Who Are the Rebel Angels and Why It Matters

It is a curious comment on the irrational aspect of human belief that of all the tyrants, mass-murderers, and sadists in recorded history, it has been Lucifer, Satan, and the rebel angels, who have consistently received the worst of religion's vilification. One doesn't have to be atheist to suggest there is something rather telling about this.

If this attitude continues into the future, monsters like Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin, will be mere footnotes in history before Christianity resolves the internal contradiction at the very core of its beliefs. Jesus Christ may have preached that loving one's enemies was the Godly way of resolving conflict, but the religion itself--as it has been taught and practiced--has seemed incapable of applying this counsel where it was most needed. If Christianity purports to be a religion of love, mercy and forgiveness, then scant love, mercy, or forgiveness, have ever been shown to their prime enemies, Lucifer, Satan, and the rebel angels. You'd have thought it would be where they would want to begin!

Of course, other religions, too, have their devils and their demons; Islam has its Shaitan; Zorastrianism, its Ahriman; and every dualistic cult and heresy has its own devil--some supernatural figure who stands in opposition to their God.

This paradox can be thought of as where monotheism collides with human nature. When there are a multiplicity of gods and goddesses in a belief system, the absolute evil of a Satan, or an Ahriman, becomes more broadly distributed. An individual divinity can have both positive and negative aspects, an advantage not extended to monotheism.

Since the human impulse to blame others, or to seek the one to blame in any situation, is an everyday experience, it's no surprise that a fictitious devil would have become the inevitable scapegoat to blame for the ills of the world. "After all," such people must think, "if we're not to blame for the mess we're in, then there must be something, or somebody, out there who has to be responsible."

A skeptic would be right in concluding that even if the devil didn't exist, it was in the nature of people to create one, as it was also in the nature of priests to use such a devil to terrify their flocks into compliance.

Thus these demonic figures in general can be best understood as representing the human struggle to reconcile emotionally the persistent presence of evil on a world believed to have been created by an all-powerful and all-loving God. It was precisely this terrible contradiction which led so many devout Jews and Christians to lose their faith after being unable to reconcile a loving omnipotent God with the reality  of Nazi concentration camps.

The "Devil," or devils, have very little to do with the personalities we know as Lucifer and Satan, or the even the rebel angels. Human beings are all too capable of genocidal brutality without any need for a devil to encourage them. Besides, Lucifer and Satan, as well as the rebel angels, have far more serious concerns regarding their own survival than with bothering to tempt human beings into wrongdoing.

Naturally, rational nonbelievers will dismiss demons and devils, along with any belief in God, as superstitious nonsense, and yet they would have to admit that these beliefs have an admirable staying power. If such beliefs are nonsense, then their persistence through so many millennia demonstrates at the very least, that they've had some continuing value as a coping mechanism for the emotional and psychic well-being of human beings. I can't think of any religious conviction so durable and widely-spread as belief in the supernatural forces of evil. In fact, it's more than possible it was the destructive forces of Nature--the "demons" of disease, of fire and flood--that originally impelled human beings to try to placate those demons, while simultaneously praying to the benevolent spirits for protection.

Because, of course, the rational nonbeliever is, at least, partially right--certainly about all these devils and demons.

A CONFUSION OF THOUGHTFORMS

As any savvy shaman knows, these so-called demons are actually thoughtforms. (1) They are products of the human creative imagination and fed by countless generations of emotionally-driven mentation. Thoughtforms are not spiritual entities; they are quasi-lifeforms that exist only in the astral regions of the collective human mental experience, as well as within an individual's inner life. Thoughtforms can also be very easily dissolved by submitting them to a burst of loving heart energy.

Since thoughtforms are generated and projected through human thought, it is these fear-impacted thoughtforms that can also become lodged within the subtle energy bodies of human beings. Anger, greed, and jealousy, are emotionally-driven thoughts that most human beings have felt during their lives. Intense anger, for example, directed at another person, will not only hurl a thoughtform that can lodge in the other person's subtle energy body, but will also have  contributed energy to the astral thoughtform of anger.

These are the demons a shaman will try to remove; the neuroses a psychoanalyst seeks to expose; they will be the "diseases" that magnetic healers take upon themselves; as they will be plaguing the nightmares of the guilty. These will be the so-called demons that have tortured the consciousnesses of schizophrenics and saints--their repressed fears of hell and their desires of the flesh manifesting as terrifying, or seductively tempting demons, as appropriate to their psychic condition.

This is absolutely central: Angels are not thoughtforms.

However, thoughtforms can appear as angels as much as they can appear as demons. True angels, on the other hand, are spiritual beings who exist at a different and far higher frequency than the astral realms: and there are no demons in the higher frequencies.

I believe this is basic to an understanding of the rebel angels as there's been so much confusion over the course of history between angels, demons, and thoughtforms. Consider the horrors of all those centuries of witch-burning; imagine living in constant fear of hellfire and eternal damnation; of growing up regularly terrified every Sunday by scheming preachers and their ghost stories; of being reminded daily of the imminence of evil and of Satan's irresistible temptations.  All these are qualities a later era would recognize as an appropriate ‘set and setting' for an entheogenic nightmare.

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG'S  MISDIRECTION

When the 17th century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg claimed he had observed "angels and devils" in his dreams and spiritual visions, he simply furthered this unfortunate confusion, adding his own stamp of approval to the delusion. With more experience, or with deeper knowledge, he would have understood that what he perceived in the astral realms were thoughtforms, and not angels and devils. 

No doubt Swedenborg believed he was reporting what he observed as an empirical scientist. He was a sincere man with a fine mind. Yet, with his former busy and successful life as an inventor and scientist; the intense religiosity of his times--he was born at the height of the European witch trials--and what seemed to have been a touch of religious mania; he would've been preconditioned subconsciously to project his own angels and demons--as thoughtforms--into the astral realms.

Emanuel Swedenborg's sudden awakening in his mid-fifties suggests he didn't have the basic esoteric knowledge to understand the difference between the astral (mental) realms of the collective human imagination, and the far higher, (spiritual) frequency-domains of the angels.

In our more secular time, belief in these so-called angels and demons has been rejected out of hand by many educated people, as a delusion we can all well do without. Yet, because of this perennial confusion between the mental and spiritual planes, and a general dismissal of the Inner Worlds and the significant role they play in human lives, many people unthinkingly blinker themselves from a far more fascinating and inspiring reality which is unfolding all around them.

This much I imagine most would broadly agree with, as spiritual practices and meditation for some and possibly an entheogenic revelation, or a near death experience for others, will have permitted more and more people an experiential understanding of the subtle inner realms.

A REBELLION AMONG THE ANGELS

However, now it gets a little more more complicated.

Let me say first, I am merely passing along one of the central issues which has emerged over the course of my thirty-year interspecies journey. If what I've found out turns out to be true, it will be sure to have profound and far-reaching implications. It is also not my point to persuade anyone to believe what I feel I've stumbled upon. I'm simply putting the concept out there with the understanding that if I am correct, the appropriate people will resonate with the truth of what I call The Return of the Rebel Angels. (2)

This is also not the place to attempt to convince anyone of the actual reality of angels. If someone doesn't know the truth by now, they will find out when they die. Angels are very real beings indeed, all with personal histories and existences independent of human beings. Yet they function within the Inner Worlds to which both species, angels and humans, have access.

If angels have remained a mystery, or if perhaps, they have appeared more likely to be merely projections of human consciousness, then I recommend exploring Ask Your Angels, (3) a book I wrote with two co-authors to help people make contact with their angels. However, a profound Near Death Experience, or, for the serious student, an openhearted consideration of The Urantia Book (4) can also serve as a helpful corrective measure.

An everyday knowledge of angels through direct inner experience is, in fact, the true spiritual heritage of all human beings. It is a heritage of which we would have been fully and personally aware had not this world been among the thirty-seven planets that have become subject to one of the most destabilizing of events to have occurred in the Inner Worlds. This was an uprising among the very angels whose function it was to oversee the spiritual growth and well-being of the human beings in their charge. It has been remembered in some esoteric traditions as The Lucifer Rebellion, and in others as The War in Heaven, and in a remarkable number of ancient or indigenous mythologies, as a profound planetary dislocation occurring in the distant past. Something terrible has happened, they all tend to report, way long ago, and it changed everything for life on Earth from that point onwards.

If this is an ancient racial memory of a rebellion among the angels, then that indeed would have been an event serious enough to have created lasting consequences. These effects will have rippled down through history as an unacknowledged context, a matrix within which generations of humans have lived out their lives, and which has directly resulted in the world we have today.

A rebellion among the angels over 200,000 years ago is obviously impossible to verify by any contemporary academic standards, so we have to approach it with our intuitions. (5) If an angelic rebellion has occurred and if it has made such a profound impact on life on this world, then it will be discernible to the wisdom of the heart. I'd suggest, therefore, if this is new territory to you, that any immediate judgment be withheld and allow the concept of the rebellion to settle in your emotional and spiritual intelligences.

If the concept I'm going to introduce resonates with you; if it also makes rational sense and serves to answer some of the questions raised by life on this world; if it touches your heart and sparks off an inner knowing, then I've no doubt you'll have the good sense to follow your intuition to discover your own part in this cosmic drama of redemption.

An angelic rebellion is a thoroughly complex affair and of course there are always two sides to any revolution. I consider the best description of the Lucifer Rebellion from the point of view of the authorities I've called MA (Multiverse Authorities) can be found in The Urantia Book. The tone of the papers in the book concerning the Lucifer Rebellion speak loudly as to just how outraged the authorities were at the actions of Lucifer and the rebels angels.

In 1981, when I first came across this description of the rebellion it all felt rather horrifyingly familiar. The reaction was strong enough to grab my attention and set me off on a journey of self-discovery to account for this uncomfortable familiarity. The focus of this journey has expanded over the years, building on what I've learned about the Lucifer Rebellion, but with particular relevance to what is happening right now on this planet. My interpretation of the angelic rebellion and its lasting impact forms one of the deeper themes that I recorded as a gradual awakening in the three books of my Adventures Among Spiritual Intelligences series. (6)            

In the Urantia model, Lucifer and Satan were the two angelic beaurocrats in charge of this System of a 1000 inhabited, or to be inhabited, planets. Of these, about 670 are currently populated with intelligent life. The Urantia Book tells us Earth in numbered 606 in this System. So, from our human point of view Lucifer and Satan can seem to be high angels, but in the larger context of an inhabited Multiverse, they were fairly junior functionaries.

The motives behind the revolution are too complex to go into here, but at the core of it was a call for greater freedom and individual autonomy for both angels and mortals. Not an appeal that any administration much appreciates.

Thus, the term Rebel Angels covers a broad category of those angels--seraphim and cherubim--who aligned themselves with Lucifer at the time of the angelic rebellion. These angels would have been functioning either on the headquarters planet of Lucifer's administration, as well as those serving on the 37 planets that took part in the rebellion. The Bible suggests it was one-third of the angels who fell from Heaven. This is an overstatement based on a fuzzy idea of what Heaven meant, but it does serve to indicate that it would have been a great many angels.

I have no reason to doubt The Urantia Book when it maintains that while it was these rebel angels who were removed from service soon after the rebellion, Lucifer and Satan were permitted to stay free to observe the consequences of their rebellion on the 37 planets remaining under their control. The book then talks of certain prison planets on which the rebel angels have been held since the rebellion, yet nothing else is said about those planets, or what has become of the rebels angels.

Whether or not the Earth is one such prison planet is never asserted, or even hinted at, in the book. If it was true, they'd be unlikely to tell us. Yet, the briefest of surveys of the quality of life on this world suggests some truth to the observation that: ‘If iron bars do not a prison make, they make a damn good substitute.'

However, the whereabouts of these prison planets is of less importance than it is to understand that the rebel angels were removed from service after the rebellion and that not a word has been heard of them after that.

WHO ARE THE REBEL ANGELS?

I place the final reconciliation of the Lucifer Rebellion as occurring in the early 1980s. This ended the long, 203,000 year interregnum, in which Lucifer's experiment was permitted to continue on those 37 planets.

So, one of the issues this event raised was what would now become of the rebel angels? Are they to be left to rot (immortality has its downside) on their prison worlds, no use to anyone? Is the knowledge they gained from following the path less traveled going to be of value to the Multiverse? Have they learned sufficiently from the consequences of their choice to align themselves with the rebellion? What might be considered an appropriate future destiny for the rebel angels? What would best allow them to fully experience the consequences of taking part in the Lucifer rebellion?

It was with this in my mind that 25 years ago I started my exploration of the rebel angels and what might have become of them. What I stumbled into was so startling and so counter to what we've all been led to believe about life on this world, that I needed those 25 years to travel around the world testing my revelation, before finally putting it out there in my most recent book.

Thus, to cut a long and complex story short, if I can paraphrase Pogo; "We have met the rebel angels and they are us!"

There is, of course, a great deal more to this statement than might at first be obvious. The most significant, perhaps, is that has to be considered a rarity in the Multiverse. Angels and humans are two different species. Humans don't become angels, and angels would probably prefer not to become humans. It is extremely unsettling for an angel to take on a mortal incarnation; like "trying to squeeze a rainbow into a coke bottle," so an angel once told me.

This leads to the second point: those I have called "incarnate rebel angels" are currently still a tiny proportion of the overall population of the planet. When I was most recently told the number it was approaching one hundred million out of a total of seven billion, but with the proviso of; "more coming in every day."

HOMO ANGELICUS

Now, before this gets all freaky and confused, these rebel angel incarnates are not the monsters someone like the fear-mongering Elizabeth Clare Prophet maintains. They aren't the fallen angels that Hollywood delights showing us raining havoc upon the world. Neither are incarnated rebel angels the Nephilim--they've long since come and gone, and they will not be returning!

In fact, most of these reincarnates have no idea of their true spiritual heritage. They are most unlikely to be aware they are actually angels who have chosen mortal incarnation, because what is spiritually important to them is that they fully occupy and experience their humanness. Even so, they will tend to be the outsiders and rebels; they are frequently the intuitives and sensitives; the new ones will be among the Indigo and Crystal children. Many angel incarnates will be naturally spiritually orientated, and yet not overtly religious; among these will be many of the rebel angels who have been coming into mortal incarnation in waves over these last 50 or 60 years.

However, what my 25-year survey has suggested is that incarnate rebel angels tend to grow up with the deep sense they are somehow very different from other people around them. In general,  incarnate rebel angels appear to have extremely difficult and challenging childhoods and adolescence. They will tend to the ones who rebel against norms that other people accept without question; they'll obstinately defy what they believe is unjust authority; they will break the rules they don't believe apply to them; they'll be unusually sensitive, or artistic; some may come to think it is either them, or the world that is crazy. Many have been made wrong by parents or teachers, or have been shamed into compliance at an early age. Yet they will still be living out their lives with a nagging sense they are different from normal people--and never quite knowing why!

Unless this distinction is understood in adulthood, a rebel angel's profound sense of difference will likely be repressed or denied, and the reincarnate will settle into an ordinary, but no doubt uncomfortable, mortal life.

In some cases, the sense of difference is so pressing that the individual feels she or he has no choice but to embark on a journey of self-discovery, if only to mitigate the confusion and psychic pain of the constant pretense of normality. A few, no doubt, will have developed ways of integrating their uniquely angelic sensibilities into their mortal lives, but they are still going to feel uncomfortably out-of-kilter with their colleagues.

However, whatever the state of each individual's self-awareness, it is to seek their redemption that the rebel angels have been given this opportunity to incarnate as mortals in these transformational times. It is because adopting a mortal incarnation is considered such a challenge, as well as a privilege, that most rebel angels have been left unaware of their angelic heritages.

Until recently this has been the case, but with the coming transformation so close upon us, it is time for incarnate rebel angels to wake up to who they truly are. It is not necessarily a pleasant awakening but it will move towards releasing deep psychic and emotional tensions, and it will allow the incarnated angels to function at a far higher and more effective level.

Being an incarnate rebel angel does not mean they are superior to normal human beings--they are simply different. Think of them perhaps more as experiments, as hybrids, as a new and different form of human being--as homo angelicus.

Whether what we have experienced on this planet for the last 203,000 years will be viewed ultimately as a cosmic drama, an interdimensional hybridization project, an experiment in freedom, or an interplanetary tragedy, the return of the rebel angels can now be welcomed with open hearts and minds.

Incarnate rebel angels now in human bodies and who are waking up to their true natures, will find themselves aligned in their enthusiasm to bring this long cosmic melodrama to its transcendent resolution.

In the end, we're all doomed to become perfect.

NOTES

1)      Leadbeater, C.W. with Annie Besant. Thoughtforms. IndoEuropeanpublishing.com  2010 (first published 1901)      

2)     Wyllie, Timothy.  The Return of the Rebel Angels. Rochester. Vt: Bear & Company. 2011

3)      Daniel, Alma, Andrew Ramer and Timothy Wyllie. Ask Your Angels: A Practical Guide to Working with the Messengers of Heaven to Empower and Enrich your Life. New York: Ballantine Books 1992 

4)     Urantia Foundation.  The Urantia Book. Chicago. Ill: The Urantia Foundation. 1955

5)      Wyllie, Timothy.  Dolphins, ETs & Angels. Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company 1993

6)     Wyllie, Timothy.  Adventures Among Spiritual Intelligences: Angels, Aliens, Dolphins & Shamans. Novato. California: Origin Press. 2001