Inside-Out Thinking

intellectual fire

intellectual fire

intellectual fire

very thin bodies

I want to draw attention to an incredibly interesting thing Michael has said, which you might've missed. He quotes a concert pianist called Bernard Roberts who says of Beethoven's music that 'each sonata is a spiritual being which the pianist helps to temporarily incarnate in his performance.'

In a recent conversation with a scientist I heard about speculations about how individual human consciousnesses might be preserved, indeed might be enabled to live forever in the event of the earth being destroyed and the cosmos becoming a much more hostile environment for carbon-based, biological life forms. He said that if we had enough time to develop the technology a cloud of gas or even an energy field could in principle be sufficient to provide an individual's disembodied intelligence with a 'body'.

If that is the case, why shouldn't the performance of  a sublime sonata provide a body for a  disembodied intelligence of a high order, such as angel?

pop quiz

Kevin Jackson, who's a professor of English literature at University College, London has given my book an endorsement: 'imaginative...erudite...ludic...advanced'.

Hey! But that would be a pretty good description of Kevin Jackson! I've noticed how often what people say about it is a reflection of their own personality. Playful people find it playful, zealots find it zealous and so on. Perhaps my book is character-LESS?

He also throws down a challenge. What pop/rock tracks would be on the compilation CD of the book?

I'd pitch for 'First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is' Donovan. The pataphysicist Robert Wyatt - but which track? I quote Dylan from his memoirs, where he is quite explicit about esoteric philosophy - but, if you have to choose one song? Someone wrote in earlier to draw attention to the Doors. Jimmy Page's interests in Crowley etc are well-known, but is it in the music? Are Bolan's references authentic, does he really mean it? (one of his biographers once told me that the wizardry was all a cynical; marketing ploy, but I don't want to believe that.) Bowie's The Bewlay Brothers? The Incredible String Band? Bjork is is shamanistic..?

More orbs and William Blake

Reading about Blake again - about mind-forged manacles and dark satanic mills  - has reminded me of something. Bake was writing at the time of the great shift from an an idealism oriented consciousness to a materialism-consciousness.

(So like many of the leading personalities in my book he was on one level saving something in danger of extinction, so that it might be reborn in a new form in a future age.)

From the point of view of esoteric idealism the fact that many people now believed in a mechanical model of the universe helped to make it MORE mechanical! So, for example, the fact that people now believed in the laws of gravity meant these laws operated in a more measurable way.

Weirder still many of today's scientists and mathematicians - including the towering figure of Roger Penrose - believe that that the world might operate in this way on a macro level, that it may well be the case that the power of perceptions to bend reality that have been recorded in the quantum world may also operate in the everyday world of our sense perceptions.

Conversely, then, by our spiritual practice we may help to loosen the manacles of the material world - because they really are mind-forged. We help to dissolve it, to spiritualize it. This is what is sometimes called the Work.

Graham Hancock has drawn my attention to a fascinating article on orbs on his website. Here - I hope! - is the link: hhtpp://www.grahamhancok.com/forum/KreisbergG4.php

He tells me that when he was photographing the Sphinx at the Spring Equinox, he and his friends captured hundreds of them on camera. This is what you would expect, according to the teachings of sacred idealism, because the Spring Equinox is a time of intense spiritual activity and the Sphinx is, of course, one of the world's most sacred sites. (In fact I try to show in book that the Sphinx is ABOUT humanity's having to pass through a period of dense materialism.)

If globes are a spiritual manifestation that can be measured, predicted and subjected to other kinds of scientific testing, then that could hardly be more important. We have learned from the deepest, darkest period of materialism what we were supposed to learn, the lessons of science and of the refining and free-ing of thought -  and can now apply them to what Blake and others helped to preserve. 

Orbs

My friend Rina recently took - in a church in Paris dense with esoteric symbols - extraordinary pictures of 'orbs', the plasma-like, translucent spheres that have recently begun to appear in digital photographs. She's sent me some as an e attachment and I'll put them up here - with the all the other stuff promised, sorry, sorry - when I can get some technical help.

Coincidentally there was an article in the Sunday Times magazine last week about an experimental physicist called Klaus Heinemann, who works for NASA, and who researches orbs in his spare time. He says 'I am constantly reminding people that what we see with our physical eyes is only a minute fraction of what we term reality and that huge amounts of the electromagnetic spectrum remain invisible to us...As a scientist used to working with...electron spectroscopy - which can detect details down to the atomic level of optical resolution - I began examining my orb pictures and found the multi-coloured spheres had interior patterns resembling computer circuit boards, and each interior was unique.' He also talks about how they appear more frequently if you ask them to and how they show up more often at happy gatherings like weddings.

Then he says: 'My working theory is that orbs are emanations from spiritual beings.'

Imagine how his scientific peers snigger at him behind his back, for gullibility and lack of scientific correctness, if they don't attack him openly!

I'm reminded of something the great Catholic writer GK Chesterton said: 'His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. To be 'taken in' everywhere is to see the inside of everything.'

ice cold eyes

I wrote earlier about how people meeting each other for the first time can 'recognize' each other, and how initiates and other gifted individuals can see the state of your soul.

Sometimes - and i'm sure we've all experienced this - we encounter someone with an instant and hard to justify feeling of antipathy.

Two days ago I was walking through Pimlico, almost at work, and i saw a few steps ahead of me a very tall, thick-set, bald man holding, on a chunky metal chain, a large white dog with an exceptionally wide face that made it look unusually human. The man turned to go up some steps and inserted a key in the door of the white stucco house. We were close now so i tried to take in a quick, unobtrusive glance at this curious sight. I saw then that he had paused with the key now still in the lock to give me a stare of extraordinary malevolence. His eyes were a startlingly pale blue that you sometimes see in wolves. I did an involuntary double take, because I hadn't planned to stare and had looked away before I registered anything, and now I looked again because I thought I must've been mistaken.

But, no, he meant it alright.

Thinking about it afterwards I wondered if he'd been about to burgle the house - quite smart and maybe not the sort of place that men with bull-pit type dogs would live - and was angry that he'd been clocked. But then he did have a key.

In some working class circles in Britain if a man so much as looks at another man it's a challenge to a fight. I read a memoir by a man who even as an infant hadn't even been able to look at his father without receiving a severe beating.

But I'd scarcely glanced at him. He was the one who'd initiated the eye contact. There was really nothing offensive about my bearing. I was just another brow-beaten middle aged office-worker on his way to work.

I wondered if he was Russian.

That eye colour is very rare here. Maybe they were contact lens?

It still disturbs me. Today I re-routed to by the same house. Did i interpret that experience aright?

the French II

The French mystic Simone Weil, who put important things succinctly, said 'A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation we bear in ourselves.'

This then is the same trait in the French I noted earlier. They are highly conscious of the destructive side of human nature - as well as its lighter side, the pleasurable with the disgusting.

In the extras on the DVD of his film La Fleur du Mal, the director Claude Chabrol says something to the effect that women  are much better than men at being able hold firmly to a principle in the face of opposition to others without becoming disgusting. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it's a very interesting thing to say - and I can't imagine someone of a different nationality saying it. It's part of a peculiarly French school of psychology that goes back to La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere.

My childhood memories of France are of the mixture of wonderful food with the prevalent smell of drains in the streets. No one loves the good things in life, no-one loves reason more than the French, but they are very conscious of their opposites and how the two opposing sets are joined and intertwined in human experience. This is perhaps why the paradox - La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort - is a typically French literary form.

If that's true of the French in relation to the material realm, I suspect it also ricochets back into the spiritual realms as they experience them too. Maybe there is something  of Manichaeism in their makeup?

I remember having a conversation with some Italian guys in a bar in Milan, a few blocks away from Via Andrea Doria, where Mussolini and his mistress were strung up on a lamppost. They said The trouble with you English is that you're so innocent! They meant, i think, that we are innocent of the depredations and temptations that occupation or fascist dictatorships bring.

I suspect that if we Brits have a characteristic heresy, it's Pelagiansim.

Mani doesn't  play a massive role in my book - one of the depredations of having to squeeze it all into 400 pages - but the individual who was Mani reincarnated does. 

the different qualities of different silences

When Colin Wilson wrote a review of my book he very generously compared it to Beethoven's music - in its 'huge perspectives' - but I also took this as a bit of a telling off. I thought it was perhaps an oblique way of pointing out that I hadn't put in enough about Beethoven.

The fact is I'm not very musical and don't know much about it. But I was intrigued to read some passages in a book by Daniel Barenboim, just published  '..at the opening of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde prelude the music does not begin with the move from the initial A to the F, but from the silence to the A.'

And later  'At the beginning of Beethoven's piano sonata opus 109, the pianist should feel that the music began earlier, so that he creates an impression that he joins what has been in existence, albeit not in the physcial world.'

You don't need to know much about music to hear the esoteric content of some Beethoven. (I might also mention the piano sonata opus 110, which suddenly lurches into the syncopations of jazz, thus 'prophesying' it.) You only have to  listen intently to it - and sometimes maybe you have to to its silences... 

I talked earlier about how telephone conversations can help you become more aware of your own capacity for mind-reading. A telephone line ca perhaps help you to focus on the different qualities a silence may have, to discern the intelligence moving behind it.

For example, if you say something and the person on the other end disagrees, the silence down the other end of the line will strike you in  quite different way than it would if that person agrees. I believe the differences are quite obvious if you choose to listen for them.

It may even be that machinery of the telephone in some ways magnifies the different qualities of silence, in other words that this is a more than purely psychological effect.  That would be weird, wouldn't it? I do think that the interface between the spiritual and technology is a very fertile area for research.