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.
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 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.
THE FACT THAT SOME LEADING SCIENTISTS are again beginning to see possibilities in this very ancient way of looking at the cosmos is an encouraging sign. Although modern sensibility has little patience with metaphysics, with what might look like high-minded, recherché abstractions piled up on each other, the cosmology of the ancient world was, as any fair historian of ideas will allow, a magnificent philosophical machine. 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.
By ‘balances’ I’m talking about more than having a balanced mind in the colloquial sense, that is to say of having emotions which are healthy and not too strong. I’m talking of something deeper, something essential.
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. The Italian novelist Italo Calvino, one of the many modern writers who have followed the ancient and mystical philosophy, puts it precisely: ‘Memory has to be strong enough to enable us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to learn without ceasing to be the same person, but it also has to be weak enough to allow us to keep moving into the future.’