Customer Reviews

A Secret History of Consciousness

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I read a great many books, and most seem to have one or two new ideas or a re-hash of something familiar. So it's easy to get the gist of most of them and to move on.

But then there are some books to savor. Books that demand care and focus. Most of these demanding books soon become covered in notes, comments and annotations, and if I feel that people might be helped by a review, it is these that make the cut. I have now read three of Gary Lachman's books: this one, The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse, and Turn off Your Mind. All three have been excellent and demanding.

Gary is evidently an interesting person. A former musician and composer with the band Blondie, he first began his explorations of consciousness between gigs. But unlike so many of his generation, he decided to do something less ephemeral than soak himself in psychedelics.

This book is an exploration of the possibility and the potential that we have to transform our consciousness, not just personally but also as a society. This is not an idle preoccupation: many of us feel that we must transform if we are to survive as a species. Yet there is also another piece to this: if and when we transform, that transformation is associated with its own parcel of challenges. Over the last few centuries, we have already begun to change physically and psychologically, and these changes help explain the rapid emergence and evolution of new laws of life and of healing.

Gary Lachman has something in common with Colin Wilson, who contributed a deeply insightful forward to the book. Both have felt feelings of boredom and dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and these feelings have propelled them to see what else is out there. Like many people before him, Gary went off on a round of pilgrimages and retreats before re-discovering that the answers are always in the same place: within the human heart and mind.

This book reviews most of the major theories of consciousness from Helena Blavatsky, to Rudolf Steiner, to Gurdjieff and Jean Gebser. It is extremely well written: Gary Lachman is remarkably erudite, yet I managed to read the whole thing for the first time during a flight across the Pacific. It was enthralling from start to finish. I was particularly pleased to see him give a lot of space to a discussion of the work of Andreas Mavromatis, which is not as well known as it should be. Mavromatis has done a lot of work on hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucination: those strange phenomena that most of us have experienced as we are falling asleep or waking. They appear to be a unique state of consciousness that give us important clues about the structure of perception and of conscious experiences.

For anyone interested in consciousness and where we may be headed as a species this book is highly recommended.

I don't believe consciousness evolved but this book is a good overview of various theories as to how it could have evolved. I suspect that if you could experience another's mind, you would find significant differences in consciousness even within our present time. The mind of somebody else would seem like an alien world to you. Anyone who possesses exceptional access to their unconscious mind is aware of how alien and distorted its perception can be and this distortion of perception is even present, in a very subtle manner, during full consciousness.

The author does explore an interesting concept, duo-consciousness, the hypnagogic state between sleep and consciousness in which it is possible to dream while being partially awake. He even speculates about consciously induced hypnogogia, the first reference to this secret ability I've seen in print. But he does not go far enough in his speculation. Given exceptional access to the unconscious it is possible to enter the hypnagogic state at will. It is possible to awaken the unconscious into activity by consciously recalling dream imagery, even snatches of long forgotten dreams, and thereby bring it into a near conscious state to the point of experiencing irrational fears. More interesting, it is possible to acquire some of the imaginative capabilities of the dream state and create highly unexpected mental imagery as random, mild hallucinations which are nevertheless subject to some conscious direction towards specific images. This is day dreaming empowered with the faculty of true dreaming! Baudelaire once described this as the poet's gift to dream exceptionally well.

While some occultists believe that exceptional access to the unconscious means peering into other dimensions, and gaining the faculty of the true dreamer would be real magic, there is little experiential evidence that supports such an interpretation. Rather it is the degree of the dissociative state that creates the sense of other dimensions or alien thoughts. The conscious mind cannot associate mental imagery from the unconscious with the self because it is too unfamiliar. However, long familiarity with the unconscious and its mental imagery can create a sense of familiarity which overcomes the dissociative state.

Gary Lachman, the author of the highly engaging Turn Off Your Mind, has, with this new work, again written a very lively account of a part of modern intellectual history. This book traces the development, from the late 19th century up to our own time, of the idea of the collective transformation of human consciousness, both the evidence of such evolution in the past, and speculation about future evolution. A fascinating array of thinkers is presented, at a pace that is fast but not superficial. Even readers who are already familiar with these thinkers will find much to engage their minds and send them off into profound reflections of their own. One important measure of this book's success is that it has inspired this reader to go directly to the works of the authors covered.

I picked this book up without any preconceptions. I just wanted to read more about the history of consciousness, having become interested in the topic over the years. To my delight, Gary Lachman's book opened some great avenues for further study. I was unfamiliar with most of the authors he discusses in depth, other than some notables like Bucke and Gurdjieff. To my delight, he gave a really good overview of Jean Gebser, whose writing I greatly admire, and who made some amazing breakthroughs in the study of the evolution of consciousness. Fourtunately for me, Lachman not only gave clear descriptions of the writers he surveys, but also shows the development of their ideas. There is also a very good bibliography for further explorations. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a student of the evolution and levels of consciousness from a "western" perspective.

This book is inteligent, entertaining, thought provoking and meticulously researched. What Lachman demonstrates above all else is that it is possible to challenge the hegemonic scientific - materialist view of the origins and evolution of consciousness without collapsing into New Age irrationalism. Marshalling the thoughts' of some of the greatist thinkers' pre and post Enlightenment, he shows that it is possible to bring philosophical and scientific rigour to the subject whilst still allowing a place for the spiritual dimension of human experience. This really is a must read for anybody interested in the History of ideas, as well as anybody who has ever asked the eternal question of 'Why'?
One of my own personal tests of a good none fiction book is the extent that it points one in the direction of many other books on the same subject. I came away from this with a list long enough to keep me immersed for the next decade. Brilliant.

This book gives us short biographies of several key philosphers -- many of them obscure or marginalized -- plus an overview of various aspects of Western culture -- history, arts, religion, etcetera -- by way of telling us a grand human adventure story, in which scientific logical positivism plays the role of antagonist, and the human spirit's expanding integrative consciousness, the protagonist. Science is not demonized as a "badguy" but shown to represent a necessary but perilous stage in our evolution. The author's writing is concise and compelling. Reading this book was for me a breathtaking experience, a freeing of my mind.

A Secret History of Consciousness is a fascinating book. I came across this book browsing Borders a few years back, sounded interesting, then I noticed it was written by the former bass player from Blondie. This made me a bit skeptical of the quality of the book. Nothing against Blondie, but 80's rockers are not often known for their intellectual prowess. Luckily, it wasn't something that made me NOT want to read it. Plus the Intro by Colin Wilson didn't hurt.

It took a while, but eventually I sat down and started to read this. It took a while to get through the whole thing due to my reading habits of jumping from book to book, but none-the-less, I was never disappointed in this. I do think it started better than it ended, it was more, open, at the beginning. Overall it is a wide exploration of various ideas in consciousness and metaphysics. From Blavatsky to Kant to Colin Wilson, do not enter into this reading unless you have a very open mind and a willingness to at least try some very unusual ideas. It even got me to accept Julian Jaynes work a bit.

Overall, the book explores the way consciousness may have evolved over time... and for that matter, where it may be going. It suggests the various ways consciousness may have perceived reality over time, and the aspects of perception that have changed over aeons. It goes into purely speculative realms, as well as exploring things in a more scientific, or at least philosophical manner. Near the end, he seems to be trying to pull some of the stranger ideas together as a true history, and that is the only part which I feel wasn't as interesting. The ideas are speculations, interesting ones, to be sure, but just ideas. There is no reason to validate them over any others.

I think Gary does an excellent job at least engaging your ability to think about where consciousness has been, and where it may be going. Not to mention the various states of consciousness that we are already capable of, even if we aren't aware of them. I haven't read the works of people like Blavatsky and Immanuel Kant in many, many years, and, as least in the case of the latter, it reminded me of just how much I liked his work. In the case of the former, it allowed me to re-consider the value of her work, and also enlightened me to other thinkers are authors that I have not known as of yet.

Overall, this is highly recommended, and I am glad that I decided to pick this up. The thing about the physical book store, is that you can find things like this, things you weren't looking for. Things you didn't know you wanted. I love being able to find just about anything on a site like Amazon, but it is far less likely that I will come across something like this.

If Mr. Lachman would understand his own written words, he would be indeed an interesting person. But he doesn't have a clue, so it's rather glue which sticks on one's throat. Lachman is fascinated by the theosophists and H. Blavatsky. Like these he gathers material like a librarian (trying to step into the footsteps of Steiner?) and creates his own "shachermacher-workshop-booth", i.e. a bit from there, a bit from there and ready is the magical occult soup (of the soup of the soup).