The Quintessence

By Michael Faust

We all have choices to make in our lives. How do we know if our decisions are the correct ones? How can we tell if our judgment is sound? Will the abandoned choices, the lost options, the lives we never led, haunt us like spectral reproaches? Will we be surrounded by wraiths of lives unlived, wistfully staring us and wondering why we didn’t come to join them?

The human race collectively is no different from individual human beings. It has its choices to make, and often it makes the worst possible selections. Are we living in a perfect world? Then why not? What went so badly wrong? Clearly, our choices weren’t the best ones. What makes us choose disastrously en masse? Whatever happened to the so-called Wisdom of Crowds? If they’re so smart, why is the world so dumb?

Is it true, as the Illuminati assert, that the West lost an entire millennium because of Christianity? Was it this strange religion that sabotaged our progress to our own Eden? What might the world have looked like if instead of the rule of the Catholic Church for 1,000 years (from the last century of the Roman Empire to the time of the Renaissance), paganism had prevailed?

If the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate had successfully checked the rise of Christianity, would we now be living in an earthly paradise? To imagine what the world might have looked like, we have to go back to the ancient Greeks, the founders of Western civilisation.

Catholic Christianity was, of course, indebted to Greek philosophy in many good and healthy respects, but there was an ingredient in Christianity that proved toxic. This ingredient was Jewish Messianism, something that had nothing at all in common with Greek philosophy and culture. This alien presence wreaked havoc. Without it, the West would have developed radically differently. Stoicism, Mithraism or Julian the Philosopher’s preferred religion of Neoplatonism would have shaped the West, and there’s no doubt they would have done an enormously superior job.

This is the story of an alternative history of the West, one where Christianity never happened. The tale of this bright world that never was begins with the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, some of the greatest, boldest and most imaginative thinkers of all time. This is the tale of the infinitely mysterious Quintessence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Hockney
• Release date: Oct 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465972187

Michael Faust

Michael Faust invites you to explore the divine order, with its most astonishing secret - that you are part of it. You always have been. But you have forgotten. That's the nature of the created world - to make us forget that we are all the Creators. Isn't it time to remember who you truly are?

Book preview

Introduction

We all have choices to make in our lives. How do we know if our decisions are the correct ones? How can we tell if our judgment is sound? Will the abandoned choices, the lost options, the lives we never led, haunt us like spectral reproaches? Will we be surrounded by wraiths of lives unlived, wistfully staring us and wondering why we didn’t come to join them? Will they glow supernaturally bright in comparison with the dull reality of the lives we actually chose? Will we look out to sea and glimpse the ships of our alternative existences sailing off to lands undreamt where we might have been so much happier, where everything we did might have been so much more rewarding?

Sometimes it seems as though people live in an ocean of regret and unfulfilled potential. In our darker moods, we think every choice we made was wrong. We think that we somehow developed an uncanny talent for choosing the wrong fork in the road, for venturing down one-way streets, for walking into dead-ends. We had a sixth sense for sniffing out the worst of all possible worlds.

Was it just us, or was everyone else screwing up too? And yet we can’t help noticing those shining people with gilded lives who dominate TV and advertising. We know that everything went right for them. Why?

The human race collectively is no different from individual human beings. It has its choices to make, and often it makes the worst possible selections. Are we living in a perfect world? Then why not? What went so badly wrong? Clearly, our choices weren’t the best ones. What makes us choose disastrously en masse? Whatever happened to the so-called Wisdom of Crowds? If they’re so smart, why is the world so dumb?

Is it true, as the Illuminati assert, that the West lost an entire millennium because of Christianity? Was it this strange religion that sabotaged our progress to our own Eden?

What might the world have looked like if instead of the rule of the Catholic Church for 1,000 years (from the last century of the Roman Empire to the time of the Renaissance), paganism had prevailed?

One of the most interesting of the Roman emperors was the man known to history as Julian the Apostate, but more accurately as Julian the Philosopher. He was the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire, reversing, temporarily, the succession of Christian emperors.

Perhaps the cleverest emperor of them all, Julian recognised the deadly danger posed by Christianity and tried to roll back the tide set in motion by the Emperor Constantine, the first emperor to embrace Christianity. Julian was a philosopher, social reformer, man of letters, intellectual and soldier. He wanted to restore the most glorious traditions of Rome and saw how the Christian poison had fatally undermined these. He rejected Christianity in favour of Neoplatonic paganism, and he was also a Mithraist. It was said that he considered himself the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. Tragically, his reign as emperor was all too brief: he was killed in battle during a campaign against the Persians.

The Christian tide rolled on, sweeping all before it. A chance to halt the disease had tragically slipped away.

If Julian had triumphed, would we now be living in an earthly paradise? To imagine what the world might have looked like, we have to go back to the ancient Greeks, the founders of Western civilisation.

Catholic Christianity was, of course, indebted to Greek philosophy in many good and healthy respects, but there was an ingredient in Christianity that proved toxic. This ingredient was Jewish Messianism, something that had nothing at all in common with Greek philosophy and culture. This alien presence wreaked havoc. Without it, the West would have developed radically differently. Stoicism, Mithraism or Julian the Philosopher’s preferred religion of Neoplatonism would have shaped the West, and there’s no doubt they would have done an enormously superior job.

This is the story of an alternative history of the West, one where Christianity never happened. The tale of this bright world that never was begins with the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, some of the greatest, boldest and most imaginative thinkers of all time.

The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Bertrand Russell described it as being a no-man’s land between science and theology. It can be characterized as thinking about thinking.

The origins of philosophy lie most clearly in ancient Greece. Egyptian, Babylonian and Persian teachings regarding mathematics, astronomy and esoteric thinking heavily influenced the Greeks, but they took this knowledge to an entirely new and systematic level.

Thales is often labelled as the first true philosopher. He was from the town of Miletus in the Greek colony of Ionia (in modern day Turkey) and lived from 640 – 546 BCE. He was the first to say, Know thyself.

He said that magnets have souls and that’s why they can move iron, that all things are full of gods (a foreshadowing of panpsychism: the position that all matter has mental characteristics) and, most famously of all, that everything is made of water.

This was the first attempt to characterize the universe according to a single principle, to locate the fundamental unity of things, to explain all phenomena as being different manifestations of one underlying substance: a primordial element known as the arche. It was, in short, the first grand unified theory of existence. Water was a surprisingly sophisticated choice since it can exist as a liquid, a solid (ice), steam (gas), and humans are, of course, at least 60% composed of water, hence it could be credibly argued that mind, consciousness and water are somehow related.

Anaximander, a pupil of Thales and also a citizen of Miletus, asserted that the arche was an indefinite, invisible, infinite, eternal and ageless substance called apeiron. He even attributed some type of divinity to it. Everything arose from this and everything would return to it. If we identify apeiron with energy then we have a thoroughly modern hypothesis.

Anaximander said, The material cause and first element of things was the Infinite…and into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, of necessity, for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time. In other words, a natural law maintains balance and harmony. Anything that commits an injustice by becoming too powerful, too dominant, out of balance, is, sooner or later, brought back to its proper, healthy status. (This is a useful principle that ought to be applied to the super rich of the present day. They have taken society out of balance and made it inharmonious and bubbling with discontent and rage.)

Anaximenes, also of the Milesian School, said that the primordial substance was air:

1) The universe is made of air and is subject to two spontaneous processes: rarefaction and condensation.

2) Fire is air in its most rarefied state while clouds, water, mud, earth and even stones are air which has become progressively condensed.

3) The elements in nature, all being formed from the same substance, differ from each other not in quantity but in quality.

4) Rarefaction produces Heat and ultimately Fire; condensation produces Cold and ultimately Water. Heat and Cold are the effects rather than the causes of the transformation of air.

Air is God, Anaximenes stated, but he used the religious word pneuma for air, meaning that the breath, spirit or soul of God pervaded the universe. Again, if we identify pneuma with energy, we get a respectable modern hypothesis.

Pythagoras, from the island of Samos near Miletus, was the first Grand Master of the Illuminati and the first philosopher to become a cultural superstar. He was an extravagantly charismatic and mesmerizing individual, to whom seekers of the truth flocked. A larger than life showman, he cast a spell over his audience. Many regarded him as a demi-god. A brilliant mathematician, scientist, philosopher, magician and mystic, he was one of the first to teach the doctrine of reincarnation. He and his followers discovered that the earth was spherical. He assigned cosmic significance to music and harmony. He was the first to systematize deductive reasoning: proceeding with logical steps from a self-evident axiom to surprising, non self-evident conclusions.

He enigmatically stated that numbers were the arche. Given that numbers are the basis of mathematics, that mathematics is embedded in the universe, that it is possible to describe all physical particles in terms of mathematical functions, this is perhaps a remarkably insightful assertion.

Pythagoras was obsessed with numerology, with the power, beauty and mystical properties of specific numbers and shapes, with esoteric codes, with magic squares, with cosmic patterns reflecting the underlying mathematical character of the universe. He considered that a mathematical law of Harmony kept the universe in balance, and that the movement of the heavenly bodies created the divine Music of the Spheres. He was assassinated by enemies who feared the growing influence of the Illuminati.

Heraclitus, from Ephesus in Ionia, was also a Grand Master of the Illuminati, and one of the strangest since he didn’t like people and preferred to be on his own. The complexity of his thought and his oracular style led to his being known as Heraclitus the Obscure, Heraclitus the Riddler and the Dark Philosopher.

He added a number of crucial elements to the Illuminism taught by Pythagoras (Illuminism is the philosophical religion of the Illuminati). He was the father of dialectical thinking, which became the core of Illuminism. He was the primary advocate of the principle of Becoming (nothing ever is, everything is becoming), another central pillar of Illuminism. He said that everything is in a state of flux, and that unity comes from the combination of opposites. He declared that the arche was fire, which, in modern Illuminism, is replaced by energy. He said that the apparent chaos and conflict of the cosmos conceal an underlying rational order called the Logos. This is another key idea in Illuminism. Logos has multiple meanings: truth, reason, the word, language, reality, God, natural law, and logic (a word derived directly from Logos).

Heraclitus completely rejected the idea of any Creator God. He declared, This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire.

His final fate was to be devoured by dogs.

While Heraclitus was the third Grand Master of the Illuminati, Empedocles, from Sicily, was the sixth. Another extraordinary showman and miracle worker in the mould of Pythagoras, he added Earth, Air and Water to the Fire of Heraclitus, to make four basic elements – the building bricks of the cosmos – each of which comes in the form of innumerable tiny particles of that element. These Four Elements dominated alchemical and scientific thinking until the modern age. Empedocles said that the particles of these elements came together or fell apart as a result of two principles: Love and Strife. In modern scientific terminology, we would say attraction and repulsion.

Illuminism has at its heart the so-called cosmic equation: r >= 0. This indicates that there are two linked realms of r = 0 (the mental universe, outside space and time) and r > 0 (the physical universe, inside space and time) which exist as separate but interacting domains within the continuum of r >= 0. r refers to the distance between two points (which can both be within an entity or each point can belong to a separate entity) and r >= 0 indicates that this distance can be reduced all the way down to zero. In relation to Cartesian philosophy, r > 0 implies a domain of extension i.e. matter, a physical world of individuated things in space and time, separated by real distances, while r = 0 implies a domain of non-extension i.e. mind, a mental world of interconnectivity, outside physical space and time, where entities are not separated by any distance and nothing has any physical size. A black hole singularity and the Big Bang singularity are examples of situations in which the distances between all entities contained within them are reduced to zero. Nothing in these singularities has any extension and therefore, according to Descartes’ definition, they have entered the realm of mind. Scientific materialism denies the existence of the r = 0 domain, and is trying to find a way to make sense of black holes and the Big Bang that avoids dimensionless singularities. (The cosmic equation is explained in much more detail in others books in this series.)

Empedocles makes a reference to the r >= 0 universe: At one time the one grew out of the many; at another the one divided anew to become many. (This describes the dialectical relationship between the r = 0 and r > 0 aspects of the r >= 0 universe. The r = 0 domain is a unity from which the plurality of the r > 0 domain emerges, and, in reverse, the r > 0 plurality can shrink to the r = 0 unity.)

Heraclitus had earlier said something almost identical: All things come out of the one, and the one out of all things. But he asserted that the many have less reality than the one, which is God, i.e. r = 0 is more important than r > 0.

Empedocles gave an account of evolutionary theory two thousand three hundred years before Darwin, but in his version the elements mixed randomly with disastrous consequences: Heads sprang up without necks, arms wandered bare and bereft of shoulders, eyes strayed up and down in want of foreheads…There were shambling creatures with countless hands…Many creatures were born with faces and breasts looking in different directions; some, offspring of oxen with the faces of men, while others, again, arose as offspring of men with the heads of oxen. These monsters of random mutation died out, leaving behind only those creatures whose bodies were mingled with divinity i.e. natural selection favoured harmonious, well-ordered beings that reflected a guiding intelligence of some kind.

Empedocles killed himself at the peak of his powers by throwing himself into the volcanic crater of Mount Etna. He desired to disappear like a god.

After his death, the Illuminati added a fifth element to the four types of matter from which all other substances were composed. Joining Earth, Air, Fire and Water was the famous quinta essentia – the quintessence – an immaterial and incorruptible substance permeating everything. It is also known as aether or ether.

The quintessence is the essential principle of existence, the highest, purest and subtlest of the elements. If in modern terms we say that there are three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension (making four dimensions in total) then above them sits the quintessence – the mysterious fifth dimension which is actually not a dimension at all: it