The Secret History of the World

As time went on the plant forms became more complex, more like the plants of today. Again, if you had been able to see this time in the history of the cosmos with the physical eye, you would have been struck by the myriad fluttering, palpitating flowers.

We have suggested that the secret history of the creation shadows the scientific history of creation in intriguing ways. We have just seen, for example, how a purely mineral stage of existence has been followed by a primitive plant stage, followed by an era of more complex plants. But there is a vital difference I must draw to your attention. In the secret history not only is it true to say that what eventually evolved into human life passed through a vegetable stage, but the vegetable element remains an essential part of the human being today.

If you removed the sympathetic nervous system from the body and stood it up on its own, it would look like a tree. As one of Britain’s leading homeopathic healers put it to me, in a rather beautiful phrase: ‘The sympathetic nervous system is the gift of the vegetable kingdom to the physical body of man.’

Esoteric thought all over the world is concerned with the subtle energies that flow round this vegetable part of the body and also with the ‘flowers’ on this tree, the chakras which operate, as we shall see, as its organs of perception. The great centre of the vegetable component of the human body, feeding on the waves of light and warmth radiating from the sun, is the chakra of the solar plexus — called ‘solar’ because it was formed in this, the era controlled by the sun.

Awareness of this vegetable element in the human body has remained greatest among the peoples of China and Japan. In Chinese medicine the energetic flow of this vegetable life force, called chi, is understood to animate the body, and disease arises when the delicate network of energies becomes blocked. The fact that the flow of this energy is undetectable by modern, materialistic science, the fact that it seems to operate in some elusive realm between the human spirit and the meat of the animal body, does not make the medicine any the less effective, as generation upon generation of patients attest.

^{Germanic sun-idol. Engraving of 1596. J. B. van Helmont, an important alchemist and scientist who will feature later in this history, called the stomach ‘the seat of the soul’.}

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^{Hindu illustration of the seven major chakras and, for comparison, illustration by Johann Gichtel to the writings on chakras by the seventeenth-century Christian mystic Jacob Boehme.}

As well as in medicine, the Chinese and Japanese tend to lay great emphasis on the role of the solar plexus in spiritual practice. If you contemplate a statue of a meditating Buddha, you will see someone who has gathered himself inward, and that the centre of this meditation, his centre of mental and spiritual gravity, is his lower belly. This is because he has withdrawn from the rigid, deadly mentality of the brain and sunk down into the centre within himself — sometimes called the hara — that is connected with all life. He is concentrating on becoming more aware of being alive, of his unity with all living things. ALTHOUGH THE IDEA OF CHAKRAS HAS become popular in the West because of an influx of oriental esoteric thought, the chakras are also central to the Western esoteric tradition and can be seen in both Egyptian and Hebrew thought. And just as Christianity contains a hidden tradition of gods of the stars and planets, so it also contains a hidden tradition of the chakras.

The organs of the vegetable body are situated in nodes up and down its trunk. They are made up of different numbers of petals — the solar plexus chakra, for example, having ten petals and the brow chakra having two petals. The seven major chakras — situated at the groin, solar plexus, kidneys, heart, throat, brow and crown — feature in the seventeenth-century writings of Jacob Boehme and, as we will see later, in those of his near-contemporary, the Catholic Saint, Teresa of Avila, where they are called ‘the eyes of the soul’.

Moreover, on closer inspection the Bible itself can be seen to contain many coded references to the chakras. The ‘horns’ with which Moses has traditionally been depicted are explained away by conventionally minded Christians as the result of a misunderstanding based on a mistranslation. But in the esoteric tradition these horns represent the two petals of the brow chakra, sometimes called the Third Eye. The flowering rod of Aaron refers to the activation of the chakras, the opening of the subtle flowers up and down the subtle tree. In the final chapter we will see how in Revelation the account of the opening of the seven seals is in fact a way of talking about the enlivening of the seven chakras, and predicting the great visions of the spiritual world that will result.

^{The almond shape that surrounds this vision of Jesus, called the vesica piscis, is derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph called the Ru, which symbolized the birth-portal and also the Third Eye, or brow chakra. What is intended by the masons who carved this device on a church at Alpirsbach, Germany, is that you can have direct experience of and communication with the great spiritual beings by activating the Third Eye. It is extraordinary to consider that Christian art and architecture all over the world commonly features a representation of the Third Eye, unrecognized by the great majority of Christians.}

THE PINEAL GLAND IS A SMALL GREY gland, the size of an almond, which is situated in the brain where the spinal chord reaches up into it. In esoteric physiology, when we have a hunch, our pineal gland begins to vibrate, and if spiritual disciplines are used to increase and prolong this vibration, this may lead to the opening of the Third Eye, situated, of course, in the middle of the brow.

^{The Third Eye as a uraeus snake in an Egyptian wall carving.}

^{Man meditating on the pineal gland, taken from a drawing by Paul Klee with Hindu depiction of the same for comparison.}

Modern anatomists only ‘discovered’ the pineal gland in 1866, when two monographs were published almost simultaneously by H.W. de Graaf and E. Baldwin Spencer. Later it was discovered that the pineal gland is large in children and when the crystallization of various body parts happens around puberty — that is to say when we naturally become less imaginative — the pineal gland begins a process of calcification and also shrinks. Scientists now know that melatonin is a hormone, most of which is produced by the pineal gland, mostly at night. Melatonin is essential for the rhythm of waking and sleeping and the maintenance of the immune system.

If modern science discovered the pineal gland relatively late, the ancients certainly knew of it very early on, and also believed they understood its function. They knew, too, how to manipulate it to achieve altered states. The Egyptians clearly depicted it as a uraeus snake and in Indian literature it is shown as the Third Eye of Enlightenment, or the Eye of Siva. It was depicted as the pine-cone-topped wand of the followers of Dionysius, and a fourth-century BC Greek anatomist described it as ‘the sphincter which regulates the flow of thought’.

They saw the pineal gland as an organ of perception of higher worlds, a window opening on to the brightness and wonder of the spiritual hierarchies. This window could be opened systematically by meditation and other secret practices which gave rise to visions. Recent research at the University of Toronto has shown that meditating on the pineal gland using methods recommended by Indian yogis causes it to release a rush of melatonin, the secretion that causes us to have dreams and, in sufficient dosages, can also cause waking hallucinations.