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Chapter One A very rich magician had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like. At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned. On the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant. Secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them. In the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further, the 1 1. ada ate ee vn | ae magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians. And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins. Ouspensky wrote that “theoretically, a man could awaken. But in practice this is almost impossible. As soon as a man awakens for a moment and opens his eyes, all the forces that caused him to fall asleep in the first place begin to act on him with tenfold energy. He immediately falls asleep again, very often dreaming that he is awake." I also thought about my study of the history of man in my search for the answers to why things are the way they are, and how I had come to see it as the biography of Satan. I was beginning to realize that something was very wrong with the picture of the world that we are taught from the moment we are born, and that is further implemented in I thought back over my life and realized that all the events that had gradually maneuvered me into my present position could most definitely be perceived as the “forces that act to keep a person asleep”. It was a certainty that some tremendous pressure had been applied to stop me from observing, from analyzing, and most of all from thinking and learning. our culture, our society and most especially our religions.