Review of People of the Secret referred to in G Con post…lf you can’t understand the eonic efffect, you may as well forget junk new age thinking about cosmic powers…

I can’t give five starts to a book like this, and it may contain many errors, but it is worth pointing to the reference to J.G.Bennett without endorsing the whole book.
I think Bennett (connected to sufis, and the book is an Octagon print, from Idries Shah zone) almost got it right. Readers should check out my World History and the Eonic Effect:
We must distinguish three different things, and they are all in Bennett, but not in the right analysis:
1. demiurgic powers
2. a hidden directorate
3. the cascade of cosmic laws as in Bennett with _!_biospheres in that sequence of levels.
4. Ordinary men, buddhas, and perhaps men with ‘permanent I’, whatever that is.Many students get evolution and demiurgic powers confused. Demiurgic powers probably don’t have the energy resources to terraform planets or do operations on a global scale: this springs from biosphere (GAIA!). Demiurgic powers can move inside this context like men in a factory but the larger system is different. This is why noone can figure out the evolution of religion, civilization and man, and the hopeless confusions of ‘design arguments’. The Axial Age shows the emergence of religion in a larger context of civilization: this is biospheric with demiurgic co-participation. Bur the modern new age throws a curve ball. This biospheric level seems cyclic as Bennett noted and this suggests it is hypermechanical, while demiurgic beings have ‘will’ of some kind (although in Bennett biospheres have ‘will’ in a different sense, 24 laws?). And this leaves the founders like buddha in an ambiguous context. The sequence of age periods is fixed: religions can arise in their transitions like Hinayana or Israelitism or they can arise in the middle periods like Mahayana, Christianity, Islam. It is important to study the diffierence because two sets of operations are different.
Religions are probably delegated to the hidden directorate, or figures like Gautama, who can initiate their starting points, while their actual construction sequence ends in the hands of men. This is why the Old Testament seems so smart and primitive at the same time. It clearly distinguish ‘god’ and ‘elohim’ btw…
These three distinctions (or four) go a long way to explaining the confusion over religion, civilization, secularism, etc… We have bioshpere, demiurgic powers, a hidden directorate, and buddhas who clearly did not see anything beyond their enlightenment, a very tricky situation. And then ordinary men. The Israelites were very smart and saw a higher power or the bioshpere where the buddha saw only a ‘turning of the wheel’, with a visit from the ‘god realm’ (???). The gestation of Christianity, Islam, Mahayana (outside of the Axial Age) are thus at best influenced by the hidden directorate, and then human agents, with the Jesus figure in between. Scott is close on many points but this analysis is filled with traps…His take on Islam and sufis is useful at a time when Islamophobes are rampant.The question of the hidden directorate is vexed. Just who are these beings and how do they relate to incarnation? The buddhas move beyond incarnation. There is a another category?? (the boddhissatwa perhaps being an artificial imitation). The emergence of Christianity was a complete mess, yet succeeded in spite of itself. This model may help. Being a part of the ‘hidden directorate’ raises as many questions as it answers.They must support themselves over many lives on the surface of a planet, not an easy thing to do. We have not facts here, so we should be wary.
Note that, and Bennett realized this, modernity is a new age. This confounds all traditionalists. But it is important to see that the progression of epochs is beyond the ‘sacred/secular’ distinction. A closer look shows the Reformation and buddhism reborn in spite of itself, just as Jainism was reborn in the Axial Age, but then giving way to buddhism.