If you are anything like me, you will occasionally, as if by serendipity, come across a book you intended to write yourself.

As Albert Einstein put it, “If I keep asking the question long enough, the answer will be given me”.

The book I “chanced” upon is The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black, a nom de plume of Mark Booth, Chief Executive of Century publishers, a British imprint of Random House. The author has used his many connections within publishing to amass an impressive array of data on his topic.

The simplest way to explain his subject is to state that science has become a militant materialist philosophy that believes matter precedes mind. Some scientists have even called consciousness “a disease of matter,” as if it were an interloper in a senseless universe.

This view is the complete opposite of what a majority of the greatest minds throughout history have believed — or better, known.

The perennial philosophy, as it has been called — that mind gives rise to matter — is still believed by the larger part of the human race. The last Pope, John Paul II, was taught in his youth by a Rosicrucian master. Following a car accident which nearly killed him, he had a spiritual experience which mirrored exactly what the teacher had taught him. Such was its overwhelming power, the young mystical Pole signed up for a seminary that led all the way to his becoming Pope in Rome.

The Rosicrucians (followers of the Rosy Cross) teach the age-old knowledge of idealism — that all is mind — in a Christian context. It is said that there are 20 miles of books in the Vatican library dedicated to this and similar points of view.

Quantum mechanics comes very close to idealism without quite letting go of the materialist base of science. There is no doubt that Einstein was a thorough-going adherent too. Everything he wrote screams “perennial philosophy”.

The problem is, the early Church came down very hard on anyone who challenged its materialist worldview, and, as Jonathan Black writes, today’s scientism demonizes anyone who as much as suggests an alternative to rocky lumps floating about in a void. Richard Dawkin is a prime example of the modern scientific inquisition. On the face of it, an alliance between early Catholicism and modern science is bizarre, but it’s a fact.

Most early believers in the supremacy of mind formed secret societies based on the Mystery Schools of antiquity, where spilling the beans meant death. According to Black, many of these societies still exist, though often branded with the tag “occult”, a word that simply means “hidden”, as in occluded.

Despite the iron fist in an iron glove approach of the present-day intellectual establishment, the vision of man’s ancient understanding of the universe lives on and thrives. As well as Einstein, the British astronomer James Jeans stated that, “the universe is nothing but a gigantic thought”. Isaac Newton spent most of his life studying aspects of it, so did C. G. Jung, the great Swiss joint-founder of psychology as we know it.

Buddhism and Hinduism are based on it, as are most religions, even Christianity, whose earliest exponents were Gnostics, a term meaning “knowers”, as opposed to believers. They sought, and many found, direct experience of the secret knowledge that mind creates matter, and not the other way round.

Dr Rupert Sheldrake, a contemporary biologist, has conducted many scientific experiments showing the influence of mind over matter, or “extended mind” as he calls it. His recent The Sense Of Being Stared At is a treasure chest of empirical idealism. His other work on the psychic abilities of animals is ground-breaking science at its unprejudiced best.

Black’s book is eye-wateringly comprehensive across the field, but concentrates on the ancient timeline and secret society aspects of the topic.

Anyone who has ever doubted the primacy of matter over mind, should read it with an open mind. It is a richly rewarding classic of its kind.

This review first appeared in Syntagma.

Owing to a lot going on at our digital publishing arm, Syntagma Media, the opening list at Dial Publishing has had to be postponed until 2008. However, we intend to set the ball rolling with an early series of chapbooks on a variety of topics. More later.

Recap : Dial Publishing began life in 1999 as the heir to Hermitage Press, our educational publishing arm which concentrated on distance-learning courses and textbooks.

It was specifically aimed at a British Government scheme which subsidized 80 percent of the buyer’s cost of approved courses. It was abruptly withdrawn overnight when Ministers found that Animal rights activists and others were defrauding the system.

Now we are relaunching Dial as a general non-fiction publisher, with two titles, one for our edgewise imprint and another for Hermitage.

Dial Publishing has two new imprints :

* edgewise : for new novels and cutting-edge nonfiction.
* Hermitage : for philosophy and spirit.

Dial Publishing itself will specialize in business and digital publishing. Its first title will be :

The Syntagma Story, followed by Superdemocracy : The Art of Corporate Governance, both by John M Evans.

Other titles to be announced in due course.

With Syntagma Media’s redesign currently underway by Thord Hedengen, it seems the right moment to declare our new business structure.

Syntagma Media will now have two operating divisions. The first, Syntagma Digital, will contain all our online properties — some 53 websites — including, three network magazines and the (currently) top secret plans codenamed, iSyntagma.

The second new division of Syntagma Media is Dial Publishing and will handle all print and other offline publishing and consulting work. This side of the business is set to swing into action in Q3 and Q4 of this year.

These changes will be progressively implemented and the present site developed accordingly.

We can now announce that the first title to be published by Dial Publishing in 2007 will be, The Syntagma Story — How a Cashstrapper Became a Serial Magazine Publisher by John M Evans.

Since Dial’s previous existence as an educational and textbook publisher, I’ve toyed with a number of scenarios for relaunching the business in the book trade. However, as Syntagma Media’s print publishing arm, it seems logical to start with the story of its creation, especially as Syntagma was started as an experiment in bootstrapping an internet business with the aim of writing a book about it.

Nowadays, with the plummeting cost of hardware, software and bandwidth, it is possible to build a substantial internet company using careful cash-flow techniques and funded by expertise and hard work rather than VC money. A credit card is vital in the beginning, but if you’re good at what you do and you have a sustainable vision, even that source of funding will fall away.

The book will delve into the secrets of internet success, both financial and technical. But it will mainly look at the flaws in the concept of “blog networks” and how the author converted the idea into a series of network magazines.

The Nirvaneans is my new book, due for publication by Humdrumming on June 21 next year. Here’s a little taster from the preface :

The basic premise of this book is that “Nirvanic experience” is more common than we might suppose, but often goes unrecognized. Moreover, it is not an abnormal event, but a sudden emergence of our subtle background consciousness: our Nirvanoception.

An American study showed that a majority of people claimed to have had spiritual experiences, but that a significant number did not want to repeat them. Even a glimpse of our real self-nature overturns every canon of the materialist world-view, and that can be deeply challenging to some.

Reality is clearly multi-layered, at least in texture. Quantum physics recognized the fact when it postulated an infinite number of dimensions in its mathematical equations. The danger of this particular approach, though, is that the further we stray from direct experience, the less our speculations are worth in any practical sense. Many of our religious woes are caused by the misconstrual of texts which sought to hide the secrets of our nature from the uninitiated. A simple adherence to phenomenology would make a difference to our understanding of many of the inscrutable mysteries of life.

Alan Watts once wrote : “It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus…are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their state of consciousness.”

I have set out here to describe the state of Nirvana—including detailed, attested descriptions of it—and the radical implications of its realization for the realizer. The process is mostly misunderstood in the West and is practically ignored in the East, where it originated in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. An extraordinary spin-off is that it delivers powerful confirmation of the survival of consciousness after death. It also gives us invaluable clues to the mystery of the Holy Grail and the wonders of the Philosophers’ Stone.

John M Evans

After all the publicity effort over the launch of Denys Val Baker’s: The Sea’s in the Kitchen, I hope to have news of the results soon.

The new Denys Val Baker is now on the streets, so lots to celebrate for Humdrumming after all their work.

Congratulations to the team and to Martin Val Baker in Penzance.

You can buy a copy of the book by clicking in the link in the sidebar.

As a final throw in our Denys Val Baker Week, here are a few more snippets from his irresistible first autobiographical volume, The Sea’s in the Kitchen. This is the opening to the book:

Author’s Note
“After working for many years in London as a professional author and
editor I responded to a call which many writers and artists have felt and
went to settle ‘away from it all ‘ in Cornwall. As this autobiographical
account of the ensuing ten years will show, life cannot be escaped from
in Cornwall any more than anywhere else. But in fact Cornwall offers
many precious things to the creative worker, quite apart from its inspiring
natural background - not least a more sympathetic and tolerant attitude
than is generally found in provincial England. For this reason I have tried
in this book to capture a portrait of Cornwall in our life as much as of our
life in Cornwall.”

Chapter One
“When Jess and I were married it seemed perfectly natural to me that we
should settle down in Cornwall. But then perhaps I was a little prejudiced,
for I had long ago deserted the literary world of London for the wilder
and much more exciting world of Cornish cliffs and carns and moors,
and everywhere the booming echoes of the restless sea.

“Like many other professional authors before me l had made the welcome discovery that one of the writer’s most precious gifts is that of freedom of movement. I could, of course, have travelled farther a field, wandered the world, but the fact was I had for a long time been conscious of feeling drawn westwards to this strange and rather primitive and mysterious land of Celtic mythology. This may have been partly due to Celtic sympathy, as I am Welsh. Whatever the reasons I felt happy and satisfied in Cornwall, whether living in a tiny castle on the cliffs at Portquin or working with a repertory theatre at Camborne or writing novels in an attic bedroom looking over the serene beauty of the Carrack Broads at Falmouth. I could not, in fact, imagine living anywhere else, or how anyone could wish to live anywhere else.

“It was true that Jess and I met far from this magic land. At the time I was spending Christmas up in London and one evening my friend Ross said: ‘Do you remember I told you about a little Sagittarian with two small daughters who has a flat off the Fulham Road? Well, it’s only round the corner — come on, I’ll introduce you.’ ”

The Cornish Review

In 1972 Val Baker began a productive association with the publisher William Kimber that ultimately produced six further novels, nine collections of his own short stories and twenty three edited anthologies of short stories by such writers as Edna O’Brien, Alan Sillitoe, Hammond Innes, Fay Weldon, Winston Graham, Margaret Drabble, Daphne Du Maurier et al. In fact, a definitive listing of major British writers. These apart, he also found space in such collections for new, young writers.

Then, midway through the prolific decade of the sixties, Denys Val Baker launched a second run of the Cornish Review. Those were hopeful times, as Val Baker himself suggested: “…There was a new climate abroad and people had come to recognize that artistic ventures such as a regional literary review deserved some sort of practical support from Government…”

How far we have regressed from such optimistic times, with the abandonment of regional literary assistance, now followed by a national neglect of literature, is patent, But the second Cornish Review ran for twenty-seven issues and was never anything less that fulsome. Among poems and stories there were works by such as DM Thomas, now Cornwall’s most prestigious literary son, as well as by Jack Clemo, Charles Causley, Donald Rawe together with such figures of the Penwith literary establishment as Arthur Caddick, Frank Ruhrmund and W.S Graham.

There was also substantial exposure of the visual arts with reproduction of work by Bryan Pearce, Jack Pender, Peter Lanyon, John Miller and many more. The rich fund of material contained in the Reviews has still to be assessed.

Inevitably, Caddick had much more to say about this ‘Second Launching’, using Denys Val Baker’s own nautical connections to good effect:

And it was those Celtic cheques that made the Cornish Review even more authentic, because Denys Val Baker recognized the importance of professionalism in the literary world as in all the creative arts.

From Des Hannigan’s obituary in Peninsula Voice, Penzance, August 1984.

In 1948, following the break-up of his first marriage, Denys Val Baker moved to Cornwall where he rented a cottage on Trencrom Hill and it was from here that the first Cornish Reviews were published between 1949 and 1952.

The magazine ran for ten issues and offered the very best of Cornish writing on all aspects of the arts, including articles by Bernard Leach, R. Morton Nance, Peter Lanyon and A.K. Hamilton Jenkin as well as poetry by the young Causley, Clemo, W.S. Graham and the irrepressible Arthur Caddick, who penned this first volume’s swan song: ‘Its friends, the artists had no cash to spare, And those who should have helped it did not care’ — thus appraising the fate of many a brave literary venture.

Short Stories
Over the years, Denys Val Baker sustained his trade as a writer by producing hundreds of short stories, many of which were broadcast by the BBC. He was an acknowledged master of the genre, reminiscent in his more literary creations of H.E. Bates and Lawrence — The Woman and the Engine Driver and The Clay Pool being particularly fine examples — and it was a matter of some regret to himself that he had not more time to dedicate to his short story form, his favourite. But life and limb, not to mention a large and flourishing family from his second marriage, demanded a steady output of bread and butter writing in the form of stories, articles and lesser novels.

During the fifties, Val Baker lived in Penzance, Sennen Cove and St Hilary before moving to St Ives, which later inspired the first of his idiosyncratic autobiographies, The Sea’s in the Kitchen and The Door is Always Open.

There was to follow an inevitable sequence of twenty-four more such books by which Val Baker captivated an entirely new public, to whom he brought great pleasure through escapist reading. The books were extrovert and delightfully eccentric and it is by these that many will remember him.

His later adventures at sea in his converted Motor Fishing Vessel Sanu were outrageously chronicled in such books as The Petrified Mariner which, in their turn, were guaranteed to harrow the blood of any professional seaman with those tales of Denys’ and Sanu’s incredible brushes with disaster.

Although one guessed that there was more than enough of Valentine Baker’s pioneering instinct in his son to keep Sanu afloat and on course in the long term. (”…You mean you had the wrong charts Denys, and you headed up channel regardless…?” A quiet chuckle and that self effacing smile, followed by …Well, Sanu knew exactly where she was going…”).

You couldn’t make it up.