The Hidden Universe

The term “Phaneron” was coined by philosophers to define the unique world we each perceive. My Phaneron will, by its very nature, differ from your Phaneron. Taken to its logical conclusion, this means that every human being lives within his or her own Phaneron.

What is fairly clear is that Gnosticism was motivated by a number of philosophers, Jewish, Christian and subsequently Islamic, who could not understand how a supposedly benevolent God could allow the existence of evil. As the central tenet of all Abrahamic religions is that if God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient, how can he create evil

This suggests that there is an apparent relationship between Egregorials and human consciousness, both individual and collective. Either they seem to impose themselves upon our consciousness to manifest in the Kenoma or else we project them into the Kenoma from our own subconscious, allowing them to fulfil our greatest hopes and fears.

The earliest attempt at communication was through cave paintings, the earliest of which have been dated at more than 40,000 years old. In this period, known as the Upper Paleolithic, paintings appeared in places as far apart as Western Europe and Indonesia. These earliest representations were hand stencils and simple geometric shapes. It was around

It is now known that the pineal gland has a crucial role in the generation of the chemical compound melatonin. Known as the “hormone of darkness”, this substance is secreted into the blood by the pineal gland as a way of telling the body that it is getting dark and that the organism needs to sleep.

The Greek word Pleroma literally means “fullness”, from the verb plero, “I fill”.

By the 6th century BCE large numbers of Greeks were living and working in Egypt and a fully Greek city, Naucratis, had been founded on the Nile river, 70 kilometres (45 miles) from the open sea. Three hundred years later the Greek general Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, which effectively became part of the Greek world. It is fair to conclude t

Before an observer detects the quantum particle, it does not exist. His or her consciousness brings the object into reality. Without conscious observation, there is no reality. In this way we create our own universe! (See pp189–191.)

Sohrawardi pointed out that in our waking lives we exist, for the most part, in what he calls the “terrestrial” – that is, the seemingly consistent physical world that surrounds us. This is the Islamic equivalent of Kant’s noumenal world and what the Gnostics called the Kenoma. This is quite literally the “sensible” world. But there is another sens