The Directorate

excerpts from Ernest Scott's The People of the Secret 
(Octagon Press, 1983):


A SECRET DIRECTORATE?


It is not surprising to see that all attempts to reintroduce the
lost component and to place man in touch with a genuine
technique whereby he might develop true consciousness (as
opposed to the walking-dream consciousness which he does
possess and which he mistakes for the other) have at all times
and places been regarded as a deep and subtle attack on
religion itself. This is as true of Islam as it is of Christianity.


For some two centuries after the Council of Nicaea it would
seem that Directorate participation was either withdrawn or
confined to a sort of holding operation.


Then, about AD 567, Mohammed was born. There seems to be
nothing in his early life to suggest that an event of significance
had happened, but presently the mark of higher activity begins
to attach to circumstances. Mohammed spent periods during his
youth with Bedouins in the desert and in conducting caravans
from Mecca to Syria, southern Arabia and perhaps to Egypt.
Arab religion at the time - "paganism" according to most
authorities - was influenced in the north by Christianity and in
the south by Jewish tradition. Legends suggest that before
Mohammed, a number of individuals had left Arabia to try to
find links with "the original religion of Abraham" and it may be
that Mohammed made contact with this activity during his
travels.


Perhaps a parallel exists here to the journeys from Greece to
Egypt which resulted in the school of Pythagoras.


At any rate, some event took place which resulted in
Mohammed deciding to retire to Mount Hira near Mecca.
There, it would be seen, he made contact directly with a level of
higher consciousness.


Soon afterwards he began to teach. His first audience
consisted of his own family, his wife Khadija, his friend Abu
Bakr and his cousin Ali. Initial attempts to record
Mohammed's teaching which he received in a state of trance
were abandoned and his hearers began to memorize for oral
transmission the material which he delivered.


The nucleus of a "school" was thus established for which
additional human material was waiting on the periphery. After
Mohammed's death in 632 a group of some 90 men and women
came together and through them the further development of
the impulse was realized. Such descriptions of them as exist
suggest that they included people who already knew that the
possibility of higher consciousness existed and were searching
for an Operation through which it could be exemplified.


One such was Salman the Persian, originally a Zoroastrian
who had gone from one Christian teacher to another and been
passed along through a series of testing trials and tribulations
which culminated in his being sold into slavery.


It was this event, apparently disastrous for his search, which
in fact brought him to the Companions.


This inner group of 90 took an oath of fidelity and are said to
have adopted the name Sufi... 

[Arabic documentation of the term, however, begins only after AD 815.]

... Does this mean that Sufism derives from the school that
formed round Mohammed? There are reasons to suppose not.
Uways el Qarni, who died in 657, was regarded as a Sufi master
but he never met Mohammed.


Five hundred years later another Sufi master, Hakim Jami,
implicitly denied the formal Islamic origin of Sufism by
declaring that Plato, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Hermes
were on an unbroken line of Sufic transmission.


Within our suggested mechanism of history there is no
problem. When Demiurgic levels first incarnated on earth to
achieve closer control of evolutionary trends, certain ordinary
men were initiated by them: that is, ordinary men were given
access to a technique whereby their minds could become able to
process conscious energy and hence to achieve contact with the
Demiurgic intention.


A certain number of such Initiates have been maintained
within the ordinary life of men in all places and at all times.
Sometimes they are known or suspected. Usually they are quite
unknown.


Such men have been given different names in different ages.
It is clear that certain of the Old Testament Prophets and the
Priest-Initiates of Egypt were of this order. The Sufis are the
exemplars of this unbroken Tradition in recent historical times.


The term [Sufi] has been adopted within recent years by groups
imitating such outward form of Sufi practice as they have been
able to discern and the word has to some extent been debased
during the 20th century in both East and West.


We are concerned only with the original and generally
invisible Tradition and to conclude that Sufism is the esoteric
aspect of Islam only is clearly unwarranted on the evidence.


The line, by whatever name it is known, is the line of
esotericism in all religions. It is also the line of esotericism in
many other modalities of evolution whose existence is generally
unsuspected.


There may be reason to suppose, however, that enhanced
techniques of "soul-making", relevant to the present stage of
mankind's development, were made available by the
Demiurgic level, through its Directorate on earth, at the time of
Mohammed. Put bluntly, these techniques constitute the trade
secrets of Sufism.


The Sufic influence was certainly exercised within the
framework of Islam as it has been exercised within the
framework of all religions without being identified with any.


We shall see that it was employed within Medieval Christianity
in an effort to restore the wisdom component which had
been excluded by the formulations of the early Church.


Here it might be permissible to venture a speculation in
general terms. So long as a religion develops according to its
evolutionary potential, Sufic activity will coincide with its
orthodox expression. As a religion becomes formalized in
dogma — that is, when it begins to desert its evolutionary
possibilities - the Sufic influence separates and is then seen by
orthodoxy as a heresy. At a certain stage of divergence, when
nothing more can be salvaged, the kinetic component
withdraws entirely, at which point the religion becomes subject
to the law of diminishing returns and finally extinguishes itself.


There is certainly no indication that the development of
Islam was any less free of contingency at material level than
Christianity was. It may be that in the matter of contingency
Prophets and Messengers are sometimes faced with cruel
alternatives. Rejecting all compromise with events as they
develop may mean that the Message with which they are
charged will be denied actualisation altogether. They may
choose to some extent to compromise with contingency and
thereby ensure that the Message is actualized at least partially.


Something of the sort has been suggested, in that
Mohammed's original insistence on an exclusive monotheism
was altered marginally as the price of securing the survival of
his Companions and hence of his Message.


Certainly the early promise that a genuine theocracy would
arise with spiritual authority subtending a stable structure at
all levels was not fulfilled.


To begin with, there was the familiar explosive expansion
along almost every line of human activity which we have seen
associated with the birth of every new cell in the body of history.
... But, as always, the impulse channelled through a genuine prophet had to be actualised in terms of human instruments congenitally contaminated with pride and jealousy and all the permutations of egoism in human behaviour.


Islam in no way avoided its share of human shortcomings.
On the one hand, there was a sublime reverence for man's
highest aspirations. There was just law-giving, a surging
expression of art and architecture. On the other hand, there
was egoism, conflict and hatred in many of those who sought to
serve the new ideas.


Umar, the second Caliph, was murdered. Uthman, the third
Caliph, and a Meccan aristocrat, aroused widespread opposition
by apparently favouring his own family and he, too,
died by assassination.


Ali, the fourth Caliph, was Mohammed's cousin and the
husband of his daughter Fatima. Ali was opposed by
Mu'awiya, a relative of the murdered Uthman. In 661 Ali, too,
was murdered and at this point arose the schism within Islam
which has never been bridged to this day.


The successors of Ali drew together as a separate sect (the
Shi'ites), while the supporters of Mu'awiya and his line of
Umayyad caliphs regarded themselves and their Sunnite
tradition as the true succession of the Prophet.


At some point in its development, a religion begins to diverge
from the impulse from which it derives; a departure which
appears to be in the nature of things. It is as though space itself
were curved and an unfolding event must actualize in a
sequence diverging from the straight line of its own noumenon.
At this point a religion elaborates dogma and ritual; it becomes
obsessed with the letter and not the spirit of its own inner
nature. Its outward expression becomes formalized, rigid and
autocratic. We have suggested that this is the point at which the
kinetic component appears to separate and is thereafter seen as
a newly-arisen heresy.


From the external viewpoint it seems fair to say that the
social and political body of Islam was showing advanced
entropy within thirty years.


The Umayyad Caliphate, deriving from Mu'awiya, retained
temporal control and continued the external expansion of
Islam.


Damascus was chosen as the capital, Arabic chosen as the
language of Empire. Laws were made, a uniform coinage
established and toleration extended to Jews, Christians and
Zoroastrians.


As the eighth century opened, a second wave of conquest
began in North Africa. .... 


There was land across the sea ...: Spain, a land so torn by the chaos left by departing Romans and contending Visigoth rulers that it was ripe and ready for invasion.


In 711 Tariq crossed the Straits with an army. The word
Gibraltar (Jebel-Tariq, Mount Tariq) marks the event. Within
months he was in Cordoba and Moslem armies, Arab, Syrian
and Berber, were pouring through Spain and mustering to
cross the Pyrenees.


Legend has it that the Saracen captains looked down on the
lush lands of France and called out "On, on, to the conquest of
the world for Islam". One general is said to have had
misgivings: "No. We shall remain in Spain. France is too green
and my men would degenerate in that soft land." His
misgivings - according to Moslem legend - gave Charles
Martel time to gather his forces and the westward flood tide of
Islam finally broke on the battlefield of Poitiers in 732.


So the Saracens settled for Spain. Visigoth landowners made
terms with the invaders and the cities and monasteries followed
suit. Settlement was facilitated by a number of widely contrasting
factors. The serfs were still tied to a Roman slave
system but could now obtain at least nominal freedom by
embracing Islam. There was no lack of fervent converts.
The Jews regarded the occupation as a merciful deliverance
from Christian persecution and welcomed the Saracens with
open arms. They remained a powerful component of "Moorish
Spain" for 700 years.


Yet another, almost a theoretical factor, helped. The Council
of Nicaea had declared against Arius but the Arian heresy
remained, for the Visigoths, orthodox Christianity. Not
surprisingly, the Neo-Platonic ideas in Islam found an answering
echo among Spanish Christians.


But there was little of a unified nature about the Moslem
conquest of Spain. Within the occupying forces there was
conflict and hatred. Arabs denigrated Syrians and both were
contemptuous of the Berbers. The latter were so badly treated
by their brothers in Islam that generation by generation they
drifted back to their African homeland.


Dissension at Spanish colonial level was matched by dissension
at the heart of Islam. The Umayyad rulers had Islamized Persia but the Persian aristocrats had contrived to retain positions of an executive nature, from which, it is said, they hoped to keep alive Zoroastrian ideas.


Finally, in protest against taxation, they rebelled and in 749
defeated the forces of the Caliph and proclaimed the first of a
new line of caliphs, the Abbasid, choosing a descendant of
Abbas, the uncle of Mohammed. The centre of government was
then moved to Mesopotamia where the second caliph of the
new line laid the foundations of Baghdad in 763. Here a stable
Caliphate was to continue for nearly a century.


Concurrently Cordoba had crystallized as the centre of the
Umayyad regime. It was to become a showpiece of Islamic
rule. At its peak it contained 700 mosques, three public baths, a
Palace with 400 rooms and a city library with 400,000
books.


At this stage it is difficult to resist the temptation to
speculate, from a human standpoint, upon the experience of the
Hidden Directorate. It must surely have been compounded of a
mixture of alarm, disappointment and qualified satisfaction.


The Directorate had vested high hopes in Islam as the
vehicle of a major evolutionary gain. It had seen much of the
intrinsic promise destroyed by the intransigence of human
nature. Yet two stable centres now existed, 3,000 miles apart,
serving, at least in name, a spiritual reality.


If we think of Cordoba and Baghdad as magnetic poles we
can see that the whole of Europe lay in the field which they
subtended. Within this field much might yet be achieved.
Within it, a required, a fore-ordered, rise in the specific gravity
of human nature could still be contrived. Humanitarianism,
science, art and a technique of man's individual as well as
corporate evolution might be induced.


A wholly new basis of human life was called for, utterly
beyond the wildest imagination of the men of AD 1000. Step by
step, trend by trend, man and his institutions would be
impelled or restrained along a predestined road. Over and over
again man would step aside and be guided back; or would step
off the road and be halted and impelled to retrace.


Institutions once regarded as fundamental verities of human
experience would melt away. Monarchy would yield to the
social management of man by himself. The concept of nation
would change to the concept of continent, and from continent
to the conception of the entire world as one.


Man would be offered a glimpse of an expanding universe
and his mind, which measured in leagues, would strain to
measure in light-years.


Within the millennium which lay ahead of the year 1,000,
the specific gravity of human soul-stuff would be required to
rise by an amount greater than had been achieved in all the eras that had gone before.


Within the force-field that was moulding him, man would
understand little and co-operate hardly at all. From the
viewpoint of his own present moment in any of the unfolding
centuries, he would see only change without pattern; quixotic
ebb and flow; disruption, chaos, order restored and chaos once
again. Sacred standards would be cast down and strange,
seemingly arbitrary, new standards created.


From the present moment of a lifetime of seventy years, all
would seem the whim of chance and accident, all without
purpose or meaning.


Yet from the present moment of Intelligence able to contain
the whole history of mankind as a single perception, all would
be true end-gaining, deliberate, law-conforming and almost -
but never quite - inevitable.


If not quite inevitable then certainly necessary; for a great
event lay ahead in man's temporal future. It existed already in
eternity and was required to be actualized in time.


The event is a mutation in man's evolutionary nature
involving a new modality of experience, a new organ of
perception. Though latent, perhaps, since man emerged from
his primate ancestry, it is an organ of experience that has only
intermittently been active in certain exceptional individuals.
Man is due to inherit it one day as part of his total experience.


For this event man had to be prepared. Certain promising
races of pre-men were inexplicably extinguished and it has
been conjectured that this happened because they were unable
to come to terms with intellect - for them an incomprehensible
and unmanageable experience.


By analogy, a function giving access to a four-dimensional
world might be equally disastrous to intellect-based Modern
Man. A certain minimum standard of soul, a certain minimum
psychic specific gravity is necessary before such a radical new
modality may be risked.


Preparation for this - in our view - was begun as a deliberate
operation of Higher Intelligence 1,000 years ago.


The first steps involved a certain social tolerance, a certain
expansion of intellect, a certain instinctive humanitarianism.
These had to be established before the first tentative switching
on of the new organ could be regarded as viable.


How mankind was prepared within the ferment of the last
thousand years, we shall hope to glimpse in succeeding
chapters.


Once we have the key we shall see that the ebb and flow of
history itself illustrates the goals that were required to be
gained. Here and there it may be possible to see the agents of
the process at work - the Secret People serving, perhaps
members of, the Hidden Directorate.


But for the most part, their presence, like their purpose, will
be obscured from the view of the men and women among whom
they walked.




The People of the Secret (p. 44-52)