Inside-Out Thinking

Initiatic sex pests

I think I've angered some followers of Gurdjieff by repeating the allegation that he used his superpowers to get sex.

First, I do recognize him in my book as one of the great initiates of the twentieth century. If among twentieth century teachers I was most influenced by Steiner in terms of content, I was more influenced by Gurdjieff in terms of style, especially Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson. Second, the allegation of sexual impropriety is hardly new and is well documented in Louis Pauwel's biography (together with some other less well-known facts, such as that the Earl Mountbatten of Burma attended his meetings.) What is going on here?

It's very difficult to be certain about what goes on around a great initiate. Indian candidates are taught to imagine, for example, a snake so intensely that not only does it appear to them as a physical object among physical objects, but later also appears as such to the people. As I also write in my book, at a certain point in history, initiates deliberately began to appear as tricksters. Part of the teaching method is to disorientate and unsettle us. If you read Gurdjieff's All and Everything you'll find it full of tall tales and absurdities. He is testing you, and it may be only when you reach the end and if you've allowed the text top work on you that you ca begin form a settled opinion. The reason - or at least one of the reasons – Gurdjieff operated this way was because he wanted you to discard all conventional forms of thought to learn to think upside down and inside out, to learn how to move between different states of consciousness in which the truth may be very different.

The other thing is that whenever you try to do a purely good or spiritual thing, the forces of evil will rise up to oppose you. Because initiates are able to act in a more purely good or spiritual way, greater evil surrounds them. Very beautiful people are also great battlegrounds for good and evil. Life is very different for them. Think what it must be like to be surrounded by people getting off on your beauty, while you are like the only sober one at the party. The great initiate will be aware of the great forces of good and evil arranged on either side, and have a cosmic perspective on every choice he or she has. Though Gurdjieff's women may have found the experience of being used and discarded as painful in the short run, perhaps a greater cosmic good came out of her experience?

And that m'lud, is the case for the defence.

Never Lie to a Freemason

I've recently met two senior Freemasons who have told me they can tell – and I'm sure they mean in an uncanny way – that they can tell whether people are lying or not. It must be a part of their esoteric training.

In my book I write that I believe that we all have the power to read other (perhaps better 'hear') minds but regularly screen this out, as it would overwhelm us.

One of the types of occasion this is brought home to me is when silences down the other end of the phone have markedly different qualities – the same for everyone, I'm sure. I think esoteric training reawakens qualities we all naturally have.

(Incidentally, it is impossible not to look guilty when someone tells you they know when people are lying.)

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.

The Wrong Kind of Nut

Very glad to say my paperback edition is published and the cover can now be seen to the right of this post. I think I prefer it to the hardback.

It may surprise people not in the publishing business to know that the dust jacket, cover, blurb, even the title of a book is decided by the publisher. Of course established, successful and otherwise powerful authors can exercise a lot of influence, and these days publishers are much less likely to go with something an author hates, but  convention and precedent says that the publisher in the end has say-so.

Apart from making my book a bit like a conventional history book - which of course it isn't - the hardback jacket was a bit dark, and I think there was also a danger it might've attracted nutters who want to believe that the world economy is controlled by a cabal of rich old Jews or that when you reach the highest level of initiation in Freemasonry, it is whispered in your ear that in fact the organization is dedicated to the worship of Satan.

Nutters like this have minds that are drenched in hate. They want to believe the worst.

The sort of nutters I want to meet want to believe the best. Their brains are drenched in demethyltriptamine - the secretion which gives rise to imagination - and people who have enough imagination know that it is a sacred faculty, at its roots a part of the impulse that creates the world.

What I want to show in my book is that is it is a crucial feature of the human condition that we have immense latitude when it comes to choosing what we want to believe about the world, and it is important that we become aware of which part of ourselves we use to do the choosing. Is it the best part or the worst part? Choosing with the best part is what that great initiate St Paul meant by 'Faith'.

The Story of My Heart

In her 'inner group teachings' Madame Blavatsky said that just one glass of wine can retard your spiritual evolution over several incarnations.

I hope not...

On Sunday, having been up half the night drinking, I got disoriented on Ashdown Forest and an hour's walk became three hours. I walked ever faster round a woody labyrinth until I eventually emerged at the top of the driveway that leads to the AMORC (an America-based Rosicrucian movement) headquarters in the UK. Carpenters were building magnificent new heraldic gates.

I found I'd walked off my hangover - was it with the help of nature spirits? Had SHE disoriented me?

I was given a wonderful present on Tuesday - a beautiful old edition of one of the greatest works of English nature mysticism, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jeffries. 

The Work

Lorna Byrne has been advising me on my spiritual practice. She tells me how, if we persist, parts of ourselves are enlivened by it and continue to pray after we've - consciously - stopped.

This sounds similar to Rudolf Steiner's advice on working on the etheric. Conscious work over 21 days, he said, creates permanent change in the etheric body.

This work is also, of course, part of the Work of the Freemasons. Building a temple, building a hut or a house, is a metaphor for shaping the non-material part of ourselves in an occult way.

I am a nut

Anyone who shows interest in spirituality is called a nut these days. But there are other varieties, some of whom may wander onto this blog by mistake. I'm talking about those who believe that Freemasons secretly worship the devil.

My guess is that this stuff is put out by extremist Catholics who are saying things that their elders and betters in the Church would not want them to say.

Anyone who genuinely wants to know about Freemasonic spirituality should go to Robert Lomas's archival website. Some old the old Freemasonic documents he has unearthed have an almost biblical density of meaning, and i have been pleased to use them as sources.

Traditions regarding the Morning Star and other heavenly bodes should, i believe, be interpreted in terms of the role of the disposition of the heavenly bodies in giving our consciousness the shape it has. I am not a Freemason, but I see eye to eye on this with Robert Lomas.

Hail to the Lizard Queen!

When I saw this title to a review of The Secret History of the World by Hilary Mantel in the Guardian yesterday, I smiled. It's hard not to - there's an amusing illustration of a man making hand gestures.

But she reviews my book as if it's about sinister conspiracy theories of evil, possibly demonic men controlling people against their will. There's none of that my book.

I've written my book to suggest that this popular, knee-jerk reaction to the secret societies - conditioned in part by The Da Vinci Code, I suppose - is mistaken. The secret societies have been guardians of an underground stream of alternative spirituality . This has from time to time risen to the surface to help prompt humanity - gently - in one direction or another.

I think it may have something important to say to us now.

I suppose there may be societies of men bent on evil, but I think it's probably unwise to dwell on that without any evidence. The initiates I have met have been good, perhaps even saintly.

THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR AND THE VATICAN

The BBC online news service has reported that the Vatican is about to release papers which will exonerate the Templars.

A damaging accusation against them came from confessions exacted under torture - that they worshipped a goat-headed demon called Baphomet.

As part of their initiation ceremonies they were required to undergo an altered state, a sort of after death experience - to experience what we all experience after death, whilst still alive. After death we are attacked by demons who tear our sins from us - the purgatory of Christian tradition.

The torture the Templars were subjected to was so extreme - in one case a knight was made to carry charred bones that had fallen from his feet - that they again entered an altered state - and saw again the king of the demons.

Jumoke Fashola

I talked with Jumoke on her Secret Soceities evening on BBC Radio London on Thursday. I didn't know what to expect - scpeticism, maybe even hostility from the Religious Broadcaster of the Year. But it turned out that her father had been a Roscirucian of some kind, and a man rang in - Alex, I think he was called - who had lived in a village in which another man was rumoured to be a Rosicrucian. Apparently after this Rosicrucian died he would knock on the doors of other villagers in the night. I was reminded of Paracelsus's claim that he could visit people in their dreams.

An hour's conversation with Jumoke finished in no time at all as I was were carried along by her wonderful, golden, good humoured torrent of energy - and plenty of what my old friend Mark Hedsel - the initiate who was subject of The Zelator by David Ovason - liked to call 'wise fooling'.