MY DOUBLE LIFE 2 – A RAINBOW OVER THE HILLS

Nicholas Hagger is one of the most prolific and prodigious writers of our time, who has produced 40 books over the last 25 years. His output includes 1,500 poems, more than 300 classical odes after Horace and Ronsard, five verse plays, two national epic poems after Homer, and over 1,000 short stories. He is variously a poet, man of letters, journalist, cultural historian, mystic, philosopher, political scientist, intelligence officer, university lecturer and educationalist. His is a multiple life rather than just a double life of the title. He reflects (p. 564) that 'the only way for an artist in an unhealthy culture to recover contact with his culture's roots is to go back to the past and reflect its vitality in images. As Sir Laurens van der Post observed to Nicholas, this was his path as it had been for TS Eliot, CG Jung and Arnold Toynbee.

Sir Laurens sees Nicholas' work in the same bracket as these other cultural pioneers, especially his work on the creative role of the metaphysical fire or light in his monumental work on the evolution of cultures, The Fire and the Stones. Nicholas himself is very aware of his own affinity with writers from previous eras, for instance the metaphysical poets of the 17th century and Ficino during the Florentine Renaissance. His journey belongs both to the hero archetype and to the illuminated thinking of the mystic way. His Universalism is one outlook within different disciplines (pp. 870 and 918):

• Mystical Universalism in terms of personal growth and transformation leading to a perception of the unity of the universe

• Literary Universalism, combining sense and spirit, Classicism and Romanticism in content and method so world literature as a unity

• Philosophical Universalism bringing together East and West, Plato and Aristotle in investigating order and unity

• Historical Universalism, perceiving world history as a unity through the patterns and roots of 25 world civilisations

• Political Universalism focusing on the world unity of the coming benevolent World State that would control what he calls the Syndicate – the New World Order of military dominance and technical control

• Religious Universalism, identifying the common essence of world religions and finally

• Cultural Universalism, identifying a unified world culture

The poles of Nicholas' double life are his practical working and writing lives, the social and metaphysical worlds – he owned three schools with nearly 250 staff. There is an underlying polarity of yin and yang, the +A of the soul and the –A of the social ego harmonised in the One. This volume continues the pattern of paired episodes with a further fifteen structuring and distilling the narrative as well as representing the tension of the transforming soul and the regressive social ego which we all experience to some degree. Nicholas then lists the nodal points or critical experiences within these episodes. He sees the archetypal pattern of human lives as a progress towards a unitive vision through the reconciliation of opposites. Free will, chance and providence all seem to play a role in the unfolding blueprint where our inner compass points home towards the One.

Space prevents me addressing the many themes of this book, so I will confine my attention to two: first, what Nicholas calls the Metaphysical Revolution. In this respect he was an early attender of the Mystics and Scientists conferences, including the first one in 1978. He himself spoke at our 1992 conference on light and explains the background and genesis of his lecture while also recalling conversations with the other speakers including Fr Bede Griffiths and John Barrow. Through John Barrow he also attended a memorable 1992 conference on reductionism (I was there as well) at Jesus College, Cambridge organised by John Cornwell. Here he recalls exchanges with Peter Atkins, Mary Midgley, Freeman Dyson and especially with Sir Roger Penrose. He is always probing in his enquiries, pushing the boundaries of his interlocutors.

Nicholas played an active role during the 1990s in the Network Metaphysical Research Group that subsequently became the Universalist Philosophy Group then the Science and Esoteric Knowledge Group. He brings many of these meetings to life and cites the contributions of Chris Macann, Peter Hewitt, Max Payne, Alison Watson and Geoffrey Read, among others. He also recalls the day I arranged on Universalist Philosophy at Regent's College and the various initiatives for publications. It has to be said that this metaphysical revolution has yet to happen, and most universities are still very much in the grip of scientism, rationalism, materialism, reductionism and scepticism, i.e. an exclusively left hemisphere approach. Nicholas also records conversations and differences of opinion with Dr Kathleen Raine of Temenos and his good friend Colin Wilson, who could never quite grasp his vision. He has a huge network of contacts.

Nicholas' earlier work in intelligence as well as his own extensive research made him aware of the ambitions of the elite New World Order Syndicate operating behind the scenes and through the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group. He repudiates their self-interested, covert and explicit agenda of military full spectrum dominance and technological control. Instead, his vision is of a benevolent and democratic world state, which Churchill also thought necessary. The problem remains one of power and how its balance can be shifted, especially as the current world system is arranged to suit the richest and most powerful people and corporations. So the transformative impulse will have to come from below and probably through the galvanising capacity of the Internet.

The fact that this autobiography is based on extensive diaries has both a positive and negative side. The positive is the vividness of the account, including the genesis of his books, family matters, travel, political intrigue and conversations with leading thinkers. The downside is the overwhelming detail – the index alone runs to 80 pages out of over 1,000 and the two volumes make 1,700 pages of reading! Having said this, the book is well organised into shortish sections and gives an intimate view of a multiple, wide-ranging and remarkable life, which should be better-known than it is.