The Secret History of the World

like us? Why should ‘His’ mind be in any way like ours?

The fact is that they’re right. Of course there is no reason at all… unless it’s the other way round. In other words, the only reason why God’s mind might be like ours is if ours was made to be like His — that is, if God made us in His image.

And this is what happens in this book, because in this history everything is the other way round.

^{Alice enters the other-way-round universe.}

Everything here is upside down and inside out. In the pages that follow you will be invited to think the last things that the people who guard and maintain the consensus want you to think. You will be tempted to think forbidden thoughts and taste philosophies that the intellectual leaders of our age believe to be heretical, stupid and mad.

Let me quickly reassure you that I’m not going to try to embroil you in academic debate, to try to persuade you by philosophical argument that any of these forbidden ideas are right. The formal arguments for and against can be found in the standard academic works referenced in the notes. But what I am going to do, is ask you to stretch your imagination. I want you to imagine what it would feel like to see the world and its history from a point of view that is about as far away from the one you’ve been taught as it is possible to get.

Our most advanced thinkers would be horrified, and would certainly advise you against toying with these ideas in any way at all, let alone dwelling on them for the time it will take to read this book.

There has been a concerted attempt to erase from the universe all memory, every last trace of these ideas. Today’s intellectual elite believes that if we let these ideas slip back into the imagination, even briefly, we risk being dragged back into an aboriginal or atavistic form of consciousness, a mental slime from which we have had to struggle over many millennia to evolve.

SO IN THIS STORY, WHAT DID HAPPEN before time? What was the primal mental event?

In this story God reflected on Himself. He looked, as it were, into an imaginary mirror and saw the future. He imagined beings very like Himself. He imagined free, creative beings capable of loving so intelligently and thinking so lovingly that they could transform themselves and others of their kind in their innermost being. They could expand their minds to embrace the totality of the cosmos, and in the depths of their hearts they could discern, too, the secrets of its subtlest workings. Sometimes the love in them was almost snuffed out, but at other times they found deeper happiness the other side of despair, and sometimes, too, they found meaning the other side of madness.

Putting yourself into God’s position involves imagining that you are staring at your reflection in a mirror. You are willing the image of yourself you see there to come alive and take on its own independent life.

As we shall see in the following chapters, in the looking-glass history taught by the secret societies this is exactly what God did, his reflections — humans — gradually and in stages, forming and achieving independent life, nurtured by Him, guided and prompted by Him over very long periods.

TODAY’S SCIENTISTS WILL TELL YOU THAT in the hour of your greatest anguish there is no point in crying out to the heavens with any expression of your deepest, most heartfelt feelings, because you will find no answering resonance there. The stars can show you only indifference. The human task is to grow up, to mature, to learn to come to terms with this indifference.

^{A nineteenth-century depiction of the cabalistic image of God reflecting on himself.}

The universe that this book describes is different, because it was made with humankind in mind.

In this history the universe is anthropocentric, every single particle of it straining, directed towards humankind. This universe has nurtured us through the millennia, cradled us, helped the unique thing that is human consciousness to evolve and guided each of us as individuals towards the great moments in our lives. When you cry out, the universe turns towards you in sympathy. When you approach one of life’s great crossroads, the whole universe holds its breath to see which way you will choose.

Scientists may talk of the mystery and wonder of the universe, of every single particle in it being connected to every other particle by the pull of gravity. They may point out amazing facts, such as that each and every one of us contains millions of atoms that were once in the body of Julius Caesar. They may say we are stardust — but only in the slightly disappointing sense that the atoms we are made of were forged from hydrogen in stars that exploded long before our solar system was formed. Because the important point is this: however they deck it out with the rhetoric of mystery and wonder, theirs is a universe of blind force.

^{LHOOQ — Manifeste DADA by Marcel Duchamp, reproduced in the book Surrealism and Painting by Andre Breton. The notion that the physical world responds to our inner desires and fears is a difficult and perhaps somewhat troubling one that we will keep returning to in order to try to understand it better. In 1933 Andre Breton, a devotee of the philosophy of the secret societies, said something very wonderful that has illumined art and sculpture ever since — and never more so than in the case of the ready-mades of Duchamp: ‘Any piece of flotsam or jetsam within our grasp should be considered as a precipitate of our desire.’}

In the scientific universe matter came before mind. Mind is an accident of matter, inessential and extraneous to matter — as one scientist went so far as to describe it, ‘a disease of matter’.

On the other hand in the mind-before-matter universe that this book describes, the connection between mind and matter is much more intimate. It is a living, dynamic connection. Everything in this universe is alive and conscious to some degree, responding sensitively and intelligently to our deepest, subtlest needs.

In this mind-before-matter universe, not only did matter emerge from the mind of God, but it was created in order to provide the conditions in which the human mind would be possible. The human mind is still the focus of the cosmos, nuturing it and responding to its needs. Matter is moved by human minds perhaps not to the same extent but in the same kind of way that it is moved by the mind of God.

In 1935 the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger formulated his famous theoretical experiment, Schrodinger’s Cat, to describe how events change when they are observed. In effect he was taking the secret societies’ teachings about everyday experience and applying them to the sub-atomic realm.

At some point in childhood we all wonder whether a tree falling really makes any sound if it takes place in a remote forest where no one is there to hear it. Surely, we say, a sound not heard by anyone can’t properly be described as a sound? The secret societies teach that something like this speculation is true. According to them, a tree only falls over in a forest, however remote, so that someone, somewhere at some time is affected by it. Nothing happens anywhere in the cosmos except in interaction with the human mind.

In Schrodinger’s experiment a cat sits in a box with radioactive material that has a 50 per cent chance of killing the cat. Both the cat’s being dead and its being alive remain 50 per cent probabilities suspended in time, as it were, until we open the box to see what’s inside, and only then does the actual event — the death or survival of the cat — happen. By looking at the cat we kill or save it. The secret societies have always held that the everyday world behaves in a similar way.

In the universe of the secret societies a coin flipped in strict laboratory conditions will still land heads up in 50 per cent of cases and tails up in 50 per cent of cases according to the laws of probability. However, these laws will remain invariable only in laboratory conditions. In other words, the laws of probability only apply when all human subjectivity has been deliberately excluded. In the normal run of things when human happiness and hopes for self fulfilment depend on the outcome of the roll of the dice, then the laws of probability are bent. Then deeper laws come into play.

These days we are all comfortable with the fact that our emotional states affect our bodies and, further, that deep-seated emotions can cause long-term, deep-seated changes, either to heal or to harm — psychosomatic effects. But in the universe that this book describes, our emotional states directly affect matter outside our bodies too. In this psychosomatic universe the behaviour of physical objects in space is directly affected by mental states without our having to do anything about it. We can move matter by the way we look at it.