Mark Booth: The Secret History of the World

God Peers at His Reflection • The Looking-Glass Universe

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS NO TIME AT ALL.

Time is nothing but a measure of the changing positions of objects in space, and, as any scientist, mystic or madman knows, in the beginning there were no objects in space .

For example, a year is a measure of the movement of the earth round the sun. A day is the revolving of the earth on its axis. Since by its own account neither earth nor sun existed in the beginning, the authors of the Bible never meant to say that everything was created in seven days in the usual sense of ‘day’.

Despite this initial absence of matter, space and time, something must have happened to get everything started. In other words, something must have happened before there was anything .

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?

The idea of mental events generating physical effects may at first seem counter-intuitive, but in fact it’s something we experience all the time. For example, what happens when I’m struck by an idea — such as ‘I just have to reach out and stroke her cheek’ — is that a pulse jumps a synapse in my brain, something like an electrical current burns down a nerve in my arm and my hand moves.

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? As children didn’t we all feel wonder when we first saw crystals precipitating in the bottom of a solution, as if an impulse were squeezing out of one dimension into the next? In this history we shall see how for many of the world’s most brilliant individuals the birth of the universe, the mysterious transition from no-matter to matter has been explained in just such a way. 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.

WHILE YOU ARE STILL ON THE THRESHOLD — and before you risk wasting any more time on this history — I must make it plain that I am going to try to persuade you to consider something which may be all right by a mystic or a madman, but which a scientist will not like. A scientist will not like it at all.

To today’s most advanced thinkers, academics like Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simony Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and other militant materialists who regulate and maintain the scientific world-view, the ‘mind of God’ is no better than the idea of a white-haired old man up above the clouds. It is the same mistake, they say, that children and primitive tribes make when they assume God must be like them — the anthropomorphic fallacy. Even if we allowed that God might conceivably exist, they say, why on earth should ‘He’ be 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.

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.

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.