Disclosure, Demons and Deception
Discernment is no longer optional
My mind has recently turned to the prospect of revelation. The UFO disclosure process started by the U.S. Government yesterday seems like another step towards broadening our collective understanding of reality. Apocalypse means unveiling, and so my mind has been drawn to the rather intense associated concept of the antichrist. I’m not alone; I recently received three consecutive Substacks on the same topic in a matter of hours, and another one the next morning. They all identified the antichrist, whether literally or figuratively, in the same way: the steady abstraction of the human soul from connection with the divine spark through technology and transhumanism. It seems obvious.
But reality then conspired to offer me an alternative vision. One of my friends is a Christian. A few weeks ago he shared his belief that sometimes the devil comes in a deceptive form of love and light. The day after speaking to him, I was pondering the claims from Rep. Tim Burchett. The rough gist of it is that he believes alien disclosure is going to come with some fairly dark revelations. General Mike Flynn then replied to Burchett’s tweet saying that we had better not fall for a false flag; where the simulation of a fake hostile alien attack is used by a governmental cabal to assume greater totalitarian control. With the Vice President himself saying that he thinks aliens are demons, this is one of those utterly absurd-sounding conspiracy theories that looks a little more credible by the day.
Having watched from the sidelines for the last two years, I can say that the UAP/UFO information ecosystem is the hardest one I’ve ever tried to navigate. So I rapidly lost interest in the when of disclosure, but I became much more interested in how aliens might challenge our worldview if we discovered that they were real. I even interviewed Jim McCarty, the scribe for the famous alleged channeled alien text, The Law of One.
In discussion with a friend on this topic a few weeks ago, he sent me a link to the Wikipedia page on Operation Blue Beam. This is a theory devised by a man called Serge Monast. What caught my eye was his claim that this kind of “evil alien” disclosure would be used to install a deceptive New Age worldview. I asked Claude for a summary and this was what I got.
The New Religion
The centerpiece was the Maitreya — Benjamin Creme’s “World Teacher” figure. Creme claimed Maitreya was already present on Earth, awaiting a “Day of Declaration” when he would telepathically address all of humanity simultaneously. Monast saw Blue Beam as the technology to fake exactly this — presenting the Maitreya as the simultaneous fulfillment of every tradition’s messianic expectation: the Christian Second Coming, the Jewish Messiah, the Islamic Mahdi, the Buddhist Maitreya, the Hindu Kalki.
The theological core, in Monast’s reading, was Luciferianism. His primary evidence was the Lucis Trust — Alice Bailey’s organization, originally founded as Lucifer Publishing Company. This organization had infiltrated the United Nations and was using it to propagate its deception. The “Masters” Bailey was channeling were actually demonic entities, and their externalization would be staged through technology.
Drawing on Bailey, the religion’s doctrinal shape would include:
The divinity of man — humans as gods in development, requiring no redemption
Lucifer as liberator — the true light-bringer freeing humanity from orthodox religion
Consciousness evolution replacing the sin/redemption narrative
The Christ as an impersonal cosmic force, with Jesus as merely one of many vehicles for it
Reincarnation replacing heaven and hell, dissolving fear of death and with it a key mechanism of Christian moral accountability
For Monast — a committed Catholic — the specific horror was the religion’s surface appeal. It would speak the language of love, unity, and enlightenment, drawing in New Age seekers, disillusioned Christians, and universalists alike. The Luciferian core would remain esoteric, revealed only gradually to initiates, while the exoteric face presented a warm syncretic humanism. The entire New Age movement, in his view, was unwitting — or sometimes witting — preparation of the cultural ground.
Reading this, my stomach flipped and I wanted to vomit. Many of these ideas have fascinated me and I write about them regularly. More strangely, I had been reading one of Alice Bailey’s books the night before; it lay at my bedside behind me. The website for Lucis was even open on my desktop. On the bookmark for Bailey’s book, they had printed a prayer called the Great Invocation (once recorded by Eleanor Roosevelt). For some reason, our cleaner had placed it above my desk. Most bizarrely of all, next to it she had also randomly placed a commemorative medal my diplomat father once received from the United Nations.
Bailey’s work had been recommended to me by a channeler I’d found exceptionally useful (although to be honest Bailey’s books didn’t resonate much for me either way). Was she channeling demons? Is the channeled Law of One material I’d been gripped by over the last couple of years from deceptive demonic entities rather than benevolent aliens? I’m not so much afraid of being wrong (otherwise I’d never write anything), as much as I am being deceived into amplifying dangerous lies.
Fear and thought loops invaded my mind. Had I damned myself and my readers, you all, by being duped by demons dressed in robes of light? I obviously couldn’t think about anything else all day. The anxiety was so bad that even a scheduled root canal that afternoon was a blessed relief from the rumination.
I was given some peace by the fact that I have really quite a few examples of people telling me my work has helped them, and nobody has ever said it actively hurt them (yet). I also now have close companions to sense-check my panic. Only when they mirrored my fears back to me did they start to diminish.
By the time I woke up the next day I was more curious than terrified. I also knew I had to write about this experience. Sunlight dissolves shame. If the ideas I’ve been drawn to are this dangerous, I owe it to you, my readers, to highlight that alternative perspective and let you decide for yourselves. As so many of you kindly do, I would love you to tell me where I may be right, where I may be wrong and why.
If I have somehow been deceived and amplified dangerous ideas, I guess “I’m sorry” doesn’t really cut it, but the road to hell was always paved with my good intentions.
Steelmanning The Deception.
Last month I spent ten days on vacation in Florida with my family. I used that time to eat fried food, drink dirty martinis, and reflect on what I really believed. I waited until I got back to read about Monast’s theory behind Operation Blue Beam in more detail. And when I did, to be honest, most of it sounded completely insane.
But I decided I needed to steelman the broader “deceptive New Age” thesis. Here are some key components of the theory that I could identify:
The risks of channeled information. This one seems like the strongest warning. Surrendering your sovereignty to “spirit guides,” or “higher powers” without proper discernment risks eroding your free will and opening you to manipulation and deception. As cutting-edge science increasingly validates the existence of disembodied intelligences, we have to accept the uncertainties and risks that come with creating interfaces to interact with them.1
Ascension narratives eroding individuality. The “global shift in consciousness” or “ascending to another density” frameworks may be quietly training us to treat human incarnation as merely a staging post, eroding the individual moral discernment that matters most right now. It may also place the focus from self-development to outside of us and onto the world. Even more extreme: are these deceptive narratives designed to make us surrender our unique individuality, Pluribus style, at a pivotal future date?
Reducing Christ to a general archetype. The framing of Christ as a balanced psyche or cosmic force, an idea I’ve found appealing, is specifically identified as an instance of deception. The more orthodox Christian framing is that the only route to salvation is through a personal relationship with Jesus of Nazareth. The recent trend of serious, intelligent people returning to orthodox Christianity may be a more direct response to this danger than I've been willing to accept.
Incorrect frameworks overwhelming direct experience. As someone with both an overdeveloped intellectual side and a burning desire to be seen as intelligent, this is a pronounced risk. I might prematurely place misleading frameworks around direct experience and therefore shut myself off from the correct path.
New Age groups as Trojan horses for evil cabals. The initiated secrets start out loving and benign, but the higher up the hierarchy you go, the more the truth is distorted. At the same time, your ego’s desire to be special inhibits your ability to test these ideas against other people. While this is probably a broader risk, I’m not a member of any of these kinds of esoteric groups and am intrinsically untrustworthy of them. A more subtle danger is that I have allowed deceptive ideas into my own non-hierarchical community. But then my hope and expectation is that my own community of discerning individuals can help challenge and course-correct each other. It’s certainly a much better idea than doing it alone, or in a cult.
This exercise was incredibly challenging and scary. Over a period of weeks I interrogated LLMs. I deliberately read dark, ominous, mostly AI-generated Substacks. I had to continuously confront the fear that I may have accidentally done some very real, even irreversible, damage to myself and those that I love. I kept trying to find the decisive demonic deception that would reveal how badly I had failed everyone. I haven’t been able to find that smoking gun, yet.
The crux of the New Age deception hypothesis seems to be that mysticism inserts a clever substitute in the place of our connection to the divine. It may even open you to influences and intelligences deliberately designed to mislead you. It doesn’t matter what the moth’s intentions are, the flame will burn him all the same.
I regard curiosity as a direct connection to the divine, your own unique path of conscious evolution. This exercise made me question my own motivations to their very core. The fear of New Age deception at times made me want to stop writing about these topics altogether. It made me want to withdraw back to an ordinary life dealing with more mundane, less risky material. Like everything else, curiosity isn’t always beneficial. Beyond the more obvious risks of bypassing and New Age immorality, spirituality obviously has some very naive and dangerous ideas. I especially believe that black magic is probably both real and an incomprehensibly bad idea. Some rabbit hole topics are also prone to make us fearful and negative, which in turn may open us up to manipulation through adversarial forces. Darker things swim in the deeper waters. But the ideas that have most resonated with me over the last few years have meaningfully improved my life, and my relationships with friends and family.
Although this framework identifies it as a New Age deception, and it’s central to The Law of One, I have found the abundant evidence for reincarnation of significant benefit in my life for reducing my death anxiety.2 The idea of Earth as an intelligent, loving school for the evolution of our souls has made me more emotionally resilient and enormously grateful for my daily experiences, even the bad ones. It has actually made me incredibly excited about living and enjoying this life here on Earth because this is the place where the most important lessons are learned. I hope it has also made me more morally responsible. Meanwhile karma simply allows you to attract the lessons you need to evolve. Depending on the day, I’m now about 70-80% sure this worldview is true. In fact, I am wondering if facing this fear of deception is another lesson in itself. Even in the last few weeks, I’ve been continuously reminded that I believe that reality is intrinsically good, limitlessly intelligent and trying to help you out all of the time. This is as close to the definition of God as I have come. Following these cues and learning these lessons is the evolutionary path of consciousness and one that I believe tries to walk in Jesus’ footsteps, back to God.
So, if, if, there is a force that works to freeze us in place on the path, severing that golden thread to the sacred, for example by inhibiting our curiosity, is a great strategy.
It is this force, if not a specific figure, that I think might be a manifestation of the “real” antichrist. This isn’t simply fear, some fears are entirely logical. This is a specific kind of irrational fear that often doesn’t have an obvious source, and distracts, diverts and petrifies. This force gets into us through our traumas and then inhabits and perverts different energies, whether it’s technology, money, or spirituality. When I meet people that are being blocked on the path to their personal evolution, it is overwhelmingly the distorted energy of money that’s doing it. The cast-iron certainty that they can’t follow their curiosity because it will damn themselves and their family, or it already has. Aside from money, the other most common blockage I hear from people I meet is that pursuing the spiritual path will see them mocked, ostracised or abandoned. Some people, justifiably, fear psychosis and insanity. For the more religious ones, they even fear the ideas and practices risk their damnation. It’s a much more subtle deception than money or technology, but one that’s worked for centuries.
In fact, I now wonder if the “antichrist” is actually the thing that tells us there are such a thing as irreversible mistakes that damn us and our loved ones.
Friendships and Fellowships
Even if she’s somehow secretly deceptive, that channeler has taught me a great number of resonant things, most importantly how to cultivate my own embodied intuition. It’s much easier to be deceived if you can’t feel truth. I suspect one lesson from this encounter is to learn to trust my own heart, rather than be seduced by ideas that only tickle my head and my intellect. Surely my goosebumps don’t lie? I’ve listened to all of my recordings with her and read all the transcripts, and honestly struggled to find anything that was problematic.
But the fact is, the only reason I could be shaken by all this is because I don’t totally trust my discernment yet. I’m pretty early to all this mysticism stuff, and at the same time the world seems to be getting exponentially stranger. I’m still genuinely unsure if I’m missing something. It’s too easy for me to conclude this piece with a tidy sense of certainty that I did the right thing. I’m not sure if the strong Alice Bailey synchronicities were a warning for me (and you?) to steer clear of her work and channeled material more generally.
The channeler also said that it was incredibly foolish to walk this mystical path alone. I’ve spent the last few weeks talking to different discerning people in Leading Edge about my fears of being deceived. The amazing things they were doing in their lives, and the compassionate way they talked to me, did more than anything else to calm me. Maybe we’re just all in culty groupthink, but to be honest I even struggle to imagine what the focus of the cult is beyond love and curiosity.
The fruits of our actions are obviously more important than the roots of our frameworks. But corrupted roots can poison the fruits. So want the end of this piece to be something that opens into questions rather than closes into conclusions. As my fear subsided it became obvious that I’m not going to stop exploring the ideas that I think will make my life, and the lives of others, better. I have a powerful intuition that things are going to get seriously weird and wacky from here. And so I’d like you to help us find the truth, together.
I recommend digging into the revelatory work of Dr. Michael Levin at Tufts for more on this.
I was also moved by a quote I saw this week in Alex Evans’ article What If This Is a Collective Near-Death Experience? “Above all, there’s zero support here for the exclusivist notion that one religion is right and all the other ones are wrong, or for the idea of a God who judges us. Instead, we judge ourselves, and experience our actions as others did — an experience that can indeed feel “hellish”.”
This seems quite healthy; pausing along the path and asking questions - and then trusting that the Infinite Light welcomes and answers (with delight!) these questions (and doubts and fears) can only build a deeper and ever more loving relationship with that Light.
Nice piece, Tom. I think about this quite a bit too, especially because, as an astrologer, I'm a member of the "damned" class. I believe we're in a time of return - to an understanding of the spiritual dimensions of reality, including the other intelligences we share it with. We went through a period of extreme materialism that enabled us to develop certain useful ideas and ways of working, but it required denying aspects of reality, and now we're in a process of rediscovery of all that was denied, armed with a more rigorous, empirical way of thinking about things. In other words, this is an era of spiritual science. You seem to be one of the many people carrying that torch now.
At the same time, the church, which formerly had dominion over spiritual matters, has its own ideas about these things and wishes to retain its primacy in these areas (and, to be kinder, protect people from harm). Astrologically speaking, I think this is the shift from the Age of Pisces (the two fish, Christianity and Islam) towards the Age of Aquarius, a sign concerned with knowledge of material and spiritual reality. The carriers of the Piscean impulse have natural "antibodies" against new ways of being and knowing, in the form of arguments that they're "demonic" and will lead to the end of the world.
This is not to say that we aren't also awash with bad ideas or that people aren't getting led astray by malevolent forces or that a lot of channels aren't being deceived about who or what is speaking through them. I just suspect that the transition away from the era of church and materialist dominion was probably always going to look something like this, in the early days. The guardrails are off. I think New Age ideas are best seen as the start of something, rather than the end point, so we're awash with nonsense and bullshit right now, but hopefully this will clear up somewhat over the decades and centuries.
This is where my own studies have taken me, although I do also sometimes entertain doubts similar to those you express in this piece. I guess all we can be expected to do is pursue the truth earnestly and adjust our ideas as evidence and our intuition suggest. Seems to me that's what you're doing. Thanks for this thoughtful piece, anyway.