First they raise the cost of living, you hear people say, then they raise your electric rates. Ever wonder who this they is people talk about when they are looking for someone to blame for life's problems. More poignantly, and tragically, someone might say, First they killed JFK, and then his brother, and then Martin Luther King, taking for granted that a hidden hand, always spoken of in the plural, lurks behind everything that goes wrong in life, from the mundane to the historical.
Some point to a shadowy group of conspirators dedicated to subverting life as we know it. In the early 1980s, Gary Allen published a book entitled None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a loose conglomeration of circumstantial evidence supporting the author's view that a conspiracy was afoot designed to degrade the American way of life. Allen wove a far-flung web of collusion and intrigue that stretched from The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to David Rockefeller. Appropriately titled, his book insisted that, although nobody would dare say it, a massive plot hatched by clandestine conspirators was to blame for everything that was wrong in the world. International bankers, socialists, peaceniks, transcendentalists, the media, rock and rollers, and just about every other major force on the world scene had somehow conspired to ruin Norman Rockwell's America. Serious thinkers had a hard time swallowing Allen's premise, that history and current events are best understood in terms of a monstrous plot enacted by hidden powers to manipulate and control.
But those same thinkers have a hard time explaining what Allen had gotten in a lather about in the first place, that something had gone wrong with the modern world, that the social and moral fabric of generations, the Golden Rule, had somehow disintegrated in less than a generation. One day we were peacefully watching Ozzie and Harriet, and the next day God Was Dead, exemplified by the drug epidemic, the assassination of our leaders, Vietnam, Watergate, a murder rate that had increased exponentially in major cities, and so on.
As values that had shaped Western civilization for centuries seemed to be going down the tubes, Allen wasn't the only one searching for someone to blame, pointing to some omnipotent they responsible for everything from scrapping phonics to the national debt. Stanford Research Fellow Antony Sutton produced a body of evidence that sounded convincing, supported by a treatise allegedly written by an insider in the massive plot. This was proof of conspiracy, some claimed. In the minds of Suttonites, and there were many, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve and Free Masonry are to blame, a school of thought that has fueled the militia movement of the 1990s, causing some to believe, for instance, that the government was secretly behind the Oklahoma City bombing in an effort to discredit the constitutional patriot movement.
Blaming secret and powerful bad guys turns up everywhere. We've heard about evil-doing multinational corporations being responsible for the world's woes, one or other of the political parties, or the military industrial complex. The Catholic Church has been blamed, said to conspire with the Mafia and international financiers, and then, lamentably, Jews.
Human beings search and grasp for a way to understand the incomprehensible, moral and social decline in the form of teen suicide, child pornography and sexual abuse, an astronomical crime rate, the drug epidemic, terrorism, etc. Some blame David Rockefeller, his Council on Foreign Relations and Aspen Institute for Humanistic studies, and the infamous yet utterly bland Trilateral Commission, reportedly in cahoots with space aliens, all this being part of an intergalactic conspiracy. And until the fall of communism, some declared that a high-level capitalist/communist conspiracy dominated American foreign policy and international trade, a secret, elite partnership between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The mind reels.
The major media ignore or pooh-pooh these theories, for fear of appearing to take seriously the perspective of the radical fringe, or, depending upon your point of view, for fear of blowing their cover as agents in the master plot. Indeed, the media rate high on conspiracy theorists lists of bad guys. But imagining Brokaw, Jennings and Rather, along with the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, giving secret handshakes and chanting verses from the Bible backwards hardly seems realistic.
But conspiracy theories riddled mainstream thought as well. Recently, filmmaker Oliver Stone joined the ranks, portraying in his film JFK a CIA/vice-presidential coup behind the Kennedy assassination, attempting, like so many others, to blame the evils in the world upon a hidden group of powerful masterminds. And then some see a conspiracy in the Clinton Whitehouse behind the Vince Foster suicide, and another to trade an accommodating foreign policy with dictatorial Indonesia for hard cash. The list goes on.
And while few of us can assert with certainty what actually goes on behind closed doors in this world, the unifying factor of all of the above is unsubstantiated evidence and, not infrequently, a shortage of common sense. How, for instance, could so many people in media and government be kept quiet about the bad guys in power for so long.
But why, then, the sudden shredding of the social fabric of generations? How, other than pointing to an insidious conspiracy, does one explain the pervasive, subversive or even predatory force to which the world has apparently fallen victim? Some of the answers, ironically, may arise in the world of science and government, the very halls of power and intellectual authority conspiracy theorists point to as part of the problem.
Not long ago, Harvard professor John Mack articulated the unspeakable, as far as science and academia are concerned, when at a meeting of skeptics and intellectuals, he declared that we, modern civilization, are the first society in history without a belief in the invisible. Mack's remark came at a particularly trying moment, as he defended himself against a hostile crowd of peers for having taken seriously, and then clinically investigated, claims of alien abductions, spooky accounts of otherwise normal individuals being kidnapped by strange beings, presumably from other worlds, victims of telepathic mind control. The kind of stuff you won't hear about on network news (check your Cable listings, though), the idea of interstellar boogey men moving between dimensions didn't sit well with Mack's stodgy colleagues. Their collective reaction springs from their adherence to absolute materialism, the belief system of modern science and academia, the theory that says all things in existence derive from matter (including that ever-elusive commodity called consciousness), the foundation of Western scientific thought since the turn of the last century.
But as we near the next millennium, evidence of the existence of an invisible resounds from quiet corners in the halls of established power, validating what the ancients took for granted and claimed to have mystically experienced. From sources as disparate as Nobel Prize-winning physicists to whistle blowers at the United States Army's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), we hear testimony regarding the existence of other dimensions, where those who seek to point the finger of blame for life's inanities might find some answers.
Modern physics, to its own amazement, allows for and even professes the existence of dimensions parallel to our own. Physicist David Bohm, a protŽgŽ of Albert Einstein, revealed to the world the scientific basis for what he called nonlocality (See Atlantis Rising, issue No. 8, The Physicist As Mystic), an essentially conscious medium he saw as the foundational reality behind all appearances, time and space. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, and other notable physicists, speak of the existence of a multiverse, in which our reality is one of many existing in non-time/non-space, a principle echoing from such disparate sources as Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, and now, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency.
Ex-DIA operative David Morehouse's in-depth forays into the shamanistic realm of out-of-body experience (see previous article), where he and other specially trained colleagues practiced remote viewing for intelligence gathering purposes, and then remote influence in order to change the way people think, reveal in a methodical manner the existence, not only of extrasensory perception, but of an otherworld where forces of good and evil dwell, according to Morehouse, in what could be called a collective, subconscious field, a realm for the initiated, to be sure, in which we all participate through the mysterious entity known as the Unconscious Mind.
In his book, Psychic Warrior, Morehouse describes how he and other operatives learned to consciously leave their physical bodies and collect intelligence beyond the veil of the material world, unencumbered by distance and even time. The DIA project, code named Sun Streak, and later called Star Gate, grew out of a government-funded program conducted at the Stanford Research Institute under the direction of high energy physicists Dr. Russel Targ and Harold Putthoff. The Soviets, Chinese and Czechs, Morehouse tells us, involve themselves steadily in similar projects.
Morehouse reveals what may well be the mother of all conspiracies. The ubiquitous they theorists blame when things go seriously wrong in life, what in simpler times were called the forces of darkness, exist in other dimensions, according to Morehouse's description of his monitored experiences, which took place over a period of years. In this other world, DIA operatives exploit what Morehouse calls the phantom body, a subtle etheric vehicle through which he transcended space and time in order to gather intelligence for the government.
The picture Morehouse paints of this realm is not an inviting one, although he does reveal a benevolent force at play, a being he calls his Angel, who understands that Morehouse must pass through necessary trials in the ether for his own betterment. But this realm is also fraught with peril and malevolence. One operative identifies what he calls the deceivers in this ether, individuals dedicated to subversion, manipulation and deception. And as Professor Mack reports, regarding those claiming to have been abducted by telepathic aliens, this ethereal landscape has a Pandora's box quality, where psychic forces take shape in forms congruent with an individuals subconscious vulnerabilities. Indeed, Morehouse's account sounds more like Carlos Castenada's Journey to Ixtlan than a report about intelligence operatives, where subconscious reality seems inextricably blended with, even responsible for, the existence of shape-shifting landscapes and evil spirits.
Morehouse alerts us that this out-of-body reality, while ultimately deeply rewarding in its sublime aspects, harbors mental, emotional and spiritual peril for those who are unprepared, as an individual becomes acutely aware of subversive forces within the collective unconscious. He describes a landscape as murky as, and perhaps identical to, the depths of human insanity, which emerges as a vast field of situations and circumstances unbound by time and space, rather than the contained record within the physical brain described by materialists.
In accounts of alien abduction, now so strangely prolific, we hear about a similar realm, where the individual subconscious seems merged with a greater landscape that appears subject to manipulation. Alien spacecraft, too, according to descriptions, oscillate between some other dimension and our own, thereby, like Morehouse and his colleagues, defying the so-called laws of time and space, projecting through the universe at will, yet mechanically, in a way materialistic science has thought impossible. The abductees themselves, with uncanny consistency and similarity of descriptions, claim to have been whisked through, once again, some sort of subconscious dimension where they are subject to paternalistic forms of hypnosis and mind control, all of which speaks of the subservience of our material reality to the power of consciousness, and of a hidden they who interfere at subtle but powerful levels within the universal unconscious.
If all this sounds too foreboding, Tibetan Buddhism provide a comforting over-all context for the existence of evil forces in the world, as do many of the world's spiritual traditions. The One Universal Mind, the llamas tell us, the one consciousness which all existence shares, and through which all evolves, interpenetrates and animates even the nastiest of dimensional hobgoblins, or angels for that matter. This one clear essence resides within all things, the reality upon which modern physics now draws a bead. In Tibetan Buddhist Psychiatry (yes, such a thing exists), patients and practitioners find that all experience, all good and evil, exists in a medium that is luminous, unconditioned and utterly liberating when consciously perceived, a reality Morehouse's Angel seemed to understand and implicitly trust as he showed the way. Even identity, ultimately, turns out to be a condition superimposed upon an infinitely elastic conscious medium, God, if you will, which does not bode well for the bad guys. Evil, then, in this profound context, arises as a reflection of one's own denied, subconscious reality, the unerring, benevolent process of the one mind consciously bringing all existence to ultimate truth and resolution.
As far as conspiracies go, all of the above points to the existence of invisible conspiracies of light and darkness within the depths of conscious reality, in parallel dimensions, the Biblical Armageddon, if you will, Spiritual Warfare couched in popular jargon. Consciousness itself can be more readily perceived, then, as the essential medium in which all life exists, appearances notwithstanding, echoing the universal beliefs of cultural and religious traditions. Morehouse, his colleagues, and modern physics seem to reveal to modern man what he once accepted without question, that which modern science, with all its mundane accomplishments, has denied, that good and evil exist as invisible forces in the spiritual and physical realms, exerting influence upon the hearts and minds of humanity.
