The Secret History of the World

In Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan’s recently published memoirs, he writes about what has to happen if an individual is to change the times in which he or she lives. To do this ‘you’ve got to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had done it once…’ He writes that such individuals are able to ‘…see into the heart of things, the truth of things — not metaphorically either — but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it is with hard words and vicious insight’.

Note that he emphasizes he is not talking metaphorically. He is talking directly and quite literally about a powerful, ancient wisdom, preserved in the secret societies, a wisdom in which the great artists, writers and thinkers who have forged our culture are steeped. At the heart of this wisdom is the belief that the deepest springs of our mental life are also the deepest springs of the physical world, because in the universe of the secret societies all chemistry is psycho-chemistry, and the ways in which the physical content of the universe responds to the human psyche are described by deeper and more powerful laws than the laws of material science.

It is important to realize that by these deeper laws are meant more than the mere ‘runs of luck’ that gamblers experience or accidents seeming to happen in sequences of three. No, by these laws the secret societies meant laws that weave themselves into the warp and weft of each individual life at the most intimate level, as well as the great and complex patterns of providential order that have shaped the history of the world. The theory of this book is that history has a deeper structure, that events we usually explain in terms of politics, economics or natural disaster can more profitably be seen in terms of other, more spiritual patterns.

ALL THE UPSIDE-DOWN, INSIDE-OUT, other-way-round thinking of the secret societies, all that is bizarre and mind-bending in what follows stems from the belief that mind preceded matter. We have almost no evidence to go on when we decide what we believe happened at the beginning of time, but the choice we make has massive implications for our understanding of the way the world works.

If you believe that matter came before mind, you have to explain how a chance coming together of chemicals creates consciousness, which is difficult. If, on the other hand, you believe that matter is precipitated by a cosmic mind, you have the equally difficult problem of explaining how, of providing a working model.

From the priests of the Egyptian temples to today’s secret societies, from Pythagoras to Rudolf Steiner, the great Austrian initiate of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, this model has always been conceived of as a series of thoughts emanating from the cosmic mind. Pure mind to begin with, these thought-emanations later become a sort of proto-matter, energy that becomes increasingly dense then becomes matter so ethereal that it is finer than gas, without particles of any kind. Eventually the emanations became gas, then liquid and finally solids.

Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University and one of the world’s leading creators of artificial intelligence. Working in friendly rivalry with his contemporaries at MIT in the United States, he has made robots able to interact with their environment, learn and adjust their behaviour accordingly. These robots exhibit a level of intelligence that matches that of the lower animals such as bees. Within five years, he says, robots will have achieved the level of intelligence of cats and in ten years they will be at least as intelligent as humans. He is also in the process of engineering a new generation of robotic computers he expects to be able to design and manufacture other computers, each level generating the lesser level beneath it.

^{An alchemical engraving from the Mutus Liber, published anonymously in 1677. In alchemy the precipitation of the morning dew is a symbol of the emanation of the Cosmic Mind into the realm of matter. As the Cabala puts it, the Ancient of Days shakes his shaggy head and a dew of divine white light falls. More particularly dew is a symbol of the spiritual forces that work on the conscience during the night. This is why a bad conscience may give us a sleepless night. Here initiates are seen collecting and working on the dew — in other words reaping the benefits upon waking of the spiritual exercises they performed when they went to bed.}

According to the cosmologists of the ancient world and the secret societies, emanations from the cosmic mind should be understood in the same way, as working downwards in a hierarchy from the higher and more powerful and pervasive principles to the narrower and more particular, each level creating and directing the one below it.

These emanations have also always been thought of as in some sense personified, as being in some sense also intelligent.

When I saw Kevin Warwick present his findings to his peers at the Royal Institute in 2001, he was criticized by some for suggesting that his robots were intelligent and so by implication conscious. But what is undeniably true is that these robots’ brains grow in something like an organic way. They form something very like personalities, interreact with other robots and make choices beyond anything that has been programmed into them. Kevin argued that while his robots might not have consciousness with all the characteristics of human consciousness, neither do dogs. Dogs are conscious in a doggy way and his robots, he said, are conscious in a robotic way. Of course, in some ways — such as the ability to make massive mathematical calculations instantly — robots display a consciousness that is superior to our own consciousness.

We might think of the consciousness of the emanations from the cosmic mind in similar terms. We might also be reminded of the Tibetan spiritual masters who are said to be able to form a type of thoughts called tulpas by intense concentration and visualization. These beings — we might call them Thought-Beings — attain some sort of independent life and go off and do their master’s bidding. Similarly Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss magus, wrote about what he called an ‘aquastor’, a being formed by the power of concentrated imagination which may obtain a life of his or her own — and in special circumstances become visible, even tangible.

At the lowest level of the hierarchy, according to the ancient and secret doctrine in all cultures, these emanations, these Thought-Beings from the cosmic mind, interweave so tightly that they create the appearance of solid matter.

Today if you wanted to find language to describe this strange phenomenon, you might choose to look to quantum mechanics, but in the secret societies the interweaving of invisible forces to create the appearance of the material world has always been conceived of as a net of light and colour or — to use an alchemical term — the Matrix.

TOP SCIENTIST ASKS: IS LIFE ALL JUST A DREAM?

THIS HEADLINE RAN IN THE SUNDAY TIMES in February 2005. The story was that Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, was saying, ‘Over a few decades computers have evolved from being able to simulate only very simple patterns to being able to create virtual worlds with a lot of detail. If that trend were to continue, then we can imagine computers which will be able to simulate worlds perhaps even as complicated as the one we think we’re living in. This raises the philosophical question: could we ourselves be in such a simulation and could what we think is the universe be some sort of vault of heaven rather than the real thing. In a sense we could ourselves be the creations within that simulation.’

The wider story was that leading scientists around the world are becoming increasingly fascinated by the extraordinary degree of fine-tuning that has been necessary for us to evolve. And this is making them question what is really real.

As well as these recent developments in science, novels and movies have gone some way to acclimatizing us to the idea that what we routinely take to be reality might be a ‘virtual reality’. Philip K. Dick, who was perhaps the first writer to seed these ideas in pop culture, was steeped in initiatic wisdom regarding altered states and parallel dimensions. His novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was filmed as Blade Runner. Other films with this theme include Minority Report — also based on a book by Dick — Total Recall, The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But the biggest has been The Matrix.

In The Matrix menacing, shade-wearing villains police the virtual world we call reality in order to control us for their own nefarious purposes. In part, at least, this is an accurate reflection of the