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How the Aeons and Other Divine Beings are Sustaining Todays Spiritual Ascension
Exclusive For Before Its News
Richard Cook will be appearing on The Church Of Mabus radio show on May 25th 11pm Eastern
How the Aeons and Other Divine Beings are Sustaining Today’s Spiritual Ascension
By Richard C. Cook
As the world of materialism, war, and money roars down the track toward its date with destiny, it is yet a time when the hidden knowledge contained in all spiritual traditions is being revealed to mankind. Through the internet in particular, many more individuals have access to information that for millennia had been known only to a select few or confined within the boundaries of the religion or spiritual teaching that originated it. Added to what is unfolding is awareness of the presence of Divine Beings from dimensions beyond our own. They are offering a choice of participating in a work of transcendent value: the transformation of Earth and humanity.
These beings were known to the ancient Gnostics as “Aeons”, implying eternality or immortality. It is once again time to acknowledge the reality of the Aeons and listen to their voices. Scholars have rediscovered the lore of the Gnostics, but spiritual experience is more than rediscovering old books. Intensive spiritual work involving meditation and channeling can bring long-forgotten teachings to life through direct contact with Intelligences who care deeply about us. This article contains a short summary of my new book, Return of the Aeons: The Planetary Spiritual Ascension, and explores how such contact has been achieved in our era. It also explains my own personal experience both as a seeker of truth and one who tries to help others. I believe these contacts can help guide us to sanity, safety and enlightenment during these amazing times.
Within the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — the Divine Beings are called Angels and Archangels. Judaism also uses the term Elohim. Age-old traditions, including those of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, as well as Hinduism and some branches of Buddhism, speak of multiple gods and goddesses. So do the older “Earth religions,” including their modern revivals, such as Wicca. For them, the Great Goddess, their most prominent deity, was worshipped across Eurasia for thousands of years by the people who built dolmens, stone circles, passage tombs, and other megaliths. Indigenous peoples around the world have had their own access points to Spirit. And while organized Christianity regarded the Gnostics as heretics, and still does, Gnosticism as a set of ideas and practices captured the essence of the mystical experience at the heart of all the world’s faiths.
The Gnostics formed a prominent spiritual movement in the early centuries of the Christian era. They were known mainly through fragments cited by their church persecutors until the discovery of their writings at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. The Gnostics spoke of the Aeons as emanations of the one Creator. The nature of the Aeons being primarily mental and spiritual, they could not be seen in the flesh by us limited humans, viewed as we were by the Gnostics as prisoners of gross matter. But we could raise ourselves up through spiritual vision.
One of the primary Aeons was “Christ,” identified by some, but not all, Gnostics with the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Another Aeon was Sophia, or Wisdom, manifesting through the various forms of the Divine Mother, including the Egyptian Isis, as well as Mary, later known in the Roman Catholic Church as the “Mother of God.” Mary conceived Jesus in her womb at the time of the Annunciation, revealed to her by the Archangel Gabriel. Several centuries later, Gabriel gave the divine dispensation to Mohammed by announcing to him the Koran. The works of Gabriel were also part of the ongoing mission of the Aeons to bring the message of the Creator to Earth.
In the life of Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament, angelic beings appeared at intervals, as with those who announced his birth to the shepherds outside Bethlehem and the ones who appeared to his female followers at the empty tomb after his crucifixion. The last book of the New Testament, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, sometimes called The Apocalypse, is full of references to divine entities. But as the Christian religion developed — or perhaps deteriorated — over the centuries, it lost touch with its rich heritage of the “heavenly hosts,” except perhaps among the peasantry, who retained traditions of various types of spirit communications.
These simple people were persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike, or, as in the case of the Cathars, exterminated as practitioners of heresy or witchcraft. As a result, by modern times, religion was a dry, dull, abstract caricature riddled with fear and appealing mainly to the clergy, to an obedient but unthinking laity, and to latter-day scribes and Pharisees. The heartfelt aspirations of ordinary people and their sensitivity to the unseen world, including the world of nature spirits, were stamped out.
By the 19th-20th centuries, science had rejected Deity altogether, while organized religion retained an image of God as a harsh judge and Jesus a sacrificial lamb on the cross, but not entities to see, know,and talk with as a friend. The Divine Feminine was almost entirely absent and the Holy Spirit a mere concept without meaning or power. No wonder by the mid-20th century people were leaving the Christian churches in droves, with many seeking meaning among yoga, Zen, or other manifestations of Eastern religion. Meanwhile, science was unmoved, having become implacably skeptical, agnostic, or even atheistic. Academia and the mass media largely followed suit.
True, there were movements within Christianity, as with Christian Science, New Thought, Unity, and the Charismatic Renewal, toward a more active and personal approach to prayer and spiritual healing, which bore fruit through teachers like Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Fillmore, Ernest Holmes, Emmet Fox, and Joel Goldsmith. These movements remained alien, however, to orthodox churchgoers, who viewed anything but the most literalistic interpretation of scripture and church tradition as of the devil. We now know that behind their vestments, some priests and ministers were themselves devilish in their personal conduct.
The problem became that very few human beings were still able to rise out of their sense-based consciousness to the direct experience of Angels, Archangels, or other beings living in dimensions beyond ours. The spiritualist movement of séances, automatic writing, etc., largely confined itself to communications with deceased human beings. But by the early to mid-20th century, the phenomenon known as channeling had appeared and was opening up startling new horizons.
Key figures were Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), founder of the Theosophist Movement; Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the Austrian esotericist; and Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), who reported receiving his gifts of clairvoyance from an angelic visitation and introduced people through his “readings” to information from the hidden realms. Another pioneer was Jane Roberts (1929-1984), channel for the Seth Material. Around the same time came A Course in Miracles, said to be channeled from Jesus Christ himself, but presenting a message of love and forgiveness in modern psychological terms that was far more advanced in its tone and implications than anything being presented by standard Christianity.
A Course in Miracles made its appearance as a published work in 1976. This was around the time that certain groups and individuals, especially in the United States, had begun to attempt to communicate with extraterrestrials. The space age by then was well underway. It had been almost 30 years since UFOs made their way into public consciousness and encounters between humans and extraterrestrials had begun to be reported, starting with works by George Adamski in the 1950s, but becoming more credible over the years.
Finally, by the late 1970s, two groups had begun to channel beings claimed to be from extraterrestrial origins that provided information of a depth, breadth, and significance worthy of consideration on a level comparable to the age-old beliefs in wise, beneficent beings like the Elohim, Archangels, or Aeons. The result was teachings from an entity called “RA,” channeled by a group consisting of Don Elkins, Carla Rueckert, and Jim McCarty from Louisville, Ky., and an extraterrestrial grouping called The Nine, that was communicating in Ossining, N.Y., through a team made up of Dr. AndrijaPuharich, Phyllis Schlemmer, and British nobleman Sir John Whitmore. This group included Eugene Roddenberry of Star Trekfame.
In some ways, channeling of extraterrestrials proved more illuminating at the level of metaphysics and theology than alleged physical UFO sightings or alien abductions. The groups channeling both RA and The Nine showed extraordinary integrity in utilizing experienced deep-trance channels (Rueckert and Schlemmer), establishing safe and secure environments, initiating questions through credentialed scientific interlocutors (Elkins and Puharich), using recording devices to produce faithful and intelligible transcripts, adopting a spiritually-oriented perspective, and maintaining an atmosphere suited to attracting entities with positive intentions. The scientific precision these groups applied to psychic communications was unprecedented.
The channelings of RA are contained in a five-volume series entitled The Law of One, published by Rueckert and McCarty’s L/L Research organization. (Don Elkins committed suicide in 1984, which ended the RA channelings.) Carla Rueckert continues to channel other extraterrestrial or extradimensional presences, including “Hatton” and “Q’uo.” The channelings of The Nine, which have also ended, appear mainly in Phyllis Schlemmer’s book, The Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space, in which The Nine specifically refer to themselves as Aeons.
In my book, Return of the Aeons: The Planetary Spiritual Ascension, I write extensively of both RA and The Nine, quoting from the transcripts published by the two channeling groups. I also correlate the remarkable consistency between the information they provided with core beliefs and practices of the world’s spiritual traditions, as well as teachings from A Course in Miracles and an account written two decades later of encounters with Jesus in a semi-physical form entitled, Love Without End: Jesus Speaks, by Glenda Green. I concluded that all these sources at their heart speak of one central idea: evolution of consciousness through love and enlightenment.
Despite attacks by debunkers — including nonsensical allegations that because AndrijaPuharich was, early in his career, affiliated with CIA-funded research programs, The Nine were part of a “stargate conspiracy” to control the minds of gullible humans — these channeled sources created some of the basic lexicon of New Age teachings. Also consistent is recent work on understanding the meaning of the crop circle phenomenon, especially among groups in the United Kingdom, as well as the testimony of people undergoing near-death experiences.
Both RA and the Nine affirm similar principles, including: 1) the unity of everything that exists in which all of us together are parts of the one Creator, thereby reconciling diversity with monotheism; 2) immortality of the human spirit through many incarnational experiences; 3) the tremendous opportunity that exists at this point in history for people to “graduate” to a higher level of consciousness through awakening to love in the heart; 4) the great harm we do to ourselves and each other by trying to control other human beings; 5) the necessity of spiritual practice through meditation and similar techniques; 6) how the Divine Beings have played a role in human history over a period of tens of thousands of years, including appearances on Earth in ancient Asia, Egypt, Israel, and South America; 7) the origin and nature of Jesus — some of the sources call him Jeshua — and the error in trying to elevate him and other friends of humanity to an unapproachable status; 8) the great danger to planet Earth from pollution, nuclear weapons, etc.; 9) the reality that we are not alone in the universe but reside at one of many locations where sentient beings are found, beings that may be far more advanced in consciousness and technology than we are.
RA says that the primary mechanism of human life on Earth is to provide human beings with “catalyst,” through which we can make a choice in “polarity” between “service-to-others” and “service-to-self.” Unfortunately, say The Nine, most people are asleep in a “sink of indifference.” The Nine go so far as to say that because sleeping humanity has caused so much damage to Earth, many will be sent in future incarnations to other planets more compatible with their relatively low level of being. Earth, say The Nine, has become a “bottleneck” that must now be cleansed.
Today, with the coming of the internet, there has been a mega-explosion of websites, groups, individuals, and teachings that claim to come through channeled sources, including the “law of attraction” doctrines and many others. Often these sources are claimed to be extraterrestrial in origin, including beings from the Pleiades, Orion, Andromeda, and other locations, and to offer information about ascension, extraterrestrial “landings,” and many other topics.
We shouldn’t take all these sources at face value, obviously, or even give them credence without bringing our intellects to bear. I believe many of them to be figments of the channel’s imagination, deliberate hoaxes, or even communications from mischievous spirits — a kind of psychic “disinformation” from lower-order entities of a negative vibration. I have personally experimented with a Ouija board but resisted suggestions from the malevolent being my partner and I contacted that wanted us to do some very stupid things. I have therefore come to hold a firm belief that a great deal of caution and skepticism is in order when studying this literature.
But I still try not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Many of the reported contacts seem genuine. I especially love accounts of contacts between Native Americans and the “Star People.” I was born in Montana, met a Native American spiritual teacher, had a profound vision of a native elder at the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, and love the spirituality of indigenous cultures. Another living example of how people today relate to Divine Beings is the worldwide implementation of principles of biodynamic gardening as taught by Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s system harnesses the forces of Angels and angelic energies to create harvests of grains and vegetables of amazing size and hardiness. Similar work has been reported at the Findhorn community in Scotland.
Another inspiring source of teachings about the Divine Beings and their accessibility was OmraamMikhaëlAïvanhov (1900-1986). Aïvanhov was a spiritual master of Bulgarian descent who taught in France and carried the torch of esoteric teachings handed down from an age-old mystical tradition that included the Kabbalah, spiritual alchemy, astrology, music, and yoga. He found inspiration through the high level of Divine consciousness mediated to humanity through the Sun, calling his method Surya Yoga after the Hindu name for the god of the Sun. He also revealed the essence of the enlightenment experience. This is called by the RA Material the opening to “Intelligent Infinity.”
All these sources make it clear that human beings can establish contact with Divine Beings and engage in inner dialogue with them. The religious establishment has generally failed to teach people how to do this. But working with several spiritual teachers as well as on my own, I have made personal contact with my own panoply of Divine Beings and have been able to obtain solid information and guidance. This has helped me greatly on my own spiritual path which is oriented to the daily practice of service, prayer, meditation, and contemplation.
The primary beings with which I am in touch and with whom I converse and seek insight are my personal guardian angel, plus Jeshua ben Joseph (a.k.a. Jesus Christ), the Divine Mother or Mother Mary, Ascended Master Babaji (the master of the Indian Order of Yogis), and occasionally “Tom,” the spokesman for The Nine. I speak regularly with my deceased mother, and I also communicate daily with St. Michael the Archangel. In a short morning ceremony, I ask Michael to clothe me in his protective “shirt of fire,” and I send love and praise to the unseen beings of the different directions. I say the Lord’s Prayer and the Russian Orthodox Prayer of the Heart, use a rosary to say the Hail Mary, and chant Hindu and Buddhist mantras and bhajans. And I meditate for one or more hours a day using Raja Yoga practices and other techniques that I have come to call Ascension Meditation and Healing.
In my experience, communication with the Divine Beings takes place not only in words but in thought forms and mental images, along with a powerful sense of Presence. Words may be deceptive, of course, as with people who “hear voices.”Also, communication with the Divine Beings will inevitably be filtered through our mental receiving apparatus. If that apparatus consists of the same old mundane state of mental confusion, one full of everyday desires, judgments, prejudices, etc., the messages are bound to be garbled and perhaps even worse than useless. Crimes have been committed because “God told me to do it.” As far as becoming “possessed by the devil,” as fundamentalists may warn against in opposing meditation, we each have our own personal devil — our ego. But we can rise above ego in the holy inner silence.
My inner contacts with Divinity are on an informal one-on-one basis, not through any type of group channeling. I also make use of a pendulum, which can be simply a key on a string, in what is known as “dowsing.” I describe this procedure in my book.
I find the first prerequisite to success a firm choice to dedicate one’s inner work to the ideal of service-to-others rather than self-seeking. Once such a choice is made, the inner doors seem to open, with the Divine Beings then available to provide their help. But they always respect a person’s free will. They do not appear unless asked, which is probably why more people don’t experience them. People are ignorant of their reality, too proud to ask for help, afraid to step out of line, or fearful of ridicule.
I can say that in the last decade, during which I have learned to turn within for contact with the Divine, my life has changed in every way possible. This has included overcoming alcoholism; retiring from a less-than-satisfying government career; meeting and marrying my wife, Karen; deciding with her to move away from Washington, D.C., to Roanoke, Va., a small city in the Appalachian Mountains; and leading meditation groups in Roanoke at the Lifestream Center in a lovely neighborhood called Grandin Village.
We have found that the safest and most effective way for people to proceed on the spiritual path is through a spiritual group. So we have tried to provide competent and compassionate leadership. It must be remembered, though, that nothing replaces individual responsibility for our life, our actions, or our striving for moral perfection, or removes the need to renew daily our search for oneness with the Creator. But we can always keep in mind that the Divine Beings are present for us. They can give good counsel and be loving friends and healers on the pathways of life. Miracles take place every day when we surrender self-will and listen to the still small voice within.
Critics ask why beings from other realms don’t simply appear in public and end the controversy. The Nine say that if they did appear, our trigger-happy authorities, bolstered by public fear, would attack them. Some say they have already appeared to governments who refuse to disclose the content of such contacts. RA says they stay in the mental sphere out of respect for humanity’s free will.
But within the sphere of consciousness that can be accessed through the spiritual heart, the veil is being removed for many thousands of people who are experiencing entities from other worlds and dimensions, including the Aeons, Angels and Archangels, extraterrestrials, and beings from Earth’s inner planes such as the Ascended Masters. According to OmraamMikhaëlAïvanhov, guiding all spiritual evolution on Earth is the Divine Being called Melchizedek (known as Manu in India) who gave The Revelation to St. John and is present today. In the Bible St. Paul said that Jesus himself was “a priest in the Order of Melchizedek.”
Is humanity undergoing a “final exam” before the world changes in ways beyond our comprehension? I and many others believe the answer is “Yes.” Surely the Divine Beings are here to help us in this era of radical change when the End Times are upon us and the New Earth is in process of being born. I believe that the New Earth is being guided to the emergence of a collective consciousness of love, harmony, and synchronicity among all those on the planet who have awakened to the Divine within their own hearts.
© 2013 by Richard C. Cook.
Richard C. Cook is a retired federal government analyst who now teaches meditation in Roanoke, Va. His most recent book is Return of the Aeons: The Planetary Spiritual Ascension. His website is www.richardccook.com.
Looks like a really good book! Thank you for posting it!