Mystical Deception and the Quest for Love and Ultimate Meaning

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The Paranormal Conspiracy:
The Truth about Ghosts, Aliens and Mysterious Beings
by Timothy Dailey Ph.D.

I stumbled across something very curious while investigating the current fascination with otherworldly phenomena for my book The Paranormal Conspiracy: The Truth about Ghosts, Aliens and Mysterious Beings. A common underlying theme emerged in the stories of those who became immersed in the dark arts: a yearning for enduring significance coupled with the desire to become immersed in that ineffable quality we call love.

Under the narcotic influence of mescaline, novelist Aldous Huxley was swept up in what he described as a mesmerizing world of indescribable beauty. His field manual for the drug culture he helped inaugurate in the 1960s, The Doors of Perception, advocated the use of psychotropic drugs to achieve enlightenment. Later he would experience an even more powerful revelation while taking LSD, which he described as "the direct, total awareness … of Love as the primary fundamental cosmic fact."

Huxley dabbled in the occult and had a lifelong interest in the religions of the East, yet it seems not to have occurred to him that his mystical awareness of a universe suffused with love necessitated a Lover, and had more in common with biblical theism than Eastern mysticism.

In Genesis 2 the divine plan for marriage as the foundation of society is unveiled: "The Lord God said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him" (v. 18 niv). Thus begins the wondrous adventure that we call love. The fruit of "they become one flesh" reverberates through the ages—and beyond, yea into eternity. It is rooted in the family, that warm hearth where love is nourished and learned by children who emulate the affection between their father and mother in their own lives, and share it beyond to the community and the world. For love, like its divine Author, provides the impetus for philanthropy and charitable work everywhere.

But what results when the divine plan is ignored, rejected and trampled underfoot? Throughout my research, I discovered that many of those who chose the dark path of involvement in psychic phenomena were the product of dysfunctional and broken families. Aleister Crowley, the arch-occultist and self-proclaimed "Beast 666" and "Wickedest Man in the World," was raised in a puritanical Christian denomination in England. Incredibly, as a young boy he voiced the desire to become "the most devoted servant of Jesus." Tragically, the young Crowley was set adrift by the death of his kindly father and left to the vicissitudes of his mother's harsh sectarian faith, and came to embrace a draconian rejection of Christianity.

Similarly, the dysfunctional upbringing of Helena "Madame" Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, doubtlessly played a part in her early fascination with all things paranormal. As a young girl she was distressed by her father's continual absence, and by her preoccupied, emotionally-unavailable mother's long periods of desertion, which according to one commentator she took "as a desertion of the home and of herself." The doyen of the New Age movement would do more than perhaps any single individual to promote Eastern religions and occultism throughout the West.

One of those entranced with Madame Blavatsky's arcane philosophy was Percy Fawcett, the legendary British explorer of the last century who led numerous expeditions into the vast jungles of South America. Fawcett fell under the influence of spirits channeled by mediums, who convinced him that a mysterious "Lost City of Z" built by the interplanetary aliens spoken of in Blavatsky's writings lay hidden in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. To much fanfare he set out to find it under the guidance of his spirit guides, never to be heard from again.

Like the others, Fawcett came from a troubled family, but found redemption in his marriage to his beloved Nina, who waited in vain for him to return, taking solace in the inscription on the inside cover of his diary: "Oh love, my love! Have all your will—I am yours to the end!"

Others have been misled down murky byways by discarnate voices promising love and affection surpassing anything on the earthly plane. Canadian Journalist Joe Fisher, who like Fawcett came under the spell of mediums, became convinced that he was communicating with his long-lost ethereal companion from other lifetimes.

When Fisher's journalistic objectivity finally asserted itself and he set out to visit the village in Greece where his spirit guide claimed they had lived together, he discovered to his dismay that the elaborate tapestry that the spirit had woven of their life together was a complete forgery. Fisher never recovered from the immensity of the deception and eventually leapt to his death from a cliff, finally freed from the tormenting spirits he had come to fear. Or was he? Troubling evidence found at the scene indicated that he may have been pushed, but by whom—or what?

These cautionary tales speak for themselves, and we can add little except to recall the scriptural admonition, "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" (Ephesians 6:12 kjv).