Inside-Out Thinking

FACTOIDS - TOO GOOD NOT TO BE TRUE

I'm amazed to meet someone who criticizes my book for a lack of reliably sourced, cross-referenced historical facts. I'm thinking Has he really read my book? He surely hasn't the intro, where I set out my working methods.

You might as well look for reliably sourced, cross-referenced geographical info in Gulliver's Travels!

The Secret History of the World is designed to draw attention to a remarkably curious - but often overlooked - feature of the human condition. When it comes to the great questions of life and death  -where do we come from? does life and the cosmos have meaning? is there another spiritual dimension? - the evidence is very sparse and open to conflicting interpretations.

I believe most of us choose what we WANT to believe. If this is the case, it's important we be aware which part of ourselves is making the decision. Is it the part of ourselves that should be making this decision, or do we have motives to untangle?

I've extracted some 360 factoids from my book to highlight this.

From memory - I can't find my copy to check - the world 'factoid' was coined by Norman Mailer in his book on Marilyn. I take a factoid to be a claim for which there is sparse evidence. If we entertain a factoid, that is because it says something more general about life that we want to believe is true. Factoids dilate the imagination, and the imagination, as I try to show in my book, is a sacred faculty.

What I'm about to say, I could say more provocatively, but for the moment I'll just say this.. Factoids are not unadjacent to 'articles of faith' of the Church.

I was born in Britain in the 50s, into a a very boring, mechanistic universe. There seemed no room for mystery and little enough imagination. Genuine spiritual presence was hard to find. (Evelyn Waugh liked to quote the Church of England bishop who said that the spiritual side of the job didn't  appeal to him much!) It's taken me a long time to climb out of that universe.

I have been helped partly by wonderful art, music and literature and partly by meeting people who knew better. Some of the sources of this book are distinctly dodgy from the point of view of conventional historians, and I don't apologize for this. Some of it is hearsay - but it is the hearsay of initiates and mystics.

I hope that if you have found your way to this site, you will be happy to enjoy the factoids in the spirit of some of the brilliant writers who feature in my book - Swift, Rabelais and Cervantes. If you don't already know all the factoids, I hope you will be amused by them, that they will dilate your imagination and that they will suggest to you the outlines of mystery that in your heart of hearts you are already aware of - a spiritual dimension weaving in and out of the material world.

On the German Translation

I've been putting together a list of references for my very studious German publisher, and thought they might be of interest:

Download secret_history_quotation_sources.pdf

Over the next week or so I hope to put together an archive including recommended reading, reading group questions and a review pack - we'll see how I get on! In the meantime, if anyone does have any questions, whether about the sources above or about details of the book in general, please do feel free to leave a comment below and I'll try to answer on my return from Ireland.

As I'm away I thought I'd point you in the direction of a couple of blogs who have kindly linked to my site, the Graham Hancock site (a flashy ad for my book going up soon - cheers Graham!) and Swan Songs, where liZZie has just returned from 'an isle over t'wards furthest reach easterly of the Aegean'. Sounds very intriguing...

as soon as you put a thought into words...

Casaubon is a sad, dispiriting character in Middlemarch. At the beginning of the novel he impresses the much younger central character with his intellectual seriousness and she marries him. She gradually becomes disillusioned, though, when he never seems to get any closer to completing his great work, a key to all the world's mythologies

If you've read my book, you'll probably find it easy to imagine the astral form of Casaubon squawking on my shoulder, mocking me as raced to meet a seven month deadline. I could easily have spent a lifetime writing The Secret History of the World, but I don't think it would've been a better book as a result. In fact i think the tight deadline gave it a focus and a drive it wouldn't have had if I'd had more leisure, and towards the end - was it after I'd met Lorna?  - I felt I had 'help' that moved my writing up to another level.

But hard pressed, I sometimes put quotes in from memory. For example, there was a passage from Schopenhauer I'd loved as an undergraduate to the effect that as soon as you put a thought into words, it ceases to be true.When my German translator made me locate the passage, it was much better, much more explicit - more monumental - than I'd remembered:

The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech: there it petrifies and is henceforth dead but indestructible, like the petrified plants and animals of pre-history. As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere or at bottom serious.When it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us. 

stalked by Basil Crump

The initiate once lent me a copy of a wonderful book called The Occult Causes of Diseases by W Wolfram, a Paracelsian in-depth study. I saw he'd written on the inside of the beautiful light blue and gold cover a date next to it an expression of his heartfelt thanks that this book had come to him on that particular date.

He was saying that this book had been meant to come to him then - a bit like the old esoteric tradition that when the time is right - when you are  ready - your teacher will mysteriously appear at your shoulder.

I was reminded of this when I went to Lewes to climb Mount Caburn and see my old friend. A few weeks ago I'd come across Basil Crump's book on ancient esoteric understanding of the evolution of the species in an Oxfam shop in London. I'd never encountered the name before but now in Lewes I fell upon another book by him, Lohengrin and Parsifal, a commentary on Wagner's operas.

In it he shows how Wagner adapted Bulwer Lytton's concept of the Dweller on the Threshold - the guardian between the worlds - and he also made me realize that Wagner, like Blavatsky, had been a key figure in th e late nineteenth century, re-introducing oriental ideas like reincarnation back into the stream of occidental, secret history. One of the influences on Wagner, he shows, was Schopenhauer.

Later in the Lewes Arms my friend and I were listing some of things that in retrospect seem to have been a complete waste of life:

reading so many of the novels of Kingsley Amis - yes, some of them, like One Fat Englishman and Jake's Thing, are very good, but there are many others in which you can read page after page without finding a single joke.

Watching Osibisa in concert. I saw this highly enthusiastic African whistle-blowing, multi-drumming band once on purpose at around the time they had their hit single Sunshine Day, and then on another occasion they stood in for a band that had backed out at the last minute.

Visiting celebrity cemeteries. At Pere Lachaise you're given a map so you can tick off Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde etc - but what's the point? What do you expect to experience? I remember that particular cemetery turned out to be a gay pick up point. Lank young men would peer round the corner of tombstones.

One thing I was glad to spot there was an inscription on the tomb of the Princess de Noailles. Her tomb caught my eye because she was a friend of Cocteau's. I can't remember the French, but in translation it went something like this:

Helas, I wasn't meant to be dead!

Immediately you get - with a rush - a sense of her love of life.  Something the initiate emphasized to me on more than one occasion was a difference between the western and eastern esoteric traditions. The western tradition has no world-hating elements. It teaches us to love the material world and to work with it and on it. We are meant to consider such questions as Did Kingsley Amis sometimes fall short when it came to his care for language, his commitment to making every sentence express his thoughts as clearly as possible? What are the qualities of authentic African tribal music?  If Bulwer Lytton was a great initiate, why was his prose so wooden?

Finding the spiritual meaning behind Osibisa and Roy Orbison and Jordan, behind the flotsam and jetsam of modern trash culture IS part of the esoteric tradition, taught to us by the initiate-masters who inspired Dada.

After a while in the pub some elderly Swampy types came in - rough-living environmental protesters -and one of them came into the side room where David and I were drinking and began to play some moody music - Liszt maybe - on the upright piano.

Later i heard one say to the other 'It's ridiculous, innit? He says he owns the land, but the land's been there for fousands of years..'

I told David about this later and we laughed. Then I remembered that that's what esoteric philosophy teaches - that matter finally solidified into the form we know today just thousands of years ago, not millions of years ago.

We must be vigilant and not allow common sense to sneak in by the back door.

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.

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.

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.

Mind, Body, Spirit

I'd hoped to be able to say that Lorna Byrne's book, Angels in My Hair, is number one in Ireland, but it's slipped from number two to four in the charts - partly, I think, because shops have underestimated hunger and there are few copies left on the shelves.

There hasn't been a single review, but then MBS books (Mind, Body ,Spirit, the conventional bookseller's category) are almost never reviewed, even though they form such a large proportion of total books sold. Maybe my book was widely reviewed because it didn't look MBS.

Lack of reviews doesn't seem to affect sales of MBS books, maybe because people who are spiritually-minded know not to expect coverage of their kind of literature on the literary pages.

As for feature coverage, that's easier, though you still have to deal with people who worry they are going to look foolish if they appear to take MBS seriously and give it house room. Even journalists who are believers often suffer from this.

Some people worry about meeting Lorna because they fear she will see the state of the soul, the dark, discolouring thoughts, anything that's twisted or neurotic or plain bad. It's true that she will, but she will regard these things with complete compassion, and people will come away from a meeting feeling blessed.

Then there are extreme cases. Because of who she really is - and that for the moment will have to remain a secret - demons have to show themselves to her. And nothing but good can come from that.

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'.