About the Author: John F. Nash, Ph.D., is a long-time esoteric student, author, and teacher. Two of his books, Quest for the Soul and The Soul and Its Destiny, were reviewed in the Winter 2005 issue of the Esoteric Quarterly. Christianity: The One, the Many, was reviewed in the Fall 2008 issue. His latest book: The Sacramental Church was published in 2011. For further information see the advertisements in this issue and the website http://www.uriel.com. ​

T​his article discusses Ahriman and Lucifer, as depicted in the esoteric Teachings of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner claimed that Lucifer incarnated some five thousand years ago, and Ahriman will incarnate sometime in the future. Their polar-opposite influences, mostly evil but occasionally favorable to human development, have been felt throughout history. Steiner’s thesis was that the dualism of Lucifer and Ahriman is mediated and balanced by Christ.

​The article recalls the long history of Ahriman and Lucifer in scriptural and other writings and the links between them and the personages in Steiner’s work. It also discusses the various types of dualism, often depicted in human or animal forms, and the moral choices they present. The biblical Behemoth and Leviathan, which may be considered early models for Steiner’s personages, are selected for special comment.

​Steiner’s teachings on Lucifer and Ahriman raise many questions, including their relationship to the trans-Himalayan teachings and the very nature of evil. The two entities personify dualistic evil, or at best moral ambiguity; but mediated by Christ, they seem to become agents of Divine Purpose.

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), alone among modern esoteric teachers, except for his own followers, spoke of Ahriman and Lucifer as beings with polar-opposite qualities and influences. Dualism of that kind is unknown in Christianity but appears in other religious and philosophical writings. Important examples can be found in Buddhism and the Kabbalah. Although Ahriman and Lucifer are generally depicted as evil, their influence was sometimes favorable to human development. Steiner went so far as to regard them and Christ as comprising a trinity, in which Christ balances the polar-opposite influences and builds upon whatever good they had to offer.

According to Steiner both Ahriman and Lucifer have influenced humanity’s development throughout history. Lucifer’s influence increased during the post-Atlantean epoch, became dominant when he incarnated in physical form, some three millennia before Christ, and slowly declined through the early centuries of the Common Era. Ahrimanic influence remained low for several millennia but has become dominant in modern times and is expected to peak when he incarnates sometime in the next several centuries. The precise timing of Ahriman’s incarnation and the damage it will cause are said to depend on human action.

This article places Lucifer and Ahriman in the context of earlier religious and philosophical writings. Ahriman was an evil Zoroastrian god, while Lucifer was the product of a medieval legend that interpreted—or misinterpreted— passages in scripture to create a fallen ang​el and arch-demon. “Lucifer” became another name for Satan. But the two characters did not step unmodified into Steiner’s esoteric teachings. In fact Ahriman did not even feature in Steiner’s early work but substituted for another character whom Steiner explored and discarded. The way Lucifer and Ahriman evolved immediately prior to and during Steiner’s teachings makes an interesting story in itself.

The article identifies, but does not seek to answer, important questions raised by the discussion of Steiner’s Lucifer and Ahriman. One question concerns the worrisomely small overlap with trans-Himalayan teachings. None of the trans-Himalayan teachers discusses Lucifer and Ahriman as dualistic entities. And the anticipated incarnation of Ahriman is hard to reconcile with the Master Djwhal Khul’s prophecies of the reappearance of the Christ and externalization of the Hierarchy.

​Other questions concern the very nature of evil: whether it is monistic or dualistic, whether it is necessarily personified in “beings,” and whether evil—despite its usual connotation— may play an essential role in the unfoldment of human consciousness: whether in fact it can be considered an instrument of Divine Purpose.

Dualism was a conspicuous feature of many ancient religions and philosophies. In Hinduism Indra was locked in eternal combat with the evil serpent Vrtra. Zoroastrianism taught that the good god Ohrmazd would battle his evil brother Angra Mainyu, or Ahriman, until the end of the age. Christianity and Islam declare that God will finally defeat Satan on the Last Day.

Eastern religions, Platonism, Gnosticism, and even mainstream Christianity taught that the spiritual world was good and the physical world either worthless or evil. The Apostle Paul wrote: “[T]he flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other.”1 The desert ascetics, the stylites of Syria, the Culdees of Ireland, and the sadhus of India believed that the physical body was the root of evil and sought holiness through selfmortification.2 Meanwhile, notions of a stark choice between good and evil surfaced many times in Christian history: in the era of the martyrs, in the Inquisitions, in the Great Awakenings in America, and in their offshoot, evangelical fundamentalism.

Good-evil dualism is easy to understand and presents a straightforward moral choice; the right course of action is to embrace good and resist evil—no matter what wily schemes an evil intelligence might devise to entrap unwary victims.

More complex situations exist where a single god exhibits ambiguous characteristics— perhaps even complementary or necessary to each other. The flooding of the Nile, the responsibility of the god Hapi, was beneficial, so long as it was not too severe; moderate drought would allow crops to ripen instead of rotting. The Roman god Janus had two faces, which, among much else, symbolized war and peace, neither of which was considered attainable in isolation. We might even envision dualistic gods that are themselves ambiguous or dualistic. In such religious or philosophical systems the necessary level of cognitive understanding is greater, and moral choice becomes more difficult.

The Bhagavad Gita illustrates a difficult moral choice. Arjuna stood between opposing armies on the field of Kurukshetra, reluctant to fight because of the horrors of war and because he would be attacking some of his own kinfolk. Krishna persuaded him that conflict was inevitable and necessary, and Arjuna eventually went into battle. Great symbolism has been read into Arjuna’s dilemma and the ensuing battle, and an example will be cited later.

The right course of action may be to balance opposing forces or ideals. A classic example is the Noble Middle Path of Buddhism. In the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the first sermon preached after his enlightenment, the Buddha warned his followers to avoid extremes of lifestyle:

Later the Middle Path was applied to many other pairs of opposites and became a cornerstone of Buddhist teachings.

The Chinese concept of yin and yang describes how seemingly opposite forces may be interconnected and interdependent. Many natural dualities, such as male and female, light and dark, life and death, are regarded as manifestations of yin and yang.4 Neither is inherently evil, but when one dominates the other the result is war, bad government, sickness, or spiritual decline. The opposites must be brought into balance to restore harmony. The concept found applications in many branches of Chinese philosophy, medicine, martial arts, and exercise.

The Kabbalah illustrates the resolution of opposites in a higher synthesis. Pairs of opposing sephiroth on the Tree of Life: Chokmah and Binah, Chesed and Geburah, and Netzach and Hod, represent, from different perspectives, contrasting manifestations of Deity, cosmic forces, or challenges on the spiritual path.5 The opposites are neither good nor bad, but they are unbalanced. Spiritual growth is to be attained by experiencing the pairs of opposites and then bringing them into equilibrium on the Middle Path. The kabbalistic system of polarities will be discussed in more detail later.

​The “Chariot” card in the Tarot—variously taken to depict Indra, Krishna, Jupiter, or the planetary ruler of Leo—shows a masculine figure steering a chariot, drawn by a white and a black sphinx, without reins. A popular interpretation is that the charioteer, or the quarant, is bringing a pair of opposites into balance by the power of will.6 Tension between the opposites cannot be resolved on their own level—in this case the physical—but resolution is possible at a higher level or by invoking a higher force.

Behemoth and Leviathan were purely evil, but no attempt was made to link either with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In the Bible evil was allocated among a variety of different entities. Neither was any attempt made to depict them as morally ambiguous; they were less complex than Steiner’s Ahriman and Lucifer.

Behemoth’s and Leviathan’s duality lay in the fact that one was a land monster, symbolizing the element of earth, and the other was a sea monster, symbolizing water. Behemoth was always referred to by the masculine pronoun. The Hebrew Bible used the male pronoun for Leviathan, but Rabbinic legend often regarded it as female. The two monsters were presented one at a time, and Job had to overcome both; their duality was subsumed in a larger goodevil moral system. There was no sense of a middle ground in which their respective powers could be reconciled or transcended. Some Jewish legends acknowledged a third monster, the great bird, Ziz, which symbolized air, and was masculine, but Ziz was never viewed as a mediator between the other two.

In a recent article Zachary Lansdowne argued that the Book of Job describes ordeals to which Job was subjected in preparation for the third initiation.17 To that end Job had to overcome maya and glamour, to use terms familiar in trans-Himalayan teachings. In Lansdowne’s account Behemoth is interpreted as world maya and Leviathan as world glamour, though the case could also be made that they symbolized individual maya and glamour. In any event, his conclusion was that Job was able to learn from his tests and successfully surmount the crisis of the third initiation.

The Book of Job is one of the oldest Judaic texts; it is variously dated from the beginning of the second millennium to the sixth century BCE,18 and its stories may be older still. At that time esoteric knowledge was communicated through symbols, and initiation rites were psychodramas, heavy in symbolism.19 Behemoth and Leviathan, along with their counterparts in other cultures, were terrifying images that impressed initiands with the power of God—and perhaps also with divine whim. God unleashed them in order to accomplish his purpose but reined them in when that purpose was accomplished.

​Behemoth and Leviathan, along with several of the examples of dualism discussed earlier, were personifications of forces of nature, influences on behavior, or challenges on the spiritual path. Such personification can easily be dismissed as a figment of a superstitious past. Yet art, literature, and the entertainment industry are not shy in creating godlike figures in our own day. Personification can make complex philosophical or moral concepts comprehensible and can give them compelling force and immediacy. 

T​he oldest Zoroastrian texts, or hymns, the Gathas, were written in the Avesta language and probably date from the second millennium BCE. Attributed to Zoroaster (Zarathustra) himself. They spoke of the angra mainyu as an evil force, or moral choice. The force came to be personified in a later series of texts known as the Younger Avesta, which historians date to the first half of the first millennium BCE. Angra Mainyu—or Ahriman as the name was rendered in Middle Persian— became an evil god. Ahriman and his good brother Ohrmazd were twin sons of the high god Ahura Mazda.20

A story in one text bears striking similarity to the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Ahriman promised Zoroaster sovereignty over the whole world if he would turn away from the religion of Ahura Mazda. Zoroaster rejected the offer, whereupon Ahriman attacked him, unsuccessfully it turned out, with legions of demons.21 Another text prophesied that Ohrmazd would ultimately defeat Ahriman and become the high god.22 Ahriman was usually depicted as depraved, ugly, and evil-smelling. Though cunning, he was also stupid, making possible his final defeat. Iconography optimistically showed him crushed under Ohrmazd’s feet
The Roman essayist Plutarch incorporated the story of Ahriman into his Isis and Osiris. There we read:

Zoroastrianism went into decline as Islam spread throughout the Persian heartland. No other major religion saw fit to adopt Ahriman, and he languished for 1,300 years until his debut in Steiner’s teachings. More recently Ahriman has become a character in novels, plays, and video games. ​

Scholars are uncertain, however, whether the passage refers to a fallen angel or to the death of an unpopular earthly king. Moreover, “Lucifer,” which appears to be a proper noun, is the translation of the Hebrew word helel, which could mean “shining one,” “morning star,” or the planet Venus; its Greek form is heosphoros or phosphorus. The word lucifer (“light bearer”) first appeared in the Latin Vulgate, and there it was left in lower case. Capitalization became common only after the fourth century CE, when the legend of Lucifer was beginning to take definite shape.

​The legend drew upon the passage in Isaiah, but it also incorporated texts which either did not name the character under discussion or even identified the character as someone else. The apocryphal Second Book of Enoch, conventionally dated to the first century BCE, refers to an unnamed angel who sought to place himself equal to God: ​

​In the New Testament, the Gospel of Luke records that the returning seventy disciples were able to cast out devils, whereupon Jesus told them: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.”26 The Book of Revelation describes the conquest of Satan: ​

At the end of the thousand years Satan would be released from his prison and allowed to “deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth.” Finally, the “devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”28

Over time these various images coalesced and were embellishment by homilies, fiction and art to produce the Lucifer of popular imagination. Lucifer was the most beautiful of the archangelic host, but pride overcame him, and he sought to place himself above his fellow archangels and equal to God. The archangel Michael—or in some accounts Christ— challenged him, and a great battle took place in which Lucifer was cast out of heaven. Thereafter he roamed the deep as the evil serpent, ever ready to ensnare humanity in his clutches. He was the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Satan, the Devil, the cosmic bogey man.

Lucifer appeared in Arthurian and Grail legends. In Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur Lucifer assumed the guise of a beautiful woman and tried to tempt Percival to have sex with her. She claimed that she was a “gentlewoman that am disinherited.” She had “dwelled with the greatest man of the world, and he made me so fair and clear that there was none like me, and of that great beauty I had a little more pride than I ought to have had.”29 In the nick of time, Percival glanced at the emblem on his sword and made the Sign of the Cross, whereupon he saw the woman for what she was and preserved his virginity. Lest anyone should fail to associate the gentlewoman with Lucifer, a “good man” explained to Percival: “Our Lord Jesus Christ beat him out of heaven for his sin, which was the brightest angel of heaven.”30

Rosicrucian writer Corinne Heline described Lucifer’s appearance in a Grail legend:

​In this account the jewel in Lucifer's crown was called Morning Star. The jewel’s significance, Heline explained, was understood differently by people at different levels of consciousness: “By the multitude [the jewel] was taken to mean Venus. By the initiated it was understood to signify Mercury, which is also a Morning Star, but one which is almost invisible to the naked eye and must be sought for diligently in its bright place close to the sun.”32 ​

​Before discussing Ahriman’s and Lucifer’s roles in Rudolf Steiner’s teachings, it will be instructive to examine links between his characters and the Ahriman and Lucifer of earlier traditions.

Steiner never cited literary precedents for his Ahriman and Lucifer. Nor did he acknowledge communications from sources in the Planetary Hierarchy, though Rosicrucian Max Heindel declared that he and Steiner were instructed by the same “Elder Brothers.”33 Instead, Steiner claimed the ability to read and understand the ​Akashic Records, an ability conventionally associated with an “Initiate,” the second of the three grades of initiation in the western esoteric tradition, the others being “Clairvoyant” and “Adept.” Heindel explained the three initiatory grades thus: “[T]he Clairvoyant is one who sees the invisible world; the Initiate both sees the invisible world and understands what he sees, while the Adept sees, knows and has power over things and forces there.”34

Steiner may have gleaned all his information on Ahriman and Lucifer from the Akashic records. But intriguing clues suggest that he also acquired relevant knowledge from more mundane sources.

Steiner was appointed head of the newly constituted German section of the Theosophical Society in 1902. Helena Blavatsky had published her monumental work, The Secret Doctrine fourteen years earlier. Contrary to western tradition, she portrayed Lucifer as the very antithesis of a fallen angel. He was “the angelic Entity presiding over the light of truth as over the light of the day.”35 Blavatsky placed him with Eve in the Garden of Eden but described the scene very differently than did the Hebrew Bible: “[T]he Serpent of Genesis [was] the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind. For it is he who was the ‘Harbinger of Light,’ bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah.”36

“Jehovah” was the crude, but then-current, rendition of YHVH, the unutterable Hebrew name of God (the more modern rendition is “Yahweh”). Blavatsky’s portrayal of Jehovah as the creator of human automata reflected Gnostic teachings, where YHVH was often depicted as the incompetent or evil demiurge that created the world. Even mainstream Christians have expressed dismay at the apparent vindictiveness and callousness of the OldTestament God.

In addition to his involvement in Theosophy, Steiner took an interest in Freemasonry. Whether he was ever initiated into the Craft is disputed, but we do know that, in 1905, Steiner sought and received warrants from Theodore Reuss to perform rites under the MemphisMisraïm Rite. 37 By then a substantial body of Masonic literature was available in the public sector, and Steiner was already lecturing on topics related to Freemasonry.38

In the mid-1890s French journalist Marie Joseph Jogand-Pagès, who wrote under the pen name Léo Taxil, wrote a series of books claiming inside knowledge of Satanic activity in Freemasonry. A key statement purported to come from a high-level Mason referred to Lucifer:

​Whereas Blavatsky cast Jehovah’s creations as automata, implying some capacity for motion, Steiner made them immobile statues. In both cases, however, Lucifer came to the rescue. 

​Blavatsky’s Lucifer opened the eyes of the automata. In Steiner’s account a group of Moon Adepts—collectively called “Lucifer”— became “the bestowers of human intellectuality.”44 The Adepts were not able to eliminate Jehovah’s influence altogether, but they “came to [early human beings] and said: You must not follow Jehovah. He will not allow you to attain to knowledge but you should. That is the Snake. The Snake approached the woman, because she had the power to produce offspring out of herself. Now Jehovah said: Man has become like unto ourselves, and brings death into the world and everything connected with it.” 45

Sometime after 1905, Ahriman took Jehovah’s place as the evil creator and materialistic influence. Steiner first mentioned Ahriman in a lecture given in 1908. Two theories for the substitution suggest themselves. Perhaps Steiner initially mistook the identity of the evil one in his reading of the Akashic Records, and when he realized the mistake he replaced Jehovah by Ahriman. But Steiner did not admit a mistake; neither did he explain the substitution in some other way.

Alternatively, Steiner may genuinely have identified the evil one as Jehovah but feared that continuing to write about him would generate unwanted controversy. To change the character’s name would avoid distraction and allow Steiner to focus on his real mission of exploring moral dualism.

If this latter theory is correct, a leading candidate to replace Jehovah would have been Mephistopheles, since Steiner had studied of the works of Goethe in unusual depth. As he ​commented later, however, Goethe “made the figure of Mephisto a mixture of two elements instead of a consistent single one.”46 So he settled on the Zoroastrian Ahriman. Steiner conceded that part of the “Mephistophelean power” was “identical with Ahriman,47 and some commentators have suggested that he projected some of Mephistopheles’ characteristics onto Ahriman.

The choice of Ahriman was not an obvious one, since he had not featured in any recent esoteric writings. Blavatsky discussed him only in the context of Zoroastrian religion, and Freemasons paid him no attention at all. In one instance they co-opted Ahiman, who appeared four times in the Hebrew Bible; 48 but Ahiman seems to have no connection to Ahriman.

In any event Steiner declared that Ahriman was not only an evil spirit but was “the representative of all the beings who belonged to” the Moon evolution.49 Thus he associated Ahriman with the Jehovah of his earlier teachings. Perhaps that association offers a clue to Ahriman’s moral ambiguity; not even the most cynical Gnostics believed that YHVH/Jehovah was all bad.

Steiner’s final task of character building was to bring to an end Lucifer’s short vacation as “God of Light,” or as the group of Moon Adepts who rescued statue-man. In the 1905 lecture mentioned Steiner insisted: “It is the intention of Lucifer to develop everything upwards, towards knowledge, towards the light.” Lucifer was responsible for the reincarnational cycle through which man could evolve to the level of a spiritual being. Steiner recognized that “Lucifer is the Prince who reigns in the kingdom of science and art.” Hinting at Lucifer’s changing status, however, he warned that “it would be impossible for Lucifer to lead upwards what is on the Earth.”50

​From then on Lucifer took on increasingly negative characteristics. Even if he did not fall quite as far as in Christian tradition, he became a predominantly evil personage. That set the stage for the evilevil dualism explored in so much of Steiner’s later esoteric teachings. Steiner saw his overall mission as one of promoting esoteric Christianity. It was not surprising, therefore, that he introduced Christ as the mediator between Ahriman and Lucifer, as the one who could resolve the opposing forces and extract from them whatever was useful for human development. Christ’s central position was underscored by the timing of their appearances in physical manifestation. Christ’s birth neatly bisected the 6,000-year interval between the incarnation of Lucifer and the anticipated incarnation of Ahriman.

T​hroughout his mature years Rudolf Steiner referred to Lucifer and Ahriman and to luciferic and ahrimanic influences. In a few instances he referred also to luciferic and ahrimanic beings—suggesting something comparable with choirs of angels. One can envision parallel hierarchies of beings, headed by Lucifer and Ahriman, comparable to the hierarchies of angels supervised by archangels like Gabriel and Raphael. 

I​n his examination of the Akashic Records, Steiner first encountered Lucifer during the “Sun evolution,” the second of the four planetary evolutions. At that time Lucifer was the “Venus Spirit,” while Christ was the “Sun Spirit.” Lucifer was described as a being “extraordinarily full of light.” But he was also “endowed in his very nature with infinite pride” and in consequence “became a dethroned ruler.” On Earth’s next evolution, the “Old Moon evolution,” Christ confronted Lucifer and by exerting “all the forces at His disposal” was able to repel him.51 Note that Steiner agreed with Thomas Malory that it was Christ, not Michael, who expelled Lucifer from heaven.

​Lucifer appeared on our present Earth, according to Steiner, in the post-Atlantean era. During the fourth millennium BCE humanity’s spiritual development was nurtured by the mysteries and revelation, but “men could not acquire knowledge through their own powers of intellectual discernment. They were dependent upon what was imparted to them from ​the Mysteries.”52 Perhaps Job was representative of that pre-intellectual era. Lucifer decided to take physical form in order to remedy that limitation. He incarnated in China at the beginning of the third millennium BCE and, even as a child, was allowed to participate in the mysteries:

Even then, it would seem, luciferic influence did not disappear entirely. Its effects were apparent in medieval mysticism, the Renaissance, Baroque art and music, and nineteenth-century Romanticism—all of which we would applaud as favorable influences. Continuing, less favorable, luciferic influence can be seen in superstition and pseudoscience, in ungrounded mysticism, in “rapture theology,” in much of the New Age movement, and in the deluded claims of would-be spokespersons for SaintMartin or Sanat Kumara. 

“The true nature and being of man,” Steiner continued, “is essentially the effort to hold the balance between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman. The Christ impulse helps contemporary humanity to establish that equilibrium.”86 Significantly Christ incarnated three millennia after Lucifer and roughly three millennia before Ahriman’s projected incarnation. But Christ is not just mediator between the opposing evil forces, he may use the two personages to serve his purpose: “Lucifer and Ahriman intervene in the evolution of mankind side by side with the Christ Impulse—these things must be taken in all earnestness and their consequences rightly assessed.”87

In an October 1913 lecture Steiner described a series of encounters Jesus had with Lucifer and Ahriman. Jesus first saw the two entities on the gateposts to the Essene community—recalling the Boaz and Jachim figures at the entrance to Solomon’s temple.88 Shortly thereafter he saw Lucifer and Ahriman fleeing the sanctity of the Essenes.89

Following the baptism in the Jordan, in which the Christ entered into Jesus’ body, Lucifer and Ahriman participated in the triple temptation in the wilderness. Lucifer made the first offer: “If thou will enter my realm, I will give thee all the beauty and glory that belong to these old kingdoms.” Christ rejected the offer, whereupon Lucifer and Ahriman jointly made the second offer: “Lucifer sought to goad His pride; Ahriman to play upon His fear.” When that offer was also rejected Ahriman dismissed Lucifer: “I cannot use thee, thou dost but hinder me, thou hast not enhanced my power but weakened it.” Ahriman’s dismissal of Lucifer may have signified the turning point when luciferic influence began to yield to ahrimanic influence.

Ahriman alone made the third and final offer: “Turn the stones into bread, if thou wouldst boast of Divine power.”90 Christ rejected that offer, too, bringing the encounter in the wilderness to an end. Although he had resisted the temptations successfully and conquered Lucifer, he was left with “the sting of Ahriman, where men were under Ahriman’s domination.”91 In particular Ahriman acquired the ability to exploit humankind’s lust for money:

Ahriman communicated to Christ something that could indeed be known on Earth, but could not yet be known by the God who had come to Earth for the first time. He did not know that there below it was necessary to turn mineral substance—metal—into money, into bread. . . That was the point where Ahriman still retained power. And he said: I shall use that power!

In due course Judas placed himself at Ahriman’s service and betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver.92

We have already seen that luciferic influence, through its support of gnosis, helped humankind grasp the “Mystery of Golgotha.” But a totally new understanding was needed. Steiner explained: “The Gospels were given as a necessary counterweight to the Luciferic Gnosis.”93 The gospels are not self-explanatory, however:

[I]f no attempt is made to develop understanding of [the gospel’s] content, the aims of Ahriman are furthered, not the progress of mankind. In the absolute sense, nothing is good in itself, but is always good or bad according to the use to which it is put. The best can be the worst if wrongly used. Sublime though they are, the Gospels can also have the opposite effect if men are too lazy to search for a deeper understanding based on spiritual science.94

Misinterpretation of the gospels resulted in unwise doctrine and more recently the rise of fundamentalism.

“What is essential now,” Steiner declared, “is to acquire a spiritual understanding of the ​Mystery of Golgotha in the light of the truths enshrined in the Gospels.” More generally a new spirituality is needed to transcend the prevailing rationalism and materialism. Steiner saw the birth of that new spirituality in his own lifetime: “Since the last third of the nineteenth century the spiritual has been streaming around us; it is streaming into earthly evolution.”95 The important thing is for people to recognize and respond to it appropriately:

[T]here is a great deal in the spiritual and unspiritual currents of the present time of which men should be acutely aware, and determine their attitude of soul accordingly. Upon the ability and willingness to penetrate to the roots of such matters will depend the effect which the incarnation of Ahriman can have upon men, whether this incarnation will lead them to prevent the earth from reaching its goal, or bring home to them the very limited significance of intellectual, unspiritual life.96

Like the charioteer in the Tarot card, Christ brings higher power to bear to balance and synthesize the opposing forces. We are called upon to participate in that effort, and thereby begin to comprehend the mediating work of the Christ, the “third reality”:

If men rightly take in hand the currents leading towards Ahriman, then simply through his incarnation in earthly life they will recognize the ahrimanic influence on the one side, and on the other its polar opposite—the luciferic influence. And then the very contrast between the ahrimanic and the luciferic will enable them to perceive the third reality.97

Steiner followed that statement, in his lecture, with the startling assertion that we must gain “an understanding of this trinity of the Christian impulse, the ahrimanic and the luciferic influences; for without this consciousness [we] will not be able to go forward into the future with the prospect of achieving the goal of earth-existence.”98 We must recognize Christ’s ability to make use of Lucifer and Ahriman, no matter what evil they might also be doing. This does not necessarily mean that they are willing collaborators; perhaps even unmitigated evil can be an instrument of Divine Purpose.

Steiner generalized this trinity to place humanity in the role of mediator: “[T]he world can really be understood only in terms of a triad. On one side we have everything luciferic, on the other everything ahrimanic, and in the third, central place, the point of balance between the two, humanity, with a sense of its relationship to the divine, of its divine essence.”99 “We can understand the world in the right way,” Steiner declared,

only when we see it based on this triad and are perfectly clear that human life is the beam of the scales. Here is the fulcrum: on one side is the luciferic element, actually pulling the pan upwards; opposite is the ahrimanic element pulling the pan downwards. Our human task—our human essence—is to keep the pan balanced.100

Steiner suggested that this truth was an initiatory secret whose broader dissemination the evil powers were eager to prevent: “the cosmic existence in which we find ourselves can only be understood in terms of the triad,” but “it lies in the deepest interest of the luciferic and ahrimanic powers to conceal this secret of the number three—after all, only the proper penetration of this secret would allow humanity to bring about the state of balance.”101

​One strategy the powers used was to promote “the illusion of the duality of God and the devil . . . the notion of divine spiritual powers above and diabolical powers below.” Presumably the church bears the blame for preaching that duality, even though it seemed to be supporting Christ’s campaign against luciferic Gnosticism. On the other hand, the church could also be blamed for preaching the notion of heaven, which Steiner saw as a luciferic ruse to distract us from the triple reality! Steiner added: “It is as if human beings have been deprived of the possibility of balance because a healthy human understanding of the world consists of in a proper grasp of the triad and this has been . . . concealed from them.”102

​Steiner’s followers, in the Anthroposophical Society and elsewhere, continued to speak of Lucifer and Ahriman and their respective influences. Richard Leviton shared an important insight into Lucifer’s incarnation and mission:

It was as if Lucifer, regent of human manas and hierophant of the Mysteries, momentarily took human biological form as a living fount of inspiration for the primeval, “pagan” wisdom culture. In that capacity he brought the ancient Rishis, the original teachers of a young humanity, the world of “intellectualistic thought,” the domain of high reason and pictorial conceptions, and the ideal of a cosmic and unconditioned activity of Intelligence and Will. Intellectually, Lucifer taught the Rishis how to fly.103

Presumably that last remark is not to be taken literally. Leviton went on to comment on ahrimanic influence in today’s world:

Ahriman fosters the illusion that elemental matter is a reality in itself, that physicalsensory life is the consummation of existence. It is not hard to see how Ahriman’s materialism effectively bars all outlook on the spiritual world for many people; an objective survey of the parameters of modern scientific theory and research demonstrates this readily. The arbiters of contemporary scientific and medical thinking almost unilaterally refuse to see through the material world to its true, spiritual foundations.104

Anthroposophist Judith von Halle commented on Christ’s redemptive mission, mediating between Lucifer and Ahriman: “Through Christ’s sacrifice the human being’s physical organization was returned to the condition it had before the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman took effect.”105 Furthermore:

Since the incisive intervention of the Christ impulse in the human organism and our supersensible bodies, it has become possible for us to activate and exert our I [roughly equivalent to the trans-Himalayan “Ego”] in a balancing way between the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer. . . . Since the Mystery of Golgotha, Lucifer and Ahriman no longer make a direct contribution to the forming of consciousness. Instead they work harmfully upon the astral body and the etheric body, and the I filled with the thought of Christ is continually called upon to bring their lower influence under control.106

Referring to the transfiguration on Mount Tabor, Von Halle saw Moses and Elijah standing either side of Christ as three in one: “Together with the Sun of Christ . . . they form a unity.”107 We are reminded of Boaz and Jachim at the entrance to the temple, Lucifer and Ahriman at the entrance to the Essene community, and also of the two thieves at the crucifixion. Sevak Gulbekian took a harder line on Ahriman’s moral status than Steiner had. He viewed Ahriman—and presumably we could include Lucifer—not as morally ambiguous, but as fundamentally evil; what we might regard as beneficial influence was no more than “evil masquerading as good.”108 He cited Christ’s words: “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.”109

​Gulbekian also cited a passage from 2 Thessalonians that seemed to apply directly to Lucifer. It referred to the “man of sin . . ., the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. . . . Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders.”110 If Gulbekian is right, Lucifer and Ahriman have expended a great deal of effort on masquerading. 

W​e have seen that Helena Blavatsky provided a model of Lucifer as a beneficent entity countering the evil Jehovah’s plan to make humankind into automata. She laid the blame for the demonization of Lucifer in western culture squarely on institutional Christianity:

​There is a whole philosophy of dogmatic craft in the reason why the first Archangel, who sprang from the depths of Chaos, was called Lux (Lucifer), the ‘Luminous Son of the Morning,’ or manvantaric Dawn. He was transformed by the Church into Lucifer or Satan, because he is higher and older than Jehovah, and had to be sacrificed to the new dogma.111

Yet even the original, good Lucifer was perceived as ambiguous by humankind:

Lucifer—the spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment and Freedom of Thought—is metaphorically the guiding beacon, which helps man to find his way through the rocks and sandbanks of Life, for Lucifer is the Logos in his highest, and the “Adversary” in his lowest aspect—both of which are reflected in our Ego.112

Blavatsky explained further:

Lucifer is divine and terrestrial light, the “Holy Ghost” and “Satan,” at one and the same time, visible Space being truly filled with the differentiated Breath invisibly; and the Astral Light, the manifested effects of the two who are one, guided and attracted by ourselves, is the Karma of humanity.113

Alice Bailey acknowledged that Lucifer had fallen from grace but sought to put the event into a larger perspective:

Symbolically speaking, some of the sons of God fell from their high estate, led, at one time, by “Lucifer, Son of the Morning.” This “fall of the angels” was a tremendous event in the history of our planet, but was nevertheless only a passing and interesting phenomenon in the history of the solar system, and a trifling incident in the affairs of the seven constellations, of which our solar system is but one.114

Bailey spoke of Lucifer as the ruler of humanity, noting for comparison that Christ rules the Hierarchy. and Melchizedek Shamballa.115 She likened Lucifer to the Prodigal Son, alluding to humanity’s descent into matter and its slow reemergence into light. If Lucifer fell from grace, so did humanity, but that was not the end of the story. Writing three years after Steiner’s death, Rosicrucian Manly Hall attributed to scholars of his own esoteric tradition an insightful comment on the nature of luciferic influence and on Lucifer himself, in relation to Christ and Jehovah:

Certain Rosicrucian scholars have given special appellations to these three phases of the sun: the spiritual sun they called Vulcan; the soular and intellectual sun, Christ and Lucifer respectively; and the material sun, the Jewish Demiurgus Jehovah. Lucifer here represents the intellectual mind without the illumination of the spiritual mind; therefore it is “the false light.”116

Hall also offered an interesting connection between overcoming luciferic influence and the alchemical process: “The false light is finally overcome and redeemed by the true light of the soul, called the Second Logos or Christ. The secret processes by which the Luciferian intellect is transmuted into the Christly intellect constitute one of the great secrets of alchemy, and are symbolized by the process of transmuting base metals into gold.”117

​Hall’s reference to the “Second Logos” reflects his familiarity with Theosophical teachings. He was probably familiar with Steiner’s work, too, and may have included the latter among the “Certain Rosicrucian scholars.” Nevertheless, this is a significant comment from someone outside Steiner’s immediate circle, on the mediation of Christ between Lucifer and his polar opposite. Why Hall retained Jehovah to play the role of polar opposite is unclear; perhaps he did not agree with Steiner’s substitution of Ahriman for Jehovah. 

The Kabbalah is a sophisticated system of esotericism in which pairs of opposite sephiroth are in continual tension. As manifestations of the Ain Soph they represent contrasting, Januslike faces of deity. As a roadmap of the spiritual journey the Tree of Life presents contrasting challenges that must be confronted and brought into equilibrium. The free-flowing creativity of Netzach must be balanced against the rational groundedness of Hod; the unstinting generosity of Chesed against the stern judgmentalism of Geburah; and the raw, masculine energy of Chokmah against the feminine, form-making quality of Binah. Equilibrium is sought in the sephiroth on the Middle Pillar, the “Pillar of Equilibrium,” though a more insightful term might be “Pillar of Synthesis.”

Steiner’s Lucifer and Ahriman bear some similarity to Netzach and Hod, viewed as manifestations of deity. And the luciferic and ahrimanic influences bear some similarity to Netzach’s and Hod’s respective challenges. But the match is not good, and Steiner’s dualism cannot be correlated in any meaningful sense with the GeburahChesed or Chokman-Binah polarities.

One point of contact between Steiner’s dualities and the Kabbalah should be noted, however. Each pair of opposing sephiroth, together with the sephirah on the Middle Pillar into which it is resolved, form a triangle, a kind of trinity. Netzach, Hod and Tiphareth form one of these trinities, and Christian Kabbalists associate Tiphareth with Christ. Another point of contact is the kabbalistic axiom that the seeker must experience each of the opposing forces before bringing them into equilibrium and moving to a higher level on the Tree. According to Steiner, humanity had to experience the long period of luciferic dominance, and now has to experience the modern period of ahrimanic influence, before it can appreciate the mediating mission of the Christ.

Neither mainstream Christianity nor Islam considered the possibility of either dualistic evil or a mediator between them. As monotheistic religions they admitted one God and one Devil. Yet we do find notions of opposing evil forces in esoteric Christianity. For example Edward Maitland, nineteenth-century Christian esotericist and close associate of Anna Kingsford, commented on polar-opposite influences in the church:

Christianity—which is rightly definable as a symbolic synthesis of the fundamental truths contained in all religions—early fell into bad hands. Like its Founder, it was crucified between two thieves, who were no other than the types of its crucifiers. These were, on the one hand, Superstition, which is the distortion of spiritual perception; and on the other hand Materialism, which is the privation of spiritual perception. These are the “two beasts” of mystical Scripture, which come up, respectively, from the “sea” and the “earth,” to ravage the hopes of humanity. And the two are one under the modes of its manifestation.118

We do not know whether Steiner read that comment. If he had, he might have explained that superstition and materialism were nothing else than luciferic and ahrimanic influences, respectively. Also he might have acknowledged the “two beasts” as prototypes of his Lucifer and Ahriman.

Trans-Himalayan teachings do not offer a direct equivalent of Steiner’s dualism, but Bailey discussed pairs of opposites at some length. She described the Battle of Kurukshetra as being fought on multiple levels of reality, one of which involves the astral body as it is “either attentive to the egoic impression or swayed by the million voices of earth.”119 Bailey also spoke of “the planetary kurukshetra,” which “will be succeeded by the Judgment Day when the Sons of Manas [Sanskrit: “Mind”] will be cast out and the Dragons of Wisdom rule.”120

Polarities lie at the very heart of the Fourth Ray of Harmony through Conflict. Much of Bailey’s discussion concerned polarities with a clear moral distinction, such as materialism and spirituality, Christ and the anti-Christ. The disciple “stands at the midway point” only insofar as he or she has yet to make the right moral choice.121 She spoke of the soul as the mediator between spirit and matter and the expression of an important soul quality: “God Himself produced the pairs of opposites— spirit and matter—and also produced the middle way which is that of the consciousness aspect or the soul aspect.”122

​Importantly, Bailey described the astral plane as “the plane of duality, of the pairs of opposites, and it is the interplay of these opposites, plus the energies released by the individual, which has, during the ages, built up the world glamour.”123 Overcoming that duality is the major challenge of the second initiation. Duality itself is implicit in the astrological sign of Gemini and the Fourth Ray.  

As noted, Behemoth and Leviathan represented the elements of earth and water, respectively, and they could be interpreted as symbolizing maya and glamour. It is not difficult to correlate Ahriman with maya and Lucifer with glamour and perhaps also with illusion.

If maya relates to the physical world, glamour relates to the astral, or emotional, nature. Bailey identified nine types of glamour: destiny, aspiration, self-assurance, duty, environing conditions, mind, devotion, desire, and personal ambition. For example: those who succumb to the glamour of aspiration “are completely satisfied and pre-occupied with their aspiration towards the light and rest back upon the fact that they are aspirants. Such people need to move onward on to the Path of Discipleship and cease their preoccupation and satisfaction with their spiritual ambitions and goals.”124 The glamour of devotion leads “to an undue stimulation of the astral body. The man or woman thus glamoured sees only one idea, one person, one authority and one aspect of truth. It feeds fanaticism and spiritual pride.”125

The concept of illusion has been explored in multiple religions and philosophies. Theosophist Gottfried de Purucker pointed out that both the Stoics and the ancient Hindus believed that the physical world was illusory. But the concept of illusion developed in the Vedanta to mean “not that a thing seen does not exist, but that we are blinded and our mind perverted by our own thoughts and our own imperfections, and do not as yet arrive at the real interpretation and meaning of the world, of the universe around us.”126 De Purucker added that this definition is “near to our own teachings.”

According to Bailey, illusion is comparable with maya and glamour but “is more mental in its impact. It concerns the ideas whereby we live, and the thought life which more or less (although mostly less) governs our daily undertakings.”127 Illusion, so defined, relates to the lower mental nature. Two of the most serious forms are the illusion of separateness128 and the illusion of superiority.129

​We saw that Job had to confront and overcome both Behemoth and Leviathan. They were not polar evils where the goal was to find a more desirable middle ground. The same is true of maya, glamour and illusion in trans-Himalayan teachings; the goal is to overcome all of them and to focus the consciousness in the higher mind. That is the challenge, for us as it was for the biblical Job, of the third initiation.

While we may be able to correlate Ahriman with maya, and Lucifer with glamour and illusion, an essential element of Steiner teachings is that they are dualistic beings. The goal is to resolve their polar opposite influences, and Christ’s mission was intended to accomplish that.

Writing through his amanuensis Alice Bailey in the 1940s, the Tibetan Master made a number of far-reaching prophecies. They referred to the reappearance of the Christ and the externalization of the Hierarchy of Masters, while related prophecies concerned the establishment of a new world religion and the restoration of the mysteries. We were told that a date “for the first stage of the externalization of the Hierarchy will “in all probability . . . be set” at the next General Assembly of the Hierarchy, scheduled for 2025.130 No dates were set for the other developments, and all would depend on our progress toward establishing right hu​man relations, but the Tibetan implied that they would occur within decades rather than centuries. The Tibetan and other transHimalayan teachers also prophesied longerterm events, like the advent of the sixth root race.

Nowhere did the Tibetan speak of the forthcoming incarnation of Ahriman, though Steiner predicted that it would occur within the same timeframe. Steiner mentioned the reappearance of the Christ, which he predicted would begin in the 1930s and last 2,500 years.131 But he insisted that it would be restricted to the etheric plane and that Christ would not again take dense physical embodiment. He did not discuss its relationship with, or impact on, the reincarnation of Ahriman. Steiner never mentioned the externalization of the Hierarchy, though it would seem to have a major impact on the circumstances in which Ahriman might take (presumably dense-) physical embodiment and “live among men on the earth.” In fact, except for the rarest of references to “the Masters,”132 Steiner never mentioned the Hierarchy.

The conflict between the two scenarios is worrisome. Yet there is an interesting point of agreement. Steiner urged us to prepare for the Ahriman’s incarnation in order to ameliorate its negative effects, while the Tibetan urges us to prepare for the reappearance of the Christ and externalization of the Hierarchy in order to make them possible. Both scenarios stress the importance of effective human action. 

Ahriman and Lucifer had long histories before Steiner made them the main characters in his system of moral dualism. Blavatsky’s newly published Secret Doctrine, as well as ideas circulating within Freemasonry in the late nineteenth century, may have influenced him. Steiner struggled with the identities of his dualistic beings, first considering a good Lucifer and an evil Jehovah, then settling on a predominantly evil Lucifer and bringing in a similarly evil Ahriman as a substitute for Jehovah. We do not know whether Steiner’s struggle reflected attempts to read the Akashic Records more clearly or whether it simply represented literary experimentation.

Whatever the process of character development, the value of Steiner’s teachings on Lucifer and Ahriman is unquestioned. His achievement was twofold. First, he painted a vivid and compelling picture of luciferic and ahrimanic influence throughout human history and our need to recognize and respond to them. Luciferic influence had a largely favorable effect on human development, stimulating memory and nurturing ancient cultures. It continues to manifest in less favorable ways, including the many types of glamour that we all seek to overcome. Ahrimanic influence stimulated the rise of science and technology but also led to materialism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism. Several additions to Steiner’s list have been suggested.

Warning of growing ahrimanic influence was, in Steiner’s view, a major element of Anthroposophy’s mission. That may be true; but, without ever referring to Ahriman or ahrimanic influence, many other people over the last 100 years have encouraged a focus on spirituality and common purpose, and a corresponding rejection of materialism, nationalism, fundamentalism, and the other ills Steiner identified.

Second, Steiner identified the Christ as the resolving force between Lucifer and Ahriman. He even suggested that the three entities form a “trinity” engaged in a collective effort to promote the evolution of human consciousness. Note that all three entities in the trinity are male. Evidently Steiner did not believe that gender balance was important to the evolution of consciousness.

Although Lucifer and Ahriman wrought great evil, and continue to do so, they nevertheless served—willingly or unwillingly—as agents of Divine Purpose. A rough equivalence can be recognized between Steiner’s trinity and the triangle of Netzach, Hod and Tiphareth in the Kabbalah.

Steiner’s Lucifer and Ahriman represent just one polarity. The Kabbalah reminds us that other polarities may be no less important. Modern society has failed to resolve the ​ChesedGeburah polarity in developing public welfare policies. The gender tensions implicit in Chokmah and Binah remain largely unresolved in the developed nations, and in the developing world resolution has hardly begun. Are these latter polarities also associated with powerful beings, and what difference would it make if they were? If such powerful beings exist, have they incarnated or will incarnate sometime in the future, and what difference would that make?

These are just two of the questions this article has identified, without attempting to answer. Other important questions relate to the nature of evil: Is evil an absolute, or is some degree of ambiguity always present? Are ostensibly evil beings, on our level and above, capable of doing some good? And how should we judge beings whose good and evil actions seem to be rather equally balanced? What role does moral ambiguity at higher levels play in the Divine Plan for humanity—and in the working out of karma?

We have seen that a Rosicrucian writer embraced the notion of Christ’s mediation between Lucifer and a being with polar-opposite qualities—even though the latter was identified as Jehovah rather than Ahriman. By contrast, none of the trans-Himalayan teachers mentioned Lucifer and Ahriman or even devoted much attention to the influences that Steiner associated with them. Much of Steiner’s other work overlaps with trans-Himalayan teachings, providing comforting assurance of mutual validity. Yet his teachings on Lucifer and Ahriman are unique in modern esotericism, except for discussion by his own followers.

Furthermore, Steiner’s prophecy of Ahriman’s incarnation is hard to reconcile with the Tibetan Master’s prophecies of the reappearance of the Christ and the externalization of the Hierarchy. Both scenarios would seem to be of great importance to humanity and the planet. Inconsistency between Steiner’s teachings and trans-Himalayan teachings requires careful consideration as we assess their relative merits—or as we evaluate the totality of esoteric teachings available to us. Some Anthroposophical writers now seem to emphasize luciferic and ahrimanic influences rather than the objective reality of Lucifer and Ahriman. Perhaps the personages merely symbolize the influences or serve as archetypes describing contrasting attitudes and behaviors that have manifested throughout history and continue to manifest today. Whether or not they are “real” entities, we can readily accept the challenge of overcoming those attitudes and behaviors in ourselves and others.

​Esotericists may not all believe that Lucifer was the “God of Light,” but they agree that he did not deserve the treatment received at the hands of western Christian culture. That said, esotericists have sometimes attracted criticism for their efforts to reinstate him. Indifferent to the negative reactions that could be expected from the general population, the Theosophical Society published the journal Lucifer, and Foster Bailey—who had recently left the Society—founded Lucifer’s Trust to publish the works of Alice Bailey.133 Eventually the journal was discontinued, and the publishing company was renamed The Lucis Trust. 

A journey into the secret technology hidden from the public until now! Dr. Steven Greer reveals the cover-up and motives on why we have been denied free energy. Unprecedented Access Into Dr. Steven Greer crusade for disclosure.

This documentary is Dr. Greer’s answer to the current government and media disinformation campaign promoting 3 big lies:

1. We do not know what these UAPs/ UFOs are. WE DO.
2. Humans cannot make craft that can maneuver like UFOs. WE CAN and WE DO.
3. The UFOs are a threat. THEY ARE NOT.

​

• That all conscious beings in the universe are created equal and are sentient by virtue of the same single light of Universal Consciousness that is awake within all;
• That the time for endless war must end and an age of Universal Peace and Enlightenment must begin;
• That the Truth that we are not alone in the Universe should be known by all and that the destiny of humanity is to join these other cosmic cultures in peace;
• That space must be preserved for peace and that all weapons must be banned from space, forever;
• That the racist ideology that divides humanity and that attempts to divide humans from their fellow denizens of the cosmos is moribund and must be banished from the Earth forever;
• That the fascist and covert powers that divide humanity, create endless war and that hide the technologies to save the earth, establish peace and justice for all, may no longer prevail on Earth;
• That we come together as one people on Earth to resist tyranny and establish the long-awaited era of thousands of years of peace on Earth and amongst the Stars;
• That we invite all people of good will on Earth and amongst the Stars to unite together as One People within One Universe. It is time.

Do you believe in the study of psychic phenomena known as parapsychology?

If not, you won’t be a skeptic for long, as Paul explores these realms and much more with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, host of the very popular New Thinking Allowed series on YouTube in this astral Living 4D conversation.

From CNN:

The Pentagon has officially released three short videos showing "unidentified aerial phenomena" that had previously been released by a private company.

The videos show what appear to be unidentified flying objects rapidly moving while recorded by infrared cameras. Two of the videos contain service members reacting in awe at how quickly the objects are moving. One voice speculates that it could be a drone.

The Navy previously acknowledged the veracity of the videos in September of last year. They are officially releasing them now, "in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos," according to Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough."After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems," said Gough in a statement, "and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena."

The Navy now has formal guidelines for how its pilots can report when they believe they have seen possible UFO's.

The Navy videos were first released between December 2017 and March 2018 by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a company co-founded by former Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge that says it studies information about unidentified aerial phenomena.

In 2017, one of the pilots who saw one of the unidentified objects in 2004 told CNN that it moved in ways he couldn't explain.

"As I got close to it ... it rapidly accelerated to the south, and disappeared in less than two seconds," said retired US Navy pilot David Fravor. "This was extremely abrupt, like a ping pong ball, bouncing off a wall. It would hit and go the other way."

The Pentagon has previously studied recordings of aerial encounters with unknown objects as part of a since-shuttered classified program that was launched at the behest of former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada. The program was launched in 2007 and ended in 2012, according to the Pentagon, because they assessed that there were higher priorities that needed funding.

Nevertheless, Luis Elizondo, the former head of the classified program, told CNN in 2017 that he personally believes "there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone."

"These aircraft -- we'll call them aircraft -- are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of," Elizondo said of objects they researched. He says he resigned from the Defense Department in 2017 in protest over the secrecy surrounding the program and the internal opposition to funding it.

Reid tweeted Monday that he was "glad" the Pentagon officially released the videos, but that "it only scratches the surface of research and materials available. The U.S. needs to take a serious, scientific look at this and any potential national security implications."And some members of Congress are still interested in the issue, with senators receiving a classified briefing from Navy officials on unidentified aircraft last summer.

"If pilots at Oceana or elsewhere are reporting flight hazards that interfere with training or put them at risk, then Senator Warner wants answers. It doesn't matter if it's weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely — we can't ask our pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily," Rachel Cohen, spokeswoman for Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, told CNN at the time.

Russell Targ  is a physicist, an author, a pioneer in the development of the laser and laser applications, and a cofounder of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) investigation of psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s. SRI is a research and development think tank in Menlo Park, California. His work in the psychic area, commonly referred to as remote viewing, has been published in Nature, The Proceedings of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), and the Proceedings of the American Association the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Targ has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Queens College and did his graduate work in physics at Columbia University. He has received two National Aeronautics and Space- Administration awards for inventions and contributions to lasers and laser communications. In 1983 and 1984 he accepted invitations to present remote viewing demonstrations and to address the USSR Academy of Science on this research.

He is the author or co-author of nine books dealing with the scientific investigation of psychic abilities and Buddhist approaches to the transformation of consciousness, including Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability (with E. Harold Puthoff, 1977, 2005); Miracles of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spiritual Healing (with Jane Katra, 1998); and Limitless Mind: A Guide to Remote Viewing and Transformation of Consciousness (2004). He also wrote an autobiography, Do You See What I See: Memoirs of a Blind Biker in 2008. His current book is The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities.

As a senior staff scientist at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, Targ developed airborne laser systems for the detection of wind shear and air turbulence. Having retired in 1997, he now writes books on psychic research and teaches remote viewing worldwide.

In discussions of the reality of psychic, or "psi" phenomena, especially from the scientific perspective, it is normal, and expected, to be skeptical and question it's validity. However, Psi has been shown to exist in thousands of experiments. There are disagreements over how to interpret the evidence, but virtually all scientists who have actually studied the evidence, including the skeptics, now agree that something interesting is going on that merits serious scientific attention.

A great place to start your research is with Targ, by visiting his website at http://www.esprsearch.com

Another great place would be to browse through a selected list of downloadable, peer-reviewed journal articles reporting on the studies of psychic phenomena, compiled by Dr. Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Transcript:

The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving any of the details to be filled in. This is a very widespread belief in our society. It's the kind of belief system of people who say I don't believe in God, I believe in science. It's a belief system which has now been spread to the entire world. But there's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry based on reason, evidence, hypothesis, and collective investigation, and science as a belief system or a worldview - and unfortunately the worldview aspect of science has come to inhibit and constrict the free inquiry, which is the very lifeblood of the scientific endeavor.

Since the late 19th century, science has been conducted under the aspect of a belief system or worldview which is essentially that of materialism, philosophical materialism, and these sciences are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the materialist worldview. I think that as we break out of it the sciences will be regenerated.

What I do in my book the science delusion, which is called science set free in the United States, is take the ten dogmas or assumptions of science and turn them into questions. It's seeing how well they turn how well they stand up if you look at them scientifically. None of them stand out very well. What I engage do is first run through what these 10 dogmas are and then I'll only have time to discuss one or two of them in a bit more detail. But essentially the ten dogmas, which are the default world view of most educated people all over the world are:

1. Nature's mechanical or machine like - the universe is like a machine. Animals and plants are like machines, we're like machines. In fact, we are machines. We are lumbering robots, in Richard Dawkins vivid phrase, with brains that are genetically programmed computers.
2. Matter is unconscious - the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter. There's no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants, and there ought not to be any in us either. If this theory is true, so a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last hundred years is being trying to prove that we're not really conscious at all.
3. The laws of nature are fixed - the laws of nature are the same now as they were at the time of the Big Bang, and they'll be the same forever. Not just the laws but the constants of nature are fixed which is why they are called constants.
4. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same - it never changes in total quantity, except at the moment of the Big Bang when it all sprang into existence from nowhere in a single instant.
5. Nature is purposeless - there are no purposes in all nature and the evolutionary process has no purpose or direction.
6. A biological heredity is material - everything you inherit is in your genes or in epigenetic modifications of the genes or in cytoplasmic inheritance; it's material.
7. Memories are stored inside your brain as material traces - somehow everything you remember is in your brain in modified nerve endings, phosphorylated proteins. No one knows how it works but nevertheless almost everyone in scientific world believes it must be in the brain.
8. Your mind is inside your head - all your consciousness is the activity of your brain and nothing more.
9. (follows from Dogma 8) Psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible - your thoughts and intentions can not have any effect at a distance because your minds inside your head, therefore all the apparent evidence for telepathy and other psychic phenomena is illusory. People believe these things happen but it's just because they don't know enough about statistics, or they're just they're deceived by coincidences, or it's wishful thinking.
10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works - that's why governments only fund research into mechanistic medicine and ignore complementary and alternative therapies. Those can't possibly really work because they're not mechanistic. They may appear to work because people would have got better anyway, or because of the placebo effect. But the only kind that really works is mechanistic medicine.

This is the default worldview which is held by almost all educated people all over the world. It's the basis of the educational system, the National Health Service, the Medical Research Council, governments, and it's just the default worldview of educated people. But I think every one of these dogmas is very, very questionable and when you look at them, they fall apart.

I'm going to take first the idea that the laws of nature are fixed. This is a hangover from an older worldview before the 1960s when the Big Bang Theory came in. People thought that the whole universe was eternal governed by eternal mathematical laws. When the Big Bang came in then that assumption continued even though the Big Bang revealed a universe that's radically evolutionary, about 14 billion years, old growing and developing and evolving for 14 billion years, growing and cooling, and more structures and patterns appear within it. But the idea is all the laws of nature were completely fixed at the moment of the Big Bang like a cosmic Napoleonic Code. As my friend Terence McKenna used to say, "Modern science is based on the principle: give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest. And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it from nothing in a single instant."

Well in an evolutionary universe, why shouldn't the laws themselves evolve? And after all human laws do, and the idea of laws of nature is based on a metaphor with human laws. It's a very anthropocentric metaphor; only humans have laws, in fact, only civilized societies have laws. As CS Lewis once said, "To say that a stone falls to earth because it's obeying a law makes it a man and even a citizen." It's a metaphor that we got so used to we forget it's a metaphor.

In an evolving universe I think a much better idea is the idea of habits. I think the habits of nature evolve, the regularities of nature are essentially habitual. This was an idea put forward at the beginning of the 20th century by the American philosophers CS Purse. And it's an idea which various other philosophers have entertained and it's one which I myself have developed into a scientific hypothesis - the hypothesis of morphic resonance, which is the basis of these evolving habits.

According to this hypothesis everything in nature has a kind of collective memory. Resonance occurs on the basis of similarity. As a young giraffe embryo grows in its mother's womb, it tunes in to the morphic resonance of previous giraffes. It draws on that collective memory, it grows like a giraffe, and it behaves like a giraffe because it's drawing on this collective memory. It has to have the right genes to make the right proteins, but genes, in my view, are grossly overrated they only account for the proteins that the organism can make, not the shape or the form or the behavior.

Every species has a kind of collective memory, even crystals do. This theory predicts that if you make a new kind of crystal for the first time, the very first time you make it, it won't have an existing habit. But once it crystallizes, then the next time you make it there will be an influence from the first crystal to the second ones all over the world. By morphic resonance, it'll crystallize a bit easier. The third time, there'll be an influence to the first and second crystals. There is, in fact, good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize around the world, just as this theory would predict.

It also predicts that if you train animals to learn a new trick, for example, rats learn a new trick in London, then all around the world rats of the same breed should learn the same trick quicker, just because the rats have landed here. And surprisingly, there's already evidence that this actually happens anyway. That's my own hypothesis in a nutshell of morphic resonance: everything depends on evolving habits, not on fixed laws.

But I want to spend a few moments on the constants of nature too, because these are again usually assumed to be constant. Things like the gravitational constant, the speed of light, are called the fundamental constants. Are they really constant?

Well, when I got interested in this question I tried to find out. Handbooks of physics lists the existing fundamental constants to tell you their value. But I wanted to see if they'd change, so I got the old volumes of physical handbooks I went to the Patent Office library here in London, and they're the only place I could find that kept the old volumes - normally people throw them away when the new values come out. When I did this I found that the speed of light dropped between 1928 and 1945 by about 20 kilometres per second. It's a huge drop because they're given with errors of any fractions (decimal points of error) and yet all over the world it dropped, and they were all getting values very similar to each other with tiny errors. Then in 1948 it went up again and then people started getting very similar values again.

I was very intrigued by this and I couldn't make sense of it so I went to see the head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Metrology is the science in which people measure constants.
And I asked him about this I said, "What do you make of this drop in the speed of light between 1928 and 1945?"
And he said, "Oh dear." He said, "You've uncovered the most embarrassing episode in the history of our science."
So I said, "Well, could the speed of light have actually dropped? And that would have amazing implications if so."
He said, "No, no of course it couldn't have actually dropped. It's a constant."
[So] "Oh, well then how do you explain the fact everyone was finding it going much slower during that period? Is it because they were fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting, and the whole thing was just produced in the minds of physicists?"
"We don't like to use the word fudge."
I say, "Well, what do you prefer?"
He said, "Well, we prefer to call it intellectual phase-locking."
So I said, "Well, if it was going on then, how can be so sure it's not going on today, and that the present values are produced by intellectual phase-locking?"
And he said, "Oh we know that's not the case."
I said, "How do we know?"
He said, "Well, we've solved the problem."
"Well how?"
He said, "Well, we fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972."
So I said, "But it might still change."
He said, "Yes but we'd never know it, because we defined the meter in terms of the speed of light, so the unit's had change with it." So he looked very pleased about that, they'd fixed that problem.
But I said, "Well then what about big G? (the gravitational constant known in the trade as big G, is written with a capital G) Newton's universal gravitational constant that's varied by more than 1.3 percent in recent years. And it seems to vary from place to place and from time to time."
And he said, "Oh well those are just errors, and unfortunately there are quite big errors with big G."
So I said, "Well what if it's really changing? I mean, perhaps it is really changing."

And then I looked at how they do it. What happens as they measure it in different labs, they get different values on different days and then they average them. And then other labs around the world do the same, and they come out usually with a rather different average. And then the International Committee on metrology meets every ten years or so and averages the ones from labs run, well, to come up with the value of big G.

But what if G were actually fluctuating? What if it changed? There's already evidence, actually, that it changes throughout the day, and throughout the year. What if the earth, as it moves through the galactic environment, went through patches of dark matter or other environmental factors that could alter it? Maybe they all change together. What if these errors are going up together and down together?

For more than 10 years, I've been trying to persuade metrologists to look at the raw data. In fact, I'm now trying to persuade them to put it online, on the internet, with the dates and the actual measurements, and see if they're correlated - to see if they're all up at one time all down at another. If so, they might be fluctuating together, and that would tell us something very, very interesting.

But no one has done this. They haven't done it because G is a constant. There's no point in looking for changes. I see, here's a very simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits inquiry. I myself think that the constants may vary quite considerably, well within narrow limits. But they may all be varying, and I think the day will come when scientific journals, like Nature, have a weekly report on the constants like stock market reports and newspapers. You know, "This week big G was slightly up, the speed on the charge on the electron was down, the speed of light held steady," and so on. So that's one area where I think thinking less dogmatically could open things up.

One of the biggest areas is the nature of the mind. This is the most unsolved problem. Science simply can't deal with the fact we're conscious, and it can't deal with the fact that our thoughts don't seem to be inside our brains. Our experiences don't all seem to be inside our brain. Your image of me now doesn't seem to be inside your brain, yet the official view is there's a little Rupert somewhere inside your head and everything else in this room is inside your head your experience is inside your brain. I'm suggesting, actually, the vision involves an outward projection of images. What you're seeing is in your mind, but not inside your head. Our minds are extended beyond our brains in the simplest act of perception. I think that we project out the images we're seeing and these images touch what we're looking at.

If I look at for you from behind and you don't know I'm there, could I affect you? Could you feel my gaze? There's a great deal of evidence that people can. The sense of being stared at is an extremely common experience, and recent experimental research suggests it's real. Animals seem to have it too. I think it probably evolved in the context of predator-prey relationships. Prey animals that could feel the gaze of a predator would survive better than those that couldn't. This would lead to a whole new way of thinking about ecological relationships, between predators and prey, also about the extent of our minds.

If we look at distant stars I think our minds reach out in a sense to touch those stars and literally extend out over astronomical distances. They're not just inside our heads. Now it may seem astonishing, that this is a topic of debate in the 21st century we know so little about our own minds, that where our images are, is a hot topic of debate with consciousness studies right now.

I don't have time to deal with any more of these dogmas, but every single one of them is questionable. If one questions it, new forms of research, new possibilities open up, and I think as we questioned these dogmas, that have held back science so long, science will undergo re-flowering, a Renaissance. I'm a total believer in the importance of science. I've spent my whole life as a research scientist, my whole career. But I think by moving beyond these dogmas, it can be regenerated once again it and become interesting, and I hope life-affirming. Thank you.

Are we connected to one another and our Earth, or are we separate from everything that we know? The answer to this question has troubled physicists, philosophers, and the like, for millennia.

While contemporary physicists, such as John Wheeler, had no problem accepting our intimate connection with the universe itself, his friend and colleague Albert Einstein did. Before Einstein died, he expressed his deep frustration with the idea that we may in fact in live a world where we are so connected where we can actually influence matter in one place while we are somewhere else. Einstein called his phenomena "spooky action at a distance."

For us to have such a relationship, if it does exist, there must be something, some field, that our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and beliefs move through to connects us to one another.

The idea that is everything is connected by some kind of energy, a field, was actually a very popular idea in the late 1800’s. During this time, a spiritual revolution unfolded, provoking scientists to determine whether or not the universe is connected at some level. Scientists at this time named this field the “ether” field. In our modern time, the term “ether” has since been deemed invalid in the scientific community, and any reference to it is not taken credibly.

In 1887, two very famous researchers, Michelson and Morley, decided to once and for all settle the argument of whether everything is connected by a field, or if everything is separate.
 
Their experiment can be likened to going outside, moistening your finger, and in the moment you did so, if you felt no wind against your finger, you conclude that no air exists. This of course is not true, because the air may not be moving at that time and place that you performed the measurement.
 
Michelson and Morley believed that this field that connects all things, the “ether” field, was a living vibrating pulsating field of energy, which should be in motion, and if that motion could be detected they could then determine whether the field exists.
 
The researchers designed an experiment using an interferometer. The experiment consisted of shooting a beam of light against one mirror that would split that beam of light into two different mirrors in different places that would reflect those beams of light to a collecting mirror. The experiment was based on the idea that if there was a field was in motion, the two beams of light would not come back to the same place at the same time, and that an interference pattern would be observed. In sum, the scientists were looking for an interference pattern in the beams of light to determine if a field that connects all things exists.
 
After conducting this experiment in 1887 and 1888, the researchers did not observe an interference pattern and they published their findings, no such field exists, in peer-reviewed scientific journals (Michelson & Morley, 1887). Modern scientists describe that the results of this were poorly interpreted.

It was the interpretation of the results of the Michelson and Morley experiment that were carried into scientific experiments from 1887 until only recently, carrying the false assumption that there is no field, that everything is separate from everything else, that there is no field of energy that connects what is happening in one place to what is happening somewhere else. This concept is antithetical to that of our ancient ancestors, who began with the idea that everything is connected to everything else. For thousands of years, indigenous people around the world began with assumption that everything is connected and they then devoted that time, of thousands of years, to learn and understand what that connection meant in their lives, to apply in in their lives, to become better people, to build stronger families and communities.
 
Science, for 300 years, has struggled to determine if this field actually exists. Since 1887, our modern scientific paradigm has been built around the concept that everything is separate. That is until recently…
 
In 1987, there was an experiment, similar to the Michelson and Morley experiment, conducted under the auspices of the United States Air Force. While the U.S. Air Force had access to better equipment than Michelson and Morley did 100 years earlier, the same principle was used. During this experiment, the Air Force sanctioned experiment determined that there is a field of energy that connects all things (Silvertooth, 1986). Not only did the researchers determine that the field existed, but it existed in the exact same parameters as Michelson and Morley expected it to exist; the equipment that they were using that was not sophisticated enough to prove it.
 
The results, published in the prestigious journal Nature, in August 1986, almost 100 years later, caused the scientific community to acknowledge that they have been falsely assuming that everything is separated.
 
To be clear, there is no longer a question of whether a field exists that connects all things. The question that now rises is “What does it mean in our lives?”
 
This field, no longer called the “ether” field has been given many new names, such as “the field” as Lynne McTaggart names it. It is also known as the “quantum field,” “God,” “source,” “the matrix,” or “the divine matrix.”

The movie The Matrix was based on the idea that suggests there is another world that exists in this field that we simply cannot see, from our perspective, from where we are right now in this time and space (just because we cant see it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist), and that what happens in this field (that we cannot see) actually influences, and in many case drives, the events that we see in our every day lives.
 
Much of our current science has been based on the false assumption that everything is separate. We now know that is assumption is not true. We know that the field exists and that we are in fact connected to this field. But what does this field do?
 
The field fulfills three fundamental capacities:

1. The field is the container for all things. Everything that we know exists within this field, including the entire universe. Nothing, as we now, exists beyond this field. All things are happening within this field.
2. The field is a bridge between us and the world around us; between our inner and outer worlds. This is important when discussing healing and prayers that sent across the world.
3. The field is a mirror in the world around us for what we claim to be true in the world within us. To be clear, we all have beliefs and expectations about what is true and what is possible, something conscious or subconscious. The world is always revealing to us what our true beliefs are, the quality of our relationships, our careers, our friends, our abundance, our healing and health. These are all examples of the field mirroring to us what it is that we claim to be true in our deepest, sometimes subconscious beliefs.

 
There now is no longer any controversy as to whether or not the field exists, or whether of not we are connected. But how deeply are we connected? What does this field mean for us?
 
Relatively recently, in 1997, the results of an innovative experiment, that were published worldwide via mainstream peer-reviewed journals, performed by physicist Nicolas Gisin at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, offer a clue to answer these questions.

Photons are what atoms are made of. Photons are light particles that the stuff of this world is made of, including you and I.
 
Researchers set out to determine how field is influenced by photons. Using extremely sophisticated scientific equipment, researchers were able to isolate a single photon and split that photon in half, thereby creating twin-photons, two photons with the exact same properties. These photons were placed into a specialized device, in which they were able to shoot the photons, the particles of light, through fiber optic cables in opposite directions from where they began. Each of the fiber optic cables was 7 miles long. Thus, when the photons reached their destination they were a total of 14 miles apart.

The researchers then “tickled”, or influenced, one photon in one place and were able to observe the other photon to see what would happen to the other photon. The researchers observed that when one photon was influenced in one place, the other photon acted like it had the exact same experience as the original photon being influenced, even though the researchers weren’t directly touching it. When one photon was influenced to rotate in a certain direction, the other photon rotated in the exact same direction at the exact same time, down to the nanosecond. When one photon was artificially charged, the other photon would respond exactly as the first at the exact same time, acquiring the same charge. These photons were responding to the same stimuli even though they were not physically connected. This experiment validates the concept of quantum entanglement (Tittel, Brendel, Gisin, Herzog, Zbinden & Gisin, 1998).

Entanglement suggests that once matter is joined physically (those twin-photons used to be one photon) it remains connected energetically. Even when matter is no longer physically touching, it remains energetically linked, regardless of their location in space. This implies once matter is connected, it is always connected.

This experiment, conducted on a small level, reveals to us something very significant on a very large level. Entanglement implies that once physical matter is connected, even when it is separated, even when it is torn apart, regardless of its distance, whether across the room, across nations, across the world, or across the cosmos, that that separate matter is actually still connected.

Let’s go back, way, way back to the very beginning: the Big Bang. The time when there was a primal release of energy and the universe began to expand in the way that it continues today. If we could go back to the instant just before the Big Bang happened and observe the status of the universe; If we took all of the space out of in between all of the atoms in the universe today, remove the space, and compress all physical matter in the universe, we would see it compressed into a solid ball of matter about the size of a single green pea. Just after the instant of the Big Bang, the universe existed as a single extremely dense and hot ball of matter.

At the moment of the big bang, this green pea began to expand very, very quickly, and what was once physically connected in that small space became the physical matter that continues to expand in the universe today. It is this expansion that we can observe today that gives researchers the belief that the big bang occurred.

We can observe that the universe is expanding. If we reverse the trajectory of this expansion, using mathematical models, back in time to a place that is called the singularity. The singularity is the single green pea, the place where everything was once physically connected.

As the results of the experiment suggest, once matter is connected physically, it remains connected energetically. At the instant of the big bang, all matter was connected: all of the matter in my body, all of the matter in your body, all of the matter on this planet, all of the matter from every star in the universe, it all came from this single green pea. If all the matter was once connected, and it is now expanding and separate as it is today, are we still connected energetically?

The results twin-photon experiment suggests the answer is yes. We are all deeply connected. But what does this connection mean? How deep does this connection go? Does this connection beyond the level of photons into our physical world? We are all made of atoms, which are made of photons, the same photons that were used in the experiment at the quantum level.

The twin-photon experiment helps us understand why all matter was originally connected when the universe was formed, some 13.8 billion years ago, to begin with; and why that connection still exists in our world and in our lives today.

The field does more than just connect things through entanglement. The field is not only entangled, it is holographic.

In a hologram, each fragment of a something is mirror of that whole something. Every piece, regardless of how big or small, of a hologram mirrors the whole. A hologram is a self-similar pattern at all scales. For example, if we had a two-dimensional holographic image printed on a piece of paper and cut that image into a million pieces, of any shape and size, and we took the smallest of those pieces and observed it under a microscope, in that smallest fragment of that hologram, we would see the entire pattern as if it was seen in the original uncut image; this is the holographic principle.

The holographic principle, combined with the results of the twin-photon experiment, suggests that if we make a change in one place, that change is mirrored throughout the rest of the hologram.

Think of the universe, for example, as a whole. If we were to cut that whole in half, and then cut that half into quarters, and continue this over and over, like the holographic image, until we a infinite amount of pieces. If we made a change in one of those infinitesimally small pieces (just one place) of the universe, on the level that the hologram recognizes, that change would be mirrored throughout the rest of the entire universe.

In the twin-photon experiment, the photons separated 14 miles in distance from one another acted as if they were having the same experience, in the same instant in time, without being physically disturbed.

The two photons were connected, via entanglement. But for the photons to be mirrored, a conventional scientist would postulate (using linear thinking) that the information of the disturbance traveled, or transmitted, from point A to point B. This linear thinking, assumes, based on current laws of physics, that the disturbance would have to travel across time and space. However, the response time that lapsed between the photon phenomena, where one photon was "tickled" and the other photon 14 miles away mirrored the same experience, was measured using atomic clocks. The researchers observed that there was no time difference, no lag; the experience occurred simultaneously. The nano-instant that one of these photons had the experience, the other one did as well. It is holographic principle that reveals to us what is occurred in this phenomenon. The information did not travel from the first photon to the second - it didn’t need to. In a hologram, the information is already there.

In a hologram, here equals there. The holographic principle suggests that at the energetic level, each of us is able to create tremendous and significant changes in our bodies and in our lives.

From the false assumption, in order for us to create change, we must make that change happen one thing, one task, and one person at a time. With this new assumption in mind, that everything is connected, we do not need to make a change itself happen, we can accomplish positive change in our world and in our lives through demonstrating a personal change in thinning, a shift that is reflected holographically in the field.

As our ancient ancestors, and modern mystics alike, have suggested, as we are able to shift our beliefs and thinking, the world can embrace those changes and mirror them, rather than going to each person, one at a time and make one change after another.

Here is a mechanism that gives us the words to explain the seemingly miraculous experiences that we find in our lives. For example, when our prayers benefit our loved ones whether we are sitting together in the same room or half way around the world. We now know, that we are deeply connected, as the most fundamental level, we are entangled. And with the holographic principle in mind, we are able to love one another and share that love in ways that we only dreamed possible before we understood this principle.

At the instant before the big bang, all mattered was connected. Are we still connected? The evidence suggests, yes, we are in fact connected.

Braden, G. (2018). Confirming Our Connections. [video] Missing Links, S1:Ep5. Available at: http://gaia.com [Accessed 3 Apr. 2019].

Browne, M. (1997). Far Apart, 2 Particles Respond Faster Than Light. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/22/science/far-apart-2-particles-respond-faster-than-light.html [Accessed 3 Apr. 2019].
 
Michelson, A., Morley, E. (1887). "On the Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether". American Journal of Science. 34 (203): 333–345. https://doi.org/0.2475/ajs.s3-34.203.333.

Silvertooth, E. (1986). Special relativity. Nature, 322(6080), pp.590-590. https://doi.org/10.1038/322590b0

Tittel, W., Brendel, J., Gisin, B., Herzog, T., Zbinden, H. and Gisin, N. (1998). Experimental demonstration of quantum correlations over more than 10 km. Physical Review A, 57(5), pp.3229-3232. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.57.3229

Nine holds within it a powerful resonance within our holofractographic, base-10 reality.  Nine is the largest number in the decimal system.  Nine is really the largest number of all, as every other number thereafter is a reflection of the Ennead, a group of nine deities in Egyptian mythology worshiped at Heliopolis, expressing itself in scalar expansions and contractions of 10.

Nikola Tesla: “If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe"

The Earth’s north magnetic pole is on the move. According to a recent update to the World Magnetic Model, the movement of the north magnetic pole, which has been erratic yet accelerating for about 40 years, has recently accelerated more dramatically. Of course, planetary scientists attribute changes to our planet’s magnetic field to the so-called dynamo deep down in the planet’s outer core. However, we have reported on the groundbreaking recent discoveries which completely confound conventional models of planetary magnetic fields. In this episode, we ask retired professor of electrical engineering Dr. Donald Scott to elaborate how a planet’s magnetic field is generated in the Electric Universe.

All of life can be conceived symbolically as one grand cycle. By analogy, three important areas can be studied and compared within a circular framework: human life, nature, astrology. For humans, the circle may represent a lifetime, from birth to death; for nature, the succession of the seasons through a year; in astrology, the zodiac, depicting the signs and their positions. The circle on which these three worlds are based is divided by two axes: one horizontal, one vertical. To travel through a cycle, one need only begin at the left end-point of the horizontal axis and proceed in a counter-clockwise direction until one arrives back at the beginning.

The four most important points on the circumference of the circle are where the two axes touch it:

1. Spring (Vernal) Equinox - Aries
   
2. Summer Solstice - Cancer
   
3. Fall (Autumnal) Equinox - Libra
   
4. Winter Solstice - Capricorn
   

GR is a theoretical framework that only focuses on gravity for understanding the universe in regions of both large scale and high mass: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, etc. On the other hand, QFT is a theoretical framework that only focuses on three non-gravitational forces for understanding the universe in regions of both small scale and low mass: sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, etc. QFT successfully implemented the Standard Model and unified the interactions (so-called Grand Unified Theory) between the three non-gravitational forces: strong, weak, and electromagnetic force.

Through years of research, physicists have experimentally confirmed with tremendous accuracy virtually every prediction made by these two theories when in their appropriate domains of applicability. In accordance with their findings, scientists also learned that GR and QFT, as they are currently formulated, are mutually incompatible – they cannot both be right. Since the usual domains of applicability of GR and QFT are so different, most situations require that only one of the two theories be used. As it turns out, this incompatibility between GR and QFT is apparently only an issue in regions of extremely small scale and high mass, such as those that exist within a black hole or during the beginning stages of the universe (i.e., the moment immediately following the Big Bang). To resolve this conflict, a theoretical framework revealing a deeper underlying reality, unifying gravity with the other three interactions, must be discovered to harmoniously integrate the realms of GR and QFT into a seamless whole: a single theory that, in principle, is capable of describing all phenomena. In pursuit of this goal, quantum gravity has become an area of active research.

The Electric Universe theory highlights the importance of electricity throughout the Universe. It is based on the recognition of existing natural electrical phenomena (eg. lightning, St Elmo’s Fire), and the known properties of plasmas (ionized “gases”) which make up 99.999% of the visible universe, and react strongly to electro-magnetic fields. Much of the material considered by the Electric Universe is peer-reviewed, but not all.

In three-dimensional space, a Platonic solid is a regular, convex polyhedron. It is constructed by congruent (identical in shape and size) regular (all angles equal and all sides equal) polygonal faces with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. Five solids meet these criteria:

• Tetrahedron
  
• Cube
• Octahedron
  
• Dodecahedron
  
• Icosahedron
  

Hermeticism, also called Hermetism, is a religious, philosophical, and esoteric tradition based primarily upon writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus ("Thrice Great"). Hermes Trismegistus, lived in Ancient Egypt in the earliest days of this civilization. He later become one of their gods, receiving the name Thoth. Some say that the word "thought", comes from the name of this God of wisdom, science, and writing. In Ancient Greece, Hermes Trismegistus also joined the Greek pantheon of gods, taking the name Hermes.

The greatest secret laws were handed down in the 7 Hermetic Principles. These are the Principles, taught by Thoth, that governs our material and spiritual life. Knowing these principles, the Universal Laws, shall open your insights to the deeper spiritual nature of reality. When you understand these laws, you will be able to use them instead of being used by them.

Three Initiates. (1936). The Kybalion: The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece. Chicago, Ill.: The Yogi Publication Society

The holographic model allows us to conceptualize a wide range of phenomena that has previously been categorized outside the province of scientific understanding. These include synchronicities, telepathy, precognition, mystical feelings of oneness with the universe, spiritual experiences, psychokinesis, near-dear experiences, and states of higher consciousness.

In part one of this two part program Michael Talbot discusses the holographic model of brain functioning and the "implicate order" model of quantum physics. He proposes that these two models combined explain many unsolved mysteries in both brain functioning (such as memory and vision) and quantum physics (such as the problem of hidden variables and quantum interconnectedness).

Michael Talbot is author of Mysticism and the New Physics, Beyond the Quantum, Your Past Lives and The Holographic Universe. He also authored four novels. This program was taped approximately six months before his untimely death in May 1992.

"The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” -Carl Sagan

A large and unusually-shaped object that has entered our solar system from a different star system was examined by one of the world’s biggest telescopes for signs of alien technology.

The elongated, cigar-shaped body was first spotted in the solar system by researchers on the Pan-Starrs telescope in Hawaii in October. The object, dubbed 'Oumuamua after the Hawaiian word for “messenger,” was observed coming from interstellar space at a maximum rate of 54.4 miles per second or 196,000 mph (315,000 kph) as it went past the sun. 'Oumuamua is located twice as far from Earth as the sun. The 400 meter-long celestial body is ten times longer than it is wide. The shape is claimed to be difficult to create through the natural, known processes of the universe.

The Green Bank telescope, located in West Virginia, examined the interstellar object as it raced through our solar system by listening for the emission of any radio signals across four different radio transmission bands. The powerful telescope can pick up signals as small as those that come from a mobile phone or microwave oven.

After scanning the object for six hours, astronomers have completed their first round of telescope observations of ‘Oumuamua. So far, they have found no evidence of artificial signals coming from the asteroid, but the search isn’t over yet. Astronomers have so far only analyzed the data from one of the four bands.

“Indeed, nothing has popped up, but we’re busy churning through the data we’ve collected so far,” said Andrew Siemion, the director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center.

Siemion said the analysis will take some time, as researchers are looking for signals from weakly transmitting or very distant technologies, bathed in a sea of signals from our own technology.

When astronomers analyze data in the range of one to two gigahertz, they can look for evidence of the molecule hydroxyl, which would suggest the presence of water on ‘Oumuamua.

Some astronomers speculate whether this space rock could be a probe of some kind, dispatched by an advanced civilization. Astronomers predict many more interstellar objects will be detected in the solar system in the years to come.

Dr. Michio Kaku, an American theoretical physicist who specializes in string theory, describes how physicists are able shrink the science of the Big Bang into an equation as small as Einstein's "e=mc^2." Thanks to advances in string theory, physics may allow us to escape the heat death of the universe, explore the multiverse, and unlock the secrets of existence. While firing up our imaginations about the future, Kaku also presents a succinct history of physics and makes a compelling case for why physics is the key to pretty much everything that exists.

According to Shkaplerov, during spacewalks from the ISS under the Russian program, the cosmonauts took samples with cotton swabs from the station’s external surface. In particular, they took probes from places where the accumulation of fuel wastes were discharged during the engines’ operation or at places where the station’s surface is more obscure. After that, the samples were sent back to Earth.

"And now it turns out that somehow these swabs reveal bacteria that were absent during the launch of the ISS module. That is, they have come from outer space and settled along the external surface. They are being studied so far and it seems that they pose no danger," the Russian astronaut said.

Some terrestrial bacteria also survived on the space station’s external surface, though had remained within a space vacuum for three years. In addition, the bacteria underwent sharp swings in temperature from minus 150 to plus 150 degrees Celsius.

The bacteria were brought to the space station accidentally on tablet PCs together with various materials that are placed aboard the ISS for long periods to study the materials’ behavior in outer space.

TASS. (2017) Scientists find living bacteria from outer space on ISS satellite's surface. [online]  Available at: http://tass.com/science/977591 [Accessed 28 Nov. 2017]