Everything You Need to Know But Have Never Been Told, published in 2017, is David Icke's consummate work, recapitulating 19 books and 28 years of writing, research, and spiritual experience. Icke's career as a shaman began in 1991 with an experience in Peru, where he was impelled to approach several standing stones on a hill in a remote and uninhabited area. While standing there wondering what he was about, he felt a powerful energetic current take over his body, and he was impelled to raise his arms above his head in the magical gesture of Typhon, the ancient Egyptian serpent god, identified with Set, who also inspired Aleister Crowley. He was then engulfed in rain, where a moment earlier there was no rain. One of the central symbols in Icke’s system is the serpent, or reptile, also described by William Blake. The serpent, or naga, is also important in Buddhism, a protector of sacred knowledge. This experience precipitated a spiritual crisis, called the "turquoise period," when Icke felt that he was communicating with a powerful spiritual presence which culminated in 2003 with two intense ayahuasca experiences in Brazil, followed by an experience with psilocybin several weeks later. It is traditional for the shaman to undergo a spiritual crisis, followed by a period of disorientation from which he emerges either as a “nutter,” to use Icke’s term, or a visionary healer and man of power. During his ayahuasca experiences Icke communicated with the spirit of the plant, traditionally regarded as a female spiritual figure, who imparted to him a body of knowledge of which he said that he made extensive notes, rather like Philip K. Dick's Exegesis. I do not know that these notes have ever been published, but they would be very interesting to see.
Everything is a summary overview of Icke's insights over a period of almost three decades, reviewing the conclusions explored in great detail in his previous books, which I have not read, in 18 chapters. The number 18 is itself interesting. It is the number of Hata (ChTA). the antique Serpent, as well as Love, Life, and Light. Once again we see the centrality of the Serpent in Icke's theology.
Part of the shamanic journey is the exploration of a symbolic world, which the shaman explores, articulates, and communicates to the world in order to bring the world into relation to the numinous reality that underlies and thus heals the world, lost in the phantasmagoria of experience. What the shaman expresses is what the world needs to hear, expressed in language that the world can hear. However, in order to do this the shaman must also communicate in the language of the people with whom he communicates, and thus the universal principles of the perennial philosophy are articulated in terms of the limited cultural framework of his hearers, which must always be less than the inspiring vision, or the latter would not be an authentically transformative experience. Thus, the preeminent spiritual language is inherently symbolic, as discerned by Jung. This last point is especially important in any serious consideration of David Icke, if we are to understand him truly and sympathetically as an authentic spiritual seeker and not merely as a crank or charlatan or, worse, an opportunist. I for one am in the former camp, and have been personally fascinated by the numerous synchronicities between my life and his, who is only two years older than I. But this story will be told in another place.
Everything truly is comprehensive and, like the Bible, begins with a cosmology, an exploration of the nature and origin of reality itself (chapter 1). Chapter 2 is positively Cabalistic, exploring as it does the nature of the Dyad (Yeats's "Duad"), the "inversion" or reversal (Crowley's "wrong of the beginning") by which the trans-dual unity of the absolute (the "cosmic egg") is “broken” and manifests in the world of appearance characterized by conflict, which is also a rebirth and an opportunity for greater growth and self-realization. Icke's reference to the "archons" is interesting, not only for its Gnostic implications but also because Jacque Vallee, the famous computer scientist widely considered to be the foremost expert on UFOs, was also inspired by the Gnostic myth of the archon, which he identified with the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon. In subsequent chapters Icke explores the notion of virtuality, now an accepted theory of modern science; the dominance in the human psyche of the reptilian brain and its effects; the historical and biological dominance of corrupt royal bloodlines that are actually degenerate as a result of centuries or even millennia of inbreeding; the collective brainwashing of the human psyche by religions and politics, culminating in the cults of scientism, capitalism, and industrialization and its consequences, including the dictatorship of a diseased, dysfunctional, and dictatorial aristocracy with an agenda, intentional or systemic, of enslaving the human race for its own profit and advantage culminating in a globalized, industrialized, and enslaved humanity of the type that we already see arising in the United States and China - "different masks, same face." Icke's view of education as a system of state control is similar to that of Noam Chomsky and "Bucky" Fuller. Like Arthur Koestler, Icke locates the origin and perpetuation of war in an innate proclivity towards psychopathy that advantages and even nourishes the aristocratic and plutocratic elites at the expense of the people, including state terrorism. Another aspect is technocracy, of the type represented for example by Ray Kurzweil, who postulates that biological humanity will disappear and be replaced by a machine-human hybrid that will inevitably culminate in a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence (AI) that will simulate and surpass human intelligence and thus biological humans will become supererogatory. This is not science fiction. Both the European Union and the United States are actively engaged in what Barack Obama referred to as the "Brain Initiative," to digitally simulate human consciousness in a silicon matrix. Google has already established the first university designed to educate AI, with Ray Kurzweil as its first president. Kurzweil believes that a machine will pass the Turing test by the end of the next decade. The American military has plans to create autonomous robot soldiers as soon as possible. Elon Musk has recently announced NeuraLink, in which he plans to insert "threads," a tenth of the width of a human hair, directly into the brain using a robot arm to be connected to a brain-machine interface (BMI) that would fit behind the ear. Human tests are scheduled to begin in 2020. This is all public knowledge, if the public would care to look up from their cellphones to see what is actually happening around them.
Icke's books are a wakeup call that humanity must rise up before it is too late, to take charge of its own destiny and resist the dystopian future that is rapidly becoming a reality. Icke’s popular success since the humiliation of the Wogan Show shows that Icke’s world view resonates with an increasingly popular and widespread realization of the dangers of elitism, plutocracy, capitalism, and industrialization and the need for a progressive world view that inspires us to take a radically new direction if we are to avoid disaster.