On Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Agharta, Shambhala, Vril and the Occult Roots of Nazi Power
© 2004 Joseph George Caldwell. All rights reserved. Posted at Internet web sites http://www.foundation.bw and http://www.foundationwebsite.org . May be copied or reposted for non-commercial use, with attribution. (31 December 2004)
Contents
Selections
from The King of the World, by René Guénon
Selections
from Shambhala, by Victoria LePage
The
Shambhalic Tradition in the West
Gaia:
The Earth as a Living Organism
The
Sign of Shambhala: Unidentified Flying Objects
Selections
from The Occult Roots of Nazism, by
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
The
Modern German Occult Revival, 1880-1910
The
Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism
Selections
from Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival, by
Joscelyn Godwin
Chapter
Seven: Agartha and the Polaires
Additional
Reading on Access to Agharta / Shambhala / Vril
Some time ago I began reading the novel, Zanoni, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Near the very beginning of the novel, I read the following passage: “Plato here expresses four kinds of mania, by which I desire to understand enthusiasm and the inspiration of the gods: Firstly, the musical, secondly, the telestic or mystic; thirdly, the prophetic; and fourthly, that which belongs to love.” Well, I did not recall anything about “Plato’s four manias,” and so I did a quick search of the Internet, and came up with the following paragraph, from the article, “Atumpan Drummers and Marsyas’ Flute: Exploring Parallels Between African and Greek Conceptions of State” (1995):
“In the Phaedrus we read the following ironic words from the Western world’s first great rational philosopher: "Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness [mania] which indeed is a divine gift" (Phaedrus, 244a). It is here that we also learn of four kinds of mania for which the telestic variety denotes ritualistic madness (attributable to Dionysus). The remaining three kinds of mania include the poetic, the erotic and the prophetic (mantic). Later, in the Laws, we learn that the telestic rites that Plato had in mind were characterized by rites of initiation, sacrifices, dance and music (Laws, 791a). While it is difficult at times to discern Plato’s true opinion on specific matters, even from the most scholarly reading of his dialogues, the fact that Plato perceived of a general and useful social end through mania, poetry and music should become clear from the Phaedrus and other dialogues that support this contention. It is clear from a continued reading of the Phaedrus (244d-e) that the telestic kind of mania, which we shall take to be essentially a form of trance-possession, consists of both good and bad kinds. The crisis kind of mania is associated with human disease, attributed to a "weakness of the soul," for which Plato saw the need to purge from his state by various means. By Plato’s account, the diseased individual can be delivered from their ordeal by those accomplished in achieving divinatory trances (here he is speaking of the mantic variety consisting essentially of a kind of prophetic diagnosis) followed by a recovery through purifications and rites (i.e., the act of telestic mania). In brief, the diviner determines the nature of the disease by divining the diety responsible so that appropriate rituals may be performed to appease the deity. The critical matter for Plato was to ascertain the manner in which one becomes "correctly entranced and possessed." [emphasis added]. The answer that he came to adopt was that the good aspect of trance is the kind brought on by ritual that has been passed down through the generations.”
The reason why I was reading Zanoni was that I had once seen a reference to it, in Rudolf Steiner’s discussion of the Guardian of the Threshold in his book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (available on the Internet at http://www.elib.com/Steiner/Books/ ). On an idle day not too long ago I recalled the Zanoni reference. I searched for Zanoni on the Internet, and found a copy at The Gutenberg Project’s website, http://www.gutenberg.org .
(In case you don’t know about The Gutenberg Project, I will
say a few words about it. It is a truly
wonderful activity that has been going on for a couple of decades. The Gutenberg Project, directed by Michael S.
Hart at
Over the course of the past year or so, I have seen an increasing number of references to Bulwer-Lytton (variously referred to in bibliographies and references as Bulwer, Lytton, Bulwer Lytton, Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, First Baron Lytton, or Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton), and so I decided to “look him up” on the Internet. Bulwer-Lytton was an English novelist, playwright and politician who lived 1803-1873. He was one of the most prolific novelists of his day. He is now remembered mainly for his work, The Last Days of Pompeii, which was published in 1834. Wikipedia (online encyclopedia) observes the following about his current-day reputation: A prolific novelist in his day, he is now almost forgotten, his name living on in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants have to supply the openings of terrible (imaginary) novels. This was inspired by his novel Paul Clifford, which opens with the famous words,
"It was a dark and stormy night"
or to give the sentence in its full glory:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
The opening phrase was popularized by the Peanuts comic strip: Snoopy would often begin with it at the typewriter. Winners in the contest capture the rapid changes in point of view, the florid language, and the atmosphere of the full sentence.
A second contest, the Lyttle Lytton contest ( http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html ), also asks for opening sentences of terrible novels, but limits entries to 25 words maximum. The contest has run from 1 January to 15 April in 2001 through 2004.
There is actually a rather long sequence of events leading to my coming across, and taking more than casual notice of, Bulwer-Lytton’s work. First, as a boy, I read many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels – not so much the Tarzan series, but mainly the Martian series and a few of his others. One of these was Pellucidar, which describes a “journey to the center of the earth.” Over the years since then, I have had a tendency to notice books about subterranean civilizations. It turns out that there are quite a few of them. Here is a quote from Arktos, by Joscelyn Godwin: “The literature of the Romantic era, needless to say, is rich in fantasies of polar mysteries and lands within the earth. The best known works are probably George Sand’s Laura ou le voyage dans le crystal (Laura, or the voyage on the Crystal); Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Alexandre Dumas’ Isaac Laquédem; Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race; Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (Voyage to the Center of the Earth) and Le Sphinx des glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice). Novels by later and less distinguished authors include William Bradshaw’s The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892), Robert Ames Bennet’s Thyra, A Romance of the Polar Pit (1901), Willis George Emerson’s The Smoky God (1908) and the Pellucidarian stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan.” Godwin might also have mentioned H. G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine.
All of the novels mentioned above are simply novels,
represented as such (adventure stories of the science-fiction / fantasy
genre). In addition to these works,
however, there is a large body of literature dealing with subterranean themes
that is of a quite different nature – an occult, or
esoteric nature, as opposed to an “adventure-story” nature. This is the collection of works dealing with
the legends / myths of Shambhala (or Shamballah or other similar spellings) and
Agharta (or Agartha, or Agarttha, or Asgartha, or other phonetically-similar
spellings). The terms Shambhala and Agharta
refer to a mythical kingdom inhabited by spirits that monitor and control the
world. Some sources consider them to be
the same thing, while others consider them to be distinct kingdoms that oppose
each other. Yet other sources describe
Shambhala as the capital city of the
Shambhala and Agartha are mythical in the same sense as the continents of Lemuria (Mu) and Atlantis – they exist in a different “dimension” (or “level of materiality”; or “density,” or “vibration,” to use current New-Age terminology) from that of today’s physical reality / world, and are reached by means such as meditation, hypnotic regression and astral projection. Edwin Bernbaum’s book, The Way to Shambhala, contains the following passage:
“An old Tibetan story tells of a young man who set off on the quest for Shambhala. After crossing many mountains, he came to the cave of an old hermit, who asked him, “Where are you going across these wastes of snow?”
“To find Shambhala,” the youth replied.
“Ah, well then, you need not travel far,” the hermit said. “The
The French mystic René
Guénon discusses the
The location of
Shambhala / Agartha is specified either interior to the Earth or on its
surface, in the latter case usually in or near the
There is a strong link between mythical cities and Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). On his trip to search for Shambhala, Nicholas Roerich relates the following experience (Altai-Himalaya, (1929) pp. 361-362):
“On August fifth [1927] – something remarkable! We were in our camp in the Kukunor district not far from the Humboldt Chain. In the morning about half-past nine some of our caravaneers noticed a remarkably big black eagle flying above us. Seven of us began to watch this remarkable bird. At this same moment another of our caravaneers remarked, “There is something far above the bird.” And he shouted in his astonishment. We all saw, in a direction from north to south, something big and shiny reflecting the sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed. Crossing our camp this thing changed in its direction from south to southwest. We even had time to take our field glasses and saw quite distinctly an oval form with shiny surface, one side of which as brilliant from the sun.”
The belief that UFOs are terrestrial in origin (but come from a different “dimension” or “density” or “parallel universe”) is strongly held today. (See, e.g., Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens by John E. Mack; Secret Life: Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions by David M. Jacobs; Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings by Budd Hopkins; The Adventure of Self-Discovery by Stansilav Grof; The High Strangeness of Dimensions, Densities and the Process of Alien Abduction by Laura Knight-Jadczyk; and several of David Icke’s books, including The Robot’s Rebellion, …and the truth shall set you free, The Biggest Secret, and Children of the Matrix.) Alternatively, many sources suggest an “Extraterrestrial Hypothesis” (ETH), in which UFOs come from faraway places (e.g., Orion, Sirius, Cassiopeia) (whether from our own dimension or not) (see, e.g., The Mammoth Book of UFOs by Lynn Picknett or The World’s Greatest UFO & Alien Encounters (anonymous, 2002, Chancellor Press / Octopus Publishing Group, London).
It is in the occult category of subterranean or
Shambhala-Agartha literature in which Bulwer-Lytton’s name frequently arises. Bulwer-Lytton had a profound effect on events
of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
He had a passion for occult studies, and used his knowledge of the
occult as the basis for several of his novels, including Zanoni (1842), A Strange
Story (1862) and The Coming Race
(1871) (all available, by the way, from the Gutenberg Project). His work strongly influenced Madame
(Other sources of information on subterranean or hollow worlds include: The Lost World of Agharti: The Mystery of Vril Power by Alec Maclellan (lots of detailed history); Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth by David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver (esp. the article, “The Underground World of Central Asia” by Childress); Subterranean Worlds inside Earth by Timothy Green Beckley; The Hollow Earth Enigma by Alec Maclellan; Hollow Planets: A Feasibility Study of Possible Hollow Worlds by Jan Lamprecht (very large bibliography); and Our Mysterious Spaceship Moon by Don Wilson. In the matter of mythic or nonphysical worlds, there is a vast literature, including, for example, The History of Atlantis by Louis Spence; Edgar Cayce on Atlantis by Edgar Evans Cayce; The Legend of Atlantis by Eliah; The Story of Atlantis and Lost Lemuria by W. Scott-Elliot; Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man by Rudolf Steiner (available on the Internet from http://www.elib.com/Steiner/Books/ (detailed description of nonphysical aspects of Lemuria / Atlantis); The Complete Ascension Manual by Joshua David Stone (brief history of Lemuria / Atlantis); and Telos by Dianne Robbins (“New-Age” orientation, limited list of references).)
Madame Blavatsky was influenced not only by Bulwer-Lytton,
but by a French writer, Louis Jacolliot, who appears to have been the first
Western writer to refer to the mystical
Why is it of interest to comment on Bulwer-Lytton’s writings? Because, almost solely because of his writings the Theosophy movement began, and Nazism was inspired to attempt to take over the world. The pen is, in fact, mightier than the sword – since it influences and controls it. Today, largely because of the work and inspiration of early writers like Bulwer-Lytton, the New Age movement is growing incredibly fast, from almost nothing a few decades ago other than a few people interested in Edgar Cayce and yoga. As the industrial world runs out of petroleum, massive change will occur. What happens at this time will be controlled, as it always has been, by those of the strongest spiritual belief and commitment. Bulwer-Lytton’s writings led, rather directly, to the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler, and the Second World War. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
Many people discount things unseen, and pay little attention to occult or esoteric explanations, either of strange happenings or of uncontested events (such as Hitler’s incredible rise to power). Those who do, however, do so at their peril. While they may reject spiritual explanations or aspects of world events, there are many world leaders who take these matters very seriously.
It does not matter who wrote these myths or whether they
exist in a spiritual realm or in the physical world. To criticize these myths as of diminished
utility or value because of the source or their spiritual/physical nature is
analogous to the use of an ad hominem
attack against an argument. The Bible and the Koran include content that is of value, independent of the
source. Is the moral lesson of Jesus’
parable of the prodigal son of diminished value because it is merely a
story? Is the utility of Synarchy as a
form of planetary government dependent on reality of Agharta as spiritual or
physical? The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of
More and more of today’s writers, such as Neale Donald Walsch (Conversations with God), Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (Left Behind), James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy) and Barbara Marx Hubbard (Conscious Evolution) are convinced that a spiritual revolution is about to take place, with concomitant massive changes in Earth and in human society. The one thing that you can count on in this world / universe is change. And it may be change for the better or change for the worse. As global petroleum supplies, the world will soon plunge into chaos and the economic forces of global industrialization will lose their stranglehold grip on the planet. There will soon be a tremendous opportunity for planetary change. That change will be for the better only if the spiritual forces for good prevail over those of evil.
By the way, the “vril” (kundalini, prana, chi)
life force mentioned below was the inspiration for the “vril” suffix in Bovril
(“Bovine vril”), the breakfast spread so popular in
Since my time available for writing at the present is short, I will quote passages from several of the works mentioned above, with no further comment. All of the works quoted are currently in print, available from http://www.amazon.com . If you are interested in this material, I strongly urge your purchase of the books – they are in paperback, and reasonably priced. The sections quoted below contain text only, and many of the books are replete with footnotes, endnotes, graphics, and references. The works from which I extract material are those of an analytical, comparative, critical and summary nature. For detailed description of the history of history of discovery of material on Agharta, Shambhala, subterranean worlds and related topics (since the time of Jacolliot and Bulwer-Lytton), see The Lost World of Agharti: The Mystery of Vril Power by Alec Maclellan and the article, “The Underground World of Central Asia” by David Hatcher Childress in Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, by David Hatcher Childress and Richard S. Shaver. For detailed descriptions of individual quests to find Shambhala, consult either Ferdinand Ossendowski’s or Nicholas Roerich’s diaries. [I will add more descriptive material, if sufficient requests are made.]
Saint-Yves
d’Alveydre’s posthumous work
Naturally, hostile and sceptical critics did not fail to accuse Ossendowski of simply plagiarizing Saint-Yves, supporting their allegation by pointing out all the concordant passages in the two books; and in fact there are a good number that show a rather astonishing similarity, even to points of detail. First of all, in one of his most improbable passages, Saint-Yves asserts the existence of a subterranean world with branches everywhere – under continents and even under the oceans – by means of which communications are invisibly established between all the regions of the earth; moreover, Ossendowski does not affirm this on his own authority, even declaring that he does not know what to think of it, but attributes it rather to reports received from people he met in the course of his journey. On a more particular point, there is also a passage in which the 'King of the World' is depicted in front of his predecessor's tomb and where the question is raised concerning the origin of the gypsies, who, among others, are said to have lived originally in Agarttha. Saint-Yves writes that there are moments during the subterranean celebration of the 'cosmic mysteries' when travelers upon the desert stop motionless and even the animals are silent; and Ossendowski has assured us that he himself was present at such a moment of universal contemplation. But most important of all, by a strange coincidence both writers tell the story of an island now vanished where extraordinary men and beasts once lived; at this point Saint-Yves cites the summary by Diodorus of Sicily of the journey of Iambulus, whereas Ossendowski describes the journey of an ancient Buddhist from Nepal; but their accounts hardly differ, so that if two versions from such widely divergent sources really do exist it would be interesting to acquire them and compare them carefully.
Although we have
pointed to these similarities, it should be emphasized that we are in no way
convinced that there was indeed plagiarism; and we do not in any case intend to
enter into a discussion of only limited interest. We know through other sources, independent of
the evidence offered by Ossendowski himself, that
stories of this kind are current in
These preliminary observations must suffice, for we wish to remain apart from any polemics or questions of personalities; we have only cited Ossendowski and Saint-Yves as a point of departure for considerations that have nothing to do with what one might think of either of them, and whose importance exceeds their individualities, as well as our own, which in this domain should no longer count. Nor do we propose a more or less vain 'textual criticism,’ but rather a presentation of some information that, to our knowledge, has been unavailable until now, and that might help in some measure to elucidate what Ossendowski calls the 'mystery of mysteries.’
[LePage is discussing Andrew Tomas, author of the book Shambhala: Oasis of Light (1976).]
Tomas's conviction
of the reality of Shambhala, fed by his meeting with Roerich in 1935, was
shared by a growing metaphysical school in
According to Guénon, Shambhala is a center of high
evolutionary energies in
Guénon indicated that Shambhala exists both above and below ground. He enlarged on the vast underground network of caverns and tunnels running under the sacred center for hundreds of kilometers, attributing to these catacombs, as had Saint-Yves d'Alveydre before him in 1910, the function of an even more secret and advanced center of initiation called Agarttha. Agarttha, he said, was the true center of world government. It was the impregnable storehouse of the world's wisdom, surviving the ebb and flow of civilizations and the catastrophes of the earth, and would shortly send forth its energies to create a new planetary culture.
In the same
prophetic spirit, other occult writers saw Shambhala as the venue of the
imminently returning Christ. The neo-Theosophist
[LePage is here discussing John Michell’s book, Earth Spirit]
…The nature of the spirit that animates the earth, "subtle, omnipresent, yet ever indefinable in terms of the dimensions apparent to our senses,” says Michell,
…forms the ultimate problem for modern physicists as it did for their predecessors, the magicians.... Yet we can be certain that this force, formerly identified with the holy spirit, provided the power and inspiration by which the ancient civilization was sustained.... It was held to be what some now call the life-essence, the pervading flow with which at death the spirit becomes merged, and from which arises the vital spark that stimulates new growth. Its names are legion. It is the prana or mana of eastern metaphysics, the "vril," the universal plastic medium of occultists, the anima mundi of alchemy.
Wilhelm Reich called it the orgone force, the Chinese call it qi or chi and understand its causal relation to all other forces.
"Chinese philosophy," says Paul Dong, an American-Chinese author writing on paranormal phenomena in mainland China, "holds that qi is the primal matrix of creation from which springs the yin and yang forces that give rise to substance and material forms ... and thus a master of ql is one who controls the very forces of life. Such a person can perform feats that are truly paranormal.”
In Guénon's view, the vast network of terrestrial magnetic and electrical currents which the Chinese call respectively blue dragon and white tiger lines is analogous to the Indian system of nadis in the human body and is similarly fed by the main artery of terrestrial kundalini that runs like a great unifying spine through the planet. There are power centers other than Meru scattered about the globe: Mount Athos, Mount Shasta, Mount Kailas, Arunachala and others; but these Guénon regards as auxiliaries of the main power center in Shambhala, even as the large nerve centers in various limbic parts of the human body are auxiliaries of the central nervous system.
The idea of an energetic correspondence between the human and planetary systems has also been voiced by Lyall Watson, a naturalist, anthropologist and archaeologist, who discusses the harmony between the two systems in terms that suggest their synchronization of activity. "Earth’s magnetic field," he writes, "fluctuates between eight and sixteen times per second. The predominant rhythm of our brains lies in the same area." Learning that at sunrise in many parts of the world there is a unique electromagnetic transmission, he notes: "We find that frequency associated with physiology... Our systems, both planetary and personal, are governed by the same timekeeper.”
According to the ancient cosmology, that synchronization was rendered possible because one universal energy gave rise to the multiplicity of all known energies, all known phenomena, whether organic or inorganic, meaningfully relating every part of the universe to every other part. Guénon's worldview rests on the same unitive principle. He sees the universal energy as synergistic, as outside the entropic processes of the cosmos and knowable only indirectly by reference to its reflected properties in spacetime. Whether we call it Kundalini, Divine Light, Holy Spirit, Shekinah or Great Life-Force – and he uses all these names in turn from the roll call of religions – it is conceived of as superordinal to all else, a power inhering at the center of all phenomena in a zone of absolute reality, absolute being and transcendental radiance that lies beyond them, yet informs them all. That power, Guénon believes, not only radiates out from the center of Shambhala, inspiring and sustaining its communities, but also plays an unsuspected central role in the life of the planet as a whole, which cannot be understood without it.
Guénon's conception is a grand one that dignifies the earth with life, consciousness and soul. In every essential it accords with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, although it goes much further. As is well known, Lovelock, a British biologist, has graced the earth with the beautiful name of Gaia after the ancient Greek earth-goddess, on the grounds that she is intelligent and purposive, "a super-organism, a living being of planetary proportions” who, like all organisms, is self-organizing and capable of maintaining her own life and well-being.
In The Ages of Gaia, published in 1988, he conceived of the planet as an integrated whole, a mothering web of life in which the organism and the environment interact and evolve symbiotically so as to form a single living entity, each part cooperating with every other part to promote a continuation and evolution of more life. All the planet's self-regulating mechanisms, he believed, point to this conclusion. The stability of the atmosphere over millions of years despite its unstable and reactive gases, the maintenance of an even temperature despite the sun’s growing heat, and the earth’s apparent ability to select, out of others equally possible, just the right climatic conditions and chemical constituents for the continuing health of its life-forms, points to the inherently living and purposive nature of our globe.
Lovelock has come under a lot of criticism for his unorthodox views in scientific circles, and he has now modified his position. In 1990 his fellow biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, referred to him as the leading proponent of the hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating living organism; but in a more recent essay (1996) by Don Michael in Jim Swan's Dialogues With the Living Earth, a footnote states that Lovelock now says Gaia acts like a living organism, not is one. Noting that the earth "has a tendency to produce stability, and to survive," he explains, "I needed to show that the stability emerges from the properties of the system, not from some purposeful guiding hand.”
No doubt there are many who regret Lovelock's reformulation, which seems to deny Mother Earth anything more than a robotic nature – if such a thing can be conceived without a guiding intelligence to motivate it. However, he has already done his work in sowing valuable seeds that can be further cultivated by others. Scientists, like Sheldrake, continue to search for a viable formula by which to express their vision of Gaia as a living, goal-directed organism. Especially since the physicists' formulation of the Unified Field Theory, the pressure to redefine the earth in holistic terms, as an animate and organismic biosphere, has steadily increased.
But as has been said, Guénon, faithful to the ancient Cabalistic-Hermetic tradition, goes further. The earth, he contends, is not only alive; it is a spiritual being, as man is. On the subtle plane it too has an inner body of light, a vajra body. It too is highly evolved, with something like the equivalent of our phylogenetic structure, the equivalent of a spinal cord, of a sympathetic nervous system and of a cortical governing center even as the human central nervous system has; and therefore Mother Earth operates under the same self-governing and self-maintaining evolutionary principles as are evident in human beings.
In his book
For Guénon, the Christ with his twelve apostles represents the Lord of the World for this age who, during it, is the supreme Lawgiver for our earth. According to Guénon:
The title "Lord of the World" belongs properly to "Manu," the primordial and universal legislator. This is the name that in various forms is found amongst many ancient peoples: Mina or Menes of the Egyptians, the Celtic Menw, and Greek Minos. In reality the name describes not a figure that is more or less historical or legendary, but a principle, a cosmic Intelligence that reflects pure spiritual light and formulates the Law (Dharma) appropriate to the conditions of our world and of our cycle of existence. At the same time, it is the archetype of man in his uniqueness, that is to say, of man as a thinking being (in Sanskrit manava).
Those on the human level of the Hierarchy who directly serve this principle mirror it from below and become themselves Lawgivers. They govern the ebb and flow of the culture tides emanating from Shambhala, according to which the spiritual brotherhoods move to and fro across the earth, obeying the obscure rhythms of history and civilization. These are the migrations that are rarely observed and never recorded in our history books, yet are the very mainspring of humanity’s cultural evolution. The movements of the underground organizations that keep the religious spirit alive in society are monitored by Masters who inhabit Shambhala’s inner zone.
Alice Bailey calls them Ascended Masters, ldries Shah calls them Guardians of the Tradition, John Bennett psychoteleios or "perfected ones," and they are also known as the Ancient Ones, the Watchers, the Immortals, the Monitors, the Hidden Directorate, the Children of Seth. All follow what is known as the Ancient Path. According to esoteric tradition, in remote times before the advent of the Mystery schools they lived in more open communication with us, but as the age advanced were compelled to withdraw into their present obscurity, so that now they are accessible to only the most highly purified souls and with rare exceptions are known to the rest of us only through the grace of mystical vision.
Those who live in Shambhala's transcendental inner zone are its engine, its powerhouse; their consciousness turns the wheel. They are the supreme authority for this planet, forming the governing core of Shambhala and, through the ashrams and monasteries of the outer region, of the world. The inner region no doubt has its hidden settlements and cultivated environs like the outer zone, and probably an even higher technology, but the inner Masters are no longer reliant on the physical state. Sometimes incarnate, but often discarnate, they are beyond religious and ethnic categories and work at energy levels that are entirely outside the frequencies with which ordinary humanity is familiar, in ways we are not yet able to comprehend.
Shambhala-Agarttha, says Guénon [actually, in The King of the World, Guénon refers only to Agarttha, and never to Shambhala], is related to the zodiacal sign of Libra, which means "balance" or "scales," and is the quintessential point of balance for the planet; and in precisely the same sense the Directorate is a stabilizing and balancing force in the life of the race. No matter how eccentrically we deviate from the path of wisdom, no matter what descending cycle of destruction, what frightful chimeras we pursue in the course of our evolution, the Directorate negotiates a balance. It is the countervailing and normative influence in our midst, secretly conserving what we have lost, holding in our best interests what we carelessly throw away and safeguarding a future in whose reality we never really believe and are not capable of serving. In an age of superstition it promotes the sciences; when materialism prevails, it reforms religions. It waits when we rush forward, acts when we sleep, believes in life eternal when we do not, and the more we value the exoteric phantasms of the material world the more it withdraws into the invisible realms of soul, counterbalancing our periods of intense physical exploration with equally long periods of withdrawal.
So far we have considered only meditational techniques; but what technology produced the shining spheroid oval Roerich and his party saw speeding high across the cloudless Inner Asian skies, suddenly changing direction, in 1927? Of all the strange manifestations attributed to Shambhala this is the most mysterious, the most inexplicable. Even allowing for an hallucinatory factor, eminently possible in anything connected with Shambhala, the purely material aeronautical basis of the phenomenon, witnessed through three pairs of binoculars and familiar to the lamas present, is undeniable. It is only in the twentieth century that we can fully appreciate how mysterious this is, and can ask ourselves whether the same Shambhalic technology is responsible for the flying saucers that have been seen by millions of people in every part of the world. If so, how and where was it developed, and how long ago? What are its principles? And how has it escaped detection? We can answer none of these questions.
The lamas told
Roerich that the flying object he saw was the signature of Shambhala and the
sign of its blessing. When it flies
overhead one may know that august powers are at hand to succor struggling
humanity and to help in enterprises of humanitarian value. As to the energy that empowers its flight, it
is the primal energy, "this fine imponderable matter which is scattered
everywhere and which is within our use at any moment" – the same energy
that Tomas has called "the intelligent force in the core of the
atom.” Whether the sign of Shambhala is
psychophysical rather than purely physical in the sense that we normally
understand the term is something we do not yet know. But not only are stories of strange aircraft
traditionally associated with Shambhala, more than one sighting of UFOs have
been reliably reported in the region. In
1933 the British mountaineer Frank Smythe, on reaching an altitude of 26,000
feet on
Up until recently the unidentified flying object was generally the mass target of either credulous cultist fascination or disbelief and scorn. But the number of hardened skeptics in the population is rapidly waning as trained enquiry by scientists and academics, plus the sheer overwhelming weight of reliable observers, is tending to support the authenticity of the phenomenon – although its interpretation is another matter. It has been almost universally assumed that the UFO, if given any credence at all, must be a spacecraft manned by extraterrestrial beings, especially since their craft appears to be capable of moving in and out of visibility, passing through material barriers and executing maneuvers that defy gravity and mass and are impossible for the human frame to withstand. But as more facts become known and their study has moved onto a more sophisticated level of research, different options are being considered.
Dr. Kenneth Ring,
professor of psychology at the
Dr. Jacques Vallée, a computer expert trained in astrophysics, is one of the most prominent investigators of UFO phenomena. According to Vallée:
It is curious to observe that even scientifically trained researchers who accept the idea of multiple universes, or the few ufologists who understand the idea that space-time could be folded to allow almost instantaneous travel from one point of our universe to another, still cling emotionally to the notion that any nonhuman form of consciousness is necessarily from outer space.
In the light of thousands of personal accounts of close encounters and abductions involving UFOs, and the extraordinary consistency and sincerity of these accounts, strong arguments are now being marshaled against this assumption of extraterrestrial visitation in favor of an unknown earth-agency that is manipulating the popular mind in such a way as to create a global metamorphosis of consciousness. Like the near-death experience, which is equally ubiquitous, the UFO experience with its strong psychic and paranormal overtones has features that are increasingly being interpreted as a form of spiritual awakening or initiation, although with puzzlingly physical elements.
It has been observed by modern researchers that, although these unknown aerial objects are physical enough to be tracked by radar and witnessed by hundreds of people at the same time, in many cases of close encounter a psychic dimension is present, indicative of trance, altered states of consciousness, time loss, hazy reportage, etc., which throws the objectivity of the experience into doubt. Many witnesses report leaving normal reality behind and moving as though within a lucid dream – as though ordinary space-time physics no longer applies – until they are returned to the normal world with the sense of a break in time. But in fact this is an accurate description of any out-of-the-body experience in which the physical body is left behind in an entranced sleep while the inner body, carrying the egoic consciousness with it, moves elsewhere for a time, often unaware that the physical body is not involved in its adventures.
An unusually clear
example of such an experience has been recounted by a woman in
On the other hand, some people seem to be well aware of the psychophysical nature of their encounter and state frankly that it has been a deeply personal initiatory experience resulting in physical hearings, psychic gifts or a radical change in spiritual direction….