrial download,” he’d never actually seen a UFO. However, he evidently didn’t need to see a UFO to know intuitively that extraterrestrial life was very real.

This is key. It’s the difference between knowing and believing. And here it manifested in the difference between my ward and Arthur Shuttlewood. There was desperation in Arthur to prove that he was right, that UFOs were real. As if he didn’t actually really believe in them himself, despite all his talk. I wondered if this might be one of the differences between normal mortals and incarnate rebel angels—that the latter have a more trusting access to their intuitions while remaining quite unaware of their angelic provenance.

So although Arthur can be congratulated for his courage in stepping out of the box of conventional denial, his true emotional obsession lay in his need to prove that his fantasies were real. Such people cannot afford to trust their inner knowing, because they have allowed their intuition to atrophy. They will either demand irrefutable proof, or they will require the constant confirmation of others to support their ideas.

Arthur, if he had but known it, was soon to have an experience that apparently profoundly affected him. It would be a subtle lifeline that, if he either grabbed or ignored, would nevertheless change his life forever. It seems that Arthur Shuttlewood had met his extraterrestrials!

*  *  *

I thought that the worst of the disasters to befall the Atlantean islands had passed by the mid-eleventh millennium. I’d fulfilled my promise to myself to stay and observe the tragedies unfold. I don’t look for congratulations, but you can probably deduce from my long excursus on death that staying with the Atlantean disasters was both a painful and humbling experience for me. Yet I’d steeled myself to remain and observe, because what I was watching was very directly a consequence of Prince Caligastia’s machinations.

I have mentioned earlier how Prince Caligastia had sent a small group of his rebel midwayers over to Atlantis under the leadership of the one who came to be known as Poseidon.

Now Poseidon and his gang of midwayers loyal to Prince Caligastia had not had an easy time of it on the Atlantean islands. Poseidon himself had spent the previous thirteen millennia ranging over the Indian subcontinent, extending his influence up through Persia to Anatolia. He had long thought of himself as one of the most important of the divinities operating throughout the whole landlocked region of western Asia. But, as with most of the rebel midwayers, this was more of a pompous boast than a reality. Human beings have always been sadly easy to impress.

Given that, I haven’t shown the midwayers due attention in this volume, so let me use Poseidon as an example of what I’d observed happening to the rebel midwayers over the millennia.

I should say first that Poseidon was not among the fifty thousand primary midwayers who were originally created as the direct offspring of the Prince’s staff. He was one of a far lesser number of the secondary order of midwayers who were born to serve the material son and daughter, the Adam and Eve of the second of MA’s missions to the planet. This was the mission that I’ve previously described arriving some thirty-nine thousand years ago and setting up their garden on the peninsula, now long beneath the waters at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. However, outfoxed by Prince Caligastia, this second mission had effectively collapsed within a few thousand years. The teachings and some of the innovations brought by the second mission, although continually sabotaged by Caligastia’s devious plots, has continued to spread from its nexus in the Land of the Two Rivers. But it was against the odds. Caligastia’s midwayers were simply too numerous and their promise too tempting, so once again the belief espoused by the visitors in the one true God had devolved into Goddess worship with a sprinkle of pantheism.

The key players of that second mission had long since died, but the fifty thousand midwayers, in their slightly higher frequency domain, remained on the planet. It was these original primary midways who had split four to one in favor of Prince Caligastia and his support of Lucifer’s revolution. This situation had only become more complicated when a number of the Secondary Order of midwayers, those created and serving the second mission, also aligned themselves with Caligastia. The Prince, by this time, though still firmly convinced he was God of the World, was finding more success in imposing his will through his midwayer proxies, duping the people into believing them divine.

They were mimicking the claim of Supreme Divinity that the Prince had made after the revolution and that, as I pointed out at the time, even I felt was becoming a touch too blasphemous. Although I wasn’t observing this at the time, I’ve little doubt it was Prince Caligastia’s persuasive claim of divine supremacy that must have convinced innocent midwayers like Poseidon to throw in their lot behind him. After all, they may well have argued that Caligastia had made short shrift of MA’s second mission.

So, here we have Poseidon, known by a different name, and being worshipped all through Asia as a horse god, no less. This was because he’d had a hand in demonstrating to the tribes of Central Asia how wild horses could be tamed and ridden. His motives for doing this had become well-known. He recognized what a powerful fighting force could be developed if his followers adopted the horse.

And he wasn’t wrong!

There’s a funny story associated with this horse business that illustrates how human superstition was mercilessly boosted by the rebel midwayers to reinforce the image of their power. One of Poseidon’s attributes, which he used to overawe his followers, was his claim to be the god of earthquakes. Yet, how this association came about had nothing to do with earthquakes!

Poseidon had frequently amused himself by using his group of midwayers to gather together immense numbers of the wild horses that roamed the steppes and plains of Central Asia. When about twenty thousand of these small, sturdy wild horses were all packed together, Poseidon and his colleagues would suddenly manifest at the rear of the massive herd, spooking the horses and starting a wild stampede. Thousands upon thousands of these wild horses would thunder across the open steppes to the delight of Poseidon and the midwayers.

And yes, the Earth did shake for any of his followers present within a few miles of the stampede. Consequently, it wasn’t much of a challenge for Poseidon, after doing his stampede trick a few times, to parley such earthshaking into earthquaking—and then into becoming the god of earthquakes. You don’t need to have a modern mind to realize that although midwayers have little to do with natural events, they can certainly use such events to their own advantage.

Another example of this is the small clan of midwayers who dominated the coastal region at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. They were always reticent to reveal their drawn name and identity and therefore operated under a number of identities. Here I will call them “the Jahweh,” one of the names by which they became known as when they exerted their influence over the Semitic tribes, some of whom claimed their ancestry in the Land of the Two Rivers. Not unlike Poseidon’s identification with earthquakes, the Jahweh chose to identify themselves as the volcano god of Mount Horeb, who later became a powerful influence on one of the local Semitic tribes.

Thus, when Poseidon was plucked out of his comfortable position in Asia by Prince Caligastia and relocated to the islands of Atlantis, he was not at all happy about it. The Prince’s humor hadn’t helped. He’d been known to have joked that as Poseidon was now a sea god, didn’t that now make him god of the sea horses?! And there was enough scorn in the Prince’s tone to let the midwayer know that being reassigned to Atlantis was an exile and not a vacation.

This was very much the Prince’s style. I can write this now without fear of reprisal, because he has been removed from the planet. In spite of his arrogant claim to be the God of this World, Prince Caligastia was becoming progressively more paranoid. I’ve no doubt of this now. He was terrified that his rebel midwayers were constantly trying to usurp his power. I say it was paranoia, because his fear of being dethroned was not based in reality. He wasn’t the God of this World, of course; he never was, but he was still the titular Planetary Prince of this world. In practice he could never have been overthrown by a mere midwayer.

The real problem of Caligastia’s paranoia lay more in the quality of his management style. For many of the rebel midwayers who were directly under the Prince’s control, his paranoia—a guilty fear caused by his unavoidable recognition that he’d overplayed his hand—was transmitted to the midwayers as an ongoing struggle for dominance. It had always been so, ever since the revolution. You may recognize the impulse entering the historical record in such control mechanisms as Jahweh’s commandment to worship no other god but him.

Frankly, for a midwayer to claim to be the One True God—a “jealous god,” no less, demanding total loyalty—was just too rank a betrayal of his true identity and function for any of us Watchers to take seriously. Astar, when I had the chance to speak to her about the Jahweh, had actually called them a laughingstock. But the Jahweh’s rash claim had infuriated Prince Caligastia.

So it was that Poseidon and his crew resented their exile on Atlantis from the start. They were bored silly. There weren’t enough people on the islands to have any fun. It was only when the islanders had turned to piracy in the fifteenth millennium that Poseidon was able to assert some influence on the Atlanteans. But even that grew tedious. It was therefore no surprise when they’d rebelled against the Prince some four centuries before the first of the disasters on the islands.

I’d sought out Astar for her insight on what had happened to the midwayers on Atlantis. In her opinion it was that Poseidon’s rebellion was a severe misjudgment of the Prince’s personality.

“Poseidon really should have known,” Astar was telling me. “He’d seen the Prince in action enough. He should have worked out that no one is more threatened by a rebellion than another rebel!”

I knew Poseidon was still smarting from the Prince’s cruel and supercilious crack about sea horses . . . sneering that their tiny size seemed to fit well with the midwayer’s diminished ambitions.

“He abominated Caligastia!” Astar broke into my thought. “He always resented him, but that slur was too much. It was in front of the other midwayers too! It was utterly shaming for him. I think it started back then.”

“Why hadn’t he rebelled earlier?” I wondered.

“You know that! No one goes up against the Prince. The midwayers learned that lesson soon enough!”

So what had happened to Poseidon and the other midwayers on the island? I said I hadn’t seen any sign of them for centuries.

“You’ll love this!” She was laughing, but there was a glint in her eyes I’d not seen before. “They were exiled to an even more isolated part of the world . . .”

“Re-exiled?” I was laughing now along with my sister. What else could Caligastia do? He couldn’t kill them—they were as immortal as he was.

“Guess where!” I heard, and before I could respond she had continued. “To Australia! To the bottom of the world. And you know they can’t get off unless Caligastia permits it. He’s got them penned in, and of course you’re aware of the natives down there . . .”

As a matter of fact, I wasn’t. I’d never really ventured that far south since the land bridge sank beneath the rising sea levels and isolated the continent. Even when I’d accompanied the dolphins on their long journey south I’d left the pod well before reaching the southern tip of the African continent. Besides, Australia, as was true for many of the southern islands, was almost entirely inhabited in the early stages by those human beings I’ve referred to as first-timers, normal human beings, indigenous to this planet, whose souls are created on third-density worlds and who then start their almost endless ascension to the highest heaven. For this reason the southern continent was never where the action seemed to be taking place . . .

Astar again: “It’ll be very different for Poseidon and his gang down there. Too many warring tribes—he’ll never be able to pull them together. And there’s a lot of Lemurian influence underlying the natives’ beliefs, which isn’t going to favor Poseidon’s arrogant style. He will just be another wandjina before he knows it.”

Now we were both laughing again. Wandjinas were generally honored by the tribes in Australia as coming from the north in Dreamtime, but the Aboriginal natives were far too intelligent to consider them divine. Ancestral spirits, of sorts, perhaps. But never gods.

“And he won’t find many horses to lord it over in Australia!” I heard Astar’s giggle echoing in my mind.

“Not many sea horses either,” I said, catching Astar’s mood. “Out there in the central desert . . . who knows what they’ll get up to!”

Yet it had made me thoughtful. I had missed Poseidon’s presence on Atlantis even if his influence had been so diminished by the shame of his exile and the disdain he must have felt from the Atlantean ruling elite. This had been a long and tragic fall from grace that characterized much of his time serving on Atlantis. He had tried to organize the people under five clans I’ve previously described, and from whom the god-kings, his direct proxies, were drawn. However, over the centuries the god-kings had been starting to cynically use Poseidon for their own ends. This was yet a further humiliation for the proud midwayer, who was himself once feared for his equally cynical manipulation of the native tribes back in Asia.

“So it goes!” I might have thought along with Kurt Vonnegut. Isn’t that always the problem with an immortal species like midwayers? They get to experience all the exigencies of living—all the ups and downs, all the triumphs and tragedies—as one single continuity, unrelieved by mortal death. Midwayers have to learn their lessons on the job, you might say. This can result in radical shifts of function and location that, if I’m to credit Caligastia with any wisdom, are designed to correct any error of behavior in the Prince’s eyes.

And pride, a quality that could have defined Prince Caligastia, was one of the characteristics the Prince most despised in others, especially in these upstart midway creatures with all their demands on him.

What I couldn’t have known at the time was that Poseidon and his crew of midwayers loyal to him would be back on Atlantis within a few thousand years. I’d learned later that they were called back to preside over the main island’s final stages and its sudden disappearance in the mid-tenth millennium.

Although this is a brief summary of just one of the more prominent midwayers, Poseidon’s story reflects the experience of most of the rebel midwayers under the Prince’s control. He was permissive when midwayers were fulfilling his maleficent bidding but brutal with them at any sign of dissidence.

Is it any wonder that human tyrants, despots, and autocrats have enjoyed such power over the ages—some still wielding it to this day—when there has been such a brutal imprint left in the World Mind from Prince Caligastia’s long regime?