INTRODUCTION
Dealing with the Darkness
Facing the Fear, Angels and Demons, the True Nature of Thoughtforms, and the Great Awakening
The very thought of a rebel angel carries with it enough historical baggage to frighten the wits out of most people.
I understand. It scared me too when I was first made aware of Georgia in my twenties, although I didn’t know who she was until much later in my life. By the time of her next appearance twenty-three years later I’d recognized that the terror was mine alone, and I was able to withdraw my fearful projection.
Between those two events separated by so many years I had a lot to learn about the business of living. During that time I gave little thought to angels—I didn’t even really believe in them—and as far as I knew they played no part in my life; that is until a profound near-death experience (NDE) in my thirty-third year opened my spiritual eyes and changed my life.
While in the out-of-body state of the NDE, I was shown the undeniable reality of celestial life. I then briefly witnessed a choir of angels, as well as the presence of my companion angels. After this I underwent a medical intervention that healed me, before I was popped back down in my body, healthy again and utterly amazed.
Georgia, the discarnate Watcher with whom I am now collaborating in writing her Confessions, is aware that this initial fearfulness is a perfectly natural human response, given the appalling press Lucifer and the rebel angels have received thoughout the centuries.
It’s a telling comment on the irrational aspect of human belief that of all the tyrants, mass murderers, and sadists in recorded history, it has been Lucifer, Satan, and the rebel angels who have consistently received the worst of religion’s vilification. Jesus Christ may have preached that loving our enemies is the appropriate and godly way of resolving conflict, yet the religion itself—as Christianity has been taught and practiced—has appeared unable to grasp and apply this counsel where it was most needed: to itself. If Christianity purports to be a religion of love, mercy, and forgiveness, then scant love, mercy, or forgiveness has ever been shown to their prime enemies: Lucifer, Satan, and the rebel angels.
Of course, other religions too have their devils and their demons. Islam, for example, has its Iblis and Zoroastrianism its Ahriman. Every dualistic cult and heresy has its own devil—some supernatural figure who stands in opposition to its god. I think of this as being where monotheism collides with human nature. Monotheism has the problem of having to account for the presence of “evil” in a world created by a single all-loving God. In polytheism each individual divinity can possess both positive and negative qualities. And when there are a multiplicity of gods and goddesses in a belief system, the absolute evil of a Satan or an Ahriman becomes more broadly distributed.
Given that the human impulse to blame others, or to seek out the one to blame in any situation, is such an everyday experience, it is no surprise that a devil would have to be invented as a scapegoat to blame for the ills of the world.
These fictional devils have very little to do with the personalities we know as Lucifer and Satan, or the even the rebel angels. Human beings are all too capable of genocidal brutality without any need for a devil to urge them on. Besides, Lucifer and Satan, as well as the rebel angels, have far more serious concerns regarding their own survival than with bothering to tempt human beings into wrongdoing.
Over the course of her narrative Georgia has made a clear distinction between the angels in their celestial dimensions and the thoughtforms that are found in the astral regions. She points out that thoughtforms are products of the human creative imagination, which has been fed by countless generations of emotionally driven mentation. Thoughtforms are not spiritual entities; they are quasi-life-forms that exist only in the astral regions of the collective human imagination, as well as within an individual’s inner life. The demons of anger, greed, and jealousy, to name only three, are a result of the emotionally driven thoughts that so many humans have felt during their lives. Intense anger, for example, when directed at another person, not only hurls a thoughtform that can lodge in the other person’s subtle-energy system, but it also contributes its energy to the astral thoughtform of anger.
The thoughtforms that lodge in a person’s subtle-energy system become the “devils” a shaman seeks to remove, every bit as much as they are the neuroses a psychiatrist tries to expose to the light. They are the “diseases” that magnetic healers take upon themselves in their healing work; they’re the monsters plaguing the nightmares of the guilty. As demons, they’ve tortured the consciousness of schizophrenics and saints—whose repressed fears of hell and their desires of the flesh appear as terrifying or seductively tempting devils, depending on each individual’s psychic and emotional condition.
I know from personal experience that these so-called demons, although they may well appear frightening, have no spiritual substance whatsoever. In the same way that thoughtforms can manifest as demons, there are times when thoughtforms may try to appear as angels, but they are just as insubstantial. There are other denizens of the astral regions—lost souls, astral shades, and discarnate obsessives—but, like thought-forms, they are restricted to the astral regions. When someone returns from a near-death experience with a story of a visit to hell, it’s both that region of the lower astral as well as that individual’s personal hell that he or she will be experiencing. Or, put it this way, the hell within that person provides access to the hell realms of the lower astral regions.
In matters of discernment, Georgia counsels approaching such phenomena as angels and demons with a commonsense mix of skepticism and courage and with the confident understanding that authentic angels are not thoughtforms. True angels are spiritual beings who exist at a far higher frequency than the astral realms—and there are no demons in the higher frequencies.
Reassuringly, Georgia volunteers that should we ever encounter these thoughtforms, in whatever form they appear, they can be very simply dissolved by directing a beam of loving energy at them from the heart chakra. Angels, on the other hand, rebel or otherwise, do not dissolve. Georgia claims (with a dry chuckle) that any angel would welcome and value a loving heart’s recognition from a human being.
I believe this distinction is fundamental to understanding who these fallen angels are, given that there’s been so much confusion over the course of history between rebel angels, thoughtforms, and demons.
I now have no doubt that an everyday knowledge of angels through direct inner experience is the true spiritual heritage of all human beings. This is a heritage of which we’d have been fully and personally aware had not this world been among the thirty-seven planets subject to one of the most destabilizing of events to occur in the inner worlds of the celestials. This event was an uprising among the angels whose function it was to oversee the spiritual growth and well-being of the mortal beings in their charge. It is recorded in some esoteric traditions as the Lucifer Rebellion, in others as the War in Heaven, and in a surprising number of indigenous traditions, or in ancient myths, as a profound planetary disruption occurring in the distant past. Something terrible happened a very long time ago, they suggest, that changed everything for life on Earth from that point onward.
If these are records of a rebellion among the angels that occurred, according to The Urantia Book,*1 more than 200,000 years ago, then indeed it would have to have been an event serious enough to have created lasting consequences. Georgia’s narrative—of which this book is only a single volume—articulates how the effects of such an uprising can be seen rippling down through history as an unrealized context, an imperceptible background noise, a matrix within which thousands of generations of human beings have lived out their lives and which has resulted in the world we have today.
The motives behind the rebellion are complex. Part of Georgia’s task, as she understands it, has been to disentangle the different strands and influences to reveal the truth of what Lucifer was attempting to accomplish. She wants to distinguish the facts of the rebellion—as she observed and experienced it—from all of the propaganda that has subsequently demonized Lucifer and the rebel angels.
It’s not altogether surprising, therefore, that she finds at the core of the rebellion a genuine call for greater personal freedom and individual autonomy for both angels and mortals—not an appeal that any administration appreciates. (For further reading on the particulars of the Angelic Cosmology, please refer to this book’s appendix.)
In the previous volume of her Confessions, Georgia became increasingly convinced that one of the reasons for relating my biography from her point of view has been to awaken others of my kind. Although her motive in doing this didn’t altogether surprise me, I found I was embarrassed by the implications of the claim. If it is true, and I’m among those rebel angels incarnated into a mortal body this time around, I would have preferred to have been more cautious in how openly to acknowledge it. Too late now. Like the proverbial shoemaker whose children, for all his shoemaking, still lack shoes, I realize I’ve been far more focused on this phenomenon of rebel angels incarnating in other people and more tentative in applying it to myself.
When Georgia and I started on this collaborative project I had no idea where it would take us. We knew it was going to be an experiment for us both, a personal document we were writing, each for our own reasons, with no thought of others reading the work. This changed with the publication, in 2011, of the first volume of Georgia’s narrative, Confessions of a Rebel Angel, which suggested that other people were finding our story of some interest.
I’m drawing confidence from this growing interest from readers and no longer feel in denial of my hybrid identity as I hear from increasing numbers of people who are discovering themselves in a similar situation. I find them to be intelligent and thoughtful spiritual men and women who have wrestled all their lives with their inexplicable sense of being profoundly different from normal people. Many of these women and men have had extremely difficult and challenging childhoods and young lives. They will be the ones who rebel against norms other people accept without question; they’ll obstinately defy what they believe is unjust authority; they will break the rules that they don’t believe apply to them; they will be unusually sensitive, or psychic, or artistic; some may come to think it is either them, or the world, that’s crazy. Most will have been made to feel wrong by parents or teachers, or have been shamed into compliance at an early age. Yet they will still be living out their lives with a nagging sense that they are so unaccountably different from normal people—and never quite knowing why!
In some cases the sense of difference is so pressing that the individual feels she or he has no choice but to embark on a journey of self-discovery, if only to mitigate the confusion and psychic pain of the constant pretense of normalcy. A few, no doubt, will have developed ways of integrating their uniquely angelic sensibilities into their mortal lives, but they are still likely to feel uncomfortably out of kilter with their colleagues.
Georgia stresses that incarnate rebel angels are in no way inherently superior to normal human beings—they are merely different. She’d have us consider them more as experiments perhaps, or as spiritual hybrids, as a new and different form of mortal being.
It was in referring to these people that I first I heard Georgia use the phrase Homo angelicus to describe those angels, rebels and otherwise, who have chosen mortal incarnation. I’ve even heard her call this “a profound and unexpected promotion” for an angel to join the mortal ascension line. She believes that whatever the state of each individual’s self-awareness, it is to seek their own personal redemption that the rebel angels have been given this opportunity to incarnate as humans in these transformational times. It’s because choosing a mortal incarnation is believed to be such a challenge, as well as a privilege, that most rebel angels have been left unaware of their angelic heritage. Knowing who they were wouldn’t have helped illuminate their mortal lives.
This has been the case until recently. But with the coming transformation so close upon us, it’s time for incarnate rebel angels to wake up to who they truly are. As they do so, they will find themselves aligned in their enthusiasm to bring this long, cosmic melodrama to its transcendent resolution. This awakening will move toward releasing deep psychic and emotional tensions, both in the self and in the collective, and it will allow the incarnated angels to function at a far higher and more effective level.
The Multiverse will never be quite the same when we have completed this cycle. Whether what we have experienced on this planet for the past 203,000 years will be viewed ultimately as cosmic drama, an interdimensional hybridization project, an experiment in personal liberty, or an interplanetary tragedy, the return of the rebel angels can now be welcomed with open hearts and minds.
This is all part of our great cosmic homecoming, for in the end, as Georgia likes to remind us, we’re all doomed to become perfect.
When you find yourself in hell, keep going.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
For fifteen thousand years, there has been increasing anxiety and the following of increasingly irrational chreodes. Only if there is a problem with the stability of the environment do the last ten thousand years of human history make any sense. This problem has created history as an evacuation, a frantic project to find a way out. That’s why things have been allowed to tear loose, to poison the oceans, to strip the continents. The world soul, I think, is in communication with us in the culminating moment of human history. Everything is being scripted for a purpose, and toward an end unglimpsed by us but tied up with the survival of everything.
TERENCE MCKENNA, CHAOS, CREATIVITY, AND COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS
All shadows whisper of the sun.
EMANUEL CARNEVALI