Inside-Out Thinking

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.

MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE PEOPLE - NO 1

I've met some remarkable people on my quest, some with strange powers and supernatural intelligence. Today I went to a boot fair in Matfield Green and found some CDs by Michel Thomas, which reminded me of our time together, talking, talking, talking.

It's his proud boast that he can teach people to be fluent in one of several languages in 8 hours.

He tells his pupils not to stress, not to try, not to do homework, but let him take all the strain, all the responsbility. This is one of the methods he uses to help people achieve access to superhuman intelligence.

In my book I show how the Oxford magus Roger Bacon was doing something similar.

Michel's CDs are now a huge international industry. I used to have him dinner with him when he came to London, planning how to make his philosophy better known , and he told me something shortly before he died that you won't find in any of the literature about him, even the excellent and pretty comprehensive biography by Christopher Robbins.

He said he was accustomed to seeing disembodied beings gathering at the foot of his bed. Perhaps a bit disconcerting at first, they were ultimately benevolent.

Michel was not, in so far as i know, an initiate of any secret society, but his supernatural intelligence and communications with Intelligencers lead me to specualte that he was a great initiate in a former incarnation.