The secret history of the world pdf free download

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The Secret History of the World. Author: Jonathan Black. This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. Since there was noTHING when something first happened, it is safe to say this first happening must have been quite different from the sorts of events we regularly account for in terms of the laws of physics.

Might it make sense to say this first happening could have been in some ways more like a mental event than a physical event? Can this everyday example tell us anything about the origins of the cosmos? In the beginning an impulse must have come from somewhere - but where? They have envisaged an impulse squeezing out of another dimension into this one - and they have conceived of this other dimension as the mind of God.

A scientist will not like it at all. Of course there is no reason at all 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.

But what I am going to do, is ask you to stretch your imagination. 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. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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, 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.

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. 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 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 , he was criticized by some for suggesting that his robots were intelligent and so by implication conscious. 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. 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. 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. 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. And this is making them question what is really real.

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. 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 teachings of the Mystery schools and secret societies.

Although all the beings that live behind the veil of illusion are part of the hierarchies of emanations from the mind of God, some display a disturbing moral ambivalence. These are the same beings that the peoples of the ancient world experienced as their gods, spirits and demons.

In its account of interlocking, evolving dimensions, the clashing, morphing and intermingling of great systems, in its scale, complexity and awesome explanatory power it rivals that of modern science.

We cannot simply say that physics has replaced metaphysics and made it redundant. There is a key difference between these systems which is that they are explaining different things. Modern science explains how the universe comes to be as it is. Ancient philosophy of the kind we will be exploring in this book explains how our experience of the universe comes to be as it is. For science the great miracle to be explained is the physical universe. For esoteric philosophy the great miracle is human consciousness.

Scientists are fascinated by the extraordinary series of balances between various sets of factors that has been necessary in order to make life on earth possible. They talk in terms of balances between heat and cold, wetness and dryness, the earth being so far from the sun and no further , the sun being at a particular stage of evolution neither hotter nor cooler.

At a more fundamental level, in order for matter to cohere, the forces of gravity and electromagnetism must each be of a particular degree neither stronger nor weaker. And so on. Looked at from the point of view of esoteric philosophy we can begin to see that an equally extraordinary series of balances has been necessary to make our subjective consciousness what it is, in other words to give our experience the structure it has.

What, for example, is needed to make possible the internal narrative, the collection of stories we string together to form our basic sense of self?

The answer is, of course, memory. It is only by remembering what I did yesterday that I can identify myself as the person who did these things. The key point is that it is a particular degree of memory that is needed, neither stronger nor weaker.

We have to be able to perceive the outside world through the senses, but it is equally important for us not to be overwhelmed by sensations which could otherwise occupy all our mental space. Then we could neither reflect nor imagine. That this balance holds is as extraordinary in its way as - for example - the fact that our planet is neither too far from, nor too close to, the sun. We also have the ability to move our point of consciousness around our interior life - like a cursor on a computer screen.

As a result of this, we have the freedom to choose what to think about. If we did not have the right balance of attachment and detachment from our interior impulses as well as from our perceptions of the outside world, then at this very moment you would have no freedom to choose to take your attention away from the page you are looking at now and no freedom to think about anything else.

For example, we may be required to make decisions at the great turning points of our lives. Again, it is the common, if not universal human experience, that if we try to work out what is the right thing to do with our lives using all our intelligence, if we work at it with a good and whole heart, if we exercise patience and humility, we can - just - discern the right thing to do.

And once we have made the right decision, the chosen course of action will probably require all the willpower we are capable of, perhaps for just as long as we are able to bear it, if we are to complete it successfully. This is right at the core of what it means to experience life as a human being. There is no inevitability about our consciousness having the structure that makes possible these freedoms, these opportunities to choose to do the right thing, to grow and develop into good, perhaps even heroic people - unless you believe in Providence, that is to say unless you believe that it was meant to be.

Human consciousness is therefore a sort of miracle. If today we tend to overlook this, the ancients were stirred by the wonder of it. As we are about to see, their intellectual leaders tracked subtle changes in human consciousness with as much diligence as modern scientists track changes in the physical environment. Their account of history - with its mythical and supernatural happenings - was an account of how human consciousness evolved.

Modern science tries to enforce a narrow, reductive view of our consciousness. It tries to convince us of the unreality of elements, even quite persistent elements in experience, that it cannot explain. These include the shadowy power of prayer, premonitions, the feeling of being stared at, the evidence for mind-reading, out-of-body-experiences, meaningful coincidences and other things swept under the carpet by modern science.

And much, much more importantly, science in this reductive mood denies the universal human experience that life has a meaning. Some scientists even deny that the question of whether or not life has meaning is worth asking. We will see in the course of this history that many of the most intelligent people who have ever lived have become devotees of esoteric philosophy.

I believe it may even be the case that every intelligent person has tried to find out about it at some time. It is a natural human impulse to wonder if life has a meaning, and esoteric philosophy represents the richest, deepest, most concentrated body of thought on this subject.

Before we embark on our narrative, therefore, it is vital that we apply one more sharp philosophical distinction to the softer edge of modern scientific thought. But then at other times our lives do seem to have meaning. Or it happens that someone decides against boarding a plane, which then crashes. We may have a heightened sense of the precariousness of life, how easily things could have turned out differently had it not been for an almost imperceptible, perhaps otherworldy nudge.

Similarly with the down-to-earth, science-oriented part of ourselves we may see a coincidence as a chance coming together of related events, but sometimes deep down we suspect that a coincidence is not a matter of chance at all. In coincidences we sometimes feel we catch a hint, albeit an elusive one, of a deep pattern of meaning hidden behind the muddle of everyday experience.

And sometimes people find that just when all hope seems lost, happiness is discovered the other side of despair, or that inside hatred hides the growing germ of love. We will then be able to relate the reasonable laws that govern objects we can sense with the very different behaviour of phenomena in the sub-atomic realm.

Once this has been formulated we will understand everything there is to be understood about the structure, origin and future of the cosmos. We will have accounted for everything there is, because, they say, there is nothing else. A boy arranges to meet his girlfriend for a date, but she stands him up. When he tracks her down, he interrogates her. His repeated question is WHY? WHY the universe? Obviously we can choose to give parts of our lives purpose and meaning.

If I choose to play soccer, then kicking the ball into the back of the net means a goal. But our lives as a whole, from birth to death, cannot have meaning without a mind that existed beforehand to give it meaning. The same is true of the universe.

Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Such questions are strictly meaningless, we are told. Just get on with it. And so we lose some of the sense of how strange it is to be alive. This book has been written in the belief that something valuable is in danger of being snuffed out altogether, and that as a result we are less alive than we used to be.

In the next chapter we will begin to imagine ourselves into the minds of the initiates of the ancient world and to see the world from their perspective.

We will consider ancient wisdom we have forgotten and see that from its perspective even those things which modern science encourages us to think of as most solidly, reliably true, are really just a matter of interpretation, little more than a trick of the light. What size would it be? What wood would it be made of? How would the wood be joined? Would it be oiled or polished or planed bare? What other features would it have? Imagine it as vividly as you can.

Now look at a real table. Which table can you be sure of knowing the truth about? What can you be more sure of - the contents of our mind or the objects you perceive with your senses? Which is more real, mind or matter? The debate springing from these simple questions has been at the heart of all philosophy.

Today most of us choose matter and objects over mind and ideas. We tend to take physical objects as the yardstick of reality. What I want to suggest now is that people did not formerly believe in a mind-before-matter universe because they had carefully weighed up the philosophical arguments on either side and come to a reasoned decision, but because they experienced the world in a mind-before-matter way.

While our thoughts are pale and shadowy in comparison with our sense impressions, in the case of ancient man it was the other way round. People then had less of a sense of physical objects. Objects were not as sharply defined and differentiated to them as they are to us. If you look at depiction of a tree on the walls of an ancient temple, you will see that the artist has not really looked to see how branches are joined to the trunk.

In ancient times no one really looked at a tree in the way we do. This history belongs to the other type. In this history consciousness changes from age to age, even from generation to generation. Note the anatomically inaccurate and somewhat perfunctory depiction of a tree from an 8th Dynasty tomb. The artists who painted these walls were less interested in these physical objects than in the gods depicted only a few paces away in the inner sanctum of the temple.

These they portrayed in golden, bejewelled and highly detailed images. The contention of this history, therefore, is that, contrary to what our tour guide might say, any similarity between women washing today and women washing four or five thousand years ago is little more than a matter of appearances. We tend to go along with the prevailing intellectual fashion that sees thoughts as nothing more than words - perhaps with a penumbra of other stuff, such as feelings, images and so on - but with only the words themselves having any real significance.

However, if we dwell on this fashionable view, even only briefly, we will find that it flies in the face of everyday experience. If we then concentrate harder, it may well become apparent that these associations are rooted in memories that bring with them feelings - and may even carry with them their own impulses of will.

The guilt I feel at not having phoned my mother earlier, as we now know from psychoanalysis, has roots in a complex knot of feelings that go back to infancy - desire, anger, feelings of loss and betrayal, dependency and the desire for freedom. As I contemplate my feelings of failure, other impulses arise - nostalgia for when things were better perhaps, when my mother and I were one - and an old pattern of behaviour is reanimated.

Signet ring from Mycenae with poppy-bearing priestess. Experience of a thought in all its constantly mutating, multi-dimensional glory may well be familiar to people who experiment with drugs such as marijuana or hallucinogens such as LSD. William Emboden, Professor of Biology at California State University, has published convincing evidence to show that in ancient Egypt the blue lily was used, along with opium and the mandrake root, to induce a trance state.

As we continue to try to pin this thought down, it will twist this way and that. The very act of looking at it changes it, causes reactions, perhaps sometimes even contradictory reactions. A thought is never still. It is a living thing that can never be identified definitively with the dead letter of language. Words can never convey or capture the complexity of an image or of the feelings. Whole dimensions lie glistening on the dark side of even the most dull and commonplace thought.

The wise men and women of the ancient world knew how to work with these dimensions, and over many millennia they created and refined images which would perform just this function. As taught in the Mystery schools, the very early history of the world unfolds in a series of images of this type.

Before considering these powerful and evocative images I now want to ask the reader to begin to take part in an imaginative exercise: to try to imagine how someone in ancient times, a candidate who hoped for initiation into a Mystery school, would have experienced the world. Of course it is a way of experiencing the world that is completely delusional from the point of view of modern science, but as this history progresses we will see more and more evidence that many of the great men and women of history have deliberately cultivated this ancient state of consciousness.

We will see that they have believed that it gives them a view of the way the world really is, the way it works, that is in some ways superior to the modern way. Everything was watching him. Unseen spirits whispered in the movements of the trees. A breeze brushing against his cheek was the gesture of a god. If the buffeting of blocks of air in the sky created lightning, this was an outbreak of cosmic will - and maybe he walked a little faster.

Perhaps he sheltered in a cave? When ancient man ventured into a cave he had a strange sense of being inside his own skull, cut off in his own private mental space. If he climbed to the top of a hill, he felt his consciousness race to the horizon in every direction, out towards the edges of the cosmos - and he felt at one with it. At night he experienced the sky as the mind of the cosmos. Modern drawing, after Rudolf Steiner, illustrating the disposition of human organs as taught in Rosicrucian philosophy.

When he walked along a woodland pathway he would have had a strong sense of following his destiny. Today any of us may wonder, How did I end up in this life that seems to have little or nothing to do with me? Such a thought would have been inconceivable to someone in the ancient world, where everyone was conscious of his or her place in the cosmos. Everything that happened to him - even the sight of a mote in a sunbeam, the sound of the flight of a bee or the sight of a falling sparrow - was meant to happen.

Everything spoke to him. Everything was a punishment, a reward, a warning or a premonition. Part of her, a warning finger perhaps, was protruding into the physical world and into his own consciousness. They believed in a quite literal way that nothing inside us is without a correspondence in nature. Worms, for example, are the shape of intestines and worms process matter as intestines do.

The lungs that enable us to move freely through space with a bird-like freedom are the same shape as birds. The visible world is humanity turned inside out. Lung and bird are both expressions of the same cosmic spirit, but in different modes. To the teachers of the Mystery schools it was significant that if you looked down on to the internal organs of the human body from the skies, their disposition reflected the solar system. In the view of the ancients, then, all biology is astrobiology. Today we know full well how the sun gives life and power to living things, drawing the plant out of the seed, coaxing it to unravel upwards, but the ancients also believed that the forces of the moon, by contrast, tend to flatten and widen plants.

Bulbous plants such as tubers were thought to be particularly affected by the moon. More strikingly, perhaps, the complex, symmetric shapes of plants were believed to be caused by the patterns that the stars and planets make as they move across the sky.

As a heavenly body takes a path that sees it curving back on itself like a shoelace, so that same shape is traced in the curling motion of a leaf as it grows, or a flower. For example, they saw Saturn, which traces a sharp pattern in the sky, forming the pine needles of conifers.

Is it a coincidence that modern science shows that pine trees contain unusually large traces of lead, the metal believed by the ancients to be inwardly animated by the planet Saturn? In the ancient view the shape of the human body was similarly affected by the patterns made in the sky by stars and planets.

The movements of the planets, for example, were inscribed in the human body in the loop of the ribs and the lemniscate - bootlace shape - of the centripetal nerves. But beyond these more obvious rhythms, the ancients recognized how other, more mathematically complex rhythms that involve the outer reaches of the cosmos work their way into human life.

Humans breathe on average 25, times per day, which is the number of years in a great Platonic year i. This sense of interconnectedness was not just a matter of bodily interconnectedness. It extended to consciousness too. When our man on a walk saw a flock of birds turn as one in the sky, it seemed to him as if the flock were one moved all together by one thought - and indeed he believed that this was the case. If the animals in the wood moved altogether in a sudden, violent way, if they panicked, they had been moved by Pan.

Our man knew that this was exactly what was happening, because he commonly experienced great spirits thinking through himself and through other people at the same time. He knew that when he reached the Mystery school and his spiritual master introduced astonishing new thoughts to him and his fellow pupils, they would all be experiencing the very same thoughts, just as if the Master were holding up physical objects for them all to see.

In fact he felt closer to people when sharing their thoughts than he ever did through mere physical proximity. Today we tend to be very proprietorial about our thoughts. We want to take credit for originating them, and we like to think that our private mental space is inviolate, that no other consciousness can intrude on it.

If we are honest we must admit we do not invariably construct our thoughts. For all of us it is the case that everyday thoughts naturally just come to us too. The reality of everyday experience is that thoughts are quite routinely introduced into what we like to think of as our private mental space from somewhere else.

And an individual is not always prompted by the same god, angel or spirit. While today we like to think of ourselves as each having one individual centre of consciousness located inside the head, in the ancient world each person experienced him or herself as having several different centres of consciousness originating outside the head. We saw earlier that gods, angels and spirits were believed to be emanations from the great cosmic mind - Thought-Beings in other words.

What I am asking you to consider now is that these great Thought-Beings expressed themselves through people. If today we naturally think of people thinking, in ancient times they thought of Thoughts peopling. The focus of these changes will often be an individual. For example, Alexander the Great or Napoleon were vehicles for a great spirit, and for a while carried all before them in a remarkable way. No one could oppose them and they succeeded in everything they did - until the spirit left them.

Then quite suddenly everything began to go wrong. We see the same process in the case of artists who become vehicles for the expression of a god or spirit for a certain period of their lives.

But when the spirit leaves, an artist never again creates with the same genius. Similarly if a spirit weaves through an individual to create a work of art, the same great spirit may once again be present whenever that work of art is contemplated by others.

When a thought came to the man walking through the woods, he felt as if he had been brushed by the wing of an angel or by the robe of a god. He sensed a presence even if he could not always perceive it directly and in detail. But once inside the holy precinct, he could perceive not just the wing, not just the swirling waves of light and energy that made up the robe.

In the midst of the light he saw the angel or god itself. On these occasions he would have believed that he really was perceiving a being from the spiritual realm. Today we experience moments of illumination as interior events, while the ancients experienced them as impinging on them from outside.

The man we have been following expected the Thought- Being he saw to be visible to others - what today we would call a collective hallucination. In the ancient world experience of spirits was so strong that to deny the existence of the spirit world would not have occurred to them. In fact it would have been almost as difficult for people in the ancient world to deny the existence of spirit as it would for us to decide not to believe in the table, the book, in front of us.

Paucity of experience makes belief in disembodied spirits difficult today. In fact the Church teaches that belief is admirable because it is difficult.