(My use of material written by other people neither implies my endorsement of all they say, nor their endorsement of anything I say. But it does mean I find value and food for thought in what is written here.  R. Davis.)

Beings of Light
 or False Angels of Light?

 Being Chapter 7 from the book The Mystery Of Death:
Navigating the Great Divide, 2001

By Tal Brooke

 

Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, whose work has revolutionized attitudes about death and dying, says the spirit of a deceased former patient helped dissuade her nine years ago from aban­doning her work ... she since has become convinced that it was a ‘spontaneous materialization of somebody who had died almost a year before.’  Kubler-Ross discussed the mysterious incident reluctantly. She said her experience ‘will sound so crazy that I wouldn't be surprised if people think,  “Oh, she's now becoming an occultist, a spiritualist.”’ (James Pearre, SF Chronicle, Nov 14, 1976)

 

    In order to be heard as a scientific voice, Moody has to keep a cautious neutral distance from too much dogma. The scientific presentation requires an air of detachment, but be assured that some of the most effective editorializing comes from who is selected to say what. Moody, a partner and friend of Kubler-Ross's, appears to be more the scientist. It is important to review a few of his discoveries before proceeding. We will see the beginnings of "higher teachings," which have paved the way for more advanced teachings. Again, when the public climate is right, there is every possibility that the spirit guide of Kubler-Ross will use her as a mouthpiece.

   Reviewing the Moody material briefly, the following subject is a man who saw a small "ball of light" hovering in an upper corner of his hospital room. The patient is then quoted by Moody:

I turned over and tried to get in a more comfortable position, but just at that moment a light appeared in the corner of the room, just below the ceiling. It was just a ball of light, almost like a globe, and it was not very large, I would say no more than twelve to fifteen inches in diameter, and as this light appeared, a feeling came over me. I can't say it was an eerie feeling, because it was not. ..I could see a hand reach down for me from the light, and the light said, "Come with me. I want to show you something." So immediately, without any hesitation whatsoever, I reached up with my hand and grabbed onto the hand I saw. As I did, I had the feeling of being drawn up and of leaving my body, and I looked back and saw it lying there on the bed while I was going up towards the ceiling of the room.

... I took on the same form as the light. I got the feeling, and I'll have to use my own words for it,... that this form was definitely a spirit. It wasn't a body, just a wisp of smoke or a vapor. It looked almost like the clouds of cigarette smoke you can see when they are illuminated as they drift around a lamp. The form I took had colors, though. . . .

So, I was drawn up to the same position the light was in, and we started moving through the ceiling and the wall of the hospital room, into the corridor, and through the corridor, down through the floors it seemed, on down to a lower floor in the hospital.²  

    The patient and his spirit guide, as Moody relates in five pages of direct quotation, glide around and dialogue, the subject experiences feelings of great inner calm, and finally—like the classical magical wish—the being of light grants the patient a longer life. At the very least, this is an out-of-the-body experience combined with a spirit contact.

    This episode is mediumistic by definition; it is as simple as that. The ensuing debate regarding the subject's willingness to participate in the experience, as opposed to his being a victim of something, is lengthy and complex. He himself says that without hesitation he extended his hand to the being. I am certain that he could have, or someone else would have, refrained. In some occult testimonies, people have prayed in fear and the presence left. Such has been true in my own life.

    Moody tells of another interesting discovery: "In a few instances, people have come to believe that the beings they encountered were their 'guardian spirits.' One man was told by such a spirit that, 'I have helped you through this stage of your existence, but now I am going to turn you over to others.' A woman told me that as she was leaving her body she detected the presence of two other spiritual beings there, and that they identified themselves as her 'spiritual helpers.'"³ Then Moody reports that a number of people have come out of these experiences with psychic abilities.⁴   

    One of Moody's subjects says, "You know in your heart there's no such thing as death. You just graduate from one thing to another—like from grammar school to high school, to college." Another testimony follows: "Life is like imprisonment. In this state, we just can't understand what prisons these bodies are. Death is such a release—like an escape from prison. That's the best thing I can think of to compare it to."⁵

    In the next few paragraphs, Moody completes what the Bible missed; he corrects it where it errs. But invariably he reminds us of the standard Biblical caricatures, so that they will stay in our minds as representations of Christianity, and then he indulges in two sweeping statements that seem to demolish the paper dummies he has erected. "No one has described the cartoonist's heaven of pearly gates, golden streets, and winged, harp-playing angels, nor a hell of flames and demons with pitchforks."⁶ In place of this caricature, which has nothing to do with true Biblical revelation, comes an erudite and fair-minded improvement. Moody goes on: "So in most cases, the reward-punishment model of the afterlife is abandoned and disavowed, even by many who had been accustomed to thinking in those terms. They found, much to their amazement, that even when their most apparently awful and sinful deeds were made manifest before the being of light, the being respond­ed not with anger and rage, but rather only with understanding, and even with humor."⁷

    The one thing that the perfect God of the Bible does not find amusing is human sin as it manifests itself across a great spectrum of cruelties, dehumanizations, perversities, and rank horrors. The living God of Scripture will not greet Himmler, Goebbels, or Hitler with cosmic giggles of amused understanding. That would be a miscarriage of justice to the mangled victims and would not be good. Such cosmic tolerance, the contented good-neighbor policy with evil, ultimately spells a topsy-turvy universe whose "god" is insane or evil. True goodness, as a quality of deity, must be absolute.

    What higher or more sublime good replaces the Biblical caricatures? "In place of this old model, many seemed to have returned with a new model and a new understanding of the world beyond—a vision which features not unilateral judgement but rather cooperative development [and here Moody lets the cat out of the bag] towards the ultimate end of Self-realization. "⁸              

    That is Eastern mysticism, with the identical "self-realization" propounded in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is the final reward given those who have maneuvered through the obstacle course of bardos ("deathplanes"), those who have come to know "their essential nature," those whose eyes have remained on the pellucid "clear light." That "self-realization" is moksha; it is Nirvana ("enlightenment"). It appears that Moody uses the term self-realization most deliberately, for he has cited The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where this term is crucial to its view of the cosmos, and it is consistent with reincarnationist views. It appears to be no accident that Moody mentions Dr. Ian Stevenson's Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation as further resource material (the same Ian Stevenson who tried to arrange seances with the "greatest medium of the century," Arthur Ford, and who was in contact with Jane Roberts, through whom "Seth" channeled). When you annihilate Christianity, there is only one great religious alternative; it is pantheism, it is Eastern mysticism. That is what Moody is leaving us with, and that is invariably the emergent "gospel" of his subjects who have become spirit contacts. This pattern is almost infallibly consonant with every contact that a subject or medium has had with a spirit, which I have ever studied. Christian doctrines are either tampered with or annihilated .

Jane Roberts—the First Wave of Channelers

    Moody has opened the door. Although he has not given us the most significant information yet, he has told us a few key premises that lead to a definite place. We know that there is a higher plane of spirit, that there are spirits, that there are beings of light, that the whole scheme seems to be the evolution of the soul or self, and that many of these fascinating truths have come through people who have talked to beings of light or spirit guides.

    Knowing all of this, if you and I should go on an excursion into the neighborhood drugstore or supermarket, we would be able to find on the average book rack numerous "higher revelations," which have come through a recent host of spirit contacts. If we are persuaded that these beings of light are out there for our own good and that they are our cosmic allies—and if we have become convinced of them through reading Moody—it will behoove us to listen attentively to what they are saying. 

    One of these books was a major occult bestseller in the 70s, flooding the book racks, and it and several other books by the same author are still big sellers. Like an old enemy on a street corner, it drew my eyes in recognition as, well past midnight in some late night bookstore, I stared at the gnarled face of Jane Roberts emerging from a purple paperback cover, contorting like a vampire in a Polish horror film. She had been photographed while "Seth" was taking over her body. I squinted my eyes in thought and looked off. Recalling my era in Egyptology, I said to myself, "Seth is the name of the Egyptian god of evil." Sure enough, when I checked it out in Webster's dictionary, it said: "Seth, n. an Egyptian god represented as having the head of a beast and a pointed snout. He was the brother of Osiris and the personification of physical evil and darkness, the adversary of good."

1.    God is not human, though he passed through human stages (and it is at this point that the Buddhist myth comes closest to approximating reality).
2.    He is not a single individual, but an "energy gestalt."
3.    This energy forms all the universes. Seth renames God "All That Is" as opposed to the "I Am That I Am" of the Holy Bible. 

    Creation, Seth says, was a massive dilemma for God and his one means of escape from cosmic insanity. This is exactly the opposite of the picture of joy, glory, and sovereignty of the Biblical creation. In this case, "god" comes across as a huge tapeworm with a billion latent eggs. If the eggs do not spew out, the god will burst. The prototypes of creation, latent within its imagination, needed expression.

4.    No personal God-individual exists, to use Christian terms. Human beings are cocreators, and what we call God is the sum of all consciousness, and yet the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

    Seth stresses reincarnation time and again throughout the book, along with the God-is-within concept. If some of this is beginning to sound like science fiction with "Zonar Nine-Five" and "The folks from Astroid Twelve," or the U.S.S. Enterprise of Star Trek fame drifting along the cranial nerve of a billion-mile cretin, there is more to come. And this, I must admit, I find repugnant.  If Frank Withers, the number-one spirit, was jettisoned and engulfed by Seth, something came along named Seth II, an ancient friend of Seth I, that gave Seth I a punt, as though he were a small soccer ball. (It reminds me of the cartoon of the ocean where the minnow is eaten by the bigger fish, and so on until the predator reaches the size of a sperm whale.) Seth II sounds like a large manta ray.

    Ruburt (alias Jane Roberts) tells what happened one night in April 1968 (the fifth year of the Seth sessions). By then Jane had been forbidden by Seth to read "religious books" and, as she confesses, she knew almost nothing about the Bible to begin with.

    With massive power the voice started to break through, and Jane was hurled off into a void. The voice sounded clear though distant. Jane felt as if a cone had come down over her head. The voice claimed to come from an alien dimension, so alien that the contact was almost a miracle.

    On June 8, the pyramid effect started again. Now it was plural, speaking of itself as "we." "They" described themselves as an entity which existed before our own time frame, and which was instrumental in forming energy into physical form.

    Jane said that under this new Seth's influence, her body became like a puppet and her face expressionless.

    After that visitation, Jane encountered difficulty getting back, and Seth had to help her.

    When Jane went back into a trance, she had a trauma. Recently she had been not only the recipient of words, but of direct spiritual revelations and experiences as well. She says that the entity referred to individuals returning in the future to peer into physical reality like giants upon the floor. At that point she saw a giant's face peer into her living room, its face filling up the entire window. Then her body, the room, and its contents all grew to enormous size. She screamed and began to tremble violently.

    Jane had one more bout with the higher Seth, but she became so shaken that the regular Seth did not allow it to continue for a long time. Again she felt the "cone" above her head and saw the giant looking at her. At this point she struggled to get in touch with her vocal cords. She seems to have felt somewhat violated by the being, a problem she never felt with the lower Seth. All the same, the medium goes on to make excuses for it, saying that it did not understand from its heightened state that she found the experiences unpleasant.

    The last statement from Seth II in the chapter is a godlike declaration. He (or "they") claimed to have given man the mental images from which man formed the known world and his own physical self.    

    "Ruburt" has gone on to be with Seth, and newer channels have come on the scene to replace Jane Roberts (Ruburt). New entities have in turn replaced Seth—such as "Ramtha" and "Lazaris"—who feature among the bright new stars of Shirley MacLaine's autobiographies such as Out on a Limb and Dancing in the Light.

    These newer entities have arrived with exquisite timing to a world in waiting. The advance work has been done. Unlike Seth, who only muttered in dark rooms before a handful of observers, other entities have spoken before millions. Compared to Seth, they have achieved superstar status.

    The media have mentioned the enormous gate fees of these entities and their channels, an indicator of the surging popular interest. J.Z. Knight, who channels Ramtha, "on an average weekend draws up to 700 participants at $400 apiece ($280,000); she admits to earning millions of dollars from 'Ramtha,'"¹ and James Van Praagh quickly surpassed that.

    A pluralistic entity taking over a man in the Bible is seen in the madman, the Gadarene, whose name was Legion. Christ could have hurled the demons into the abyss; but as an illustration of their concrete reality, he sent them into a large herd of pigs. Then the pigs charged into the sea and killed themselves. The man in his possessed state had exhibited a sufficient range of superhuman and paranormal feats to scare everyone away. Among other things, he had the physical strength to snap heavy chains. But when Christ appeared, the demons trembled in horror. Legion was demon-possessed.

    What is Seth? It—they, the pluralistic entity—is a demon, mediumistic demon. There is no reason to believe what it says, for it is a brilliant liar. This woman's Ouija board caught a spiritual manta ray, and she was too seduced by it to know it. Yet Roberts was only too accountable, for at a specific time in her life she turned her back on the God of the Bible. She referred to that era scornfully, making sure to give us the caricatures. She said that as she grew older she found it increasingly difficult to accept the God of her ancestors. God seemed to be as dead as they were. And here comes the caricature, as she asked somewhat rhetorically what kind of God would require constant adoration by subjects sitting around singing hymns. This woman, who claimed to be intelligent, asked this on the one hand and confessed ignorance of the Bible on the other hand.

    Roberts made her decision. She decided that that kind of God was out and she would not have him as her friend. She then observes that it appears that God had not treated his own Son very well.

    In the place of the Biblical God, this woman has chosen the one who bears the same name as the Egyptian god of evil, "Seth," the ancient twin of Osiris; Seth, whose image is carved in the dank, musty descending corridors of stone beneath the Valley of the Kings, whose huge stone colossi lean against the bulbous pillars of Karnak, a subterranean god from the ancient past of Egypt. This multiple identity, Seth, claims to have never been enfleshed. Little wonder; this being from the void existed before the foundations of our world. It floated across the ancient world, for it is a spirit; it has always been a spirit. And there are others.

    We learn from the Apostle Paul that the originators and powers behind the ancient idols were "elemental spirits." In 1 Corinthians 10:19, 20 (Revised Berkeley), Paul says, "What then am I saying? That an offering to idols amounts to anything, or that the idol itself is anything? No, but that which they sacrifice, they are offering to demonsand not to God" (italics added). This problem is reiterated in Deuteronomy 32:16, 17 (NASB) about the truth of idol worship: "They sacrificed to demons who were not God, to gods whom they have not known, new gods who came lately." Such is Seth.

    Again Paul says, "But the Spirit [of God] explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons" (1 Tim. 4:1, NASB). So there is dire warning to those who are already Christians. What will be the means of spiritual seduction? Deceitful spirits. Incidentally, the word demon, from the Greek daemon, means "knowing" or "wise." Spirits have knowledge far beyond mere temporal mortals, and the fierce range of their superhuman powers emerges when one studies the Greek connotations of the following words: principalities, powers, dominions. Ephesians 6:12 says, "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." In the Revised Berkeley Version, the latter part of the verse reads "the cosmic powers of this present darkness; against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly spheres."

    If you decided to turn your back on the Biblical God, entered into occult pursuits, emptied your mind, and surrendered to an invisible intelligence, to whom or what would you go? The clear answer is: to one of these above-named wicked potentates. Not Fred Jones, not Fletcher (the guide to Arthur Ford), Frank Withers, or anybody else with some tame hometown name, but instead, a demonicbeing. The blanket warning that the Bible issues regarding all spirit contact now emerges as a profoundly sensible injunction. Should you care to gamble in this particular casino, the odds against you infinitely outweigh those of the grade schooler trying his luck at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

    The consensus of all evangelical Bible scholars, using clear exegesis, is that the deceased, the dead, cannot be contacted. God has created an impassable barrier. What are, in fact, being contacted in place of the sought-after human souls are some type of deceiving spirits masquerad­ing as the deceased, some spirits out of the untold myriad for whom Tehom ("the abyss") was prepared before the foundations of our physical universe. The number of these spirits is great, this we know. A genius, humanly speaking, with a massive genealogical card file, encyclopedic memory, and an active imagination could fool most people at a seance. An immortal spirit with a superhuman intelligence would have no trou­ble fooling just about anybody who tried to engage it, especially if the contact, no matter how brilliant, disregarded the Bible. Men alone are no match for these things.

    Part of the "con" is to get people to believe that they are sufficiently armored with their own minds and intuitions. They are not. The Rand Think Tank is not, even if you throw in the faculty of M.I.T., Stanford, and the Ivy League, even if you unified their minds. Unlike the baleful powers, none of these men was around to witness the creation of galaxies and atoms. The account of the role of the angelic hosts was that they saw, and in some way participated in, God's sovereign act of creation (they "shouted for joy," (Job 38:7). Those among these creatures who would later oppose God, whose natures would twist, would still retain, in a perverted form, much of their intellect, power, and knowledge. What hideous strength they have!

    Therefore, it makes sense, in the Biblical tradition, for God to forbid spiritism. Anything else would not be love. If a host of cosmic beings once rebelled, then God knows of it and lovingly warns us of it. We have seen the numerous statements of Moody, Kubler-Ross, Cayce, Bishop Pike, Dowling, and Roberts. We have seen that there is an invisible world of beings—spirits—that some people can contact. We have seen their teachings, and the similarity of these teachings, and the obsession, common among all the teachings, with Jesus Christ. We also have seen the mainline spiritualistic and spiritistic views of the afterlife: that it is a progressive, multilayered, and multidimensional spirit plane where all souls evolve. The physical body is an unpleasant shell to be jettisoned. Real happiness, we are told, only begins on the other side. The biggest prize of all, we are then assured, is the ultimate stage of spiritual evolution where one becomes a being of light. We are asked to accept these statements on faith. It is that simple; this is a religion and its high priests are the mediums. To accept its view, we are forced to ignore the Bible and finally say, "The Bible is wrong." At that point, one has believed the spirits.

    We are forced to ask, as God himself seeks to reason with his people, "And when they say to you, 'Consult the mediums and the wizards who whisper and mutter,' should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living?" (Isaiah 8:19, NASB).

    Nevertheless, we are under endless bombardment of the newest and sleekest prototypes of this ancient phenomenon — channelers and wizards who "whisper and mutter" who rise and fall almost like rock stars.

* * * * * *

Endnotes:
1. James Pearre, interview with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, San Francisco Examiner and
Chronicle, Nov. 14, 1976.  Reprinted, courtesy of The Chicago Tribune.
2. Raymond Moody, Life After Life (Covington, GA.: Mockingbird Books, 1985),pp.72-73.
3. Ibid., p.45.
4. Ibid., p.66
5. Ibid., p.70
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid, italics added.
9. Jane Roberts,Seth Speaks (New York: Bantam Books, 1973).
10. Jane Roberts, The Seth Material (New York: Bantam Books, 1970).

Excerpted from The Mystery of Death: Navigating the Great Divide by Tal Brooke, 2001,
End Run Press, Berkeley, CA