Inside-Out Thinking

Enough Damage

Sorry, i don't really think I've got the hang of this blog thing. I know it's supposed to be short, frequent posts, rather than a few long ones.  I'll try to do better when I return to my office in the NY.

I've QUITE enjoyed being published - I mean this in the English-English sense, not the American. I enjoyed the last big radio thing  I did, the Steve Wright Show on Radio 2, because he was great, very friendly and I knew it wasn't live. They cut out all the ums and errs and made me sound on the ball for once. A neighbour told me Steve W said the next day they'd had an unprecedented number of queries and gave out the book's details again, which is good - but I'm glad to be going back to being a 'back room boy'.

I'll Come to You, and More Remarkable People

The night before last BBC 4 gave Jonathan Miller's dramatization of MR James's ghost story Whistle and I'll Come to You a rare screening. (It is available on a BFI DVD, but is very expensive).

It's an exceptionally powerful portrayal of the scientific-materialist world-view under attack. As in my account of Freud, the professor who unwittingly summons up a malignant spirit is a man who wants to promote the scientific-materialist world-view. But he's stretching things too far in his attempts to make them fit, and they snap back at him in a terrifying way.

I've never met Jonathan Miller, but I did get to know Peter Cook. He was not, in so far as I know, interested in esoteric philosophy, but he did change the consciousness of a generation. Before PC British humour was men in suits telling formulaic jokes. After PC it became much more sophisticated and subversive, making the audience complicit in multiplying, self-reflecting ironies.

The first time i lunched him, I'd been pressing him by letter to write his auto. He arrived late, already a little drunk, I suspect, and he shoved an old fashioned school exercise book at me across the table. 'Look, Mark, I've already started'.

I eagerly opened it up. There were just four lines. 'Is that it?' I said.

He said 'I thought we could flesh it out with pictures.'

Many professional comedians I've known are on a big loop tape, forever circulating the same material offstage as much as on it. Peter Cook minted new material all the time, and the spirit of his humour is to be found everywhere in England from TV sketch shows to the templates of Private Eye.

This man had palpable 'soul force'. Everywhere he went he was planting seeds that changed thought, making it less rigid, more free-flowing, subtle and inventive. Remarkable people have soul force in different ways, not all of them good. A colleague of mine worked with Robert Maxwell, and told me that if Maxwell walked into a room behind you, even if you couldn't see or hear his booming voice, his mere presence would hit you on the back of the head like a clout.

Esoteric philosophy offers different theories on how people come to have these different types of soul force. it's part of the process of becoming more aware of the way that the supernatural works in our lives, of working with it, rather than against it - like the professor pursued by a malignant spirit.

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.

Meetings with Remarkable People 3

One of the people who have most helped me with my thinking is Lorna Byrne.

When I first heard about her, a young woman living in the countryside outside Dublin, who sees angels and is consulted by Dublin's elite, I suppose I imagined an Irish Joan. But when i met her, she was not like that at all - at least on the surface.

I noticed she has the habit, when she greets you, of looking all around you as well as at you - a habit I've also noticed in the initiate I describe meeting at the beginning of my book. In Lorna's case i now know that she can see the energy that runs through and around the physical body - what in my book I call the vegetable body. She can also see how you fit in with the 'ecology' of the spirit world and your relations with the spirits.

Lorna has always found reading hard, I believe - she has so many distractions. So she has not read the sort of esoteric literature I weave together in my book. But she has experienced the things that literature describes. She had never even heard of, for example, Rudolf Steiner, but she regularly experiences Michael as the archangel of the Sun, and has seen Gabriel as the archangel of the Moon. Elijah has approached her walking on water, just as he sometimes does as the Green One in Sufi tradition. She described to me meeting the group spirit of the foxes, appearing to inhabit the body of one individual fox in a field near her home, and the different patterns of light emitted by different plants.

We are shy of acknowledging people like this, even though I imagine there are only a very few living on the planet at any one time. If she were a Hindu she would be revered like Mother Meera, say. Maybe she will be?  I hope so.

The head of a religious order in Rome visits her for advice and a leading Dublin theologian goes to see her when he wants to know, for example, if what he is saying about the different orders of angels is correct. I can see why it would be difficult for the Church to acknowledge someone like this in public - and difficult for clergymen who yearn for a spiritual experience and perhaps sometimes even doubt if they have ever had one to encounter someone whose access to the spirit worlds is so definite and unclouded.

It's an odd thing, isn't it, when the officers and agents of a Church make themselves busy being sceptical about other people's spiritual experiences?

I'm publishing her book next year - May. I hope that if people are sceptical about her ability to see into the spirit worlds, they will be impressed by what she can see in this world. She has an entirely different method of perceiving it to the rest of us, seeing things not on the part of the spectrum our senses have been trained to register.

Meetings with Remarkable People 2

A few days ago i had lunch with Robert Temple and his beautiful wife, Olivia. Robert is a remarkable man, able to divide 7 figure numbers by 7 figure numbers in his head, who can speak several dead languages, and has written the history of Chinese science that is the standard textbook in Chinese schools. He also invented the modern alternative history genre with The Sirius Mystery. He's just more brainy than the rest of us. My job as publisher is to try to find ways of communicating his thoughts - some of which, i believe, are of historic importance - to a wider audience.

He has also told me about encounters with the supernatural, but i won't repeat these until i have his permission.

Towards the end of lunch he began to recite Rilke in German and really quite loudly. We share an enthusiasm for Rilke, believing him to have been one of the great guiding spirits of the age.

I was reminded of other lunches. Auberon Waugh did not DO embarrassment. I remember him in a restaurant singing me a nursery song, about a sultan, I think, with many, many verses, pausing only to observe that i was blushing. The time of Bron's Atheneum club in a basement in Soho was for me the Golden Age of publishing. Ozzy Osbourne told me a story over lunch about how in the early days, when Black Sabbath was scraping a living in Hamburg, the only way they could get money to eat was by robbing prostitutes of their handbags. Ozzy would get off with the woman, distracting her so that his friend Geezer could grab the bag. Ozzy said he was always worried, though, that he might get carried away, and, if there was a danger of this, he'd call out 'Put the boot in Geezer!'. At which point his friend would kick the woman off him and they'd run off. There was a bishop at the next table.

Ozzy didn't want to work with a ghost writer and sent me 4 brilliantly written pages about his Brummie childhood. I pestered and pestered him for more over several months. Then after a long silence I had a fax from Sharon, saying... Ozzy's finally decided he really wants to write it. ARE YOU READY TO ROCK!!

I never heard from them again.

Ozzy always says that the occult stuff in his music is just windowdressing and I take that at face value. Of course, there is real occult content in much great rock music. I mention Dylan and Donovan in my book, and had there been space and time, I'd have said more. For a brilliant account of the intertwining of music and the occult in the Sixties, i recommend Robert Irwin's novel SATAN WANTS ME. It's written with great sly humour that repays careful reading. You are not reading what you probably first assume you are reading.

Is Consciousness Changing?

Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University is engaged in fascinating research and development in the field of artificial intelligence. He told me it's only a matter of a very short time before either he or his rivals in Japan or the States create robots that are as intelligent as humans. In fact he said this some time ago, I haven't spoken to him for a few years and so this may already've been achieved. He's also developing new ways of integrating human and artificial intelligence. If you are drunk, for example, this registers as a pattern of pulses in your nervous system.Kevin has developed chips that can be inserted in the nervous system by surgery, chips that can read and store these patterns. If you then want to get drunk without drinking, you press a button so that the chip replays the pattern into your nervous system. Your consciousness is then in a sense robotic...

I was reminded of all this by being asked by this blog to read fuzzy letters as a way of confirming I am who I say I am and not a robotic intruder unable to interpret the fuzz. Wouldn't it be weird -in a Dick kind of way - if it was in the course of carrying out this blog instruction, that you discovered that you are in fact a robot?

Another application of Kevin's technology is direct mind-to-mind communication. He has experimented with communication between a chip inserted in one body with another inserted in another body. If he feels love in Tokyo, his partner can be made to feel the same pattern of pulses in Reading.  The last i heard the technology was only sophisticated enough to communicate fairly basic sensations. But what happens when it's possible to communicate words or images?

One of the themes in my book is the mysterious relationship between spirituality and science. I've tried to show that rather than the simple opposition that fundamentalists in both camps propose, the two intertwine in interesting ways. There is a subtle interplay. Something predicted by esoteric philosophers is that the sensation we all have currently, that we are each shut off in a private mental space, will gradually be eroded. We are returning to a great shared mental space in which we will realize that we have all thoughts in common.

The net is playing a part in this too. People sometimes ask why there are no great novels nowadays- or at least no novels that have the impact of a Wuthering Heights or a War and Peace. As I've tried to suggest in my book, the very greatest art - the epoch-making art - forges new forms of consciousness. The great novels of the nineteenth, early twentieth century had a vital role in forming the sense we now all have of an interior narrative.

People in print media routinely dismiss internet culture as unregulated and lawless, but i believe that this is where the great new art from will evolve. When we're plugged into the net we're in a sense plugged into one great communal brain, and the form of this resonates with the newly evolving consciousness. If you look at a site like Graham Hancock's, you will see an intellectual risk-taking, a range, a ferment of ideas and a passion quite unlike any print media. The language that teenagers use msn-ing is inventive in a way that recalls use of language before there was the attempt to regulate it via a universal grammar.