Inside-Out Thinking

Where dreams meet

Great art galleries can give such a sense of life bursting with codes and hidden meanings.

On Saturday I was going to see the end of term show at The Place - home of the London Contemporary Dance School. There was a wonderful Japanese dancer, deeply centred and able to draw the whole audience's gaze to her because of that. I wondered if she knows all about the oriental, esoteric teachings on the 'hara', which I touch upon in my book?

The last dance, which started with a slide saying 'In the beginning' and embraced the whole history of the cosmos, was choreographed by a guy who's worked on Skins. I'm hoping to publish some Skins books, as I'm interested in anything that's at the growing point of consciousness.

Waiting for the show to start I visited the Courtauld galleries. Not been for years.

Gauguin's The Dream shows a child sleeping in the foreground with a little demon lurking nearby. In the middle-ground are two large figures, an older woman looking to one side and a beautiful, younger woman looking straight out of the picture. The room in which they sit has murals which include a woman with a demon lover and animals rutting. In the distance you can see a male figure retreating on a horse, which reminds me a bit of the distant knight in Leighton's Lady of Shallot. Of course in Tennyson's poem it is the fact that the lady has looked directly at the phallic knight rather than at his reflection in her mirror that causes her downfall. Is the retreating figure in Gauguin's painting the father of the sleeping child? Was there something demonic about his love?

Gauguin means us to ask Whose dream is this? The child's? The mother's? The distant male figure's? The painter's?

Gauguin was a Theosophist, interested in the flux of interpenetrating dimensions. A drawing by him in the same gallery confirms that he believed that in dreams - as in death - we enter the spirit worlds. In

The Dream he means us to understand that ALL these different dreams meet in a dreamworld that has its own ontological status.

There's also a drawing by Picasso. The Minotaur is seducing a beautiful woman. They are both magnificent. He looks at you, holding up a glass of  champagne in celebration.

The initiate who is behind much of the thinking in my book once said to me 'Of course people don't realize who Picasso really IS'. Well, who was he? It's clear to me that although he inhabited a human physical body, his was no ordinary human spirit. He changed the world effortlessly, never putting a brushstroke wrong. He was amazed at his own powers: I never seek, he said, I find. The heroes of the Greeks were spirits of higher orders than the human - angels - inhabiting human bodies. My intuition is that Picasso is trying to tell us in this picture that he had been Theseus. When Theseus fought the Minotaur, he was - on one level - fighting the beast within himself. Picasso's mission was to help lead humankind towards a new accommodation of the animal parts of its nature, as foretold in esoteric history.

A bookseller in Ireland has reported that she's never seen anything like the crowds coming to an event of Lorna's last week. Bigger than Harry Potter mania, she says. It begins...

what you're supposed to feel II

An unexpected invitation to the opera and Glyndebourne. It's a beautiful building in a lovely setting, in one of the valleys around Mount Caburn, the vegetation almost supernaturally lush at the height of summer and the beautiful people were there..in force

I feel slightly uneasy about the combination of high culture and extreme wealth and ostentatious privilege. I lived in Milan for a few months and got to go to La Scala a few times. There it's the same people as here would perhaps go to Country and Western concerts that fill the theatre, and they hum along to all the best tunes!

The opera last week was Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, a typically Russian take on the Byronic hero.(See also Lermontov's A Hero of our Times, one of my favourite books when I was eighteen.) The singer in the title role was very handsome, with a fine voice, but perhaps didn't have the galvanic, brooding intensity and charisma you hope to see in a Byronic hero.

Still, it was a beautiful production, the sets were beautiful, there was some very clever staging - in the duel scene, you couldn't see for a suspenseful few moments who had been shot - the dancing was magnificent  and looked authentically Russian, and there were a couple of achingly-wonderful tunes, perfectly, intensely sung at high points in the drama with a mounting sense of climax so that everyone was quite carried away. At its best opera is almost as good as Roy Orbison.

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.

Enthusiasm - a very modern virtue

Enthusiasm is usually a substitute for intelligence.

When you get some management type trying to get you to be enthusiastic you must distrust him. He's trying to get you to give over the best part of your life for some material benefits - and these are always benefits in which YOU have no major stakeholding.

Enthusiasm is next to murder, in my view.

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.

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.)

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.

The Good Side of Cynicism

I've been trying to call in favours, use any contacts I can to get coverage for Lorna's book. Yesterday I introduced her to two writers, one whom I've known a long time and the other only met a couple of times quite recently. Then after the three of us went for drink with Rina, Century's genius publicist.

At one point the the guy I've known a long time said that when we met - as students in the late Seventies, so towards the end of the hippy era - I'd introduced him to an entirely new sensibility, which he called 'romantic cynicism'. The other guy seemed surprised and said that he hadn't detected a trace of cynicism in my book?

That's right. But I think that The Secret History of the World could only have been written by someone who's travelled to the far reaches of cynicism and passed out the other side.

Update

Just added a couple of youtube videos to posts below - hope they are of interest...

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.