Inside-Out Thinking

The Anti-Christ Again

Last year Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, retired archbishop of Bologna and formerly a candidate for elevation to the throne of St Peter, warned that the Anti-Christ is already among us. He said that the Anti-Christ presents himself as a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist. He talked of the Anti-Christ reducing Christianity to a set of values, and trying to take away the element of personal, spiritual experience.

I don't know about the 'green' element or whether he is already walking the earth, but there is nothing inconsistent with what i do know in reports I've read of what of what the Cardinal said, and it fits in with ideas of the Anti-Christ 'explaining away' the supernatural by means of science. As the incarnation of great spirit of materialism, it will also be his aim to squeeze out genuine spiritual experience.

I'm interested that the Cardinal seemed to take the Russian writer Soloviev - alluded to in my book - as authoritative on this matter.

I think it's also significant that the Cardinal made this statement after a period of spiritual exercises - and so an altered state of consciousness. As a young man Pope John Paul II had made spiritual exercises devised by Rudolf Steiner. I intend nothing but good by saying that, and I'm certain that nothing but good came of it.

Consider, too, the present Pope's book discussed in an earlier post. The leaders of the Church are steeped in esoteric thought.

I am what I see

I was lying on the top of Mount Caburn on a hot summer's day - it was Monday - and the sky was a perfect blue dome. You could see exceptionally clearly all around  and southwards as far as the sea.

One of my favourite forms of meditation is to go to high places like this and let your consciousness expand - race - to the horizons. Then more slowly pull it in again until it becomes a point inside your head.

I love the land around Mount Caburn, the spirit of the place. I was thinking about love, and about how I used to lie on a beach immobile for long periods, sink into the sand a little and become a part of the beach.

Suddenly a para-glider hit the ground beside me. I hadn't seen him coming. He asked me if I was a pilot too? then began speaking very quickly into his mobile phone in Italian.

I wasn't feeling very sociable. At times like that you stop BEING the land and become just a scruffy bloke with a beer-stained t-shirt.

African Anglicans and homosexuality

How Dawkins, Hitchens and the other militant secularists must be gibbering with glee.

This is so bad for spirituality.

It obscures the great argument for spirituality in history - that the great mystics and forgers of esoteric thought have always been on hand to help guide humankind evolve to the next level of consciousness.

Dogma from earlier eras are dispiriting for the good-hearted and an easy target for our enemies.

The Martin Amis Problem

When literary-minded fellows of my generation get together and discuss the modern novel, the conversation tends to turn to Martin Amis. The most extravagantly gifted of novelists when we were in 6th form, university etc, he wrote in The Rachel Papers to Money a series of matchless comic novels. His prose was on a par with Nabokov's. Then something fell away.

I think it's maybe that in his later books he tried to address the great issues of life and death, and I for one wasn't convinced, for example, by all the stuff about lying awake at nights worrying about nuclear war.

The initiate I talk about in the intro to my book once said to me that in the past art and literature was guided by secret schools, but that this no longer seemed to be the case.

Esoteric philosophy is the greatest, richest tradition of thinking about the meaning of life and the other ultimate questions. It was very influential on the earlier generation of Bellow, Salinger, Updike, Golding and Lessing - for the most part the influence of Rudolf Steiner - which is why their work opens up onto vast dimensions of thought.

I think Martin Amis may be a militant secularist like his friend Hitchens.

Music and the Longing for Old Forms of Consciousness

I've had some more messages of support from musicians. Donovan said he thought my book 'wonder-filled'. Gareth Sager of The Pop Group said it expresses in words what he's tried to express in his music.

When we listen to music and are 'carried away' by it, when we feel music's patterns working through us, playing us as if our bodies were other instruments in the orchestra, we feel re-connected with the cosmos and feel again that sense of being at home in a cosmos that cares for us, is 'anthropic' and carrying us along to our ultimate destiny.

So part of what attracts us to music is that it reactivates us in a form of consciousness that not long ago everyone enjoyed. Not long ago everyone felt that they were guided along every step of life's path, that the cosmos was nurturing them, that they were being prompted to play the parts they were meant to play in patterns set in motion by God and marked by the movements of the stars and planets.

So we may regain some of these joys, usually lost to the modern, alienated form of consciousness, when we listen to music, and if we revive the old form of consciousness but do so with the heightened awareness and conscious exercising of intelligence that esoteric philosophy brings, then we are right at the growing tip of human consciousness right at this minute.

An old initiate once told me that Mozart went through several brief incarnations before his incarnation as Mozart so that he would be able to remember, while encased in flesh, something the rest of us only retain as a very faint echo - the music of the spheres.

How Much of Your Book do You Believe?

I've been asked this on the radio and feel guilty that I've given glib answers, and now I've been asked on this site – and that deserves a considered answer.

In a way it's an unwelcome question, because the aim of the book is to create a feeling of uncertainty. It's about trying to withhold from rushing to impose conventional beliefs on experience, about waiting for a richer, deeper pattern to emerge.

Critics have been sharply divided between those who get it and those who don't. I sent an early copy to Gary Lachman, one of the founder members of Blondie, who now lives and works in England as a writer on esoteric subjects. He's one of very few reviewers in the national press prepared to take esoteric books seriously. In the event he was unable to persuade the literary editors he writes for it was worth reviewing, but he sent me a nice letter saying so. He said something to the effect that while he wasn't sure about every detail, he found it a more convincing model of reality than the conventional, materialistic one - describing it as a Morning of the Magicians for the twenty-first century:

'I like your take it or leave it approach ... Behind the torrent of factoids and believe-it-or-nots there is a serious, philosophical purpose at work. I took away from this book a strong sense that, regardless of how factually 'true' the esoteric account of the world and ourselves may be, it is certainly more 'existentially' true than the reductionist rationalist one.'

Gary, who has studied Gurdjieff, understands the underlying intention.

The Secret History of the World is packed with tall stories, esoteric believe-or-nots and factoids. (Did Norman Mailer coin that word in his book on Marilyn Monroe?). The criterion for inclusion in my book was not necessarily that they could be proved to be true – but that people in esoteric circles have believed them. Some of these people have left written records of their beliefs. In other cases they were things I was told by remarkable people I have met in esoteric circles. These people, both historical and contemporary, tend to be super-intelligent.

As I write in the intro, these stories, these claims would require a whole library to even begin to try to document them and, besides, most are stories about the supernatural, which are not in principle 'provable' on the page.

The point of bringing all these tall stories, these factoids into one book, one narrative is to show that they form a surprisingly unified, coherent, cogent view of the world. They make meaningful patterns in history.

I believe these patterns can be seen in history – and that they wouldn't be there if science explained everything there is.

Towards the end of the book, in the latter part of chapter, I get to the real point of the book. I ask the reader to look at his or her own life and ask if these same patterns can be discerned there too.

I know they can be seen in my own life.

My book's plea is that we should trust to our own personal experience rather than the say-so of experts. We have given too much away in that regard.

I've known many dons, as teachers and as friends, and while I'd trust their judgment in their own fields of research, not all of them are so well-rounded, well-integrated and good-hearted, not all of them have such well developed Higher Selves that I would trust their judgment on life.

Destiny and Dematerialization

Met Fatima Bhutto, a beautiful, fascinating woman with an exceptionally strong, fine nose. When I said something about her family and particularly her aunt being regarded by the West as a bulwark against fundamentalism, she rather told me off, saying Benazir Bhutto had compromised with them.

She wants to influence things from below, by writing, but I wonder how long she can her evade her destiny as a political leader?

I think maybe we all have propensity to do this – as well to run away from real love when we find it. I first began to think about this when I read Rilke's retelling of the Prodigal Son in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In his version the son leaves because he can't take the responsibility of being loved.

Of course there is an esoteric - or at least idealist – interpretation of this story too. The son leaves to descend into the material world, gets the fatted calf when he returns because he had acquired qualities his brother hasn't.

The Eve of Midsummer

A couple of nights ago an owl was terwitterwooing nearby and made our neighbour's dog howl - a small sign of changes coming. Today I went back to the woods where I got lost last week. I saw two fox cubs playing and a green woodpecker, and a young deer stepped out right in front of me.

The world is a great door turning on its hinge, and tonight we may be able to slip through and visit the world between the worlds - the Green Wood where 'things do best please me that befall preposterously'. The Green Wood is a place we enter in an altered state of consciousness. There we may become aware of the ways the supernatural works in the world, ways which may well appear 'preposterous' to the everyday, waking mind.

You may be turned upside down and inside out, mixed up and made a complete fool of, you may be terrified, but at the end of it you will be realigned with the sacred purposes of the world, helped to be as you were wont to be and to see as you were wont to see.  Above all you will be helped to love as you are meant to love, as we see the lovers united with those they are meant to love at the end of the play.

When you are in love with someone you see wonderful qualities in them no-one else can - and your love can help those qualities blossom in a magical way so that they become visible to everyone. Esoteric philosophy is about trying to love the whole world in the same way and with the same results.

I'm talking about faith in things which are too good not to be true - even though the worldly may hate them.

The secret societies who had to shelter from the world's hatred practiced secret techniques to cause a sacred dew to rain down in the mind. Shakespeare alluded to this when Oberon says 'Let the field dew consecrate'. His play is not fantasy but a work of the imagination. He knew what he was talking about.

Sweet dreams.

You Must be Mad

I know it shouldn't but it still surprises me when people say my book is mad.

After all, only a few generations ago EVERYONE believed the mind-before-matter philosophy it proposes.

Esoteric philosophy is really the 'higher science' of the idealism that was pretty much the universal philosophy of life before modern, materialistic science changed not only people's beliefs but also their consciousness.

Esoteric philosophy was to idealism what, for instance, nuclear physics and quantum mechanics are to modern science. Everyone knew of it, but only a few had a good, working knowledge, practiced in secret.

If I'm right the materialistic world-view is already beginning to fray, and will come to be seen as a small, temporary island in a vast ocean of idealism.

Parallel Universes and Pinheads

The idea that there is an infinite number of parallel universes was dreamed up by scientists – a pupil of John Wheeler's in fact, who broke away from Wheeler's own view – to explain how come we live in the universe containing the extraordinary number of co-incidences necessary for the creation of life that we do.

These days people sometimes use the word 'metaphysical' in a pejorative sense to mean something like 'a high flown fantasy with no relation to life as we live it'. Typically it's used when talking about, for example, Thomas Aquinas's supposed speculations on how many angels could be dance on the top of a pinhead.

But aren't the parallel universes at least as 'metaphysical'? At least people such as Enoch, St Paul, Plotinus and Lorna Byrne have actually met angels and experienced the multiple heavens. So far as I've heard no-one's experienced any of the parallel universes?

I wish I could give Philip K Dick a ring. If anyone's experienced both, don't you reckon?

I'm beginning to get fitted carpets and short sleeved shirts.