“The Secret History of the World” by Jonathan Black

When I was young, I used to be very keen on conspiracy theory, secret societies, occultism, esoteric knowledge and so on. I would be entertained the whole afternoon reading books about UFO’s, Bermuda Triangle, Rosicrucianism, Gnosis, Essenes, Vimana Aircrafts, Lemuria, Atlantis, Skull and Bones, and a lot more. I think it is rather natural, once every childish and teen book shows mystery and magic in their pages and plots. I would say that, at least, while reading this kind of books I was taught to have the necessary attention and get the habit of reading and that would help me a lot in the future. Growing old, off course, I learned that I should spend my time reading better literature and I set aside those books to get into adult issues such as economy, business, philosophy, politics, science and non-fiction writings. But, time to time, I keep my self puzzled with this desire of reading about this non-conventional kind of knowledge and I can not help myself. It might be a desire to be younger and get in a journey to the mysterious world again without worrying about reason or the reality.

It was in one of those occasions that the “The Secret History of the World” by the American Jonathan Black came across. For some reason, that I cannot remember, I was talking to this Irish old man who I happened to know in the library and he recommended it to me. People are used to recommend to me a lot of books. Unfortunately, I cannot take all the reading suggestions, but that one, specifically, I got without thinking.

I enjoyed reading this book. It has a good length and I took maybe three or four weeks to finish it. And the funny stuff was to get stuck days and days with the ideas presented by Jonathan Black. I kept wondering about many things and I did many questions on its contents and I am to say that it was a very good exercise for the mind. I said exercise and I meant that because I know that it is quite hard to believe in everything that is in the book. Some things make sense; others are rather completely out of reality, and many others can be taken or not as facts to his theory depending on someone’s point of view.

But the author starts with a very positive point. He has worked in publishing for over twenty years and his book is the result of many and many years reading literature in this area. You can feel his experience throughout the book. It has a lot of well-known books references and many pictures to illustrate what is being taught. The way he manages to link the ideas and the facts on the history of the world is quite interesting and makes sense at some point.

Jonathan Black says in the beginning of the book that he will show the history of the world in a way that the reader has never seen before: upside down, inside out and the other way around. Black says to be preparing the reader’s spirit to a journey where the universe is being given birth.

He explains many ideas on esoteric stream and tries to rebuild the conception of the whole universe using the beliefs belonged to secret societies. For all ideas within the book some of them caught strongly my attention: the idea of the universe being in an evolution movement, the idea that the cosmos has a strong influence in our day-by-day experiences and the fact that the universe is in a processes of materialization.

He explains that the whole universe starts with something less dense or consistent than the matter and the beginning of everything was when this thing started the processes of being materialized. This process of being materialized created and continues creating this experience that is the existence of the universe. Throughout the times this processes got velocity and each time, the universe as we see is more materialized than ever.

When the cosmos was being created and getting places to the material things, the universal consciousness was on the move of progressing, influencing and being influenced by the cosmos itself.

At certain point he explains some ages and how the movements of the planets and stars were felt in the living experience. Long before the sun be the centre of our system, Saturn used to be the biggest influence and the laws and the experience of life was much heavier that it is now. Saturn was the reference of God and the bible shows us the God of the Old Testament. When the sun approaches he changes the laws and starts a new age, which is referred as the New Testament in the bible.

Although the author explains that much of what is in the bible is actually an allegory about what happened with the stars, he says that the facts described could be perfectly true, once what happens in the cosmos happens here and everywhere in the Universe. The life of Jesus Christ would be a mark to represent the coming of the sun, for example.

Other intriguing idea is that the evolution of the human being comes from the kingdom Plantae. He explains that the Genesis tell us the story when the human being breaks the condition of being plants and start to walk in the path we are now. He says that once a plant, someone would never die, would just follow the movements of the earth and would never care about being feed or something else (being in the Paradise for ever). But it looks that this condition was broken when those beings discovered the sex. They would exchange DNA information and give birth to another being apart from them and this creationism would change the way life was being carried until then.

Jonathan Black follows the footsteps of the humankind and points out the changes in the Universal Consciousness throughout moments in our history. He presents many authors and many situations when something was seemed to change towards the evolution of the universe. In addition, pictures from renascence artists, diagrams from well know masters of philosophy and other visual materials held by secret societies are showed and explained in accordance with what is being said.

The Secret History of the World has to be read with the critic feeling off and the creative will on. A little piece of imagination would not make someone mad and could be very enjoyable. The book might flourish some philosophical ideas in someone's mind.

For example, in accordance to the Big Bang Theory, or model, the universe was very hot and dense and than expanded very fast and has since cooled by expanding to the present diluted state. It, as it is considered, is still expanding.

Ok. But the Big Bang Theory cannot tell us the beginning, but just maybe a second step on the creation of the universe. Scientists came to the conclusion that matter cannot have originated matter, but matter has to be originated by something more subtle. In addition, the big bang did not create any laws, as it was thought before. The laws of the universe have to be there before any matter or any happening. If there were not any laws, such as gravity, or time, space, continuity and so on, nothing would have happened.

In the book “The Secret” they say that the thought is the seed to grow something in the universe. You have first to imagine something to bring it real to the mind and then it will be real in the material state.

In the Bible’s Genesis, the creation of the world was done by the command of the God’s voice: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”

Voice is the ultimate manifestation of a thought; therefore, maybe the Abraham’s religion would have thought this allegory to show the rules of the creation of the universe. Someone, through speaking, is putting your ideas to the external world and they start to be taken as real, very different when those ideas were inside of your mind.

The Genesis might have imagined a Holy Spirit who got start to the universe through the manifestation of his mind. This supreme mind is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent because the holy universe is just part of him. But at some point God created man and, as it is showed in the Genesis, God created man in his on image. Once created in God’s image, the man could create and transform things as God himself could. The man maybe is the edge of the consciousness of the universe and might have the position of understanding the already existent laws and use them to create experiences within the universe.

Many scientists believe that the universe might replicate itself all the time and it is a kind of idea that Hindus have about our existence. Ancients Hindus used to treat the human condition as a “dreaming condition”. A human is a dreamer that creates all the time universes through the process of dreaming (or thinking strongly). Human beings create in their minds worlds and they jump to live in them. It just to show what is the power of thinking. The thinking can do everything: since change someone’s reality until create another completely different reality. Therefore, here in this frequency or condition we share together, we are living with six billions people on earth and it might have 6 billions of different worlds just interacting because we are in the same frequency. For the ancient Hindu, we are never awaken, and even though we thing we are sharing a reality; each person has one reality and is ruled by their individual laws.

Maybe this was the way the universe has found to reach high consciousness: through many minds and different experiences testing many possibilities to add to the universal knowledge and wisdom.

The idea showed in the book that the cosmos influences our lives and that religion teaches us through allegories about those moves, can be seen as well in the Zeitgeist - the Movie. The writer Acharya S, whose real name is D.M. Murdock, treats this issue in a very interesting way. This material can be seen on the follow address, in pdf format: http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/zeitgeistsourcebook.pdf

Finally, the point that the author says that human beings came from the kingdom Plantae can at least be considered as a not so out of reason idea. Have you ever seen the tree man?

Well, I recommend “The Secret History of the World” by the Jonathan Black saying that it is a good reading experience, a pleasant one. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet:

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”