Insight Editions · No. 385
Electrical Christianity
A Revolutionary Guide to Jesus' Teachings and Spiritual Enlightenment
L. Ron Gardner
If Jesus returned, he would teach Electrical Christianity: Holy Communion as a circuit in which plugged-in presence and self-emptying draw down the Holy Spirit and awaken the soul as Christ.
A study guide to Electrical Christianity by L. Ron Gardner. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
CORE CLAIM
The esoteric Eucharist works like Ohm's Law: plugged-in presence is the voltage, self-emptying lowers the resistance, and the Holy Spirit is the current that en-Light-ens the soul.
SCOPE
Fifteen Q&A chapters: the Eucharist, Trinity, baptism, communion, surrender, prayer and meditation, mysticism, reading lists, Kundalini, psychology, politics and the Aquarian age.
KEY FIGURES
Jesus, Meister Eckhart, Longchen Rabjam, Ramana Maharshi, Adi Da, J. Krishnamurti, Eckhart Tolle, Ken Wilber, Ayn Rand, Bernard McGinn.
BEST FOR
Contemplative Christians and cross-tradition meditators who want a concrete method for communion with the Holy Spirit, and can take a polemical tone.
What the book is. Electrical Christianity (2013, Vernal Point Publishing) is a book of questions and answers between L. Ron Gardner and his students, drawing in places on his earlier Beyond the Power of Now. Its opening provocation: if Jesus were alive today, he would teach Electrical Christianity, and the churches' "egregious sin" is that they don't teach communion with the Holy Spirit.
The central claim. The esoteric Eucharist, Holy Communion, works like a circuit governed by Ohm's Law (discovered in 1827): plugged-in presence is the voltage, perfect poverty lowers the ohms, and the pulled-down Holy Spirit is the amperage. Gardner calls this the Electrical Spiritual Paradigm (ESP) and invites readers to test it "in their own laboratory."
The foundation. Christianity is trinitarian: the Father is Being-Consciousness, the Holy Spirit His Light-energy, and the Son the soul awakened when the Spirit cuts the knot in the Sacred Heart-center, just right of the chest's centre. Baptism (the Spirit's descent, equal to Hindu Shaktipat) is the foundation, the Eucharist the crown.
The method. Chapters 3 to 8 give the practice in detail: whole-bodily presence, gazing into space, the enquiry "Avoiding relationship?", the prayer "Bless me," surrender in the context of communion, electrical pranayama, japa, and a lifestyle regime. Gardner reads the three monastic vows, the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25 as coded instructions for this practice.
The wider argument. The method is universal: Gardner finds it in Meister Eckhart, Longchen Rabjam's Dzogchen, Kashmir Shaivism, Adi Da and Krishnamurti, and proposes Electrical Zen and a fifth turning of the Buddhist wheel. Salvation comes through the Christ, the Self, not through Jesus the man.
The last three chapters turn outward: an "Integral Psyche-ology" that includes astrology and iridology (against Ken Wilber), a libertarian reading of Jesus' politics drawing on Ayn Rand and Ron Paul, and a prophecy that the Aquarian age will favour a Christianity of communion plus rational thought.
How to read it. Gardner warns he is no Dale Carnegie, and the tone confirms it. The spiritual chapters are a clear, practical manual; the political and astrological material is opinion that the Critical Lens boxes flag.
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The "Electrical" Eucharist | The Eucharist is the whole of Christianity, and it works like Ohm's Law |
| 2 | The Holy Trinity | The Spirit is the missing link; Son and Spirit unite in the Heart |
| 3 | Holy Baptism | Spirit-baptism is Shaktipat: fire first, then bliss |
| 4 | Holy Communion | Presence must be plugged in; Tolle misreads Matthew 25 |
| 5 | Holy Spirit Reception | Alternate presence and poverty; secondary practices; Grace is measured |
| 6 | Holy Surrender | Surrender is secondary until plugged in; the void is not God |
| 7 | The Sermon on the Mount | "If thine eye be single": the Sermon as a circuit diagram |
| 8 | Prayer and Meditation | Five instructions, "Bless me," japa, and a lifestyle regime |
| 9 | "See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me" | Salvation is through the Christ-Self; from relatedness to Being |
| 10 | The Essence of Christian Mysticism | Four stages, the Hermetic path, and how to explain it |
| 11 | Spiritual Literature | Read across traditions; Tomberg, McGinn, Ramana, Norbu |
| 12 | Electrical Flesh, Electrical Bones | Electrical Zen, Kundalini, the battery model, a fifth turning |
| 13 | Electrical Psychology | Freedom is already the case; astrology and iridology versus Wilber |
| 14 | The Spiritual Politics of Jesus | A libertarian Jesus against the Fed and both parties |
| 15 | Christianity in the Aquarian Age | Logic plus onto-logic, and an Electrical Dharma Revolution |
Chapter map
The "Electrical" Eucharist (The Radical Essence of Jesus' Teachings)
Being a Christian, Gardner argues, is not believing in Jesus but duplicating his realization, "I and the Father are One." The method is the one Jesus gave at the Last Supper, the Eucharist, and the clearest way to explain it is an electrical circuit.
The whole of Christianity. Gardner borrows his starting line from the nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi: "The whole of Christianity is the Eucharist." Properly understood, the Eucharist is the entire act of Holy Communion: connecting to the Divine Presence and receiving its Grace as Light-energy. The Greek word means "thankfulness," and a true devotee is always grateful for Grace. Gardner's complaint is that this, the core discipline of mystical Christianity, "has never been adequately explicated," and his book exists to supply the missing manual.
A caveat before the method. Technical instructions only put you in position to receive. Until you are baptized by the Spirit, you cannot practise true Holy Communion; once the Power descends, "instead of you meditating, God... meditates you."
- Sit upright, palms on thighs, or in a floor posture.
- Be whole-bodily present to the empty space in front of you: "feeling-occupy" the body and press against, or gaze into, the void.
- Anchor the body by touching attention to the hands and "third-eye" area.
- Return each time you notice the mind wander or yourself retract; ask "Avoiding relationship?" or simply pray for Grace.
- Yield when the connection "locks in" and becomes a felt pressure; the Spirit-current can then pour in.
- Rest. Once the Spirit strongly "touches" you, the void no longer needs attention.
The lamp and the socket. Your bodymind is a lamp; consciously plugged into the Divine Socket, it lets the Spirit-current flow through and "save" you from primal sin, which is estrangement from God. The Presence and its Power are one, like fire and its flames, but you are en-Light-ened by the Power, so the practice shifts from concentration on the Presence to receptive feeling-connection with the Spirit. The technique is "an art as well as a science": you may adjust it like a baseball hitter relaxing and repositioning at the plate, but communion remains only communion.
| Element | Surface meaning | Gardner's reading |
|---|---|---|
| Bread broken | The body must be sacrificed | An invisible Truth Body (Dharmakaya) underlies form |
| Wine in an empty cup | Christ's blood | Empty yourself to be filled with the Holy Spirit (Sambhogakaya) |
| Yeast and fermentation | Food and drink | The enzymatic transformation of the disciple |
| Transubstantiation | Doctrine of the Real Presence | Offer yourself so the Master Alchemist can divinize you |
The Last Supper read esoterically
Baptism by the Spirit
Without Spirit-baptism you can be "only a believer, not a true disciple." The Spirit, Holy "Water" from above, pours down and fills the bodymind with flowing Energy. If a few months of practice, at two half-hour sessions a day, bring nothing, try the concentration exercises later in the book.
- More voltage. Single-pointed concentration: "If thine eye be single, thy whole body will be filled with Light."
- Celibacy, or much less sex. "Not about morality; it's about energy": conserved life-energy turns into concentrative power.
- An imitation of Christ's forty days. A weekend retreat with sparse eating and near-nonstop prayer, study and meditation.
Poverty in the Spirit
When the Spirit enters, relax the body and let go of the mind: "Be as if dead: empty and effortless." The Spirit's pressure lets you feel your own resistance, and the only intelligent response is to release it. "The meek shall inherit the Earth" means that those who practise this poverty will, through the Blessing they radiate, become humanity's Saving Grace.
The dialectic. Receiving "mediates" the other two: it means letting go of psychic content while holding on to the context of connection. Sometimes stress the pole of presence, sometimes the pole of poverty; when the current is strong, drop both and rest.
- Ohm's Law: current is proportional to electromotive force and inversely proportional to resistance (V = I × R).
- Eucharistic version: C = I × R, where C is communion (connected consciousness), I the intensity of the Spirit-current, R ego-resistance.
- So: the Holy Spirit is the amperage, Holy Communion the voltage, ego the ohms.
Gardner states plainly that no one can prove or disprove that Ohm's Law applies to Spirit; he offers it as a "nonpareil metaphor" confirmed in his own experience. Mainstream sacramental theology would also object to reducing the Eucharist to a meditation technique: for Catholic and Orthodox Christians it is first a communal rite and a gift received, not a method performed.
The Holy Trinity (The Triadic "Structure" of Reality)
Gardner says he could not have understood the Trinity without Kashmir Shaivism, Dzogchen and Daism. His thesis: the Holy Spirit is the "missing link" between the Father and the Son, and the Trinity is solved only when Spirit and soul unite in the Sacred Heart-center.
The three Persons. The Father is Divine Being-Consciousness, omnipresent (radiant Space) and omnipotent (Spirit-energy). The Son is the disciple's own Self- or Buddha-nature, the same Presence as the Father's, but unrealized until the Father's Power blesses it. The Holy Spirit is the Father's dynamic Power, counted as a separate Person only to distinguish it from His static Presence. Reality is a Monad, best grasped triadically.
The Heart-center. When the descending Spirit-current cuts the knot in the Heart-center, just to the right of the centre of the chest, the soul is illumined and the disciple awakens as a Christ. Gardner follows Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950): thoughts are seed-tendencies (samskaras) stored in the Heart that "sprout" up a subtle channel to the brain. The brain is the mind's organ; the soul lives in the Heart.
| Christian | Kashmir Shaivism | Vajrayana / Dzogchen |
|---|---|---|
| Father (Being) | Sat, Siva-Shakti | Dharmakaya |
| Holy Spirit (Virgin Mother) | Shakti | Sambhogakaya |
| Son (en-Light-ened soul) | Siva realized by the jiva | Nirmanakaya freed |
| son (unawakened soul) | jiva, contracted Siva | nirmanakaya, contracted soul |
One triad, three traditions
Son-Spirit = Father. As Siva plus Shakti equals Sat, so the Son united with the Spirit realizes the Father. Hence "the only way to the Father is through the Son," but the Son does not emerge until the soul is divinized. Catholic theology calls the Trinity a Mystery, graspable only by Revelation; Gardner says the Revelation is exactly that union in the Heart.
The subject (soul) must become one with the Object (Light-energy) to recognize itself as the Subject (Self) that was always one with it. The ever-united Subject-Object is the Father.
Gardner reads Mary symbolically. The Holy Spirit is the "Virgin" because it is pure Light-energy untouched by mind, and the "Mother" because it gives birth to the Son in each soul. The Immaculate Conception then describes the soul's rebirth from above, not a historical biology lesson.
Why it stayed a mystery. Consciousness can never see itself as an object; it beholds itself only in its own Light, which requires the Light to pierce the Heart-knot. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) risked torture for hinting at Christ-like identity, so no one wrote it plainly, and the Church's two cardinal sacraments, Baptism and the Eucharist, lost their meaning as descent of Power and union with it.
Orthodox theology holds the Son to be uniquely incarnate in Jesus and the soul to be adopted, not identical with God. Gardner's "every disciple can become the Son" is closer to Advaita and tantra than to the creeds, as he admits when he calls it "the height of apostasy."
Holy Baptism (Spirit-Initiation)
Spirit-baptism is Shaktipat, the descent of Divine Power. It is the foundation the Eucharist stands on, and it often arrives as fire before it becomes bliss.
Is a guru needed? It depends. Many yogis awaken unaided, but Grace flowing through a master, John the Baptist for example, can trigger it, and so can empowered sites such as temples and holy burial grounds. For the guru-shy, the best method is the one with the most "voltage," Holy Communion, ideally practised in a group or a sacred church, because "in a gross secular environment" invoking the Divine is much harder.
What it feels like. It depends on karma: a light touch, or Power that seems to "crash down." Usually a pressure in the head, especially the third eye, sometimes with jerking or shaking.
| Stage | Classical term | Keating's term | Electrical meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before baptism | Acquired contemplation | Centering prayer | Building the circuit, no power yet |
| After baptism | Infused contemplation | Contemplative prayer | Current flowing; the Eucharist becomes real |
Two stages of contemplation
Bernard McGinn calls baptism the "foundation" and the Eucharist the "crown": a lamp's circuitry (Ohm's Law, the Eucharist) means nothing until the lamp is plugged into a source (baptism). Gardner recommends Thomas Keating's Open Mind, Open Heart as the best introduction.
- A pressure or current felt descending from above the head, especially at the brow.
- Spontaneous movements (kriyas), heat, or tears that you are not producing.
- Practice shifts from effort to reception: the circuit now carries current by itself.
- The Eucharist stops being an idea and becomes a felt event.
Water and Fire. Water baptism symbolizes the washing away of primal sin, separation from God; in mainstream churches it is "merely ceremonial." The Spirit is also the Baptist Fire: sins are "fried" in its heat, and the disciple must pass through purgatorial fire before resting in Ambrosia. "The Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11:12).
Why doesn't the Church teach this? Gardner blames a "dumbed-down, de-esotericized" society: the State preaches "statism," the Church "churchianity," and media and corporations form a Matrix that caps freedom and spiritual verticality. His prescription: "Take the Shakti pill, and wash it down with Holy Water from above."
The political turn here is abrupt and polemical ("brain-dead bureaucrats," "neo-Marxist, Mafia-like government"). It anticipates Chapter 14 but rests on assertion, not argument, and the Shaktipat-baptism equation is Gardner's comparison, not a doctrine either tradition teaches.
Holy Communion (Plugged-in Presence)
Presence is not enough; it must be plugged in. Gardner sets his method against Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, which, he notes, never mentions the Holy Spirit, and defines communion as presence plus oneness.
Three replies to Tolle. First, real spirituality is plugged-in presence: presence + oneness = communion, relationship, at-one-ment. Second, a book called The Power of Now says nothing of the Power of the Now, the Holy Spirit, even when it discusses Jesus. Third, a "plastic, pop, celebrity-driven culture" (with help from Oprah) turns such teachers into superstars, whom Gardner calls "snake oil salesmen in drag." His full case is in his earlier book, Beyond the Power of Now.
The root sin. An unplugged lamp gives no light. The primal human sin is ignoring God: the ego is "the moment-to-moment activity of ignoring, or avoiding, at-one-ment with the Spirit." You atone by reassuming the holistic asana of relationship.
| Vow | Meaning in Holy Communion |
|---|---|
| Obedience | Radical "under-standing": stand directly under the Spirit and let it pour down |
| Chastity | Abide in the pure, "virgin" Light; retracting from it makes you a "sinner" |
| Poverty | Self-emptying; become a holy chalice to be filled |
The three monastic vows as one practice
The Secret Book of John, the main Gnostic text, says it in one line: "[He] stood in the Spirit's presence, and it was poured upon him."
Break on through
The non-conformist objection. A student wants freedom, not obedience to a Deity. Gardner replies that everything you do makes karma, so you cannot free yourself; the real non-conformist is the one in a thousand who turns to God, while the other 999 are "brainwashed conformists" who believe in soul independence.
Positioning, not doing. Communion is not an act of self-liberation but positioning yourself so God can free you. Direct, unqualified relationship generates all the voltage needed. The yogi feels he must cut through mind-forms, but by assuming the posture of presence he has already "leapt over" them. Hui Hai: "Straightforwardness is the Holy Place." Gardner enlists Blind Faith ("live in the Presence of the Lord") and the Doors ("Break on Through").
Tolle's reading. Oil is consciousness, the bridegroom is the Now, the feast is enlightenment; stay alert or miss it.
Gardner's reading. "I'd flunk him." Citing Stanley Horton's What the Bible Says About the Holy Spirit, oil is the Holy Spirit; the bridegroom is the Son of Man, as Matthew says (the Now cannot be missed, being ever-present); and there is a wedding, the union of virgin Spirit and Son. The foolish virgins are practitioners of mere presence whose lamps die for lack of Shakti.
Truth. Alert presence, witnessing. Tolle's teaching, worshipping God in truth only.
Spirit. Receiving the Holy Spirit, "the power of Now." Acts 1:8: the Spirit's power is what makes us witnesses.
Medicine for the drunken monkey
The wandering mind is every unenlightened being's problem; we are all prodigal sons. Krishna's advice in the Bhagavad Gita, "Set your mind on me and fight," means: as soon as you notice wandering, resolutely reassume relationship. When the space in front of you "dances," you are present to shining Presence; when its Power cuts the Heart-knot, you are present as Presence. The Spirit's "Sober Intoxication" displaces toxic mind-forms, which makes a true disciple a fundamental "Methodist."
Gardner's attack on Tolle is fair on its central point, since The Power of Now does not discuss the Holy Spirit. The insults ("snake oil," "pabulum") are not arguments, and Tolle's own framework treats stillness as already the presence of God, so the two men partly disagree about words rather than practice.
Holy Spirit Reception (Pulled-down Power)
If communion is presence plus oneness, reception is presence plus poverty. The art of practice is the "skillful means" of balancing the two so that you conduct the maximum Spirit-power.
Yin and yang. When the Spirit touches you, you can passively yield to its "Invasion" or actively seek to unite with it; Gardner's frank image is the vagina and the phallus. Yielding is poverty, uniting is presence; the pressure of presence "awakens" the Spirit, and self-emptying gives it an opening.
- Be directly present to the void (or to the Spirit, if awakened).
- When the connection's pressure becomes uncomfortable, let go totally and let the Spirit penetrate.
- When letting go becomes burdensome, revert to presence.
- After baptism, the two merge into the single act of conducting the current: tacitly present while releasing resistance.
- In samadhi, stop exercising; resume as soon as absorption is lost.
This is the spiritual version of alternately raising voltage and lowering ohms. Before baptism it still moves energy in the body.
Secondary practices
These serve the primary practices and are matters of skillful means:
- Devotion. Powerful but secondary, because it depends on mind and emotion and can only be practised "spasmodically." It warms an otherwise dry gnostic communion. Catalysts: religious art, Pachelbel's Canon, Paul Horn's Inside the Taj Mahal, the Bible or the Gita.
- Electrical pranayama. Be in direct relationship to the breath. Following Walter Russell (1871-1963), inbreath charges (voltage) and outbreath discharges (amperage); breathe fully down to the navel and empty both lungs and mind.
- Tai chi and qigong, or anything that helps you connect.
Pranic energy. Exercises you perform: they energize the body and quiet the mind. Preliminaries.
The Baptist Fire. Performed on you by the Deity. It "literally crashes down," rocking the body with kriyas.
Mother or lover? Matthew 1:18 makes Jesus "a child of the Holy Spirit," while the Song of Songs makes the Spirit a bride. To avoid an "Oedipus complex," treat the Spirit as God's Energy, imagined however helps: grammatically it is masculine in Latin (Spiritus), feminine in Hebrew (Ruach HaKodesh), neuter in Greek (Pneuma).
Fire before Light
Before Light can shine through you, Fire must burn through your resistance: knots (chakras) in the subtle body and buried psychic content. Christians call this purgatory; yogis call it tapas; in India a perfect master is "fully cooked." In Kashmir Shaivism the violence of the Shakti signals the yogi's potential.
- Is Grace measured out? Yes, or yogis "would be fried alive." John 3:34 in older King James editions says God gives the Spirit without measure "unto Him", meaning Jesus.
- Is Grace ungraceful? Never; your resistance is ungraceful.
- The Dark Night of the Soul? Adi Da (1939-2008): "just Narcissus," the soul avoiding the Light.
- Suffering? Every state is a contraction; only Grace removes the root. All other solutions are remedial.
- Head pressure? Probably the Spirit pressing at the ajna door. Relax the head; if the pressure grows, it is the Spirit. Ramana's head bobbed in samadhi. Adi Da: the Lord "doesn't send down a grinning photograph; he takes you by the neck."
The claim that intense, violent experience marks spiritual potential is a teaching of some Shaivite and Pentecostal circles, but many contemplative traditions (the Carmelites, Theravada teachers) warn against prizing dramatic phenomena. Head pressure and jerking also have non-spiritual causes, which a practitioner should rule out.
Holy Surrender (Perfect Poverty)
A student proposes that spiritual life reduces to surrender. Gardner says the single principle is consciously abiding in the Spirit, which needs both communion and letting go, and that surrender is secondary until you are plugged in.
Try it for several days. Practise nothing but moment-to-moment letting go, he suggests, and you will find it "an arduous task that never ends." Poverty outside communion is not holistic. Random total letting go is still worth doing; it just cannot carry a Spirit-full life.
Communion has primacy over surrender, because without its conscious force letting go "has little spiritual significance"; but once you are plugged in, the two are equal, because by Ohm's Law voltage and resistance affect current equally.
Where they meet. Practise surrender in place, inside communion. Once you lock in to the current, communion and surrender merge into one principle, conscious resting in Light-energy. When that becomes constant, you have Divine Union. "The cosmos is built on Consciousness, not on surrender."
Is the void God?
There is no ineffable Nothingness beyond the Godhead. The universe did not come ex nihilo; before the Big Bang (about 14 billion years ago) Consciousness-Energy existed as pure potential. Nothingness is a zero with no ontological status; even a lab vacuum still holds particles and energy. Mystics call the Divine a Vacuum-Plenum because emptying the mind floods it with energy, but "Presence is the absolute Context; emptiness is merely the relative lack of content."
Eckhart on poverty: "wanting nothing, knowing nothing, and having nothing." That is the ohms pole, a means to make a Eucharistic chalice, not an end. To equate God with emptiness is "a grievous spiritual error."
Surrender alone. Moment-to-moment letting go with no connection: arduous, endless, and spiritually thin.
Surrender in place. Letting go inside communion: the Spirit fills the space you open, and the two acts merge.
| Function | What it does |
|---|---|
| Object of meditation | Gazing into space (a Dzogchen practice) leads to empowered communion; space is curved by gravity, so it is not "nothing" |
| Voiding of mind | Makes inner room for the Spirit's invasion |
| Status | A gateway to the Absolute, not the Absolute |
Two jobs for emptiness
Will the meek inherit the Earth?
Gardner jokes that they will if scientists bioengineer "a docile cockroach." The international banking cartel runs the planet and the Federal Reserve prints fiat money; Lao Tzu's sage governing by non-action has given way to Chinese "state capitalists." A gentler reading: the meek inherit Grace, the only lasting wealth. Wayne Jackson (Christian Courier) notes that praus, "meek," meant "strength brought under control," a horse tamed to the bridle. For Gardner the tamed horse is the wild Shakti, so the meek are powerful, Spirit-full disciples.
This section leans on conspiracy material (the New World Order, RFID chip implants, the Bilderberg Group) and recommends Molyneux, Rothbard, G. Edward Griffin and Daniel Estulin. These are contested or fringe sources; the spiritual argument about praus stands without them, and readers should treat the political claims as opinion.
The Essence of the Sermon on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is where the electrical nature of Jesus' teaching shows most clearly: connect to God by one-pointed presence or prayer, then let His Power save you.
| Verse | Text | Gardner's reading |
|---|---|---|
| Matthew 6:22 | "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light" | One-pointed presence (voltage) pulls down the Spirit (amperage) |
| Matthew 7:7 | "Ask... seek... knock" | Prayer for Grace locks you in to the Holy One |
| Matthew 6:28 | "The lilies... neither toil nor spin" | Effortless letting go (ohms reduction) |
| Matthew 5:3 | "Blessed be the poor in spirit" | Poverty inside communion leads to eternal rest |
| Matthew 6:5-13 | The Model Prayer | Call on God and let His Power deliver you |
The Sermon read electrically
Judgment. Before the eye is single, judgment usually obstructs practice; once you are established in pure presence, it no longer binds you: "first cast out the beam of thine own eye" (Matthew 7:5). Even "Judge not, that ye be not judged" (7:1) allows judging, Gardner says, if you accept being judged back.
"The Truth will set you free, not Jesus or Buddha." Their teachings are maps, not the Territory; test them against your own experience, as long as your compass points to Truth and not to whim. Truth is recognition of Reality, Consciousness-Power (Father-Holy Spirit); "Jesus was the man, and the Christ is the Consciousness that he realized."
The rock. Building on the rock means building on the Eucharist. Jesus' moral injunctions (turn the other cheek, love enemies, give in secret) have a yogic basis because they free attention and energy for communion. But many saints never awaken to the Spirit while many "sinners" do; India's left-handed tantrics deliberately break conventions to stir the Shakti. So the real rock is Spirit Communion itself.
- Keep rational morality: no killing, stealing or lying.
- Drop "antiquated and cockamamie" injunctions such as stoning Sabbath-breakers.
- Compare Christian ethics with Buddhist ethics and Ayn Rand's Objectivism.
Reading the Sermon as a meditation manual is an esoteric overlay. Most New Testament scholars read Matthew 6:22 through the Jewish idiom of the "good eye" (generosity) and the Beatitudes as an ethic of the Kingdom, which Gardner subordinates to technique.
Prayer and Meditation (Aligning Yourself with the Divine)
The book's most practical chapter. Prayer done one-pointedly is meditation, and both are "positioning" yourself to receive Grace. Gardner repeats his instructions in a new form, adds True Prayer, repetitive prayer and japa, ways to vanish the mind, and a full lifestyle regime.
Prayer and meditation are one. True prayer is not begging for favours; it is intently asking God for His Grace, which is His Will: in essence, "Thy Will be done," then letting Light irradiate the body. Real meditation is Relationship, whole-bodily oneness with the Holy One.
- Sit upright; tucking the chin straightens the spine. Chair edge, chair back, or a zafu on the floor.
- Self-possession (the Buddha's term): feel and be present as the whole body; touch attention to the third eye and hands to heal the bodymind split.
- Gaze into empty space; use "Avoiding relationship?" when you notice retraction. When the void "shines," it is Presence; when its Power descends, emptiness has become Spirit.
- Relate to the breath until it comes alive as prana-shakti; it becomes infused communion when prana-shakti turns into the descending Holy Spirit.
- Relax totally and let go of mind: be an empty cup; stay motivelessly present to the downpour and merge with it.
No practice is holy in itself; only the Holy One is. Real meditation = real Christianity = real yoga: uniting soul with Spirit. When the "two vines" are permanently joined, the yogi awakens as Conscious Light: Enlightenment to Hindus, Nirvana to Buddhists, Heaven to Christians.
Meister Eckhart (via McGinn's The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart): breaking through (plugging in), detaching (poverty), birthing (becoming Christ-like by the Spirit).
Longchen Rabjam (The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding): spontaneous presence + oneness (voltage), openness (ohms), ineffability of "dynamic energy" (amperage). Reading it, Gardner "nearly fell off my chair."
He also credits Krishnamurti and Adi Da, and equates Rabjam's trekcho (cutting through) and togal ("relaxing in the continuum of radiance") with the two halves of Electrical spirituality.
True Prayer
First self-possess (a "feeling flash"), then position yourself before the open space, silently ask God to bless you, and wait. Gardner just says "Bless me." The "Bless me" prayer is the yin, a receptive portal; the "Avoiding relationship?" enquiry is the yang, a connective one.
Try repetitive prayer or japa, with prayer beads to bring the hands into practice:
- The Way of a Pilgrim: a nineteenth-century peasant's ceaseless Jesus Prayer.
- The Essential Swami Ramdas: realization through Om Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram.
Keys: one-pointed repetition and a devotional mindset; when it leads into the Spirit or becomes oppressive, let go.
Vanishing the mind
The Spirit's Light outshines thought; lose the connection and the thoughts return, often feeling worse because you are more sensitive. Short of communion, use prayer, japa and object meditation. Advanced yogis can watch the mind (you cannot be watcher and thinker at once), disidentify, or, tantrically, let thoughts self-liberate. All demand effort, so results are "spasmodic." The aim is not to destroy the mind but to rest in the Light-energy continuum; abiding there effortlessly is Nirvana.
| Area | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Energy practices | Tai chi, qigong, Jin Shin Jyutsu, Reiki |
| Food | Small, simple meals; Herbert Shelton's Food Combining Made Easy; avoid acid or sugar with starch |
| Stimulants | Cut spices (garlic, onion, pepper), caffeine, alcohol; pot "fogs the brain for up to a month" |
| Sex | Less is better; stop masturbation, which drains subtle life-force |
| Diet type | Against vegetarianism and veganism; favours Cordain's The Paleo Diet and Vasant Lad's Ayurveda |
| Space | A home temple, a bodhimandala; Swami Sivananda kept his under lock and key |
| Timing | Several short sessions a day; extend when Shakti is strong; intensify at full moons |
| Gunas | Sattva: meditate; Rajas: act; Tamas: rest |
Gardner's lifestyle advice
No commitment required. God won't punish a "bad boy" who gets drunk; you just punish yourself with less free attention. Practice comes first and purification grows alongside it. Gardner admits to "a couple of double espressos daily" and fine scotch: once practice is strong, "real spiritual life isn't about becoming a dry puritan."
The diet section mixes personal history (his own early-1970s raw vegan years) with health claims, such as an "optimal 2/1 alkaline/acid ratio" and vegetarian "alkalosis," that mainstream nutrition science does not support. The full-moon advice is astrological. Treat this part as one practitioner's regime, not evidence.
"See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me"
Where does Jesus fit? Gardner's answer, framed by the Who's rock opera Tommy, is that salvation runs through the Christ, the Self-nature, not through Jesus the man, and that God can be touched, felt and seen directly.
Deaf, dumb and blind. Tommy, the pinball wizard, cannot hear of Jesus or accept him, yet finds salvation, because salvation "has nothing to do with Jesus," an Avataric messenger of the Good News. "The Way to the Father is through Me" means through the Christ, which any person can realize by renouncing the root-ego and letting the Spirit divinize him.
"No, you don't." You have a relationship with a mental image built from childhood pictures and church belief, which Gardner compares, crudely, to a man's "relationship" with an Internet porn star. Images can still lead into formless communion. His standing reply to evangelists: introduce me to Jesus and "I'll worship him."
Sensing God
- Touching God: contacting the Spirit, felt as presence (radiant stillness), pressure (especially in the head), and power (a pull down the frontal line of the body).
- Seeing the Light: beholding God's radiant Splendor.
Radical nondual mystics say these are experiences of God's theophany, not of God, because anything over against you is dual. "Seeing God" in the strict sense happens when the Spirit-current reaches the Heart-center and the yogi simply inheres as the Seer, Christ-Consciousness coessential with the Father.
| Before Heart-release | After Heart-release |
|---|---|
| Shakti felt as an object, apart from oneself | Siva and Shakti united in the Heart |
| One contracted feeling after another | The uncontracted Feeling of Being |
| Blissful relatedness, intermittent | Beatitude, permanent |
| Present to Presence | Present as Presence |
From relatedness to Being
Feeling is not a sense. Feeling and "seeing" (understanding) are the soul's two non-sensory functions. Consciousness is the "sixth sense" the five depend on; it was never born and never dies. Krishnamurti: "To be [unqualifiedly] related is to be." Practically: gaze into space until the void "dances" as Shakti, keep the connection, and let the boundary dissolve so relatedness becomes Being. That temporary union of the "two vines" is absolution.
Faith without experience is blind. Real faith follows contact with the Spirit; only the baptized can have it. Faith-based fanaticism produced conversion by the sword; stressing communion over exclusive belief would help end such violence.
The claim that "Jesus" is unnecessary to salvation sets Gardner outside every creedal church; he says so openly. His porn analogy is meant to shock. A charitable reader will note that Christian contemplatives such as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing also teach going beyond images of Christ, but within, not against, devotion to him.
The Essence of Christian Mysticism
A summary of the Heavenly Way, followed by three variations: the Christian Hermeticist's path, how to explain mysticism to a conventional believer, and how to reach a psychedelic teenager.
The way in brief. The mystic seeks to duplicate "I and the Father are one" by the Eucharist. The three vows are the method: radical obedience (reconnect the instant you notice disconnection), radical chastity ("embracing the bosom" of the Virgin Mother rather than carnality), radical poverty (become a holy chalice).
Why "identity" was left out. Christian mysticism grew up inside the Church, where claiming consubstantiality with the Father was reserved for Jesus; a mystic who hinted at it "risked serious consequences." Identity is not higher than union, only its spontaneous recognition.
Obedience keeps you plugged in, chastity keeps you resting in the pure Light, and poverty keeps the chalice empty. Practised together they are the whole Heavenly Way.
The Christian Hermeticist
Hermeticists combine Christianity with the occult writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Gardner calls Valentin Tomberg's (1900-1973) Meditations on the Tarot "magisterial."
- Mysticism begins with baptism: Holy Water, then intoxicating Wine, finally Holy Blood, the Elixir.
- Gnosis + philosophy, powered by the Elixir, equal the philosopher's stone.
- Sacred magic blends Divine Will with personal will to heal self and others, like tantra.
- The Grail. When the Blood cuts the Gordian Knot of the Heart, the Chalice overflows.
Explaining it to others
| Audience | Approach |
|---|---|
| Conventional believer | Decode familiar words: sin = falling from Grace; atonement = at-one-ment; baptism = first contact; confirmation = repeated contact; constant Sanctifying Grace = Christhood |
| God-fearing fundamentalist | Escalate "Bad News/Good News": perdition (Satan's "outhouse") versus the Lord's "Penthouse" |
| Scholarly Christian | Use Greek: henosis via katharsis, kenosis, theosis, perichoresis; pleasure < joy < bliss < Beatitude |
| Psychedelic teenager | Give him Ram Dass's Be Here Now; skip "Churchianity"; teach a theurgical way to pull down Clear Light, then reveal that the Soma is the Holy Spirit |
Three audiences, three pitches
The teenager pitch states the book's thesis in miniature: the essence of Christian mysticism, the Eucharist, is "the essence of all genuine religion," uniting individual consciousness with infinite Spirit. Gardner adds that Be Here Now launched his own "journey to the East" forty years earlier.
The four-stage scheme is standard (purgative, illuminative, unitive), but treating "identity" as suppressed doctrine is an inference. Many mystics, such as John of the Cross, describe union as participation in God, not identity, for theological reasons and not only out of fear of the Church.
Spiritual Literature: A Cognizant Overview
After forty years of reading, Gardner argues that Christian mystics gain most by reading other traditions, because each draws its own map to the same "Holy Land." His picks are frank and opinionated.
| Tradition | Book | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Christian (first choice) | Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot | The perennial philosophy "through the eyes of a sagely Catholic mystic" |
| Christian (scholarly) | Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism | Read three times; for intellectual readers |
| Christian (classic) | Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (1911) | The standard general text |
| Christian (sermons) | The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart | "A Zen master disguised as a fourteenth-century Dominican"; about $100 |
| Kashmir Shaivism | Deba Brata SenSharma, The Philosophy of Sadhana | Its practice is "virtually identical to the esoteric Eucharist" |
| Advaita | David Godman, Be As You Are | Ramana Maharshi, his favourite Indian guru |
| Raja Yoga | Prabhavananda and Isherwood, How to Know God; then Hariharananda Aranya | Basic principles of meditation |
| Dzogchen | Namkhai Norbu, The Cycle of Day and Night; Rabjam, Way of Abiding | Buddhism's highest teaching |
| Buddhism | F.L. Woodward, Some Sayings of the Buddha; John Blofeld, Huang Po | Best general text; "the premier Zen book" |
| Daism | Adi Da, The Knee of Listening, The Hridaya Rosary, The Pneumaton | "Somewhat derivative" but profound |
| Free thinkers | Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom; Peikoff, Objectivism | A mystic and an "atheistic anti-mystic," both iconoclasts |
Gardner's core reading list for Christian mystics
Also liked. Ethan Walker's The Mystic Christ (love-oriented), Richard Smoley's Inner Christianity (gnostic), McGinn's Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism (an anthology for deciding whom to study next). For centering prayer: Thomas Keating and Carl McColman's Big Book of Christian Mysticism, which shows Ken Wilber's influence.
Gardner is Jewish by birth and wishes he could recommend a great book on Jewish mysticism, but has found none. Scholem's Major Trends is fine scholarship but below McGinn; Moshe Idel's Kabbalah is academic; the Zohar "has been identified as inauthentic" and is weaker than the Gita. He lists Scholem and Aryeh Kaplan's Jewish Meditation.
Because its Sefirotic Tree of Life maps creation, Jewish mysticism could become "the most integral" school, but only when a sage arrives who can read the map from both the highest mystical and the deepest occult viewpoints.
The rule. Read deeply in the traditions that move you, and at least sample the top texts of the others.
The Zohar's authorship (attributed to Shimon bar Yochai, but most scholars, following Scholem, credit Moses de Leon in thirteenth-century Spain) is a dating question; calling it a "forgery" does not settle its spiritual value, which many Jewish mystics regard as foundational.
Electrical Flesh, Electrical Bones
A Zen practitioner asks for an energetic account of meditation. Gardner predicts a third school, Electrical Zen, describes his own forty-year experience of Kundalini, sketches a battery model of enlightenment, and ends with a prophecy: a fifth turning of the Dharma wheel.
The Zen of electrical spirituality
Rinzai and Soto both ignore the Spirit's energy, so "the door is wide open" for a teacher who integrates it. The Sambhogakaya is already a third of the Buddhist Trinity, but Zen, "a reductionist, void-worshipping" tradition, doesn't acknowledge it. Zen needs not Christianity but electrical religion: religare, to bind back to the Source. Zen comes from dhyana, meditation, and the highest meditation is plugged-in presence.
Early Ch'an and Rinzai. Hui Neng and Huang Po teach endless letting go, a low-energy, yin practice. Rinzai added the ultra-yang koan, "trying to smash one's fist through an iron wall."
Plugged-in Presence. Consciousness + oneness = maximal conscious force, more than a koan, without the self-torture. Zen missed the formula by "denigrating man's conceptual faculty."
Why Zen omits the Spirit. Its philosophy comes from the Prajnaparamita Sutras, which void every object, the Sambhogakaya included. Yet Bodhicitta means Conscious Light, and Light-energy is half the project.
| Image | Gardner's reading |
|---|---|
| The ox (Ten Ox Herding Pictures) | The wild Shakti, tamed by becoming one with it (not Buddha-nature, which can never be an object) |
| Thirty-two marks of a Buddha | Bodily traces "carved" by the Sambhogakaya's pressure |
| Zen flesh | The fullness of the drawn-down Sambhogakaya |
| Zen bones | Emptiness |
| Marrow | Flesh + bones: realization of the Dharmakaya |
Zen images decoded
"The Fire must have its way. There is no Light without Fire... That is the Law" (Adi Da).
Gardner's own Kundalini
A disclaimer. He has not cut the Heart-knot and is not fully enlightened, but he says he rests in the Heart for long periods and channels intense Shakti with an "ultra-sensitive" body. He reads his chart (Scorpio rising, five planets in Cancer in the eighth house, Sun conjunct Uranus) as a destiny to experience Kundalini painfully and to publicize it, and plans an autobiography of his "forty-year battle with the Serpent Power."
Ascended Kundalini brings absorptive samadhis but cannot free you; only the higher Kundalini can, so a smart yogi skips raising the lower and connects to the higher.
Hooked to a biofeedback machine, Gardner let go: heart rate slowed, blood pressure dropped, yet his back and neck muscles contracted, pinning the tension needle at maximum for as long as he stayed in effortless awareness. The technicians had no explanation. Since muscles contract under electric current, this was where he first connected electricity and spirituality, then noticed Ohm's Law fitting presence, absence and the Spirit-current.
Kundalini is the Self in its dynamic phase (Ramana: "just another name for the Self"), as flames are the fire.
A battery theory of en-Light-enment
- The Heart-center is the battery; ascending and descending currents pass through and beyond the brain.
- The brain-mind is the load, creating head and neck pressure; in the enlightened its load is reduced and it glows like a "super light bulb" with a halo.
- Thoughts shrink consciousness and so the current; the answer is to outshine them, not suppress them.
- The Spirit-current makes a field, which is Presence or Light, as in The Secret Book of John: "He stood in the Spirit's presence, and it was poured upon him."
- Induction. Entering a master's field can initiate with a glance; see Franklin Merrell-Wolff's Pathways Through to Space. A Shaktipat guru is jumper cables; Jesus, a "pneumatic," would today be a "spiritual electrician."
- Caveat: the Soul-Spirit is conscious and feeling, so no mechanical model is complete.
- Using howstuffworks.com's water analogy: voltage is pressure, current is flow, resistance is pipe size, and power (P = V × I) turns a waterwheel.
- Energy is motion; power is energy organized for a task. The Buddha turned the Spirit's amperage into the wattage of Dharma.
- Four turnings so far: the Buddha's Dharma; Madhyamika (emptiness = ohms); Yogacara (Mind = voltage); Vajrayana (energy = current).
- A fifth turning, Electrical Buddhism, will unify all three and integrate Buddhism with Christianity.
One Truth. Electrical Buddhism and Electrical Christianity are the same practice. All you need: be totally present, then utterly absent, "a conscious, but empty, cup."
The biofeedback anecdote is a single uncontrolled observation reported from memory, and muscle tension during meditation has ordinary explanations. The "four turnings" also depart from the standard Buddhist scheme of three turnings (Agamas, Prajnaparamita, Yogacara/Buddha-nature); assigning each to one variable of Ohm's Law is Gardner's own construction.
Electrical Psychology, Electrical Spirituality
Can psychology alone free us? Gardner says freedom is always already the case and can only be discovered. He sketches an "Integral Psyche-ology" built on the Heart-center, astrology, iridology and the aura, set against Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology.
Jesus and Buddha are superfluous. Countless people have reached Self-realization without hearing of either, so neither the persons nor the religions are necessary. "Bondage can be created; freedom can't."
J. Krishnamurti. Gardner attended his groups in San Diego in the '70s and heard him at Ojai. Message: effortless, choiceless awareness, awakening "real intelligence." He mentions "the Highest" and, in his Notebook, "the Benediction," but never directs seekers to seek it.
Adi Da. "Krishnamurti on 'roids." Ordinary life is self-contraction, the avoidance of relationship; every conventional cure (money, sex, drugs) is remedial. Radical understanding is enacting conscious relationship until it becomes nondual Awareness. The Knee of Listening is "the greatest spiritual autobiography ever written."
The elephant in the ivory tower
Universities are "institutions of lower learning": in four years at UCSD (1969-1973) Gardner met "no wise men." Professors are blind men with an elephant, each extrapolating from one part.
| Thinker | The part he grabbed | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| John B. Watson | Behaviour only: "consciousness doesn't exist" | Man as a Pavlovian robot |
| Sigmund Freud | Sexuality | Spirituality reduced to sublimated sex |
| Carl Jung | Much more of the elephant | Mistook Transcendental Consciousness for the unconscious |
| Post-Jungians | Fragments | "Atomized, disjointed" study of cognition and behaviour |
Psychology's blind men, per Gardner
Integral Psyche-ology
Unlike Wilber's matrices, Gardner considers the psyche on three planes: spiritual, physical and psychical.
- Psychical. The soul-matrix of samskaras sits in the Hridayam, the Heart-center on the right, distinct from the anahata chakra. Seed tendencies rise via Amrita Nadi to the brain and crystallize as thoughts. He seconds Plato's tripartite soul (cognitive, conative, affective).
- Physical. Iridology reads the body (and to a degree the mind) best; add Ayurveda; prescribe diet, herbs and bodywork from massage and chiropractic to acupuncture and Jin Shin Jyutsu.
- Energetic. The astral body has an etheric correlate, the aura: the freer the consciousness, the brighter the aura.
Wilber accepts the enneagram but not astrology. Gardner, a professional astrologer, says the enneagram's nine types mirror the first nine planets, with Pluto missing because the system predates its 1930 discovery. Myers-Briggs' four functions (feeling, sensation, intuition, thinking) match the four elements (water, earth, fire, air). Studies find astrology fails at prediction because the stars "impel, they do not compel"; person-centred astrology deciphers tendencies, not fortunes.
The cure. Understanding is not enough; an integral "soul doctor" must teach the Way, Holy Communion, to a Christian, and the same practice as Plugged-in Presence to an atheist, who would stop being an atheist once the Power descended.
Your Christ Self is always already free, but you cannot realize it until Grace unties the Heart-knot. Even the Pali Canon calls Nirvana "Heart-release," which implies an action, and calls the Buddha "the Blessed One": blessed by the same Spirit that blessed Jesus.
Why teach Eucharistic spirituality, not radical understanding? Few can practise the latter, and most people want the warmth of devotion. So he offers Christians the Eucharist, Buddhists "mindfulness on 'roids... Mind-full-ness," and science fans Ohm's Law.
Gardner's "integral" alternative rests on astrology and iridology, neither of which has held up in controlled studies (iridology failed diagnostic tests published in JAMA (1979) and the BMJ (1988)). The equation of the enneagram with nine planets is his claim; the enneagram's documented history runs through Gurdjieff and Oscar Ichazo, not astrology.
The Spiritual Politics of Jesus
The book's most combative chapter, written in 2012. Gardner argues that a returning Jesus would be outspokenly political, and that his politics would be libertarian: for private property, free markets and sound money, against the Federal Reserve, the IRS and both major parties.
Apolitical or political? "My kingdom is not of this world" and "Render unto Caesar" (Matthew 22:21) suggest an apolitical Jesus. Gardner reads the Caesar line as a clever reply to a baited question that does not concede individuals' money to the State, and concludes that Jesus would be political today.
| Passage | Usual reading | Gardner's reading |
|---|---|---|
| Render unto Caesar (Matt. 22:21) | Submit to civil authority | No endorsement of unjust taxes; Jesus would abolish the IRS |
| Camel and needle (Matt. 19:24) | Wealth endangers the soul | Non-materialism, but not anti-property |
| Workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16) | Grace is unearned | Respect for private contracts and businesses |
| Moneychangers in the temple | Zeal for worship | Opposition to dishonest money, i.e. the Fed |
| Woman taken in adultery (John 8) | Mercy over law | Jesus was no social conservative; against "legislating morality" |
Gardner's Gospel evidence for a libertarian Jesus
The moneychangers today
Gardner calls the Federal Reserve "the biggest scam and largest counterfeiting ring in history," a private banking cartel ("the Banksters"). Printing money causes inflation, which he calls stealing; since leaving the gold standard in 1971, the dollar has lost 80% against the Swiss franc. He cites William Greider's Secrets of the Temple. He also says the NDAA (2011), an executive order on national defense resources (2012) and the Patriot Act have made America "officially" a fascist state.
Having studied Marxism at UCSD in 1970 under Herbert Marcuse, Gardner later learned from Ayn Rand, "my political 'savior,'" that fascism and communism are "two rival gangs fighting over the same territory": both are statism, differing only in whether the State owns property outright or controls its use. Jesus' principle, "Do no harm", never initiating force against a person or his property, is for Gardner the libertarian creed America was founded on.
Charity is not taxation. When government "robs Peter to pay Paul" while taking a large cut, "that is legalized theft." Charity is you choosing whom to give to.
Republicrats and Democans
- Democrats want to control your money; neocon Republicans want to control your personal life through wars on drugs, gambling, pornography and prostitution, "social fascism."
- He calls social conservatives such as Santorum and Bachmann "Bible-thumping," and elite liberals (Obama, Clinton, Gore) Ivy League "social engineers."
- Since Reagan, every president and major nominee has been a Harvard or Yale product; Gardner attributes this to the Bilderberg Group.
- Government married to big business is "crony capitalism," a genteel term for fascism. He recommends Jesse Ventura's DemoCRIPS and ReBLOODicans.
- He thinks Jesus would have backed Ron Paul, and that a libertarian on the brink of victory might be assassinated.
Democracy. "Unlimited majority rule": "two wolves and a sheep voting on what they'll have for dinner." Fine for electing personnel, but only as a subordinate system.
Constitutional republic. Inviolable individual rights the State cannot override. Gardner faults even George W. Bush for calling America a democracy.
Against Wilber's integral politics
Wilber's spiral dynamics places Rand's views at level five of eight. Gardner calls levels seven and eight "New Age mumbo jumbo," and says level six, with postmodernism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism and the motto "sacrifice self-interest now... for group harmony," reflects a collectivist bias. His father, a German Jew who fled in 1936, told him the Nazis would have chanted that motto. Still, Wilber is on his reading list.
- Individualism versus statism. Democracy as primacy of majority or State is statist; republican rights make you sovereign. Sovereignty excludes initiating force, but the State initiates it with victimless-crime arrests, taxes and quantitative easing.
- Capitalism versus socialism. Laissez-faire capitalism is a social system of free trade; socialism is State ownership.
- The dialectic. Individualism-capitalism (thesis) subsumes statism-socialism (antithesis), since it permits voluntary communes but not the reverse. The synthesis is a limited State for defence and rights, and a "terrestrial Shangri-La."
Do your own reading. Left: Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, The Communist Manifesto, Chomsky. Right: Ron Paul's The Revolution, Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rothbard at lewrockwell.com, Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island.
This chapter is partisan opinion, and much of it is factually disputed: the Federal Reserve is audited (its financial statements by outside auditors, its operations by the GAO with limits), FEMA camps are a debunked conspiracy theory, and the Bilderberg claim is unsupported. The biblical readings are selective; most interpreters see the vineyard parable as about grace, not contract law. Gardner's remark about Obama's racial identity is gratuitous. Readers who share none of his politics can skip the chapter without losing the spiritual method.
Christianity in the Aquarian Age
Gardner, an astrologer, closes with history and prophecy: the Piscean age of faith-based Christianity is ending, and the Aquarian age, electrical by nature, will favour a Christianity built on communion plus rational thought.
When Aquarius began. The Earth precesses about one sign every 2,150 years. Astrologers disagree on the date; Gardner places the "dawning" in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, marked by the conduction of electricity (1729) and the discovery of Uranus, Aquarius' ruler (1781).
18th century. The Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: individual freedom and inquiry; the rise of scientism.
19th century. Darwin; industrial capitalism's materialism; Marx's Communist Manifesto ("Religion is the opiate of the masses").
20th century. Marxist revolutions weaken institutional religion.
21st century. Hitchens and Dawkins attack; churches soften into self-help.
The New Age's dark side. Today's New Age is "pabulum," with Eckhart Tolle (an Aquarius Sun, Gardner notes) as its star. Aquarius is friendly but impersonal and dissociative: tolerance has grown, but so has disconnection. Gardner's examples are laptops in a Starbucks, drone warfare, and corporate media that no longer show war's horrors. The Globalists preach unity while "ripping off the world's wealth."
The true New Age: logic and onto-logic
Two processes: ontologically, live in the Spirit; epistemologically, think rationally. Neither is taught, he says, by State schools or the Church. For epistemology read Peikoff's Objectivism and Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; had Rand learned to meditate, she might have become "the ultimate integral guru."
- Logic (Rand): "the art of non-contradictory identification" of phenomenal reality: right thinking.
- Onto-logic (Gardner): non-contradictory identification with Ultimate Reality: right "non-thinking."
- Two IQs. Ontological IQ is your capacity to relate to the Spirit; epistemological IQ your capacity to connect and grasp reality.
- "Consciousness is relationship."
| Branch | Right form |
|---|---|
| Metaphysics | Life in the meta-physical Spirit |
| Epistemology | Logical, objective thinking |
| Ethics | Non-aggression |
| Politics | Laissez-faire capitalism |
| Esthetics | Art that uplifts the spirit |
Rand's five branches, made 'right'
Christianity after the fish
The fish sign of Pisces stands for the "brainwashed true believer," whose age is ending under three new "Churches": Science, Secular Humanism and the New Age. Preachers like Joel Osteen have already turned to pep talks. The future minister will teach Electrical Christianity: free-thinking people communing with the Spirit. The Aquarius glyph, two parallel waves, is "written in the stars" as electrical energy seeking harmony.
Electrical Christianity is not a belief system but an empirical method for de-contracting consciousness, and consciousness, never an object, is "forever immune to deconstruction." Spirit is the "energy of consciousness": as current is inseparable from voltage, the Holy Spirit is inseparable from uncontracted consciousness. So atheists and scientists can practise it too.
- Live the Dharma: become a living example.
- Study the great traditions, so you can speak to atheists and Bible-thumpers alike.
- Teach the method: as the Eucharist to Christians, as Ohm's Law to the science-minded.
- Hand them this book. Against Tolle's "New Earth" and Wilber's "Integral World," Gardner offers a revolution.
The chapter's dating of the Aquarian age is admittedly speculative, and its social diagnosis (Starbucks, drones, girlfriends' signs) is anecdotal. The deeper claim, that a practice-based spirituality is immune to criticism because consciousness cannot be objectified, would also protect any experiential claim from testing, which cuts against the book's appeal to empirical "laboratory" proof.
Master Takeaways
- The Eucharist is the whole of Christianity: connecting to the Divine Presence and receiving its Grace as Light-energy.
- Presence is voltage, poverty lowers ohms, the Spirit is amperage. Raising force and releasing resistance both increase the current.
- Plug in first, then let go. Surrender without communion is endless and dry; inside communion it is equal in importance.
- Baptism is the foundation. Until the Spirit descends, technique only positions you; afterwards the Eucharist becomes real.
- The Holy Spirit is the missing link between soul and Father; union happens in the right-side Heart-center.
- Salvation is through the Christ-Self, not through Jesus the man, and is open to anyone, including atheists.
- The primal sin is avoiding relationship; the enquiry "Avoiding relationship?" restores it.
- Obedience, chastity and poverty are one practice: plug in, abide in the pure Light, empty yourself.
- Fire comes before Light. Purgation is the Spirit burning through resistance; Grace is measured to capacity.
- The void is a gateway, not God. Emptiness is a lack of content; Presence is the context.
- Prayer done one-pointedly is meditation. "Bless me" receives; "Avoiding relationship?" connects.
- Real faith follows experience; faith without contact is blind and breeds fanaticism.
- If communion won't come, use japa and repetitive prayer until it does.
- Discipline serves practice, not the reverse: start practising now and purify alongside.
- The same method appears in Eckhart, Dzogchen, Kashmir Shaivism and Adi Da; read across traditions.
- Kundalini is the Self in motion; only the descending "higher Kundalini" frees you.
- Freedom is always already the case, but realizing it needs Grace to untie the Heart-knot.
- Gardner pairs onto-logic (identifying with Reality) with logic (identifying reality) as "Integral Truth."
- His politics: Jesus as a libertarian, "Do no harm" as the core ethic.
- Teach to the audience: Eucharist for Christians, mindfulness for Buddhists, Ohm's Law for scientists.
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Electrical Spiritual Paradigm | Current = conscious force divided by ego-resistance | Diagnosing a dry or strained sitting |
| Presence-poverty-power dialectic | Connect, surrender, receive; the third mediates | Choosing what to emphasize in a session |
| Lamp and socket | Technique is circuitry; baptism is the power supply | Explaining why method alone is not enough |
| Three vows as practice | Obedience, chastity, poverty = plug in, abide, empty | Reading monastic texts practically |
| Logic and onto-logic | Right thinking about reality; right being with Reality | Balancing contemplation and critical thought |
| Rand's two poles | Individualism-statism, capitalism-socialism | Following Gardner's political chapters |
Frameworks and mental models
The whole book. Gardner's achievement is a clear, repeatable contemplative method in Christian language, with a memorable metaphor and wide cross-traditional reading behind it. Its weaknesses: the Ohm's Law model is a metaphor offered with the certainty of a law; the Trinity and the Eucharist are reduced to techniques in ways no church would accept; and the last third rests on astrology, iridology and contested political claims, delivered with insults that will put many readers off. Read the first twelve chapters as a practitioner's manual, and the last three as his personal worldview.
- AI systems. The lamp-and-socket point (good circuitry is useless without a power source) maps onto model deployment: prompt technique cannot substitute for the underlying capability or data.
- Enterprise architecture. Gardner's dialectic (connect, release, receive) is a usable change-management pattern: build integration first, retire legacy resistance second, then measure throughput.
- Banking. His Federal Reserve chapter is polemic, but it is a useful exercise to separate testable claims (inflation, the dollar's purchasing power since 1971) from conspiracy claims when briefing non-specialists.