Searching for Secret Knowledge
Milchar
Since the ancient times, many legends have been told about the secret knowledge that gives a great might to the one who is able to comprehend it. Ancient Egyptian priests, Tibetan monks, as well as various secret societies and occult orders are often attributed the possession of such knowledge, which they presumably have been keeping for millennia in highest secrecy from laymen...
Nowadays, when intelligence services cannot get a direct access to the information they need, they try to decipher it by analyzing all the open information related to the secret anyhow: when and at what circumstances the secret information appeared, what people can know at least some part of it and what other business and social relationships those people have, what kinds of rumors are circulating about the organization that is keeping the secret, etc.. By this way, it becomes sometimes possible to correctly guess the secret, or to find an indirect access to it.
Let's start from the question: if the secret knowledge we're talking about does really exist, at what time and from where could it come? Or, in other words, what kind of information and in what situation can be reasonable to conceal for centuries or even millennia? (Moreover, that information should remain actual after that period.)
Surely, we're not dealing with a normal situation, a relatively stable historical epoch. Any scientific or technical knowledge gets obsolete soon. Even if sometimes lonely geniuses appear, who are going far ahead of their time, and who invent something that can find a use only centuries later (like Leonardo da Vinci, who hit upon the ideas of submarine and bathyscaphe) — their works are hardly worth keeping in secrecy for centuries: people would reinvent everything anyway, as soon as industry demands it. The same can be said about any occult knowledge: what one person could invent, another one can reinvent if needed. Although it can be possible that some secret society is still keeping a technology of gunpowder production or the Bessel functions invented by some ancient civilization long before than we were thinking, a searcher of the real secret knowledge is not interested in such amusing things.
However, in a situation when an advanced civilization (either global or just leaving all other cultures far behind) is about to collapse by some reason, and primitive barbarians are going to come after it, — the last representatives of that civilization can think of preserving its knowledge in secret. It would not make any sense for them to try to educate the barbarians immediately; first, it's a risk of being killed, and second, the barbarians simply would not be able to properly understand that knowledge at that moment. (Imagine, for example, how the Huns or Vandals could react if the philosophers from the academy of Athens tried to teach them something on the ruins of the Roman empire...)
However, being incomprehensible is not the worst what can happen to knowledge. A dangerous situation can occur if people are already able to understand it, but not yet able to predict the consequences of using it. For example, when the test of the first H-bomb was planned, some physicists feared that a thermonuclear explosion might cause an uncontrolled chain reaction involving the hydrogen atoms in ocean water, which would lead to a thermonuclear explosion of the whole Earth. At that moment, politicians decided to take a risk, and our planet came to be lucky. Nevertheless, this story makes us think: would not it be better if such a dangerous technology were kept highly secret and did not get into the hands of irresponsible politicians? This idea could have come to ancient wise men as well.
Additionally, another possible source of ancient secret knowledge can exist, though it has some flavor of conspiracy theories. Suppose that some politicians of an advanced ancient civilization (again, either global or going far ahead of other cultures), decided to fabricate some false version of history for the purpose of propaganda and brainwashing in the global scale. After that forged version had spread among people, and the truth nearly forgotten, the manipulators could keep the true information in secret for their own needs.
However, the things are probably simpler than we can think. Secret societies can just have been keeping information on the history and culture of the ancient civilization whose descendants they claim to be, because they, for some reason, consider their contemporaries unworthy of disclosing that information.
On the other hand, the very notion of "secret knowledge" is relative. An absolute secret is something that people are unaware about its very existence. Maybe some kind of such secrets exist, but if so, only its keepers can know anything about it. We can make any reasonable assumptions only when just the details of the knowledge are kept in secret, but the fact of its existence is openly known to some extent. Let's review the possible opportunities of this kind.
Technologies that provenly exist, but are not studied by the official science yet:
1) Telepathy. The existence of it was confirmed in several experiments, but the reliability of telepathic communication appears to be too low for any practical use. The most realistic physical explanation is an ability of human's brain to radiate and perceive electromagnetic waves of extremely low frequency.
2) Cold thermonuclear synthesis. The most realistic physical explanation can be catalytic thermonuclear reactions inspired by some particles present in cosmic rays.
3) Momentary levitation ("flying yogis"). Hundreds of evidences and tens of photo- and video-documents are known, but no ideas of scientific explanation proposed.
4) Long-term lethargy (up to decades) without any noticeable harm for the health and with deceleration of the processes of aging. From the point of view of medicine and physiology, it's not much wonder, but the practical techniques are kept in secret at several schools of Yoga.
Technologies attributed to gods in mythology, but possibly known to some people at some moment:
1) The ancient aircraft described in 'Vimanika-Shastra' treatise.
2) Stone processing with millimetric accuracy (which exceeds the abilities of modern industry) in the pyramids of Egypt and pre-Inca buildings of South America.
3) Lifting of loads weighing up to hundreds of tons, by using an unknown mechanism that makes a sound, similar to an orchestra of trumpets, during its work. It was implemented for construction of the Egyptiam pyramids and for destruction of the walls of Jericho.
4) The highly powerful weapon that destroyed the city of Mohendjo-Daro.
5) The unknown superhard alloy, unprocessable for any modern instruments, that was found in the mysterious artifacts ("cauldrons") at Olguydakh river (Yakutia, Russia).
Technologies formerly kept in secret societies and used by intelligence services nowadays:
1) Slowing of the subjective perception of time. It has been a technique of Asian martial arts, which is now used by commando units of some armies. This ability allows to make 10-20 times more actions in a time unit, and accelerates reactions to the same extent. However, it works for short time only, because the tiredness of using it comes also 10-20 times faster.
2) "The black medicine", i.e. the knowledge of how to kill a person with one fingertouch to a distinct weak spot at the body.
3) The techniques of "psychic programming" and other highly efficient methods of brainwashing.
Information that certainly was known to the ancient people and could be preserved in secret societies up to now:
1) The real origin of humankind.
2) Contacts with alien visitors in the distant past.
3) Ancient languages and writing system that are not deciphered yet.
4) Other data on ancient history, such as:
• civilizations that did not leave any artifacts or documents to descendants;
• Antarctica before the growth of its ice sheet, i.e. the primary source of data for Piri Reis's, Oronce Fine's and Philippe Buache's maps; the possible existence of human cultures in the ancient Antarctica;
• the real purpose of the pyramids in Egypt and Mexico;
• and many other issues.
Technologies, described in unreliable sources, but not provenly impossible:
1) Teleportation at the distance of up to tens of kilometers.
2) Direct observing of events of the past (up to millennia before) and the future (up to decades ahead) without physically traveling in time. The observers say that the semi-transparent pictures of the past or future are overlaid on the view of the present, and that staying at the place of the past or future events is a necessary condition for seeing them this way.
3) Time traveling at the sites of natural anomaly zones (up to several days into the future, or several month into the past).
Notice that the knowledge attributed to gods in mythology can, to some extent, be viewed as several distinct branches of science and technology rather than a bunch of tricks unrelated to each other:
1) The study of the anomalous (from the point of view of our science) features of time and space. This also includes the artifacts found in rocks and minerals that date back to millions of years.
2) The study of the properties of gravitation that are still unknown to our physics; this, however, can be a particular case of the aforementioned spacial and temporal phenomena.
3) The study of properties of the human psyche yet unknown to the modern science; they can also interact by some way with the properties of space, time and gravitation.
This means that the secret knowledge can be not just a collection of "patents" in different areas of technologies unknown to us, but a single secret science with its own theory, laws and mathematical formulas, which describe the phenomena that are very rarely observed in nature and, therefore, untouched by our official science. The Yogis' flights and what we call magic — this all can be particular cases of the phenomena studied by that secret science. Probably, some fragments of it got spread due to an information leakage. However, without any systematized knowledge of those rare natural phenomena, we cannot create any new technologies based on them. Remember, how long was the way from the first use of fire to the modern chemistry. Apparently, in the area of knowledge that has suspectedly been kept in secrecy for millennia, setting experiments is a much harder task than in chemistry or physics, because it's dealing with phenomena observed so rarely that some people never can see them for their whole life. Nevertheless, a more advanced civilization, whose history lasted for many millennia, could have studied them and considered too dangerous to disclose that knowledge to the barbarians that came after it; however, it chose a few talented persons among those barbarians and bequeathed them to keep that knowledge secret until more intelligent descendants come, who would be able to use it safely.
Here a question can arise: "Why those who have been possessing so powerful technologies for millennia still don't manifest themselves? why they, for example, have not conquered the whole world?" First, the keepers of the secret knowledge can believe that the moment for using it the most efficient way has not come yet; if they have been waiting for so long, they can wait even more. Second, and the most important: that knowledge has been kept in secret exactly for protecting it from such mad pretenders to the reign over the world. Imagine, for example, what could happen if the Nazis got access to the technology of nuclear weapons? and what can happen if now the Islamic terrorists get access to it?
Now, let's turn from the question of what can have been kept in secrecy for millennia to the issue of how it can be done. Imagine that we are those ancient wise men who know some information that:
1) cannot find any practical use at the moment;
2) can become really useful in the distant future;
3) can lead to disastrous effects on something valuable for us if has fallen into the hands of ill-educated fools.
We need to keep that information for our better descendants by such a way that:
1) it never got forgotten or distorted;
2) it never got known to laymen before its time comes.
The 2nd condition is the most difficult to satisfy. Even if we believe that the candidates for keepers of the knowledge are always reliable, we're unable to predict all accidents that can happen in centuries. This means that, sooner or later, the information that we want to keep in secrecy will fall into the hands of undesired people anyway, despite of every possible security measures we can think about. Therefore, we need to keep our knowledge in such a form that, if a layman has got access to it, he does not understand it, or even does not recognize it as something secret and valuable.
Therefore, a usual cipher does not suit the goal, because it provokes a desire to break it, and, sooner or later, people will manage to do it. A solution can be a hidden cipher, which looks like an ordinary text on a topic unrelated to the enciphered message. For example, Bacon's cipher encodes the information into the shape of letters, so that glyphs are taken from different fonts and it's the font type that contains the real message. A more complicated cipher can set the symbols of the encoded message onto distinct positions in the text and fill the gaps between them with meaningless letters by such a way that the result looks like a grammatically correct text; in order to decipher it, one has to know the exact order of how the symbols of the encoded message are distributed inside the text and probably also the rules of their correspondence to the real letters that constitute the original message. Apropos, it can be not so stupid of the Cabbalists to try to find secret enciphered messages in 'Torah'. It seems to be a smart way to keep information secret: encode it in a religious text that tells the believers to preserve itself unchanged at any price. Maybe Somebody holds a small note with the key to it... The Cabbalists have been trying to hack it by brute force, but Somebody laughs at them, knowing that it will take them millions of years.
As a blind, many fake secret societies can have been created, and fables about the mysteries of the Knights Templar, the Albigensians and the Illuminati have been told. The real keepers of the secret knowledge would have no reason to spread any information about themselves; if they exist, we cannot know even the real name of their organization. At the same time, those well-known "secret" societies serve as false targets for Gestapo, KGB, CIA and other chasers of secrets. Even if a sheer army of cops and spies breaks into their "secret" lodges with orders for general search and for arrest on all vain fools proud of their secret society membership — this all will lead to nothing, as well as nothing has been found in Montsegur or in Tibetan monasteries.
However, those fake secret societies can have some indirect relation to the real secrets. The keepers of the real ancient knowledge can be their unofficial leaders and observe: how seriously the members are approaching to preservation of fake secrets and who of them are worth recruiting into the real secret society. In such a case, the formal leaders of a fake secret organization have no idea of its double purpose.
However, mere security measures would not be sufficient for keeping information secret for millennia, if anybody who has accidentally got known the secret could give it away to everybody else. Nevertheless, if we are dealing not with a usual military or political secrets, but with the ancient knowledge, — the secret can stand up for itself, because 99 persons of 100 would not understand it even if somebody tried to explain it to them as clear as possible. Even the rest 1 person of 100 would be unable to grasp the secret science without knowing its terminology and the facts it's based on. (This is exactly why modern researchers can understand next to nothing in 'Vimanika-Shastra', however strange it can seem: the ancient knowledge is written in plain text, but...)
Meanwhile, when people got access to something that lied beyond their comprehension, most probably they would make a cult around it. As my friend Sathur stated it, "They put a physics textbook upside down onto the altar, go around it chanting the sacred mantra E = m c2, and expect that wealth would fall into their hands." We can see it, for example, in the so-called cargo cults of Melanesian aborigines. Therefore, it's definitely possible for some religious texts to contain encrypted secret information that most followers of those religions are not aware of, while esoteric scholars are trying to decrypt it. Depending on the intellectual abilities of a person, several variants are possible:
1) Fanaticism. This is the easiest way for most people — just to believe in what's openly stated in the religious text, feeling proud of knowing the only wisdom that's necessary to know.
2) Dogmatism. Some narrow-minded people are sure that they always understand everything the right way. When they hit upon something that lies beyond their comprehension, they try to "understand" it anyway they can. This is how dogmas appear. Dogmatists not just feel superior to those not believing in their dogmas, but sometimes even view themselves to be obliged to bring their "truth" to as many people as possible.
3) Mysticism. One of the most reliable ways to keep a secret is to disclose its unimportant part and claim it to be the whole of the secret. It's definitely possible that the current spread of occult information in popular literature follows exactly this recipe of hiding the very existence of the real secret. 99% of people who engage into occultism don't set any aims reaching farther than solving their everyday problems: to attract a mate, to avenge on an enemy, to get some material benefits. "Let them reach their goals", — decided Somebody who's keeping the real secrets, — "so they'll stop searching anymore".
Those whose aim is searching for occult knowledge in itself, are caught at another bait — an interesting but practically useless branch of the knowledge that could be developed forever without any visible result. Examples are numerous: astral, aura, bioenergy, Castaneda's inorganic beings, and much more.
4) "Spiritual enlightenment". When somebody starts to understand something that most people don't grasp and hardly ever can, it becomes a totally mind-changing experience. But this notorious "most people don't grasp and hardly ever can..." is yet another trap for "Human, All Too Human" that almost nobody can manage to avoid — so strong is the desire to feel superior over most people. This is why the searchers stop here, as soon as they start feeling their advantage over laymen.
Even the aforementioned traits of human psyche would be sufficient for a great majority of people to be unable to use any secret knowledge that could accidentally fall into their hands. However, in addition to this, some propaganda tricks are intentionally implemented, which can possibly have been serving the goal of preventing any information leakage from secret societies, is they really exist:
Skepticism as a smokescreen. One of the best way to guard a secret is to persuade everybody that no secret exists at all. When searching any information leads to nothing but being called insane — it can discourage everybody from such attempts, except those whose aim is searching for knowledge in itself, who view their life to be senseless if that knowledge did not exist, who are ready to sacrifice their reputation for it... This can also be a good filter for selection of candidates for new keepers of the secret knowledge.
Informational noise. Under the Soviet regime, the Western radio stations that broadcast in Russian were jammed. The most efficient jamming technology was using the same radio program with a delay of several seconds as a source of noise for jamming. It sounded astonishing: the sound was loud, it was even clear that the announcer was speaking Russian, but even a single word could not be understood. Secret societies can use a similar technique in order to additionally secure there information: they can just spread lots of rumors and misinformation on the same topic. Even if some part of the real secret knowledge accidentally leaked, it would be indistinguishable from all the informational noise that had been spread before.
This can also mean that, if the amount of stupid nonsense published on some topic seems too high and even exceeding the public demand on such junk, it can be a campaign of spreading informational noise.
"Imagine that an alien spaceship has crashed in a remote area of your country, and you, as a high-rank state official, have to hide this fact from the people. Two general scenarios are possible, let's call them the Soviet and the American one. The first scenario requires to build a fence of six rows of barbed wire around the site of the accident, to arrest all the witnesses, and to issue a new top-secret instruction for the censorship department. For the second scenario, you need to immediately report the accident to all mass media and to add also: a detailed comment by the president of the International Association of UFO Researchers, an essay of a popular sci-fi writer, an interview with a pop star confessing her teenage pregnancy of an alien from Altair, a report from a neo-nazi rally demanding resignation of that traitorous agent of the secret alien occupation government from the office of President, and, of course, many other materials on the relationships between the aliens and the Loch Ness monster, Bermuda triangle and Atlantis... Which way of concealing the truth is more efficient?" /"Our Criticism on F. Fukuyama" by Kirill Yeskov/
If we notice the areas where such informational noise campaign is going on now, we can see that most of them are related to the possible topics of the secret knowledge that were mentioned before.
However, keeping something in secrecy for ages poses another fatal problem: the keepers themselves could have lost the keys to their secrets. Even a plain text becomes more and more difficult to properly understand as time goes and cultures change. What was obvious to, for example, the ancient Romans can come to be not so clear for us. As a result, the members of modern secret societies can well have no clue to the information that they have been withholding from laymen for so long. If the information has not been practically used for centuries, its sense can have been forgotten, and now its keepers can only hope that some genius among their descendants will manage to decipher it.
On the other hand, we cannot exclude the situation that the encrypted information stored in the secret societies is something that our science has already reinvented. One example of such scenario is well known: the Free Masons society, which originally was founded for keeping 'The Ten Books on Architecture' by Vitruvius in secrecy; the knowledge of the construction technologies described in that treatise allowed to reduce the cost of any building works up to 10 times. Since the invention of book-printing, the secret of the Free Masons became known to all educated readers. But some members of that organization liked to continue playing a secret society, which they are still doing today.
Paradoxically, only few people really strive to access some secret knowledge, while the majority wants only to feel superior over laymen and to play mysterious rituals and symbols. Therefore, most of the now existing secret societies are probably nothing more than games of vanity, and there "secrets" can well have been written by mystic graphomaniacs of the 19th century.
Nevertheless, real and practically useful secret knowledge can exist. We can have found the optimal procedures for keeping it secret. The information is encrypted in a text on an absolutely unrelated topic. Preservation of this text is guaranteed somehow; for example, it can be a sacred text of a religion. The key to the cipher is being held in another country where few people can know the language of the text. Possibly, the knowledge is separated into several parts encrypted in different texts with different keys and cryptographic methods. For the purpose of combating a possible information leakage, a propaganda campaign is launched in advance, aiming to persuade people that any information on this topic is stupid nonsense.
Certainly, no security techniques can be absolutely reliable; the aforementioned one is not an exception either. Now, computers can find a key to any cipher; it's only a question of time. Ancient and exotic languages are also well studied. This all, however, can be foreseen by those who made that information secret; they could view it as a test of readiness to grasp the knowledge properly. People should first overcome their ethnic bounds and create powerful artificial intelligence — and then they would be able to decrypt an ancient text and find a technology of anti-gravity or time traveling ;-)
Does such secret knowledge really exist? Or, maybe, the greatest occult secret of all times is the fact that such secrets make no sense, because geniuses can always learn themselves whatever they want, while ordinary people can never really learn anything, no matter how many "secrets" are disclosed to them? What if the legends about secret knowledge have been made up with the only purpose of protecting geniuses from the aggression of the crowd of laymen? Let every average person dream of obtaining a supernatural might by mere reading the 'Book of the Dead' or entering a "secret" occult organization...
But even if matters stand this simple way, even if all the secret societies of keepers of the ancient knowledge are nothing more than a romantic legend, — it would not mean that no secret knowledge exist. Secrets is not necessarily something intentionally concealed from people. Nature still contains many secrets that embarrass both scientists and occultists. You don't need to be initiated in a mystic order to disclose these secrets; you need only intellect, effort, and a bit of fortune.