Inside-Out Thinking

The Little Newsagent on Ave of the Americas

First time i went to NY as a cub publisher I wandered into a little newsagent on Ave of the Americas, about the level of Washington Square. It had the most amazing, wide-ranging selection of stuff, and I found a book/magazine of experimental art and literature with a strong esoteric dimension - mostly Sufi, I think.

Of course there was a time when the best, new writing was inspired by esoteric thought - famously Joyce, Yeats, but also - the initiate i mention in the intro of my book told me - Samuel Beckett. It maybe that his writing is written in the Green Language, and so replete with astrological and other spiritual symbolism. This is an intriguing suggestion I've never found the time to follow up - can anyone else shed light, i wonder?

Anyway, modern experimental, cutting edge writing is less often inspired by the esoteric thought and experience - the reason it's uninspired, according to the initiate - so i was delighted to find this book/magazine. 

Then when I was in NY the other day, I found the newsagent again. I spent a lot of time browsing, and for much of it the only experimental, literary magazine i could find was English. How disappointing. But then I found a curious batch of stuff in a transparent bag - there was a journal for Yeti hunters, some letters, some brochures. I bought it, and the proprietor gave me a deep and significant smile. 

When I got back to my hotel room, I discovered that everything in it was unreal. The journal was an issue in a series that doesn't really exist. The letters are by and to people who don't really exist. They were like leaves that had blown in from another dimension.

Different People have Peculiar Tastes

What is at issue here, the reason for the endlessly mutating, paradoxical nature of this field of thought is that the same reality can be looked at through the lens of different forms of consciousness.

We have been looking at suggestions that pre-scientific cultures knew things long before they were 'discovered' by modern science  - the fact that Sirius is a 3-star system, the function of the pineal gland, the evolution of the species from fish to amphibian to land animal to anatomically-modern human and so on. Obviously, the ancients do not know these things in the same way..

...but there are other ways of knowing than the sense-led, empirical method that developed over the last 300 years.

My history highlights the great diversity of forms of consciousness. People have had - and still have - very different from of consciousness. The control freakery of the militant materialists, the urge to classify other forms as primitive or mad, reveals their neurosis.

Apologies and the Wine of Rabelais

Sorry to have been absent. I've been in NY, doing business for Random House, setting up introductions for Lorna Byrne - searching for kindred spirits - and promoting the US edition of my book. It was number 26 in the NY Times bestsellers when i left, but seems to have slipped down now - maybe because it's no longer in the front of store promotions that - as happens, too, in the UK - publishers have to pay for.

For a small, independent publisher to muscle in - even if only briefly - on the promos usually carved up by the big international corporations and brand names is an achievement in itself.

When i came back i did another interview on BBC Radio Wales - Phil the Book. We had a great laugh, raging around the outer limits of esoteric madness - special subject, the Templars. Phil is, I imagine, a believer - and is certainly a kindred spirit - and he was egging me on to say madder and madder things. Then right at the end, he said that now I'd 'come out' as a believer in the esoteric, did other people in the publishing industry look at me askance?

Good question! I'm ummed and aaahed and then at that moment the producer cut in to say we'd run out of studio time. On reflection, i think publishing is packed with eccentrics - and the completely self-centered - and this sort of thing probably goes unremarked. What people really care about is whether you're successful or not. At the time of writing the list I run has both the hardback fiction and non-fiction number ones. The moment I lose what Anthony Cheetham was kind enough to call my 'uncanny nose for unusual bestsellers', I imagine the wolves will descend!

I've been speculating to myself that people may be enjoying my book, that the degree to which it makes sense to them is determined by the levels of the enzyme dimethyltryptamine in their system. We all have different levels. Mystics have very high levels, naturally. The meditation techniques of the secret societies increase levels. (As will some hallucinogens, but that's perhaps another story.)

The best appreciations of my book seem to me to have come from mystics and others with the gift of communicating with disembodied intelligences - they 'recognize' the world I am describing - or from initiates of the secret societies themselves.

What will convince those with very low levels? Probably nothing, unless they're prepared to do the work. But if they have no inkling, why should they be bothered?

They will surely remain very sceptical about other worlds. Perhaps a key question for them might be whether the altered states cultivated by the secret societies actually enable an uncanny seeing of real things - the way things work - in THIS world.

I've tried to show in my book that believers are not all lone madmen, that esoteric philosophy is not a hole in the wall activity. Cultural leaders and successful people in many walks of life are steeped in this tradition.

Once you declare yourself, it's amazing how many people - including many you'd least expect - reveal themselves to you in private.