The Sickle Paperback – August 6, 2017

I follow Eschatology by William W. Walter and anything that he's written is always a thought provoking and eye opening document. Highly recommend that anyone on a spiritual path and serious about searching for that spark of understanding that dwells within us all, that they look into William W. Walter!

A miracle in a book is the best book i have ever read. Sadly not all the people will understand it.

I read a lot of William W. Walter and this book is his best in my opinion; that's why I have several!

My mother left leather-bound editions of The Sickle (1918) and The Sharp Sickle (1938) to me before she passed away. She used to read to me from these books on Sundays when I was young. I believe her mother, my grandmother, originally introduced her to these books when she was a young woman. Both my mother and grandmother died of colon cancer. My father was a physician. In my mother's case, she kept her early symptoms secret from my Dad and everyone else so that she could work on them via "mental healing." When at last she did tell my Dad and she went to her doctor, it was too late. I both love these books as my mother's close possessions, and despise them for encouraging her to ignore modern medicine. I will not leave them to my children.

This book has been restricted for all of its' copywrite years because a casual reader or the merely curious will get the wrong idea. If you really want to understand this book, go through the classes offered through the William W. Walter foundation. This is metaphysics at it's most straight forward. It is easy to misunderstand and should be avoided by all who have not been properly prepared to actually understand what is written.

My mother left leather-bound editions of The Sickle (1918) and The Sharp Sickle (1938) to me before she passed away. She used to read to me from these books on Sundays when I was young. I believe her mother, my grandmother, originally introduced her to these books when she was a young woman. Both my mother and grandmother died of colon cancer. My father was a physician. In my mother's case, she kept her early symptoms secret from my Dad and everyone else so that she could work on them via "mental healing." When at last she did tell my Dad and she went to her doctor, it was too late. I both love these books as my mother's close possessions, and despise them for encouraging her to ignore modern medicine. I will not leave them to my children.

In his time there were people who considered Walter a swindler. Florence Stranahan, one of his most loyal disciples, wrote in the booklet Messages on Christian Science series I:"You write that Mrs. __ says that Mr. Walter is a crook [...] and that he is promoting a money-making scheme."Stranahan doubted that the accusation of the unnamed woman was accurate. But Oliver Roberts de La Fontaine, a rich man from Wells Fargo & Co. in California, wrote in The Great Understander that Walter charged him $10,000 for a course for the initiate (the value of a mansion in those times). In his book Oliver confessed that when he heard such a figure he momentarily harbored the thought that Walter had been chasing him with previous courses so that, once convinced, take out from him a fortune.Oliver paid Walter what he wanted. The anecdote moves me to point out that some paragraphs of THE SHARP SICKLE suggest a lack of principles of the man who, in absentia, I took as my spiritual guide and master. Walter wrote:"There are two positive stages of unfoldment which precede conscious transition; and these must be fully understood and demonstrated before the third stage of conscious transition can be understood and demonstrated. Therefore, whenever any student of mine will prove to me through demonstration that he or she understands these first two stages, I will gladly give him the law governing the third stage. The first stage is the demonstration of invisibility. Jesus could accomplish this at will, as is stated in the Scripture. The second stage is the transfiguration."Did Walter really believe this stuff? In his words ("whenever any student of mine will prove to me through demonstration that he or she understands these first two stages...") it is implicit that, if Walter asked the student such a demonstration, he could make himself invisible and transfigured.Years ago I used to think that Walter was simply a crackpot. Now I am starting to look at him under a darker light. If Walter didn't make himself invisible he was not a crank, but a charlatan. The difference between a crackpot and a charlatan is that the crank believes in his myths, whereas the charlatan swindles consciously. Martin Gardner distinguishes between the two in his book Science: a crank is someone like Velikowski, who believed in his lunatic astronomy; a charlatan is someone like Uri Geller, who deceived us with his "psychokinetic" tricks.So I repeat: Did Walter really believe what he asked his students, that with time they could make themselves invisible? As I said, in such a request it was not only implicit that he, Walter, did master invisibility but that he had transfigured like Jesus too. But it is an established fact that Walter never demonstrated he could made himself invisible before the men of science. Had he done that he would have revolutionized the world.Presently I do not believe that Walter made himself invisible. And that can only mean one thing: that Walter lied to his pupils and readers by implying, in the above-cited quotation, that he could achieve such parapsychological feat. This conclusion can upset eschatologists, since Walter ended The Sickle (The Sickle and The Sharp Sickle are two different books) stating that, above all, one must be sincere with oneself. But it is a well-known fact that this sort of self-delusion is pretty common among gurus and their followers.It is impossible to prove a negative; for instance, that Walter did not become invisible. But it is possible to show what science really is. There are two basic rules of the thumb in the skeptical community. The first one is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", for example, not only evidence that Walter had demonstrated invisibility publicly but that advanced eschatologists could do it today. But in his book Walter does not even bother to describe an ordinary proof for his extraordinary claims (the same fault appears throughout the textbook of Walter's big mentor, Mary Baker Eddy). The second one is "The burden of proof rests upon the claimant alone". It has been noted that in pseudosciences the burden is inverted; for instance, a teacher that requests the student to make himself invisible --even if the teacher himself has not previously demonstrated invisibility! (Just contrast it with the teachers of magic in the Harry Potter films.)Let's assume for a moment that Walter could made himself invisible. Why didn't he performed public demonstrations? Was it to hide his secret formula of importunity to develop such powers from the evil minded? Don't make me laugh, Walter! Let's imagine how absurd it would have been that Edison, just after he invented the electric light bulb, showed it to nobody but kept his most important invention to himself. Let's imagine that he asked his students that they, not the inventor must show Edison how to create a light bulb --before letting them enter into his lab to see the shining light bulb of the teacher!After pondering over The Sharp Sickle with a healthy dose of skepticism, the inescapable verdict about Walter is that he may well have behaved as a crook, just as the woman mentioned by Stranahan stated in the above quotation.I've written more about Walter and the Sharp Sickle in my blog "The West's Darkest Hour" (entry: "Eschatology: The Cult that I Left").