by Colin Wilson
“Seth” went on to dictate a number of books, with titles like The Seth Material and Seth Speaks, which achieved tremendous popularity. They certainly demonstrate that Seth, whether an aspect of Jane Roberts’s unconscious mind or a genuine “spirit”, was of a high level of intelligence. Yet when Jane Roberts produced a book that purported to be the after-death journal of the philosopher William James, it was difficult to take it seriously. James’s works are noted for their vigour and clarity of style; Jane Roberts’s “communicator” writes like an undergraduate:
Yet, what a rambunctious nationalistic romp, and it was matched with almost missionary fervour by the psychologists, out to root from man’s soul all of those inconsistencies and passions that were buried there; and to leash these as well for the splendid pursuits of progress, industry and the physical manipulation of nature for man’s use.
There is a clumsiness here that is quite unlike James’s swift-moving, colloquial prose. “And to leash these as well . . .” is simply not William James; he would simply have said “And to harness these . . .”
Yet Seth himself often says things of immense and profound importance – for example, his emphasis (in The Nature of Personal Reality) on the importance of the conscious mind and conscious decision.
I quite realise that many of my statements will contradict the beliefs of those of you who accept the idea that the conscious mind is relatively powerless, and that the answers to problems lie hidden beneath – i.e., in the “unconscious”. Obviously the conscious mind is a phenomenon, not a thing. It is ever-changing. It can be concentrated or turned by the ego in literally endless directions. It can view outward reality or turn inward, observing its own contents . . . It is far more flexible than you give it credit for.
Comments like these are so opposed to our familiar dogmas about the unconscious and the “solar plexus” that they make an impact of startling freshness. This is not the usual diffuse verbiage of “inspirational” writing, but the communication of a vision into the powers of the mind. If Seth is an aspect of Jane Roberts, then she is a philosopher of considerable insight.
The experience of the Londoner Tony Neate is typical of the “psychic” who finds himself “in communication” with Van Dusen’s “higher order hallucinations”. In 1950, at the age of twenty, he began as a skeptic playing with a primitive form of ouija board, a glass on a polished table-top; the glass flew off the table with such violence that it knocked a man over backward. He began to practise psychometry – receiving “pictures” from objects that are held in the hand – and found that his visions of the history of such objects were often accurate. One day when he was practising psychometry he went into a trance, and “spirits” spoke through him. A “spirit” who claimed to be Freud quoted a German book giving the exact page; Tony Neate was able to track down the book in the London Library and found the quotation accurate. A spirit who claimed to be the singer Melba told of a concert she had given in Brussels; again, the statement was found to be accurate.
Then, during the Christmas of 1955, Tony Neate found himself tuned in to a character who called himself Helio-Arcanophus (H-A for short), who claimed to be an inhabitant of Atlantis – the name means high priest of the sun. Tony Neate and his associates founded a society called the Atlanteans, and they moved into a farm complex in West Malvern. The writer Annie Wilson spent some time there, and her book about her experiences, Where There’s Love, makes it clear that, like Seth, “H-A” has many important and some original things to say. Reading these utterances, it is natural for the skeptic to assume that they originate in the unconscious mind of Tony Neate. But if that is the case, then how can we explain the Freud quotation and the information obtained from “Melba”? And if we are willing to admit that this information was obtained “paranormally” or that any information can be obtained paranormally, as in the case of the Glastonbury scripts (see Time in Disarray) then it is obviously possible that the same applies to the utterances of Seth and Helio-Arcanophus.
Not all “occult teachings” claim to originate with disembodied entities; others are accompanied by the claim that they have been preserved down the ages by secret societies or brotherhoods. George Gurdjieff, one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, spent much of his youth in search of a certain “Sarmoung Brotherhood”, and claimed to have received his basic teachings from a monastic brotherhood in the northern Himalayas. The essence of Gurdjieff’s teaching consists in the notion that ordinary consciousness is a form of “sleep”, that nearly all human activities are entirely “mechanical”, and that if man wishes to cease to be mechanical he has to make a tremendous effort of will. But books like In Search of the Miraculous (by Gurdjieff’s leading follower P.D. Ouspensky) make it clear that behind Gurdjieff’s “psychological” teachings lay a highly complex cosmological system, which has no obvious relevance to the psychological teachings, and which it seems unlikely that Gurdjieff invented himself.
This cosmology is further elabourated in the four-volume work of another leading Gurdjieff follower, J.G. Bennett, The Dramatic Universe, which is founded on the assertion that “there is a class of cosmic essences called Demiurges that is responsible for maintaining the universal order”, and that these Demiurgic Intelligences “work upon time scales far exceeding the span of a human life”. Bennett calls the universe “dramatic” to underline his sense of the importance of free will; because the universe is not dead and predetermined, the final outcome is uncertain. “The key to the whole scheme is will-time or Hyparxis. This is the region in which the will is free to make decisions that introduce something new and uncaused into the world process”. The demiurges have far greater power than man to introduce something new and uncaused into the world process; but they are not infallible. Although their main task is “to guide the evolution of the world from its first lifeless beginning”, they have “guided the process by experiment and trial, sometimes making mistakes and retracing their steps, sometimes making great leaps forward, as when life came out of the ocean and land creatures began”. Bennett adds that Gurdjieff calls the demiurges “angels”, “but this had so many meanings that it is best avoided”.
The existence of a secret tradition of hidden teachings is hinted at in Idries Shah’s book The Sufis, and it was in a review of this book in the London Evening News that its literary editor, Edward Campbell, wrote:
For many centuries there has been a strange legend in the East. It suggests that in some hidden centre, perhaps in the Highlands of Central Asia, there exists a colony of men possessing exceptional powers. This centre acts, in some respects at least, as the secret government of the world.
Some aspects of this legend came to the West during the Crusades; the idea was renewed in Rosicrucian guise in 1614; it was restated with variations last century by Mme Blavatsky and the French diplomat Jacoliot; was suggested again by the English author Talbot Mundy, and most recently by the Mongolian traveller Ossendowski in 1918.
In the mysterious Shangri-la of this legend, certain men, evolved beyond the ordinary human situation, act as the regents of powers beyond this planet.
Through lower echelons – who mingle unsuspected in ordinary walks of life, both East and West – they act at critical stages of history, contriving results necessary to keep the whole evolution of the earth in step with events in the solar system.
And in his book The People of the Secret (1983), Campbell (under the punning pseudonym Ernest Scott) goes on to suggest that “in the first quarter of the 20th century, Western science had not only reached a critical stage but an impasse and that, simultaneously, material possibly capable of resolving that situation appeared unobtrusively from the East”. He goes on to suggest that “this interpretation derives from a source superior to, and qualitatively different from, ordinary intellect”, and that “similar ‘intervention’ occurs at critical points in human history and has done so in all cultures and all ages in a form appropriate to the moment”. Campbell refers to the sources of this in
fluence as “the Tradition”, and suggests that between 1920 and 1950 part of the intention appears to have been to “reveal publicly the mechanism of the Tradition’s own operation”. And he mentions that two men who were in contact with “the Tradition” were J.G. Bennett and Rodney Collin, both followers of Gurdjieff.
Campbell goes on to suggest a close analogy between the human organism and a civilized culture.
A sperm cell originates a new individual. Suppose a conscious man originates a new culture. Suppose that within life there are a few men, unsuspected and hidden, who are able to process conscious energy and are therefore in touch with the pattern of conscious energy outside life. (In J.G. Bennett’s terminology this would correspond to the Demiurgic level.) Such conscious men would be to a human culture as a sperm cell is to tissue cells in the human body.
Campbell then sketches out the “cultural systems” outlined by Rodney Collin in his book The Theory of Celestial Influence (Chapter XVI): Aurignacian man, Magdalenian man, Middle and Far Eastern Man (Egypt, Sumer, Ancient India), Graeco-Roman Man, Early Christian Man, Mediaeval Christian Man, Renaissance Man, Modern Man. In this scheme Egypt gave birth to the world of the Greeks, and the Greeks transmitted the “energy of fertilization” to Rome via the philosophy of the Stoics and Epicureans. “Again a period of dazzling achievement seemingly from nowhere”. Early Christianity sprang out of Rome, but by the eighth century had fossilized into the corrupt church of the mediaeval papacy. The next culture, according to Campbell, is the medieval church, which originated in Cluny, whose Gothic cathedral “encapsulated all the Gothic cathedrals to come”. “In each of these there was a suggestion of a whole unseen cosmology; each an encyclopedia in stone containing, for those who could read . . . a summary of the Plan and Purpose of evolution”. Campbell clearly agrees with the author of The Mystery of the Cathedrals (see chapter 17) that Gothic cathedrals were alchemical textbooks. The medieval masons were exponents of “the Tradition”. Campbell also notes that this was also the period of “esoteric building in Islam”, and mentions the joint mission from Cluny and Chartres to Saracen Spain, which returned with knowledge of logarithms, algebra and alchemy.
This was the preparation for the next major stage: the Renaissance. And Renaissance culture finally gave way to the modern epoch around the mid-nineteenth century – Campbell mentions 1859, the year of The Origin of Species. Our modern age, Campbell suggests, reached the peak of its development about 1935 with road and air transport and radio and cinema – and indeed, we can see that these developments transformed the mental outlook of the human race just as the invention of printing did in the Renaissance. The modern epoch may well continue for another six or seven hundred years; but the new epoch that will replace it will struggle into being long before our own period comes to an end.
Campbell’s starting point, then, is the “Demiurgic intelligences” of J.G. Bennett. He assumes that these are a reality, and that their activities can be seen in human history. From the point of view of this “Hidden Directorate”, early Christianity took the wrong turning. He sees the mission of Jesus as an event of universal significance, an attempt to introduce certain energies into the evolutionary process – the energies of a selfless love. Campbell suggests that the Early Fathers “rejected the wisdom component within which lay the techniques of developing consciousness”. They reasoned that nothing is necessary for spiritual evolution except the Christ. The “heretic” Arius felt instinctively that this was a mistake. His heresy consisted of the assertion that the Son was not the equal of the Father – a dim recognition that Jesus had been “sent” into history at a particular time for a particular purpose. When the Council of Nicaea rejected this view in AD 325, they turned their back on the “Demiurgic Tradition”. “Yet”, says Campbell,
Demiurgic responsibility for evolution remained. The Demiurges were still obligated to achieve evolutionary gains, in harmony with growth beyond the earth. Their agents, the Hidden Directorate on earth, were still required to contrive the social environment which would provide the necessary opportunities. The mandate of both is to raise the level of consciousness of mankind in general and of suitable individuals exceptionally. Mankind in the West had subconsciously decided that this was no longer necessary.
The coming of Mohammed once again allowed the Demiurges a foothold. A “school” for the oral transmission of his ideas formed around him. “This inner group of 90 took an oath of fidelity and are said to have adopted the name Sufi”. (A moment later, Campbell confuses the issue by stating that this is not to say that Sufism derives from Mohammedanism, and that the Sufic tradition actually goes back through Plato, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Hermes Trismegistos. But the main thrust of his argument is clear.) In due course the Arabs invaded Spain, and planted the seeds that would become the Renaissance.
Campbell’s chapter on “Rome, Christianity and Islam” contains a clear example of what he means by Demiurgic intervention in human history. The monasteries of western Europe, which preserved learning during the Dark Ages, were too remote and inaccessible to serve as real cultural centres. But St Patrick’s conversion of Ireland – beginning in AD 432 – caused “the rebirth of Celtic culture by a ‘shock’ from Christianity”. Ireland became a centre of learning – so much so that in 550 a ship had to be chartered to carry scholars from Gaul to Cork. Celtic Christianity valued pagan literature. St Columba and his pupil Columbanus directed the missionary flow back to Europe, and Columbanus founded more than a hundred monasteries. Rome finally brought the Celtic Church to heel in 664 at the Synod of Whitby, but the impulse could not be destroyed. Two Celtic monks were established as dispensers of wisdom at the court of Charlemagne. Campbell makes the fascinating suggestion that the Celtic Church obtained some of its wisdom through “psychokinetic techniques”. Psychokinesis is the term invented by students of parapsychology for “mind over matter”, and Campbell suggests elsewhere in the book that this is the basic secret of alchemy; it is not quite clear how he believes the Celtic Church used these techniques.
In the ninth century, says Campbell, schools of initiates began to flourish in Córdoba and Toledo, and their efforts were to have far-reaching influences, which can still be traced in the world today. The doctor Al Razi and the scholar Avicenna, both Persians, were only two of an immense number of scholars who “provided the raw material for the coming injection of intellect into Europe”. Among these intellectual impulses were the schools of thought that would later become known as Freemasonry and Illuminism, “impulses which at their seventh harmonic were to encompass the French Revolution”.
The next five chapter of The People of the Secret are an interpretation of European history from the “interventionist” point of view. They consider the Kabbalah, the Tarot and alchemy as vehicles of “the Tradition”, and study the historical significance of Catharism, the rise of the Troubadors, and the legends of King Arthur. Again and again, Campbell traces the original seed of these movements back to their Sufic origins.
In the chapter on Gurdjieff, Campbell comments:
Since the early 1950s, a great deal of hitherto unknown material has become available, and in the nature of things this cannot have happened by accident. If it has leaked, it is because those in charge of it have decided to “leak” it.
Separately, the various hints amount to little. Taken together, they suggest for the first time the nature of the organisation, long suspected but never identified, which is concerned with injecting developmental possibilities into the historical process at certain critical points.
On the basis of internal evidence, it may be legitimate to suggest that this organisation is the expression of one of the Centres inferred by J.G. Bennett as directing the evolution of the whole human race. In The Dramatic Universe, the Centres of Transformation are the four hypothetical regions where, 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, the human mind was endowed with creativity and man became Homo sapiens sapiens. Twelve thousand years ago, these Centres withdrew for some 80 generations
to prepare for the debut of modern man. The suggestion is that one of these, immediately responsible for the West, has decided to come, partially at least, into the open in the second half of the 20th century. It may be that the intellectual development of the West is now at such a stage that the parent can only guide the offspring further by taking it into its confidence.
Campbell mentions that attempts by Gurdjieff’s pupils to make contact with the monasteries or other teaching centres where Gurdjieff gained his “occult” knowledge were all unsuccessful.
In the 1930s it is believed that Ouspensky made contact with the Mevlevi (Order of Dervishes) and asked them to send someone to England. This they declined to do, but indicated that they were prepared to receive a representative from him. One of Ouspensky’s senior pupils was ready to leave for the East in 1939 when War broke out and the project was abandoned.
But in 1961 a journalist seeking material for an article on Sufi practices “was unaccountably introduced to every facility for getting material . . . This journalist, Omar Burke, found himself allowed to visit a secret Dervish community whose location has been identified as Kunji Zagh (“Raven’s Corner’) in Baluchistan”. Burke then wrote up his findings in an article in Blackwood’s Magazine in December 1961. It was seen by a member of a London Gurdjieff group who realized that one trail to Gurdjieff’s source was being openly revealed in a magazine. But when the London group made contact with the “source” they were told that it would be pointless to come to Baluchistan because the current focus of activity was in England.
Campbell argues that Gurdjieff’s “source” was the Sufic tradition. What is implied, presumably, by the comment about the “current focus” in London is that this is to be found in the group run by Idries Shah, author of the book The Sufis. Bennett had in fact handed over his own teaching centre at Coombe Springs to Shah. In his autobiography Witness Bennett describes how in 1962 he was told by an old friend about Idries Shah, who had come to England from Afghanistan to seek out followers of Gurdjieff and “complete their teaching”. At a meeting with Shah his first impressions were unfavourable.
