secret
Definitions and explanations of key terms used throughout the site.
The intentional withholding of information to restrict knowledge to a limited group.
A sense of mystery, fascination, or secret plotting that stimulates curiosity.
A family of secret societies formed in late medieval Germany, which taught esoteric practices that were concealed from the average person. The meetings of these societies were held in private...
The term occultism derives from occult, itself adopted from the Latin word occultus, meaning “hidden” or “secret.” In medieval and early modern Europe this term had been used in reference...
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In order to understand the world intellectually, the left brain has to distance itself from it and turn it into an object.
from The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
There are great ideas undiscovered - breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truths protective layers.
There is no secret stuff here. It is all to be found if you have the eye to see it, if you know where to look for it.
from Getting US Into War by Porter Sargent
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
from Take Today by Marshall McLuhan
The word 'occult' comes from the Latin occultus, meaning 'hidden'. In modern times the word is used for those sciences and arts involved with looking into the secret world which is supposed to lie behind the world of our familiar...
There is another kind of knowledge. It is not one of physical facts, nor can it be quantified and measured. It is a knowledge of our inner world, not the outer one, a knowledge of what we used to call...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
We know that with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century—a development clearly linked to the temperament of the left brain—the esoteric tradition lost much of its prestige and that, in order to maintain itself, it had to...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
The esoteric tradition is also intuitive, focusing on our subtle, inner worlds, rather than our obvious outer one. It believes in a living, organic, spiritual, even conscious universe, rather than a dead, mechanical, oblivious one. It is also concerned more...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
All THE upside-down, inside-out, other-way-round thinking of the secret societies, all that is bizarre and mind-bending in what follows stems from the belief that mind preceded matter. We have almost no evidence to go on when we decide what we...
Source: The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth
For those who have a sense of this invisible, other reality, the answers to life’s mysteries offered by modern science are inadequate and unsatisfying. They are unable to accept them and they find themselves seeking something else.
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
The left brain, on the other hand—literally—is geared, McGilchrist argues, toward breaking up the whole that the right presents. It turns the right brain’s unity into bits and pieces, which it can then manipulate. Its job is to analyze the...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
Since its beginnings in the seventeenth century, modern science has focused on the kind of “facts” that can be grasped by the senses and proven by measurement. It abandoned the religious explanations for the world, which posited an unseen God...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
Some of these teachers we know and in a sense are not secret at all. Yet in many cases what they have to teach remains so. Some are not so well known, indeed, are hardly known at all. One can...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
For one thing, the esoteric tradition deals in imagery and symbols, the meanings of which are often complex and multiple, and which elude the left brain’s demand for clarity and definiteness; they are more attuned to what McGilchrist calls the...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
The symbols and ceremonies of Masonry have more than one meaning. They rather conceal than disclose the Truth. They hint it only, at least; and their varied meanings are only to be discovered by reflection and study. Truth is not...
Source: Morals and Dogma by Albert Pike
The right brain is geared toward engaging with living things, McGilchrist says, and with recognizing overall patterns, meanings, and relations. It is attuned to the network of connections that links everything with everything else. Its fundamental attention is to the...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
The real power structures [are] always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers." The power elite is not a group from one nation or even of one alliance of nations. It operates throughout the world and no doubt has...
Source: JFK by L. Fletcher Prouty
This power elite is not easy to define; but the fact that it exists makes itself known from time to time. Concerning the power elite, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote of the "vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful...
Source: JFK by L. Fletcher Prouty
Underlying this Secret Doctrine was a profound philosophy of the creation or evolution of worlds and of man. The present humanity, in many quarters of the globe, has evolved on the intellectual plane so far that there now exist a...
Source: Mystic Masonry by Jirah Dewey Buck
What this secret tradition reveals is that the one whom most Christians naïvely worship as creator, God, and Father is, in reality, only the image of the true God. According to Valentinus, what Clement and Ignatius mistakenly ascribe to God...
Source: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
What sets the mental-rational structure apart from the previous three structures is that it is the most separated from “Origin.” In it, human consciousness, which had previously felt a fundamental connection to the world around it, was now unattached and...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
Of course you don't know. You don't know because only I know. If you knew and I didn't know, then you'd be teaching me instead of me teaching you. And for a student to teach his teacher is presumptuous and...
Humans for the most part don't have a clue. They don't want one or need one either. They're happy. They think they have a good bead on things. Why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it. A...
Source: Men in Black
Indeed, imagination, linked to the right brain, is one of the central pillars of the esoteric tradition. As the historian of esotericism Antoine Faivre writes, imagination is “a kind of organ of the soul, thanks to which humanity can establish...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
The secrecy in which they buried their Mysteries, had that end. Those to whom they were confided, bound themselves, by the most fearful oaths, never to reveal them. They were not allowed even to speak of these important secrets with...
Source: Morals and Dogma by Albert Pike
I might point to the fact that, although the meetings of our society are of necessity enshrouded with the veil of secresy, which circumstance, in seasons of excitement and peril, the designing and malicious would have converted into matter of...
As its name suggests, the mental-rational structure, which Gebser believed began circa 1225 B.C., is characterized by rational, discursive thought, the kind of logical, sequential thinking associated with the left brain. Whereas the previous structure of consciousness, the mythic, is...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
Even figures associated with the rise of modern science and the modern world—Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton—were profoundly influenced by Hermetic ideas. Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, made a living as an astrologer, and Newton wrote more...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
But there is one new and encouraging element present in most of the recommendations of today's experts. They are recognizing the necessity of conceiving the world as one interdependent structure.
Source: The Secret Destiny of America by Manly P. Hall
World democracy was the secret dream of the great classical philosophers. ... Thousands of years before Columbus they were aware of the existence of our Western Hemisphere and selected it to be the site of the philosophic empire. ... The...
Source: The Secret Destiny of America by Manly P. Hall
Sometimes this philosophy has been hidden from the public and at other times it has been placed in plain view - though always in such a way as to remain unrecognized by outsiders.
Source: The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth
Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global...
Source: Memoirs by David Rockefeller
It channeled funds through three private medical research foundations. One of these, the Geschikter Foundation for Medical Research in Washington, D.C., is still active. Another, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology Inc., was disbanded in 1965. A third...
The CIA's intrusion into the foundation field in the 1960s can only be described as massive. Excluding grants from the "Big Three"- Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie--of the 700 grants over $10,000 given by 164 other foundations during the period 1963-1966,...
The existence of the agency's investigations into behavior and thought control was previously known. But through access to 2,000 C.I.A. documents and wideranging interviews, a group of New York Times reporters has developed new information about the cost of the...
The use of philanthropic organizations was a convenient way to pass funds, in that large amounts could be transferred rapidly, and in a form that need not alert unwitting officers of the recipient organizations to their source. In addition, foundation...
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — Several prominent medical research ‘institutions and Government hospitals in the United States and Canada were involved in secret, 25‐year, $25‐million effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to learn how to control the human mind.
All my faith is in the next big thing - It's where I'll hide what you don't see
Feed my eyes - Now you've sewn them shut
My God, amazing how we got this far - It's like we're chasing all those stars
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds - And there upon the rainbow is the answer to a never ending story
Tell me your secrets, and ask me your questions - Oh, let's go back to the start - Running in circles, coming up tails - Heads on a science apart
Our lips are sealed
They painted up your secrets, with the lies they told to you - And the least they ever gave you, was the most you ever knew
Don't ask if they are real - The men in black, their lips are sealed
These secret garden beams, changed my life, so it seems
Hope I live to tell the secret I have learned till then, it will burn inside of me
The secret messages are calling to me endlessly - They call to me across the air
I've got a secret and I can't explain - All the time I've waited for this day - All along I was never in doubt - I always knew it would never get out
Oh, life, it's bigger, It's bigger than you and you are not me - The lengths that I will go to - The distance in your eyes - Oh, no, I've said too much, I set it up
All the answers stay a secret and yet everybody knows - They're followin' the leader but no one's watchin' where it goes - Movin' to the left, movin' to the right, but don't look up and down, unless you're lookin' for a fight
The Distance in Your Eyes, Oh No I Said Too Much
People referenced across the archive.
