Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

The world of Shakespeare is the world of human values, where, whatever happens, it is human happiness and the shape of human lives that are at stake. The world of Bacon is one where human values have been stripped out.

Human experience is the tricky, paradoxical, mysterious and ultimately unpredictable thing that Shakespeare dramatized. Bacon taught humankind to look at the physical objects that are the contents of experience and to note the predictable laws they obey.

He devised new ways of thinking about the contents of experience. He advised the discarding of as many preconceptions as possible while gathering as much data as possible, trying not to impose patterns on it, but waiting patiently for deeper, richer patterns to emerge. This is why in the history of the philosophy of science he is known as the Father of Induction.

In short, Bacon realized that if you can observe objects as objectively as possible very different patterns emerge from the ones that give subjective experience its structure.

This realization would change the face of the planet.

LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT MEISTER ECKHART, the shadowy thirteenth-century German mystic, but, just as his contemporary Dante can be seen as the source of the Renaissance, Eckhart can be seen as the source of the broader but more slowly moving Reformation. In Eckhart we can also see the source of a new form of consciousness which would lead Northern Europe to world domination.

Born in near Gotha in Germany in 1260, he entered a Dominican friary, became a prior and eventually succeeded Thomas Aquinas teaching theology in Paris. His great Opus Tripartitum , as ambitious in scope as the Summa Theologica , was never finished. He died while on trial for his life, accused of heresy.

A few sermons have come down to us, some of them transcribed by people in Strasbourg. They had never heard anything like these notions before:

I pray to God to rid me of God.

If I myself were not, God would not be either.

If I were not, God would not be God.

God is within, we are without.

The eye through which I see God and the eye through which God sees me is the same eye.

He is He because He is not He. This cannot be understood by the outer man, only the inner man.

Find the one desire behind all desires.

God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.

Through nothing I become what I am.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

These sound exceptionally modern. You would probably even be a bit surprised to hear them coming out of the mouth of your local clergyman today.

Like a Zen Master, Meister Eckhart tries to shock us out of fixed ways of thinking, sometimes with what at first sounds like nonsense.

He also teaches an oriental style of meditation that involves both sustained detachment from the material world and emptiness of the mind. He says that when the powers have all been withdrawn from their bodily form and functions, when man has absconded from the senses, then he ‘lapses into the oblivion of things and of himself’.

Like Buddhist ‘emptiness’ this oblivion is a void containing infinite and inexhaustible possibilities, and so a place of rebirth and creativity. It is also a difficult and dangerous place. Eckhart was showing the way not of consolation for a harsh, repressed life, not rewards deferred, but a strange and testing dimension you enter at your peril, ‘the desert of the Godhead where no one is at home’.

Like Mohammed, like Dante, Eckhart had direct personal experience of the spirit worlds. Again and again what he reported back is not what you’d expect:

‘When you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see demons tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, you’ll see that the demons are really angels freeing you from the earth. The only things that burn us is the part you won’t let go, your memories, your attachments.’

Eckhart is sometimes spoken of as one of ‘the twelve sublime Masters of Paris’, a phrase that reminds us of the ancient traditions of hidden masters and adepts, the Great White Brotherhood, the Thirty-Six Righteous of Cabalistic tradition, the Brotherhood on the Roof of the World, the Inner Circle of Adepts or the Nine Unknown. According to ancient traditions knowledge, the way to gain experience of the spirit words is passed on by an initiatic chain of transmission from master to pupil. In the East this is sometimes called satsong . It is not just a matter of information passed on by word, but a sort of magical mind-to-mind process. Plato may be read as referring to something similar when he talks of mimesis . In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato is inviting his pupil to create an imaginative image which will work on his mind in a way that operates beyond the narrowly rational. In Plato’s opinion, the best writing — he is talking of Hesiod’s poetry — casts a hypnotic spell that carries with it the transmission of knowledge.

An initiate I knew told me how, when he was a young man living in New York, his Master had reached over to him, drawn a circle on a table and asked him what he saw.

‘A table top,’ he replied.

‘That is good,’ said the Master. ‘The eyes of a young man should look outward.’ Then, without saying any more, he leaned forward and touched my friend on the forehead between the eyes with his outstretched finger.

Immediately the world faded and he was dazzled by a vision of what seemed to him a cold, white goddess of the moon, carrying a skull and a rosary. She had six faces each with three eyes.

The goddess danced and my friend lost track of time. Then, after a while, the vision faded and shrank until it became a dot and disappeared.

My friend knew, though, it was still living inside him somewhere like a burning seed and would do so forever.

His Master said, ‘You saw it?’

I was thrilled when I heard this story, because I knew I was very close to the chain of mystic transmission.

THE DIRECT SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE THAT Meister Eckhart talked about with such conviction in his sermons was experience of a kind organized religion no longer seemed able to provide. The Church seemed pedantically tied to the dead letter of the law both in theology and ritual.

So it was in a climate of spiritual dissatisfaction and restlessness that loose and shadowy associations arose among like-minded people. Groups of lay people questing for spiritual experience, ‘wandering stars’ as they were sometimes known, were said to meet in secret: the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, the Family of Love and the Friends of God. Stories were rife among all levels of society in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, even among the underprivileged and alienated poor, of people being approached by mysterious strangers who took them to secret meetings or even on journeys into strange, otherworldly dimensions.

One of the more intriguing notions associated with the secret societies is that you can never track them down. Instead they operate some form of occult but benevolent surveillance. When the time is right, when you are ready, a member of the secret schools will come to you and offer himself as your spiritual guide or master.

The same initiate told me how at a gathering of top academics who all shared an interest in the esoteric — he himself was an art historian — it eventually emerged that the great teacher in their presence was none of the doctors or professors but the cleaning lady with mop and pail at the back of the lecture theatre. Such stories may have an apocryphal air about them, but they also have a universal resonance. The spiritual master of the greatest esoteric teacher of the twentieth century, Rudolf Steiner, was a woodcutter and herb-gatherer.