Dark Robes, Dark Brothers by Hilarion

This is an extraordinary book.

Now I understand what they mean by when one has the totem of the Black Panther. One may either go all the way evil or all the way good, but in the meantime, they have to go through a lot to just get there, either side. Which reminds of me Ramtha. The guy said he only had ONE lifetime. Seeing it from that perspective, one can surely be kind to him seeing what he has to go through, if he had that certain combination to deal with. Just an example. Hmhmhm. Look at me as another one. Difficult stuff. Have some kindness. And you gotta wonder who he is if he only had one lifetime.

If I Only Had A Heart....

Ok. Here's the first chapter. You can click on the link to read the rest of the book.



Dark Robes, Dark Brothers, by Hilarion


Chapter One
The Background

The purpose of this small booklet is to show the nature and the purpose of what has been called the Dark Brotherhood, and to discuss some of the techniques which they are permitted to utilize in order to draw human souls away from their purpose. The dark ones do not seek to cast any soul "into hell", as the popular religious notion has it. Rather, they act as testing agents for the race of man, as forces whose task it is to weed out from among the human flock the souls whose dedication, wisdom and insight are not developed enough to allow them to move forward into the higher ground of spiritual achievement. 

This can be compared to the effect of the wolf on a herd of caribou. Among the caribou are the old, the sick, the congenitally weak specimens. The wolf attacks only these defective caribou, and would never think of wasting its energy trying to chase or bring down healthy specimens. By weeding out the weaker ones, the wolf ensures that the herd remains strong. 

So it is with the Dark Brotherhood. They know that many human souls would not be taken in by their seductions, that many individuals can perceive clearly whenever attempts are made to draw them away from the light. But they know too that multitudes of incarnated individuals on the earth have allowed the attractions of pleasure and materialism to sway them, have permitted the negative emotions of hatred, resentment, grief, worry and self-pity to cloud their days. And it is against these stragglers that most of the Dark Brotherhood's efforts are directed. They can only influence those who allow them the necessary access, and they would not waste their energy on souls who remain firm in the truth. 

We will speak first about the origin of the entities which we call the Dark Brothers. The early phase of the human race is far different from that which is believed by scientists. Man thinks that he evolved upwardly from unicellular creatures which appeared in the primaeval swamps of a slowly cooling earth many hundreds of millions of years ago. It is true that a number of the simpler animal life-forms were allowed to develop through natural selection from such primitive beginnings, but we stress that the evolutionary process as outlined by Darwin and others is an extremely limited technique for the development of life-forms. Almost all of the forms that evolved through natural selection from unicellular creatures are now extinct, and those that have continued to the present are mainly of the lizard variety - all being cold-blooded creatures of relatively simple metabolism and with no prospect of ever evolving into forms capable of the emotional or mental experiences of man. 

By contrast, all warm-blooded life-forms on this planet have been "seeded" onto the surface of the planet and originate   in other parts of the galaxy. In many cases, specimens were deliberately brought to earth in space vehicles, and left to procreate on their own. This was the case for most of the early root-races of man, although in at least one case a root-race was developed on the earth itself by genetic engineers who were from another star-system, using certain techniques now recognized by man and called "cloning". 

We have digressed briefly in order to sketch the real beginnings of man on this planet, because it is important to realize that man has been the recipient of many additions and inputs from other levels and other parts of this galaxy. One of the most significant additions to humanity occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago, when entities from a higher plane - an astral one - came to the earth, took on certain - physical forms, and interbred with man as he then was. As a result of this miscegenation between the groups, a number of mutations occurred in the offspring, some times giving rise to creatures which would be looked upon now as quite fantastical. Among the mutations was one change which had extremely profound consequences for the human race: this was what Edgar Cayce referred to as the acquisition of the soul. To explain that concept, we must point out that, until this time of cross-breeding, the human group did not know death. This too will seem quite incredible to many readers, but it may help to understand that mankind then did not have the same dense corporeality as the animals did and still do. It was not necessary to go through an aging process similar to that which man now knows, because the bodies were capable of deriving from the ambience itself all the necessary energies to sustain life indefinitely. This was aided to a considerable extent by the -presence, in the atmosphere of the earth at the time, of a large quantity of the inert gas Xenon amounting to some 3% of the total. The rejuvenation of all bodies was also made possible by the fact that the human race was not then subject to the many negative emotional states which are now common. Greed, self-pity, hatred, anger, remorse - all of these were unknown. The damage which these negative emotions do to present physical bodies is incalculable. If man only understood that the aging and premature death now so prevalent is largely due to his negative emotions, he would surely make some attempt to stop them. But humanity has blinded itself to this truth, as to so many others. Most individuals think it is "right" to bear resentment against someone they believe has harmed them, that they ought to hate someone who hates them, and that they have every justification to feel sorry for themselves, or to worry excessively, or to grieve when parted from a loved one - never realizing that not a single positive effect can ever flow from such negative emotional states. For example, not only does hatred not harm or debilitate one's "enemy", it actually causes damage to the one doing the hating, while feeding strength to the opponent. The only way to disarm one's so-called enemy is to love him, for only in this way can the feud be sapped of the emotion that was feeding it. Without the negative feed-back, the enmity disappears for want of sustenance. So it is too with the other dark emotions: all of these harm the person harboring them; none of them produces any positive result whatever. 

Again we have digressed, but we did not wish to miss the opportunity to stress the true explanation of man's physical ills, in the hope that some readers of this small book will be encouraged to change the patterns of negativity and despair with which their lives are marked. We have said previously that one of the most significant results of the time of cross-breeding between man and the group which came to the earth from the astral planes was the acquisition by man of a soul. This requires a further explanation, relating to the idea of permanence. 

One of the qualities which is sought by all entities through the experience of incarnation on the physical plane is the ability to exist apart from any need for a body. This ability was not possessed by individual human beings at the epoch in question. It was a characteristic of the human family as a whole, but not of the individual fragments into which- the human life-stream had divided itself. In order to allow the individual fragments to acquire this quality of permanence without a physical body, there had first to be an experience of the body itself. By living for an extended period in a physical body (even one of less density than the present vehicle), the individual fragments of the human life-stream would learn to gather their essence, their uniqueness, around the body itself - in a sense to rectify their individual essence with reference to the physical body. It was intended that the human life-stream - which prior to its appearance on the earth as man was far more "amalgamated", far more homogenous and blended together than it is now - should learn through this initial phase to differentiate itself into separate but coherent individuals. Up until the time of the cross-breeding already mentioned, the process had not been completed. If the different fragments of the human life-stream had given up their physical bodies simultaneously, they would all have been drawn back together into a single unit of spirit-stuff, because they would not have acquired the necessary self-picture or self-realization to enable them to remain apart from each other. 

The matter can be compared to the physical substance, water. If a cup of water is tossed high into the air, it will disperse into thousands of individual droplets and come down to earth as a spray. But if all these droplets were again to be collected in another container, they would amalgamate into a single mass of water, and thus lose their individuality. 
However, if during the trajectory of rising and falling, a cold blast of air should suddenly freeze the individual droplets into particles of ice, then they would not merge together when again collected. It is a process comparable to that freezing into ice which was intended to take place for the human life-stream. 

The parallel can be carried a step further. The freezing of the droplets into ice particles causes them to become colder. In an analogous sense, the first effect of the "freezing" of individual human fragments was to make them emotionally colder toward each other. The warmth of emotional affection and love would have promoted a "melting" of the now more rigid self-ness of each individual, and there fore this had to be avoided until a stronger cast of individuality could be moulded. 

As the aeons passed, the individuality of each fragment did become stronger, but only in the last few thousands of years has it solidified - to the point where it is no longer dangerous to allow true love and affection to flower between members of the human family. That is why the major teaching of the most recent Way-Showers, including Jesus of Nazareth, has been that of Love for all. But we have got ahead of our story, for we have not explained in detail how the step of "freezing" the individual fragments of the human life-stream was accomplished. It is this process which has been called the "gift of the soul". 

When the cross-breeding between the human and the other group produced offspring with a parent in - each group, the offspring all had the one capability which human beings then lacked: the facility to remain focused and individualized without the aid of the physical body. This was due to the fact that the entities that ensiled the offspring were not part of the human life-stream, but rather were beings from another star system who had asked for and received permission to incarnate on the earth through the mutant bodies that were then created. 

For reasons which can now be explained, a decision was then taken by the guides of the human life-stream - to allow a speeding up of the individualizing process for human beings, to bring them quickly to the point where they could exist apart and separate from their physical bodies. One of the reasons was to allow the beginning of the reincarnation scheme, in which human entities would live repeated lives in different bodies and would sojourn in the astral realms between earthly lives. However, until each human entity became capable of retaining a separate existence   apart from the physical body, without allowing itself to be drawn back and absorbed by the life-stream as a whole, it was not possible to allow the death experience to begin. And of course, without death, rebirth into the physical level could not take place. 

The reason for wishing to initiate the death/rebirth pattern was related to the various effects which the astral group was having upon mankind, both during and after the cross-breeding. These entities were of many levels in terms of their understanding of the cosmic laws, and some of them were extremely base in vibration, motivated solely by selfish concerns. These latter proceeded to teach to the more innocent human group many techniques relating to the manipulation of others, hypnotism, and selfish pursuits - so that the original purity of mankind was rapidly becoming debased. It was recognized by humanity's guides that the only way to short-circuit this downward spiral which had been initiated by the astral group was to cut off the physical lives of men through death, to take them into the astral realms for higher teachings and a purging away of the dross of selfishness and materialism resulting from the physical existence just ended, and then to arrange for rebirth into the physical plane with the loss of complete memory regarding the earlier lives. 

Once the decision was taken, it remained to decide how the necessary additional individuating force could be applied to mankind. Because of the part which the fallen astral entities had played in the Temptation of man, it was decided that a portion of each of the ones who had engineered the debauchery would be removed from them, and then distributed among all of the human beings, in proportions which were just sufficient to allow each human entity to hold itself together as an independent unit. Although this distribution did succeed in bolstering the self-picture of humans to the necessary degree, it also had a negative effect: by incorporating into each human being a small part of one of the fallen beings, there was planted in each human a seed of negativity that could, unless purified and cleansed, lead to a downward spiral for that human entity. 

The plan was explained fully to the human group before it was implemented, and all human entities agreed. It was promised that, in order to compensate for the addition of the negative "seeds" to mankind, other members of the astral group ones that had not taken part in the cross breeding - would act as guides and guardians for human beings up until the end of the reincarnation arrangement. Among the astral beings whose vibrations were particularly low were several that could not be fragmented in the manner just described. They were the main instigators of the debauchery and the evil teachings that were conveyed to mankind, and for the part they played, the karmic burden was very heavy. These beings were allowed to "serve" the advancement of the human race in another way: by directing a Brotherhood whose duty it would be to try again and again to tempt man away from purity and spiritual advancement. The function of these entities would be to draw the weaker specimens off the path, so that those who remained strong could constitute a group of uniformly dedicated entities - who had passed through the tests of selfishness and materialism and had won. The Brotherhood is that which we have called the Dark Brotherhood. 

Although the worst of the fallen astral beings did not contribute fragments to the individuating of the human race, there were others whose vibrations were also extremely low, and who did contribute. There was then a problem as to how to decide which of the human group would receive these particularly dark fragments. It was realized that any who allowed such darkness into themselves ran a greater risk of failure because of the darkness within. It was decided   that any who volunteered to accept the darkest fragments   would be helped in two ways: 1) they would also receive a fragment from one of the astral beings who had not fallen and Who had remained pure, and 2) they would be given special help throughout their series of incarnations. 

There are still human beings on the earth now who were these special volunteers. They are generally those who appear to have more "essence" or "spirit" than others. Often they are responsible for the greatest good - and the greatest evil. Some among them lost the battle which they had assumed, and became the worst of men. Others succeeded, and became the best. 

The Black Brotherhood drew its members mainly from the astral entities who had fallen but some of them are souls who were originally human, who had received the powerful dark fragments along with the light, and who had allowed the temptations of materialism and selfishness to draw them into the downward spiral. They had enough unified essence (as a result of the extra contributions) to remain individualized even in the very difficult vibrations where the Dark Brotherhood are confined - an environment which most human souls could not bear. We have mentioned the confinement of the Dark Brother hood, and this will be explained in the next chapter.