Chapter 1: Evilution

If you were pure animal, right through to the marrow, created and evolved to be nothing more, you would react to the stress and pressure of your environment like any other animal, without conflict or second thoughts. But we do know conflict when we respond like animals; and because we do, we must face the fact that we are something more than highly evolved animals. The conflict that we feel, whatever you want to call it, "speaks" to us of another way of being. It speaks of a form of being that springs from within and above, different from, and superior to, the natural order that governs the animal world.

The anxiety we feel is not of flesh, but of spirit. It comes from an inner knowing that we should not be responding to stress as animals do.

On the animal plane, all living things exist under the law of survival: kill or be killed. But we, as human beings, must live under a different system. Whereas the creature falls under the law of chance, we must find our law in faith. And if our law is to be just, we must place our faith in the God-given consciousness that enables and confirms our dominion over the animal world, both within and without.

In the animal world, the concept of injustice is unthinkable. Like Popeye, the sailor man, the animal is what it is and justice has nothing to do with it. How can we find fault with the fact that little fishes are eaten by bigger fishes who are eaten in turn by still bigger fishes? How else would they survive? They must surely be living in accordance with God's plan for them. But when it comes to us humans, surely you must see something wrong with our living like animals. Having been graced with consciousness, we must live from it, on a level that is inaccessible to the lower animals who were born to die for the preservation of the natural order.

Suffering and death convey a different meaning to the animals than they do to us. We may see a mother duck with her flotilla of ducklings swimming peacefully in a pond. Suddenly, plop! one of the ducklings disappears, gobbled up by a big-mouth bass. Here, we see the law of chance at work. One of the brood had to go in order to feed a hungry fish, and nature allowed for it to happen. Another may go to a hawk so that it might go on being a hawk, and the survivors may go on being ducks for their allotted time on earth, or they might not. The only certainty is that no creature will be exempt from the law of chance insofar as its survival is concerned. One creature eats another in an endless food chain. With billions of them devoured daily, and billions more born to replace them, the death of one contributes to the life of another. Without overpopulation and the ongoing process of eating and being eaten, the natural order would cease to exist in all its everchanging variety and renewal of life.

Now ask yourself whether you think you and your offspring should exist under the natural law of the animal. Are we not, with our burden and blessing of consciousness, of greater significance than the birds of the air and the fish of the sea? And if we are, why does He let us suffer the "injustices" of "chance" events?

Prepare yourself for a shock. The "unjust" jungle law will apply to you for as long as you continue to exist in a fallen state of consciousness. Sooner or later, you will become a sacrificial victim of the "natural" order, the kingdom of hell on earth that depends on sacrifice for its existence, and no god will hear your cry for mercy. In an overpopulated world, you will be food in an insane system whose slaves provide diseased bodies for medicine, inmates for prisons, laborers for factories, and cannon fodder for armies.

All who do not live by faith are subject to the "unjust" law of chance.

So what is this faith to which only man, of all the created beings, can have access? Whatever it is, it serves those who are endowed with it as surely as instinct serves the denizens of the natural order. Faith is the survival knowledge that saves and protects us from the lower dog-eat-dog system. If it were to be available to the lower animals, it would protect and perfect them and render them deathless. Shielded by faith, they could no longer remain beasts, programmed to eat and be eaten. They would no longer be part of a food chain; and without a food chain, the endless variety and beauty of the purely animal kingdom would cease to exist.

Unlike the human being, who is all too prone to identify himself with his Creator, the only way a chicken can identify with something greater than itself is through the belly of whatever happens to eat it. By surrendering to the hawk, it attains to the hawk, even as the worm had become upgraded to chicken status when it was eaten by the chicken. Fortunately, both for them and for us, creatures do not have our kind of consciousness. Think of the horror sweeping over billions of sardines if they were conscious of being swallowed alive by a big hungry fish. What torture; what cruelty! They are spared the horror by virtue of the fact that they don't even know they exist, even though they are awake.

You, of course, are conscious that you exist, and this consciousness allows you to see and feel the horror of suffering and dying. It tells you something is wrong. But let's look at your egotistical response: you make the same dumb mistake Adam made, the one that brought him down into this bleak realm. You turn against the very special awareness that exalts you over the creatures and links you to your Creator, and you set out on a course of denial. You think that by making yourself less aware that something is wrong, less aware of your suffering, less aware of what is happening, you can make the problem go away. So you choose, by means of drugs, drink, music, sex, and "positive thinking"—all the worldly excitements of challenge and risk—to submerge your human consciousness into an "evolving" animal unconsciousness. You literally change yourself into a beast.

The very headlong desperation that propels your frenzied escapes reveals to anyone still standing on the plateau of objective understanding that, at some level of awareness, despite all your denials, you do know what you know—namely, that there is something wrong about death and dying.

So here you are, living on an animal plane, with two natures in conflict, the higher gradually losing power to the lower. You know something is wrong, but part of you is afraid to realize it. That part of you would gladly dig a hole in the ground and bury itself in it, rather than face the truth about its devolving condition, and that is precisely what it does. The soul, having gradually yielded power to this lower animal self, has become its captive in a dogeat- dog world wherein men kill, murder, and devour their fellow men, emotionally and spiritually, as a matter of course, a world ruled by pride, arrogance, violence, and deception.

Here, in the lower level of beingness we have chosen for ourselves, every man, woman, and child is part of some ghoulish food chain. Here we see only the takers and the taken, the eaters and the eaten. The takers are closer to hell than the taken, but in order to survive at all, and however briefly, you must become a taker yourself before it's too late. So the taken dream of becoming takers, and they are taken in by their dreams and the cruel system they see as the "real world."

In this system, you are enlisted in the service of hell through a military chain of command, doing unto others what has been done unto you, failing and setting others up to fail, degrading others as you have been degraded. Everyone unfortunate enough to stumble into your "space" must surrender something of himself to you, for in this hideous system, in order to buy another instant of "life," you will identify with the predator, the beast, the evil one. You become the torturer, the troll under the bridge. Not much of an option, but many choose to go that way.

In Hitler's death camps, there cowered inmates who, in order to save their own necks, helped to herd their own brethren into the execution chambers. We think it is "safe" to be the one who does the hurting, the one who causes the misery and pain; it seems to release us from sharing the common yoke. But not even Hitler could escape payment in kind—surely not in quality or quantity—but "in kind" to the extent that it was all the life he had left to give.

The Bible speaks of living in the world, yet not being of the world. Have you not often experienced the feeling that the other people in the room with you were living in a different world? It could be, of course, that you were simply caught up in different worldly totems, so disparate that you could not experience one another's world with the same acuity of perception and reverence. There is, however, a transcendent reality, a realm of undying joy that the beasts know nothing of, nor were they meant to.

Nature exists on one level of creation; man, on another. You must seek this other realm, this realm of true consciousness. Abandon faith in order to pursue glory and selfish goals and you fall, not only under the natural law that governs the animal world, but beyond, into hell on earth. As you aspire pridefully to attain to the greatness that is God's alone, you cast off the mantle of His grace that protects the faithful, and you find yourself in and of the world. This is a domain far more terrible than the natural world inhabited by the simple beasts. It is a merciless world wherein spiritual predators feed upon one another with satanic subtlety.

In case you think I am exaggerating the existence and scope of the underworld that is reserved for fallen man, let me quote the following from the manifesto of a subversive organization. Note the predatory mentality of the "man" who could write such words. What he is writing about is real, of course, and he knows it.

Our goals are old and dark ones; they look on the centuries of Christianity as a trivial interruption. Our gods are like fire, always smoldering below; they are close to the blind will that truly runs the world. They command us to be spiritual vampires, taking power as food for the will. We keep our eternal youth on a habitual diet of others, and the so-called "dark powers" which await us after death are simply other vampires in a new phase of consumption. None of this involves carnage or blood; it is a matter of spiritual conquest. Ours is an alternate karma, a heritage of power and supremacy.

For successionists, the glory of life is the hunt, and our home lives must be arranged in subservience to it. Nothing can interrupt the joys of predation. We want to reestablish a royal sense of respect, where everyone we encounter must show deference. Our form of mysticism or transcendence often comes in the middle of a crime—suddenly the victims are all that exists; we see through everyone around them, and their suffering is of utterly no consequence.

We have our own pantheon of saints; we have our own religious symbols. Our churches reach downwards to dark forces; our prayers have a background of sinister music. Our beatific images have more orgasm than love; our heaven is for victors, never the meek. Our brotherhood is like a core of blackness, where everyone who hates goodness can turn.

"The wages of sin is death, " and between here and there we encounter so much horror that it should wake us to the error of our way; yet our sinful lifestyles turn us into vulnerable prey for those haters of goodness whose allegiance is to the "dark forces. " When you allow environmental stresses to motivate and change you, they displace your human nature and change your destiny forevermore. Your changed nature becomes subject to the forces that created it, and you invite this fate every time you seek to escape your human awareness by wallowing in sensual distractions. As you fall more deeply under the spell of your vices, you change and mutate, until you become such an ego-animal that you cannot—or, more accurately—will not receive the gift of faith. It is your stubborn insistence on your "right" to escape into the flesh that pulls you into lower and lower realms of hell on earth.

Pridefulness fears to encounter Truth—that knowing from which faith springs. Faith is a power that can redeem the soul from its debased dark form and transform it by its light. But thanks (and no, thanks) to pride, fallen man "mistakes" his deformed self to be his real self, and willfully seeks to preserve and strengthen it by giving it all it wants. Thus, the ego-animal within fattens into a bigger and mightier beast. Unfortunately, a better beast is not a better man. Continuing to regress as a slave to flesh, you can not escape the system. You exist for the pleasure of the predator who stalks the earth, seeking whom he may devour. The horror is this: Souls are his prey—not merely flesh, as in the innocent realm of instinctive creatures; and as we slowly feed ourselves to the system, we encounter an infinite variety of incarnate devils whose power is magnified by a military chain of command that leads all the way back to the commander in chief of hell. The worm becomes a chicken, and the chicken becomes a hawk. Remember?

The ego-animal thrives on the food of excitement. It seeks danger and risk. It is a gambler, and, in a way, allegiance to chance has a sustaining and transforming power just as faith does. The person who has succumbed to the lure of the gaming table does enjoy a sense of being alive, master of his fate for a moment; but little does he realize that in that very moment, his soul is being consumed. He mistakes his growing alertness, the high he feels when his life's security is on the line, for the higher awareness of faith. So the gambler "proves" his "faith" by risking his all on the smile of Lady Luck. But the workings of chance are quite opposite to those of faith. They nourish the beast of pride and sustain in it an alertness that grows keener and viler as it scans the horizon for its big "score." The more alert you feel as the result of your excitements, the lower you sink, till at a certain point you may actually see reality, but you will be unable to face it. The pain of seeing what your pride has done to you will be more than you can bear.

Forward

It's a classic science fiction theme. A person from another dimension slips through a "time warp" and plops down on Earth. He may have travelled billions of miles through space, or perhaps he hurtled back through time from some future era. Yet as far as he's concerned, he just stepped through a hole in space in a matter of seconds.

The notion of a parallel universe has intrigued the human mind for millennia. This book, however, is not about science fiction; it is about real life. Indeed, Jesus Christ himself, the most "real" human being that ever existed, spoke of the "Kingdom of Heaven" almost as though it were another dimension—a parallel universe.

We must live in the world, but not be of it, Jesus taught. If so,then what world are we supposed to be "of," and how do we get there? "The Kingdom of Heaven," answered Jesus, "is within you." All a person has to do is knock, he said, and the door will be opened.

The key to this door is our sincere desire to know the truth— from the most basic truths about our problems and our wrong way of living, right up to the ultimate truth about Christ and his message of salvation. Love of truth—that is what draws us,imperceptibly, inch by inch, toward the hidden inner door to this "parallel universe." And all those who follow the leading of their conscience to the "promised land" are able to translate that "parallel universe"—the Kingdom of Heaven—into their lives, their families, their little corner of the world.

Although this book is Christian in content, it talks less about Christ—although he is the embodiment of all truth—and more about personal problems. Why? Our deepest problems, it turns out—caused mostly by childhood traumas and the cruelty of others—have a profoundly positive side to them. Ironically, they are our strongest and surest connection with God.

Our conflicts tell us wordlessly that there is something wrong with the way we exist; they are sure evidence that the identity we have evolved is "of this world"—that is, full of pain and suffering. Our internal conflicts represent the warring of two worlds: the world of what we have become, with all our problems and hangups, versus the heavenly world of our bright potential. The contrast of these two warring worlds within us causes friction, which we know as pangs of conscience. Like a messenger from that other world, conscience is always trying to cut through our confusion and save us.

Listening to what conscience is trying to tell us about our problems is the beginning of truly listening to God. It is the 1+1=2 of salvation, before we get to the E=MC 2 of Christian Mystery, and without which the "advanced math" has little value to us.

If problems, hang-ups, and addictions provide us with a key focal point, then it is the way we focus on our problems that determines whether we get better or worse. Being obsessed with our problems is as bad as ignoring them—both approaches cause us to become more deeply mired in our troubles. Yet there is a positive way of standing back and focusing upon our inner conflicts—described in this book—a way that resolves problems, rather than making them worse.

When we listen to our conscience, the wisdom and understanding we gather through life evolve into an identity—a person within a person, so to speak. To be "in the world, but not of it," then, is to rise above identifying with the body and its feelings and cravings, and to stand in the objective place observing all things—a practice that truly "makes all things new."

If you are sincere about being a better person, this book will help you to rise above and overcome your suffering through developing grace under pressure. When you discover how not to be upset, angry, and doubtful—in other words, how to stop overreacting to outside influences—your life will undergo a metamorphosis, a change for the better in ways more profound than you could ever have dreamed possible.

If we stop running away from ourselves and into the distractions of this world just long enough to listen to our conscience—this voiceless voice from the "other dimension"—we will be guided safely by the Holy Spirit through even the most trying and dangerous experiences of life. And we shall experience a renewing of the self from deep within.

Eventually, the purity of our sincerity reveals to us Who it is, by name, that has been leading us all along. "Ask, and ye shall receive. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

So now, heed the call from that other dimension. Follow your intuitive knowing confidently through that door, and discover the "parallel universe" alluded to by the patriarchs and prophets of the Bible. Far from being a distant alien realm, it is actually our true home, from whence the human race descended, and to which we, tried and proven, in faithfulness must return.

—Roy Masters