Introduction

The purpose of the writings on this site (downloadable as a single pdf) is to both affirm David Icke’s work and to apply to it what philosophers called ‘Occam’s razor’ – namely that unless they prove inadequate, the simplest possible theories that make sense of phenomena should be adopted, and that unnecessary over-elaboration or ‘egging the cake’ should be avoided. In addition, I emphasise that ‘facts’ do not ‘speak for themselves’ but are capable of multiple interpretations, some more elaborated than others - and/or contradictory to one another in their assumptions and the overall picture they present. I see my role as one of both pointing to and removing what, as a philosopher, I see as some basic inconsistencies or outright philosophical contradictions in David Icke’s theories. In addition I present some alternative interpretations to his conclusions, which I see in part as confusing symbols and metaphors of psychological and metaphysical truths with those truths themselves. For example, I see Icke’s account of a hyper-egotistic and ‘extra-terrestrial’ species of Reptilian beings as a over-elaborated symbol of the human ego and of human ego-consciousness as such – which defines itself by a basic delusion of omnipotence – the belief that it is both essentially separate from the world - ‘extra-terrestrial’ - and thus also capable of acting on and transforming that world without itself being acted upon and transformed by it.  

At the same time, I do not in any way deny the existence of non-physical species of consciousness from other planes of awareness, some of which manifest in reptilian form.  On the contrary, I understand all species (including the human species) as essentially ‘species of consciousness’ - all of which have their source in non-physical planes of awareness. Similarly I understand all beings as capable of 'shapeshifting' (an area in which I myself have many experiences and abilities). This is because each of us is essentially but an individualised portion and expression, manifestation and embodiment of a singular universal Awareness - one that is capable of taking on infinite possible forms and which is the source of all experienced phenomena, all worlds and realities and all beings – all individualised consciousnesses. From this perspective I also question David Icke’s take on the illusory or ‘virtual’ nature of physical reality, which I see as philosophically inconsistent. That is because, in order to explain the illusory nature of physical relies he relies, paradoxically, principally on abstract and complex physical-scientific theories of electro-magnetic frequencies, waveforms etc. - rather than using Occam’s razor and simply recognising all experienced phenomena and all realities as both non-physical and non-illusory manifestations of a singular universal Awareness.  

I also question the ambivalence and inconsistency I see in David Icke’s view of the relation between ‘evil’ and ‘ignorance’, emphasising in particular that no being or beings can control or perpetrate even the most unforgiveable acts on others without their conscious or subconscious collusion – arguing that to deny this basic truth is to believe in our own powerlessness in the face of the cruel and destructive powers he seeks so conscientiously to expose. Finally I question not the breadth but the depth of some of his research and its conclusions. In particular I show the shallowness of, for example, branding Karl Marx as a ‘Rothschild-Zionist agent’ - when a close study of Marx shows him to have been the David Icke of his time – having been the first to expose and analyse the history of usury, the insidious workings of finance capitalism and the relation of both Judaism and Christianity to its ‘God’ – the God of Money. 

There are many ways of making sense of our world – of ‘connecting the dots’ as David Icke is very fond of saying, and many ways of interpreting and presenting a ‘big picture’. That said, we also need to be aware that faced with any set of dots, there are many ways of connecting them up to form different patterns – whether seemingly arbitrary or with a definite form such as spider’s web or geometic sign. Even more importantly however, we need also to bear in mind that, taking the phrase ‘joining up the dots’ metaphorically, not only are there many ways in which the ‘dots’ can be joined but also many ways of joining them. By this I mean that what any large body of ‘evidence’ is actually evidence of depends not just on how long, how earnestly and sincerely it has been researched and accumulated but on the way or ways it has been interpreted or made sense of. For what we take as evidence of something  - the ‘dots’ - can be made sense of in many different ways – for example by ‘joining’ them or finding connections between them, for this can be done historically or archeologically, politically and/or economically, sociologically, psychologically or anthropologically, genetically or biologically, theologically or mythologically, literally or symbolically, psychically, associatively or logically - as well of course through personal ‘experience’ and that of others (though it must also be emphasised that experiences themselves, including psychic experiences, are, like the apparent ‘evidence’ of our senses, not something immune from interpretation but themselves a mode of interpretation of different dimensions of awareness). What characterises all and any the modes of interpretation however, is that they are not simply reducible to a set of facts, however well-documented or researched, but to the ‘semiotic’ character of these facts. By this is meant the way they serve or are taken as signs of something or imbued with a sign character by virtue of the way in which, like letters connected in words, or words connected in sentences, their meaning has to do with the way in which they appear to spell out or ‘signify’ a certain central, unifying meaning or sense. 

Put in other words, the result of any type of research, even the most seemingly ‘factual’ or ‘scientific’ is invariably a verbal account or narrative of some sort – a story which ‘joins the dots’ to create a picture. What distinguishes the different ways of joining the dots I have mentioned therefore – and many more - is above all the different terminologies and types of story, picture or narrative constructed from them (see narrative analysis). A genetic or bio-evolutionary ‘explanation’ of certain ‘facts’ – by virtue of treating them as signs in very different ways – will result in a quite different type of connecting story, picture or narrative to one based, for example, on a specific form of political-economic analysis, psychoanalysis or set of mythological archetypes. The very terms in which these differing types of narrative are couched – their ‘language’ - will be different in themselves. I say all this because to take up, as David Icke has so boldly sought to do, the challenge of constructing a type of over-arching  narrative or ‘meta-narrative’ – a ‘big picture’ - is not something that research into ‘facts’ alone, however rigorously researched or broad in range, can in and of  itself provide us with – unless we are also prepared to consider them from a ‘semiotic’ perspective – as signs in and terms of the very way they are construed and taken as significant or meaningful. To do this however, is a philosophical challenge and not merely one of interweaving a set of parallel and/or overlapping narratives – some economic, some technological, some cosmological, some symbolic and mythological. Yet his is what David’s ‘inter-textual’ meta-narrative seems to limit itself to.  The challenge of philosophical thinking on the other hand, is precisely not merely to interweave or seek to tie up a set of ‘parallel narratives’ but to look more closely at the very terms, concepts, vocabularies and language employed in those narratives.  

In this and the other essays that follow, I  take up the challenge of seeking to disentangle some of David Icke’s own ‘narratives’ or ways of ‘joining up the dots’ – not in order to dismiss, devalue or merely ‘deconstruct’ them – but rather in order, in the most supportive way possible, to distinguish them more rigorously, as well as to add both more philosophical depth and more conceptual clarity to the vast breadth of research and its ‘spider’s web’. For again, this is  a web woven not just of an array of facts but an array of interlinked narratives, each of which in turn is a way of placing specific interpretations or constructions on the ‘data’ he has gathered over many years. My aim however, is most definitely a supportive one, i.e. it is not simply to ‘deconstruct’ his narrative and ‘meta-narrative’ – the ‘big picture’ he paints – but to help philosophically clarify and re-conceptualise this picture in a more philosophically consistent way. In doing so, I will draw on my own strengths as a philosophical  thinker. For if there is anything lacking in David’s work it is nothing lacking in his work alone but something lacking in virtually almost all contemporary forms of discourse, theorising, writing and literature on the subjects he deals with,– namely a lacking depth or rigour of philosophical  learning and study, and philosophical modes of analysis or interpretation. This is not to say I wish to disparage David as a philosopher. For he shares with me what I myself hold to be the single most important philosophical truth that the world needs to recognise today – namely that all things and all beings (‘All That Is’) are manifestations of a singular, universal and infinite Awareness, albeit one that is not itself a ‘being’ – even a ‘supreme being’ of the sort worshipped by the monotheistic religions. On the nature of this Awareness I myself have written a great deal - all of which  I believe to of profound relevance to the constructively intended and re-constructive commentaries of David’s work that follow – see www.peterwilberg.org  www.theawarenessprinciple.com  and www.thenewyoga.org

One of the biggest problem faced by a philosopher in commenting on David Icke is that though he has a wealth of information and profound insights to share, at the same he seems blind to the logical-philosophical contradictions that arise from what he makes of this information and these insights – the ‘big picture’ he creates. Thus whilst he claims that all that we perceive as solid 3-dimensional physical reality is an illusion and that we live in a virtual, Matrix-type reality – created by what he calls our brain or ‘body-computer’ -  he excludes this ‘body-computer’ itself from this illusory physical reality. In  other words he effectively treats the (physical) ‘body-computer’ as an exception to his own view of physical reality in general – seeing it as more real  than anything else (indeed the only thing that is real) whilst at the same time saying we should dis-identify from it. 

In this respect, far from adopting an original or radical viewpoint Icke adopts the conventional yet, from a philosophical standpoint, highly contradictory viewpoint of current brain science – contradictory because it too regards perceived reality as a construct of our brains and sense organs but does not apply this notion of perceived reality to our perception of the human body, brain and sense organs themselves.  Thus according to brain science, the eye receives light reflected off objects in the world and the brain constructs a picture of those objects. But how can the brain ‘decode’ information (light for example) coming from objects that are themselves nothing more than illusory 3-dimensional perceptions created by it??!!!

Similarly, to believe, as David Icke does, that the Moon is, ‘in reality’, a type of physical spaceship goes contrary to his more basic statement that all physical objects – however they are perceived or conceived - are illusory realities. The underlying philosophical contradiction at stake here was already recognised in the 18^th century by the ‘immaterialist’ philosopher Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley was reacting critically to the new notion advanced by John Locke. This was the idea that behind our rich qualitative experience of all the sensuous phenomena we experience in the world lies an invisible realm of physical ‘matter’ or ‘substance’ – one that only has purely quantitative properties such such as mass, momentum etc. It was John Locke’s philosophy that in fact went hand in hand with a new form of money-dominated society in which all that counted as ‘scientifically’ real were measurable quantities - and all that was important were quantitative calculation and quantitative values. Berkeley on the other hand, resisted the notion that the perceived world was ‘illusory’ in the sense Locke believed it to be – arguing instead that all perceived worlds and phenomena,  rather than being the property of some invisible universe of ‘matter’ were manifestations of a single divine ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’. In this way he sought to affirm our direct subjective consciousness and perception of reality – and not reduce its sensuous richness to a merely illusory or ‘secondary’ property – whether of ‘matter’, or in modern terms, of ‘information’ or quanta of ‘energy’. 

David Icke on the other hand, goes along with the latest scientific dogma that ‘out there’ is a world whose reality consists of nothing but invisible frequencies or waves of energy.  In this way he binds himself to the new religion of science, which regards its own mathematical constructs and concepts as more ‘objectively’ real that the actually experienced phenomena (such as colour, form etc.) that they are supposed to explain – all of which, are in truth expressions and manifestations, not of invisible energies or quantitative frequencies - but of a universal consciousness. Thus what we perceive as ‘light’, for example is no mere illusory way of perceiving visible or invisible ‘frequency’ of electro-magnetic ‘energy’ – it is an expression of light in its very essence – the light of awareness.  Our bodies too are not essentially physical or material – and nor are they merely some sort of ‘energy field’ or ‘computer’. On the contrary, what we perceive from the outside as a ‘physical’ body of any nature (from a atom or molecule to a rock, tree or multi-cellular organism) is but a specific shape or form taken by a universal awareness. We are each individualised portions, patterns, expressions and embodiments of this Awareness - which is not ‘yours’ or ‘mine’ but the very essence of the Divine. I believe that David would in principle agree with me. All the more pity then, that his narrative or ‘big picture’ gets distorted by the unquestioned use of what are merely fashionable modern metaphors drawn, for example, from Hollywood movies such as The Matrix or Star Wars (the Moon as ‘Death Star’), or from new technologies such as computing or genetic engineering – all of which are instruments of the powers he wishes to oppose, designed also to convince us that money-driven science and technology  - rather than awareness - is the sole key to truth and well-being.