THE DEATH OF FOREVER

Darryl Reanney 1991

A NEW FUTURE FOR HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Page 256

The pursuit of happiness

"Is this a mirage, a romantic's myth, a dreamer's dream? I am certain it it not. One night, many years ago, I went to a concert in Auckland with a friend. As we came out after one of the most magnificent performances of a classical symphony I have ever heard, my friend turned to me and said, 'Ah well, music is all very well but we have to get back to the real world'. It has taken me half a lifetime to realise what was wrong with that statement. It was the wrong way round. Music is the most powerful alchemy we know, the magic agent of transcendence that lifts consciousness into a more perfect state. When we lose ourselves in music we become more real. The return to everyday mode, to the sad, confused world of the ego-self, is a Fall, a reversion to unreality, an expulsion from some simalcrum of eternity, back into time.
The essence of the human quest is to break free of time, to reconnect to the eternal in all of us, in that space where the past and the future interleave, the reality laboratory of our own minds. We are all explorers; we are all time-travellers; we are all lost children seeking home. We have a dim memory of home; it is a place we have been before. In the remote future. / Page 257 / The last signpost on this journey is now in sight. It points to what is, to me, the strangest and most revelatory part of the quest. Of necessity, this part has to be incomplete for it can be 'known' only when we ourselves die.
In Chapter 6 I described the sequence of psychological states a dying person goes through, in the experience of Elisabeth Kuebler- Ross. However, I stop short of describing the actual moment of death itself. Let me now restate a point made in Chapter 6. Our attitude to and ignorance of death is shaped by the fact that we cannot comprehend death experientially; we cannot remember something we have not yet gone through. However this statement is, in a limited but important sense, not true. There exist in the community people who have died in the scientific definition of the term and as it were, returned to the living state by luck or medical management. These people can tell us what the death experience is like.
Near death experiences, or NDEs, have now been documented in many hundreds of cases. NDEs are defined by the cessation (at least to an outside observer) of some or all the normal physiological indicators of 'life': the heartbeat may stop, breathing may cease, and perhaps most importantly, the repetitive blips traced out on a video monitor by 'brainwaves' on the EEC may fade away, leaving a flat line on the screen (hence the term 'flat-liners'). This is not to say that every case of NDE occurs in a hospital; rather that, to qualify as a genuine NDE candidate, a person must have at the very least stopped breathing or lost any detectable pulse and that NDEs are most credible when the cessation of vital function is monitored by state-of-the-art technology. The period during which vital functions can no longer be measured can be as short as a few seconds or as long as two hours.
The remarkable thing about NDEs is that they show a consist-ency, a common 'core' of seemingly identical experience, irrespec-tive of gender, religion, background or race. This hints at the possibility that the brain experiences a more-or-less universal cog-nitive shift at the point of death. This is centrally important in the context of this book. The message of The Death of Forever is that ego ceases with physical death but that consciousness does not. NDEs may thus offer a window into that climactic moment my hypothesis predicts, when our human reality melts away like a shadow, when the fabricated skein of the time-trapped ego-self unravels, exposing the deep knowing of consciousness in its tempo-rally unfettered four-dimensional state. / Page258 / Before I analyse NOEs in the light of my conclusions in this book, I must address the alternative explanations for their occur-rence. Are NDEs hallucinations? Does the brain malfunction in a consistent way at death? Many experts think so. Some of the key elements of an NDE experience can be artificially induced by hallucinogenic drugs like ketamine (used in anasthesia) or 'angel dust'. This may be significant because, once the blood supply to the brain is diminished or cut off, the brain enters a period of anoxia or oxygen starvation. There is evidence that this oxygen starvation reproduces some of the effects of those hallucinogenic drugs that mimic the NDE.
Against this, an impartial observer must set the following facts. At precisely the time one might expect impaired brain function because of the stopping or winding-down of vital life support functions, NDEers report heightened cognition, a strong sense of a reality that is in a deep way more real than everyday awareness. Morever, at least one NDEer whom I have heard deliberately took a range of hallucinogenic drugs after his NDE specifically to compare their psychological effects with those of his NDE. His verdict was quite emphatic: whereas the drug-induced condition brought about sensory disorientation, the NDE was cogent, indelible and overwhelming; the effects of the drug-induced state faded quickly whereas the memory of his NDE remains with him to this day.
It is neither possible nor desirable, in a work like this, to give a balanced discussion of the various hypotheses advanced to 'explain' the NDE. Readers are referred to the detailed investigations of Margot Grey, Kenneth Ring and others, which attempt to analyse the phenomenon using accepted scientific methodology. The only point I would make concerns the 'criticism' that, with the virtue of hindsight, one can question whether a person who is later restored to full cognitive function can ever be said to have been 'dead' at all. I agree with this. In my view the significance of the NDE is that it gives us a fascinating window of insight into the actual experience of dying. It can say nothing about possible post-mortem existence except by inference and extension.
My attitude to NDEs has been significantly affected by a I programme I saw on ABC television. In this programme a group of
people who had experienced near death experiences were brought together with doctors and other experts. One aim of the programme seemed to be to try to see whether the NDE was a mental abberation / Page 259 / induced by the loss of vital function or whether it opened a door to a different dimension of being. The people who described their NDE made a big impact on me. It is one thing to read about NDEs in books, quite another to watch real people struggle to find words for something which seems to transcend language.
Consider the words of a scientist whom I will call John:

it's as if everything was there and everybody was there; the sense was of absolute total fulfillment. And yet there was no sense that I was there. That's the most extraordinary thing; John vanished at that moment.

That comment fascinates me: my hypothesis predicts that ego, the sense of self, evaporates at death but that consciousness remains. John in this instance used just the words I would expect of someone whose ego-self had dissolved but whose deep knowing, his real 'self, was unaffected. The 'I' flickers out of existence but integrated awareness, one in all and all in one, remains.
John expanded on this point in these words:

The sense was of immense depth... It's like having been to a space before everything was and then coming back and seeing all this from that space instead of seeing it, as I used to, from inside my head.

Other NDEers speak of retaining a sense of identity but only as a strand of the greater whole they now feel part of:

One of the feelings I remember most about them was the feeling of unity, of being totally a part of everything around me and about me. There was no separateness at all.

Different NDEers use different words and images to describe their experience but the one universal factor that almost everyone reports is a vision of light. Not just any light, light that goes beyond light. A radiance that is wordlessly ineffable:

I just found myself in this extremely bright light and felt absolute peace. I feel the light and the peace were one.
The light is brighter than anything you could possibly imagine.
There are no words to describe it.
A beautiful light- it's like being an ant inside a large diamond.

Page 260

Compare this with Whitman's words:

lighting the very light, beyond all signs, descriptions, languages.

Another universal element in the core experience is a sense of profound and transcendent love and oneness:
And the quite amazing thing is that I had an incredible sense of well-being - I just felt completely born aloft by goodwill and by love... just the most fantastic feeling of love and goodwill.

I felt exhilarated and felt I was one with everything.

And from another ABC programme on the same topic, this, to me, the most powerful description of all:

I came into the light and it hit me all over. I stood in the light... While I stood in the light, for that split second or a few minutes, whatever it was in time. I had this feeling of just total understanding. It was just being part of that universal spirit, part of what you can only describe as being all. Everything... and it was the most inspiring and, I guess, the greatest single experi- ence I've ever had in my life. It was just incredible.

This can be compared with Larry's description of his illumina-tion in the quote from The Razor's Edge given earlier. Although Larry is a fictional character, Somerset Maugham seems to have modelled his description of Larry's enlightenment on historical accounts of the moment of 'enlightenment' as documented for example by R. M. Bucke in his classic opus, Cosmic Consciousness. The point I want to emphasise is that Larry's description of his illumination could be fitted into a book on NDEs without changing a word.
To me one of the most intriguing aspects of the NDE is the feeling two people reported in which they state that their NDE was so real that the living seemed shallow by comparison:

As if it 's not the dying that's the problem but the living.

I felt as though I was awake for the first time in my life.
                     

Compare this again with Whitman's words:

I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before or else I am awake for the first time and all before has been a mean sleep.

Page 261

In the context of this book, one has to note especially the odd  time-sense perception that often accompanies an NDE. As an
American NDEer reports of her 'life-review', the replay of one's life history that seems to be an integral part of an NDE:
I can't exactly describe it to you, but it was just all there. It was just there all at once. I mean, not one thing at a time, blinking off and on, but it was everything, everything at one time.
Compare this with Goethe's words 'one moment holds eternity'. Likewise, I am impressed by the strongly non-verbal nature of
the NDE experience. Not only do NDEers find that existing lan-guage is completely inadequate to describe what they went through, but communication with the 'light' (which seems to invite them to review their lives) takes place, wordlessly, in a kind of instant telepathy. As Patrick Gallagher, who had a nearly fatal car accident in 1976, reports:

I seemed to possess a knowledge as radiant, transfiguring and ideal as the luminous light...I knew that all one had to do was approach an interesting person and quite easily and almost immediately understand his essence. To do so completely re-quired only a brief glance... without any speech...the result was a consummate exchange of knowledge. Words cannot provide a hint of such a universal knowledge.
Confronting the deep similarities between NDEs and mystical experience ('cosmic consciousness') at least one commentator, Kenneth Ring, has drawn a striking conclusion:

What occurs during an NDE has nothing inherently to do with death or the transition into death...the NDE...should be re- garded as one of a family of related, mystical experiences that have always been with us, rather than the recent discovery of modern researchers who have come to investigate the phenom-enon of dying.

In this context it is interesting to note that the myth of the Fall, which I have used repeatedly throughout the course of this book, is not a specifically Christian phenomenon. Every human culture has its myth of a golden age, paradise, a time of innocence that man has 'lost' through some 'wrong-doing'. Anthropologist Richard Heinberg suggests that this golden age, this lost paradise, can be equated with  / Page 262 / the 'Dreaming' consciousness of 'primitive' cultures before the advent of symbolic written language:
perhaps our most useful new clue to this lost state of being is contained in the modern study of altered states of consciousness and in particular, the near-death experience."

PARADISE

I = 9 EYES = 9 9 = EYES 9 = I

PARADE EYES EYES PARADE

PARADE I EYES 9 9 EYES I PARADE

"The essence of Paradise is...equivalent to what various traditions have termed, nirvana, ecstasy, union and cosmic consciousness. It is the condition of the absence of the separate human ego with all its defenses, aggressions and categories of judgement."

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

THE GARDEN OF NEED

"The concept that Eden really existed, as a paradisic state of mind, is appealing but it can lead too easily to the facile New Age belief that the purpose of life is to 'go home to Eden', to go back to the Golden Age, by returning to prehistory. This is woolly-minded romanticism. Evolution never runs back along its own tracks. As Ken Wilber stresses, the Edenic mentality felt itself to be 'one' with nature because it had not yet separated from nature; it was precon-scious (infantile) not superconscious (spiritual). So the 'goal' of personal growth and development is (in terms of the metaphor) not to go back to prehuman 'Eden' but forward to posthuman 'God', to integrate non-linear consciousness in its full depth with the self-consistent elegance of linear mathematical definition, perfecting both the intuitive holism of right-brain knowing and the mathemati-cal logic of left-brain science, uniting and thus completing both mind modalities, finally, in the one mutually supportive, comple-mentary, splendid synthesis.
This sense of return brings me to my final point. Carl Sagan has advanced an interesting explanation for the NDE. Noting the fre- quency with which NDEers report going through a 'tunnel' towards a source of radiant 'light', Sagan suggests that what NDEers are
doing is, in fact, reliving the birth process - running their lives back to their beginning. Elements of the 'core' NDE may be consistent with this suggestion -the 'life review' for example- but if Sagan is right, it is difficult to see why the sense of love and unity reported by NDEers is always linked to the light. One would suppose it would be more logically linked to the unitive darkness of the womb which the backward-running mind records as its first memory, prior to the traumatic separation of birth.
However, Sagan's thesis does dovetail with a motif of this book, that to know the end one must return to the beginning (see chapters / Page 263 / 5 and 7). The key cosmological conclusion of this book is that time is closed back upon itself to form a self-consistent loop. Thus end and beginning are, in a sense, 'linked events'. NDEs in this perspec-tive reunite the consciousness of life's 'end' with the consciousness of life's 'beginning' but moved up one or more octaves in the scale of creation because of the increase in knowing that comes from a life of searching. This is, I believe, how consciousness evolves. At our present stage of evolution we may be limited in what we can 'see', even after death. But the collapse of the linear time fallacy must bring us closer to the climactic mystery of completed consciousness, which in the mythology of our past cultures we have called 'God'.
Several times during the ABC programme I referred to earlier, the camera kept panning back to one man, in the front row. As others described their NDE, he obviously relived part of his. On his face was an arresting expression, a look hard to put into words; a look that, in less cynical times, might have been called 'holy'.
That look haunts me.
Finally, how does the message of this book help us live our lives? I believe that what is missing in our lives is a sense of the sacred. By this, I do not mean a return to religion in any formal sense. Religions like Christianity and Islam are, in my view, profaners of the sacred, denying in practice the very truths they profess in principle. The American historian, Lewis Mumford, summed up the failure of organised Christanity when he said:

Karl Marx once said of himself that he was not a Marxist; and of Jesus one may say without irreverence, that he was not a Christian. For little men, who guarded Jesus' memory, took him, drained off the precious life blood of his spirit, mummified his body, and wrapped what was left in many foreign wrappings; over these remains they proceeded to errect a gigantic tomb. That tomb was the Christian Church.

To see how this came about, remember that the structure of our minds, with their emphasis on negative feedback, predisposes us to resist change. Organised religion, with its bureaucratic insistence on the 'right way' and 'eternal truths', denies change. Its very exclu- siveness shows how tightly its dogmas are identified with its own sense of collective ego. The eagerness it displays to win converts, to bring their otherness into its own self-image, betrays its deep-rooted / Page 264 / insecurity-that insecurity is the inevitable companion of ego. Christianity and Islam have been the chief examples of this unstable super ego and the consequences of their insistence that their way is the only way are only too evident, even today, on the streets of Belfast or Beirut.
The metaphor I have always used when I am confronted with the paradox of a thousand faiths, each claiming to have found 'the way', each claiming for themselves a monopoly on truth, an exclusive right to salvation, is the parable of the searchers on the mountain. At the bottom of the mountain they look up, dimly sensing the high place that the intuition of their prophets see as 'God'. Each searcher starts from the baseline of the mountain where, handicapped by ignorance and trapped by ego, he cannot see round the comer where his nearest fellow-traveller is. So, each searcher thinks, and believes, that the path he has found, his way up, is the only way and that the vision he glimpses is a special privilege granted to him alone. As the searchers climb higher, i.e. evolve towards higher states of consciousness, their various paths start to converge and they see that round the edge of the hill are other roads, with other seekers. At the summit, the high place (pure consciousness), all paths unite. The sense of separateness that divided searcher from searcher and road from road is no more. They finally understand that all the seemingly different roads led to the same place in the end, the common meeting point that novelist Umberto Eco describes, where each can say:

I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union, and in this sinking all equality and all inequality shall be lost, and in that abyss my spirit will lose itself; and will not know the equal or the unequal, or anything else; and all differences will be forgotten. I shall be in the simple foundation, in the silent desert where diversity is never seen, in the privacy where no one finds himself in his proper place. I shall fall into the silent and uninhabited divinity where there is no work and there is no image.

When I began this book, I spoke of a 'gap at the centre' in Western civilisation due to the breakdown of the old faiths. The clear implication was that this gap needs to be filled. But with what? I repeat, I believe it can only be filled by a renewed sense of the sacred. By this, I do not mean a new set of beliefs, which will inevitably harden into dogma. I mean an experiential sense of trust and caring, / Page 265 / a renewed feeling for beauty in whatever form it may be found. To give this experiential message some 'shape' it will, I think, be necessary to develop a new story for our time, based on science. I say 'story' because science in its present form gives no human dimen-sion to the truths it creates and illuminates. We need a parable, not a textbook, a poem of reality so rich and beautiful that its meaning will transcend the words it uses.
An example may help. The timescale of evolution is framed in numbers so vast that they literally lie beyond comprehension. Who can really get a feel for a number like 10000 000 000 years ago? However, all of us can sense the meaning of deep time from a story I read when I was a boy, in Arthur Mee's Childrens' Encyclopedia:

Faraway, in the West of the world there is a mighty granite rock,
a mile high, a mile wide and a mile deep. Once every hundred
years a little bird comes to the rock and sharpens its beak on the
granite. And when the bird has worn the rock away, that will be
one day in eternity.

The restoration of this sense of the sacred is the most important task of this generation. People may say, 'No, it is more important to
develop strategies to combat the greenhouse effect (for example)' .
That is only superficially true. The greenhouse effect, a result of planetary pollution, is a direct consequence not so much of a rapacious commercial culture as of the attitudes and assumptions that make that culture possible. We see now whence those attitudes come. They are the direct consequences of the me-first competitive- ness of the ego-self. The only way, I repeat, the only way to reverse this planetary degradation is to break down the barriers that wall us off from each other and the world, to recognise that aphorisms like 'the brotherhood of man' are not romantic, pie-in-the-sky day- dreams but practical patents for survival.
To achieve this, I believe we need to reintroduce a cycle of rituals into life-not grandiose, self-important charades but participatory ceremonies that have their roots in human needs, rituals that give meaning to our lives, by connecting us to both the elemental simplicity we once were and to the sublime glory we shall be. When a group of people gather to share a meal, they could, for a minute, link hands. Small though this gesture is, it is rich in significance. We all need that human contact because we all need to belong to something bigger than ourselves: something that remembers our Page 266 / past and affirms our future. We should create new rites of passage to celebrate the phases of the human life cycle, rituals for birth, for the transit into adolescence, and above all, for dying.
Of these, the need for a ritual of dying is the most urgent. I know of no greater testament to the failure of our civilisation than the fact that so many people die alone, abandoned like discards on society's junk heap. Dying must again be united with a sense of the sacred, for it is here, if anywhere, that the psyche outgrows its human limitation. The most important message of this book is that consciousness cannot be extinguished by death, for consciousness transcends time. We should learn to approach death with gratitude, seeing it for what it is, the final elimination of ego, the end of the fallacies of time and self.
In the end it can all be said so simply.
Time and self are outgrown husks which consciousness will one day discard, just as a butterfly abandons its chrysalis to fly towards the sun."

"JUST AS A BUTTERFLY ABANDONS ITS CHRYSALIS TO FLY TOWARDS THE SUN"

 

FROM CATERPILLAR INTO BUTTERFLY

THE WORLD OF NATURE

J. P. Vanden Eeckhoudt 1960

90

THE "butterflies and moths whose life history we have studied are an insignificantly small sample of the hundred thousand or so species known throughout the world. They range in infinite variety from the great GEOMETER of Brazil, with its wing span of nearly thirteen inches, to tiny, clothes moths with a span of only about a tenth of an inch. We find the simplest shapes and patterns and the most fantastic; a riot of gaudy colours and the dowdiest of greys and browns. Fascinating as they are, the perfect insects are often equalled or even outdone in beauty and strangeness by the caterpillars, and sometimes by the chrysalises."

Page 43

" Great numbers of butterflies appear when the weather is good; they flutter everywhere, plundering the flowers, sunning themselves on bushes, on tree-trunks, on the ground. But no Small Tortoise-shells are to be seen. Those that were out in the spring are dead, and the larvae from their eggs have not yet completed their transformation; they are still in the chrysalis state. Beneath their hardened skin a complete remodelling of their organs is in progress, and two weeks at least are necessary for its completion. Then one last moult will release the perfect insect.

MOULT 81 81 MOULT

MOULT 18 18 MOULT

MOULT 9 9 MOULT

Page 22

"The growth of caterpillars is not a continuous process. Their skin does not stretch much, and rapidly becomes too tight for them as they grow. So the caterpillars periodically leave their skin, as people give up clothes which no longer fit them, and emerge in a new skin, which has all this time been forming underneath the old one, and which allows them scope for further growth. When this in turn becomes too tight, it is cast aside in favour of a third, and so on."

 

DOES GOD PLAY DICE

THE NEW MATHEMATICS OF CHAOS

Ian Stewart 1989

Page 141

"From the traditional way of thinking, so it should be. Lorenz realised that his equations weren't behaving the way a treaditionally- minded mathematician would expect. Lorenz coined his famous phrase 'butterfly effect' (Figure 57 omitted). The flapping of a single butterflys wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does

 

 

MIN DOTH DREAM WHAT DOTH MIN MEAN

 

 

THE MASK OF TIME

THE MYSTERY FACTOR IN TIME SLIPS, PRECOGNITION AND HINDSIGHT

Joan Forman

1978

Page 44

"The dream-time is a mythic state - not a heaven or paradise in the sense in which Christians conceive of it but a recollection of a heroic time long past but still intensely "remembered" - in the sense that beauty is "remembered", not with the mind but with the awakened imagination."

-	DREAM TIME	-	-	-
5	DREAM	41	23	5
4	TIME	47	20	2
9	First Total	88	43	7
-	Add to Reduce	8+8	4+3	-
-	Second Total	16	7	7
-	Reduce to Deduce	1+6	-	-
9	Essence of Number	7	7	7

 

"The usual idea of time is irrevelant to this concept, for the Aborigine believes that spirits of his clan pre - exist in definite sites in the country and wait for incarnation. After death they will return to these spiritual homes, possibly to be re- / Page 45 / incarnated at some future time. So for the aboriginal's spirit - whatever he means by that term - there is no time past, present, future, only a continuous process of movement and rest, like that of a tide on an empty shore.

 

10	ABORIGINES	99	54	9
9	ABORIGINE	80	53	8
10	ABORIGINAL	88	52	7
9	DREAM TIME	88	43	7
-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-
2	A+B	3	3	3
8	ORIGINAL	85	49	4
-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-
4	RACE	27	18	9
5	TRIBE	54	27	9
10	NAMES OF GOD	99	45	9

 

Page 45 continues

"The living Aboriginal believes he has access to the dream-time through certain sacred objects or totems, and through his private dreams which can reveal to him what has happened, is happening and will happen. The dream-time therefore, is an area of time (chronological time)-suspension where the three common divisions of it are co-existent. Personal dreams in sleep bear out this view, since here clock-time refuses to operate, and the dreamer may find himself in the past, present and future all at once."

 

4	PAST	56	11	2
7	PRESENT	97	34	7
11	PAST + PRESENT	153	45	9
1+1	-	1+5+3	4+5	-
11	PAST + PRESENT	9	9	9
-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-
4	PAST	56	11	2
7	PRESENT	97	34	7
6	FUTURE	91	28	1
17	First Total	244	73	10
1+7	Add to Reduce	2+4+4	7+3	1+0
8	Second Total	10	10	1
-	Reduce to Deduce	1+0	1+0	-
8	Essence of Number	1	1	1

 

"The dream-time of the Aborigine is truly a sacred life of the spirit, sustaining and enlightening physical life, much as prayer once did in the Western world. It is not suprising that the First Australian is a contemplative, a man whose belief is in "being", and whose need to replenish his depleted spirit leads him back to an ideal which he believes not to be remote, like the Western idea of Paradise ,but ever present restorative. To him to 'turn but a stoneand start a wing means precisely that. Natural objects partake of the dream-time as much as he does himself. His spiritual life is all around him and he is fortunate enough never to have been divorced from it by time and space."

 

9	YESTERDAY	122	41	5
5	TODAY	65	20	2
8	TOMORROW	137	47	2
22	First Total	324	108	9
2+2	Add to Reduce	3+2+4	1+0+8	-
4	Essence of Number	9	9	9

 

We "civilised" people have long since lost the ability to find our ancient innocence so easily. The natural man in us is obliged to survive in what little space is left after the industrial, the social, the political and the commercial man have taken their share. He is forced to live almost without sustenance - an arid, choked existence with little to satisfy the inner need which is as old as his unconscious and a great deal older than his aquired civilisation. It's small wonder that the dreamer, theidealist, the worshipperin mankind are dying. Starvation kills. The intuitive qualities in human nature have been despised for so long that they are well on the way to atrophy. Human consciousness as exemplified by the logical and intellectual qualities, on the other hand, has / Page 46 / been handsomely encouraged - but developed out of balance with the older deeper - hidden layers of being, so that now to be rational is regarded as to be whole, and somehowelevated, superior. It is not seen for the lopsided curiosity it is. The purely rational condition resembles one of the stages of development of a butterfly. In pupa the creature may seem complete in itself; may seem so as long as one is unaware of the final metamorphosis. 'When half - gods go, the gods arrive,' "

 

 

ALICE'S ADYENTURES IN WONDERLAND

Lewis Carroll

CIRCA

1836

ADYICE FROM A CATERPILLAR

Page 42

" THE Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.
Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I-I hardly know, sir, just at present-at least I know who I was when I got up this moming, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly.
'Explain yourself!'
'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'
' I don't see,' said the Caterpillar. / Page 43 / I'm afraid I ca'n't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, 'for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'
'It isn't,' said the Caterpillar. .
' Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; 'but when you have to turn into a chrysalis-you will some day, you know-and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?'
'Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.
'Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice;
' all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.'
'You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. 'who are you?'
Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. . Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar's making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, 'I think you ought to tell me who you are, first.'
' Why?' said the Caterpillar.
Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.
.Come back!' the Caterpillar called after her. 'I've some thing important to say!'
This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again. .
' Keep your temper,' said the Caterpillar.
'Is that all?' said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well
as she could.
'No,' said the Caterpillar.
Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, / Page 44 / but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, . So you think you're changed, do you?' ,
'I'm afraid I am, sir,' said Alice; 'I can't remember things as I used-and I don't keep the same size for ten minutes together !'
'Can't remember what things?' said the Caterpillar.
'Well, I've tried to say "How doth the little busy bee," but it all came differentl' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice. 'Repeat "you are old, Father William,'" said the Caterpillar. Alice folded her hands, and began:

 

 

REINCARNATION

THE SECOND CHANCE

Sybil Leek

1974

Page 151

Once Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly. He did not know that he had ever been anything but a butterfly and was content to hover from flower to flower. Suddenly he woke and found to his astonishment that he was Chuang Tzu. But it was hard to be sure whether he was really Chou and had only dreamt that he was a butterfly, or he was really a butterfly and was only dreaming that he was Chou.

 

 

NOT OF THIS WORLD

Peter Kolosimo

1970

Page 243 (Chapter Twenty-Two)

THE EYE AND THE SUN

I

TRAVERSE THE PATHS OF THE HEAVENS

I

RESIDE IN THE DIVINE EYE OF HORUS

THE EYE OF HORUS GIVES ME ETERNAL LIFE

AND WHEN IT SHUTS PROTECTS ME

SURROUNDED BY SPARKLING RAYS

I

PROCEEED ON MY PATH,

AND PENETRATE ANY PLACE AT MY PLEASURE

I

TRAVERSE THE COSMIC SOLITUDES

 

Quoting from the famous The Book of the Dead Professor Solas Boncompagni emphasises that the "eye" maybe identifiable with the winged disc often recurring in Egyptian mythology and says: "Such discs compare with the emblems of Ahura-Mazda and the Assyrian winged circle, all showing a god in a flying and luminous body as if he lived there. He seemed to be the ruler of time and space to judge from The Book of the Dead-'the god of yesterday, today and tomorrow'. This may be compared with the Turin papyrus chapter 110 which reads:

I

LAND ON EARTH AT THE RIGHT MOMENT

WHEN IT IS CALM ACCORDING TO ALL THE TEXTS

FROM WHEN THE EARTH EXISTED

"The pronoun 'I' could mean Osiris, who was a semi-god rather than a true god whose mother belonged to the celestial beings (sky-goddess Nut') and whose father was Geb, the god of earth. As he was brother and husband of Isis there is clearly /page 244/ a connection with Jove-Juno. But some consider him the god of light, like Apollo or Phoebe of the Greeks and thus different from Zeus, the Phoenicians' Adonis and the Persians' Ahura-Mazda. It seems as if a 'deus ex machina' is involved in 'I land on Earth' to help humanity at critical moments in its history. He is the leader of the Egyptian Pantheon of gods after losing his life in struggling with evil Seth and then regaining life and heavenly kingdom. Losing life on earth meant an eternal one in Heaven, so this became common practice; but Osiris is also the father of Horus so even in this ancient pagan theogony the father and son have something in common and which unites them as one. This is the mystic trinity of life (Osiris, Isis, Horus) unchanging through the centuries; but Horus is 'he who flies up high' and 'he lives in his eye'.

'he lives in his eye'.

HE LIVES IN HIS

I

 

1	I	9	9	9
2	ME	18	9	9
5	BEING	37	28	1
9	CONSCIOUS	118	37	1
4	ATUM	55	10	1
3	SHU	48	12	3
6	TEFNUT	86	23	5
3	GEB	14	14	5
3	NUT	55	10	1
6	OSIRIS	89	35	8
4	ISIS	56	20	2
3	SET	44	8	8
7	NEPTHYS	107	35	8
-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-
5	HORUS	81	27	9
5	THOTH	71	26	8
4	PTAH	45	18	9
6	ANUBIS	66	21	3

 

 

THE

TIBETAN

BOOK OF THE DEAD

LIBERATION

THROUGH UNDERSTANDING IN THE BETWEEN

Translated by Robert Thurman 1994

TIBET:  A SPIRITUAL CIVILIZATION

Page 10

"During the three centuries of Tibet's modern period, the national priority was on monastic education, literary and philosophical creativity, the practice of meditation, the development of ritual and festival arts, and so forth. Spiritual adepts were accepted as the highest level of Ti-betan society, considered to have become perfected Buddhas through their practice of the Tantras (spiritual technologies) of Unexcelled Yoga (self-cultivation). They were inner-world adventurers of the highest daring, the Tibetan equivalent of our astronauts-I think it is worth coin-ing the term "psychonaut" to describe them. They personally voyaged to the furthest frontiers of that universe which their society deemed vital to explore: the inner frontiers of consciousness itself, in all its transfor-mations in life and beyond death.
In Western culture, the last frontiers of our material conquest of the universe are in outer space. Our astronauts are our ultimate heroes and heroines. Tibetans, however, are more concerned about the spiritual conquest of the inner universe, whose frontiers are in the realms of death, the between, and contemplative ecstasies. So, the Tibetan lamas who can consciously pass through the dissolution process, whose minds can detach from the gross physical body and use a magic body to travel to other universes, these "psychonauts" are the Tibetans' ultimate heroes and heroines. The Dalai Lamas and the several thousand "reincar-nate" Lamas (also called "Tulku," which means "Buddha Emanation") are these heroes and heroines. They are believed to have mastered the death, between, and rebirth processes, and to choose continuously, life after life, to return to Tibet out of compassion to lead the Tibetans in their spiritual national life and to benefit all sentient beings.
Thus the modern Tibetan civilization was unique on the planet. Only such a special civilization could have produced the arts and sci- ences of dying and death transmitted in this book. I describe the unique psychological character complex that corresponds to the modern Ti-betan society as "inner modernity." It should be understood to contrast with the modern Western psychological character complex, which can be described as "outer modernity." The Western character complex is usually contrasted with a premodern traditional" character. It is often / Page 11 / described as a complex of traits such as individualism, openness and flexibility of identity, restless reflectiveness, and adherence to rationality. This modern Western character complex is connected with a peculiar perception of all things-including psychic or mental things-as ulti-mately reducible to quantifiable material entities. This is what gives it its "outwardness." The modern Tibetan character complex shares the modern traits of individualism, openness and flexibility of identity, re-flectiveness, and rationality. But the Tibetan character is bound up with its peculiar perception, derived from Buddhist civilization, of all things as infused with spiritual value, as interconnected with mental states. In contrast to Western ideas, the Tibetan view is that the mental or spiritual cannot always be reduced to material quanta and manipulated as such-the spiritual is itself an active energy in nature, subtle but more powerful than the material. The Tibetan view is that the "strong force" in nature is spiritual, not material. This is what gives the Tibetan char-acter its "inwardness." Thus while Western and Tibetan personalities share the complex of modernity of consciousness, they are diametrically opposed in outlook, one focused outward on matter and the other in-ward on mind."

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADD TO REDUCE REDUCE TO DEDUCE

 

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=
=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=
J	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R
10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18
1+0	1+1	1+2	1+3	1+4	1+5	1+6	1+7	1+8
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=
=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=
S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z	I
19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	9
1+9	2+0	2+1	2+2	2+3	2+4	2+5	2+6	ME
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=
=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=
=	ME	I	ME	I	ME	I	ME	1
9	18	9	18	9	18	9	18	9
=	1+8	=	1+8	=	1+8	=	1+8	=
=	9	=	9	=	9	=	9	=
I	ME	I	ME	I	ME	I	ME	1
9	9	9	9	9	9	9	9	9
I	ME	I	ME	I	ME	I	ME	1

 

I

AM THAT I THAT I THAT AM

I

 

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

1+0

1+1

1+2

1+3

1+4

1+5

1+6

1+7

1+8

1+9

2+0

2+1

2+2

2+3

2+4

2+5

2+6

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

 

 

I

ME

EYES

SIGHT 9 9 SIGHT

TIBET

THE IN BETWEEN

THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

LIBERATION

THROUGH UNDERSTANDING IN THE BETWEEN

Translated by Robert Thurman 1994

Page 11
"Thus while Western and Tibetan personalities share the complex of modernity of consciousness, they are diametrically opposed in outlook, one focused outward on matter and the other in-ward on mind."This difference of personality underlies the difference between the two civilizations. While the American national purpose is ever greater material productivity, the. Tibetan national purpose is ever greater spir-itual productivity. Spiritual productivity is measured by how deeply one's wisdom can be developed, how broadly one's compassion can exert itself. Tibetan Buddhists believe that outer reality is interconnected with inner mental development over a beginningless and endless series of lives, so they see no limit to how far the self and the environment can be transformed for the better. The self can become a Buddha, a being of perfect wisdom and compassion; and the environment can become a perfect Buddha-land, wherein no one suffers pointlessly and all are there for the happiness of all.
The ultimate example of the inwardly directed rationality of the modern Tibetan mind is precisely our present concern, the Tibetan exploration of death. The outwardly directed Western mind long ago dismissed the topic of death and future lives as archaic, of concern only to the superstitious traditional mind. Materialistic habits of thought reduce the mind to matter and eliminate the soul. Ruling out the pos-sibility of future lives, death is merely a physiological condition, equated with a "flatline" on an electroencephalograph. There is no interest at all in the states of the person or condition of the mind after death. Scientific investigation restricts itself to the material quanta perceivable by the physical senses, augmented by machinery, during this one bodily / Page 12 / life. At the same time, Westerners have set about exploring the outer world, the farthest continents, the macro realms of the outer galaxies, and the micro realms of the cell, the molecule, the atom, and the sub-atomic forces.
Tibetan inwardly directed reason put the material world second on its list of priorities. Its prime concern was the world of inner expe- rience, the waking, gross realm of causality, relativity, sensation, percept and concept, and the subtle realm of image, light, ecstasy, trance, dream, and finally, death and its beyond. The Tibetans considered the inner, subtlemost, experiential realm the important point at which to assert control of all subjective and objective cosmic events. And so they set about exploring this inner world, using analytic insight and contempla-tive concentration to extend their awareness into every crevice of ex- perience. They used the manipulation of dreams and inner visions to visit lucidly the territories of the unconscious. They used focused dis- identification with coarse subjectivity to gain access to the subtlest level of sentience. And they used an augmented sense of mindfulness and memory to gain access to past life experience, including the dreamlike experiences of the between states traversed from death to birth."

THE MUMMY

Ernest A. Wallis Budge 1893

Page 350

"The quality of the papyrus depended entirely upon the class of plant used in its manu-facture. The colour of the papyri that have come down to us varies greatly, from a rich brown to a whitish-grey; the texture of some is exceedingly coarse, and of others fine and silky. The width of papyri varies from six to seventeen inches, and the longest papyrus known (Harris, No. I, B.M. 9999) measures 135 feet in length. The finest hieroglyphic papyri of the Book of the Dead are about fifteen inches in width, and when they contain a tolerably full number of chapters, are from eighty to ninety feet long"

135

1 + 3 + 5 = 9

135 x 12 = 1260 1 + 2 + 6 = 9

THE

GRAND GALLERY

IN

THE

GREAT PYRAMID

IS

153

feet long

1 + 5 + 3 = 9

153 feet x 12 inches

1836

 

 

5	H	O	R	U	S	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	8	15	18	21	19	+	=	81	8+1	=	9	NINE	9
-	8	6	9	3	1	+	=	27	2+7	=	9	NINE	9
5	H	O	R	U	S	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-

 

 

5	V	E	N	U	S	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	22	5	14	21	19	+	=	81	8+1	=	9	NINE	9
-	4	5	5	3	1	+	=	18	1+8	=	9	NINE	9
5	V	E	N	U	S	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-

 

 

5	HORUS	81	27	9
5	VENUS	81	18	9
10	Add to Reduce	162	45	18
1+0	Reduce to Deduce	1+6+2	4+5	1+8
1	Essence of Number	9	9	9

 

 

9	E	I	G	H	T	Y	O	N	E	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-		9	-	8	-	-	-	-	-	+	=	17	1+7	=	8	-	8	EIGHT	8
-	E	I	G	H	T	Y	O	N	E	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-		9	-	8	-	-	15	14	-	+	=	46	4+6	=	10	1+0	1	ONE	1
9	E	I	G	H	T	Y	O	N	E	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	5	9	7	8	20	25	15	14	5	+	=	108	1+0+8	=	9	-	9	NINE	9
-	-	-	-	-	2+0	2+5	1+5	1+4	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-	2	7	6	5	-	+	=	20	2+0	=	2	-	2	TWO	2
-	5	9	7	8	-	-	-	-	5	+	=	33	3+3	=	6	-	6	SIX	6
-	5	9	7	8	2	7	6	5	5	+	=	54	5+4	=	9	-	9	NINE	9
9	E	I	G	H	T	Y	O	N	E	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-

 

 

9	E	I	G	H	T	Y	O	N	E	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	5	9	7	8	20	25	15	14	5	+	=	108	1+0+8	=	9	NINE	9
-	5	9	7	8	2	7	6	5	5	+	=	54	5+4	=	9	NINE	9
9	E	I	G	H	T	Y	O	N	E	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-

 

 

H = 8 8 = H

I = 9 9 = I

N = 5 5 = N

O = 6 6 = O

S = 1 1 = S

X = 6 6 = X

7 HINOSXZ = 7 7 = ZXSONIH 7

THE UPSIDE DOWN OF THE DOWNSIDE UP

 

 

KEEPER OF GENESIS

A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND

Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996

Page 254

"...Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta Stone? We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have.

That common language is science and mathematics.

The laws of Nature are the same everywhere:..."

 

 

5	V	E	N	U	S	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	5	-	1	+	=	6	-	-	6	SIX	6
-	-	-	1+4	-	1+0	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	14	-	19	+	=	33	3+3	=	6	SIX	6
5	V	E	N	U	S	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	22	5	14	21	19	+	=	81	8+1	=	9	NINE	9
-	2+2	-	1+4	2+1	1+9	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	4	-	5	3	10	+	=	22	2+2	=	4	FOUR	4
-	-	-	-	-	1+0	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-	1	-	-	1	-	-	1	ONE	1
-	-	5	-	-	-	+	=	5	-	-	5	FIVE	5
-	4	5	5	3	1	+	=	18	1+8	=	9	NINE	9
5	V	E	N	U	S	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-

 

 

KEEPER OF GENESIS

A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND

Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996

Page 254

"...Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta Stone? We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have.

That common language is science and mathematics.

The laws of Nature are the same everywhere:..."

Page 255

" In addition, though the monuments are enabled to 'speak' from the moment that their astronomical context is understood, we have also to consider the amazing profusion of funerary texts that have come down to us from all periods of Egyptian history - all apparently emanating from the same very few common sources⁵ As we have seen, these texts operate like 'software' to the monuments' 'hardware', charting the route that the Horus-King (and all other future seekers) must follow.

We recall a remark made by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet's Mill to the effect that the great strength of myths as vehicles for specific technical information is that they are capable of transmitting that information independently of the knowledge of individual story-tellers.⁶ In other words as long as a myth continues to be told true, it will also continue to transmit any higher message that may be concealed within its structure - even if neither the teller nor the hearer understands that message."

 

SUPERNATURE

Lyall Watson

1

973

MATTER AND MAGIC

Page 175

"Alchemy flourished until 1661, when Robert Boyle published the Sceptical Chymist and demolished the old, Aristotelian idea of the four "elements"-fire, earth, air, and water. Eighty years later Black introduced quantitive chemistry, and soon after that Priestley discovered oxygen and Lavoisier analyzed air and water. This chemical revolution swept away the romance and adventure of the alchemist's quest and ushered in a new objectivity. 'The idea of converting one element into another was laughed out of the laboratory until in 1919 / Page 176 / Lord Ruthenord used alpha particles from a radioactive source to bombard nitrogen and turn it into oxygen. Today, with instruments such as the strong-focusing synchrotron, the transmutation of metals has become commonplace and the alchemists begin to look quite good.
There were two arms of alchemy, one outward and concerned with attempts to find the Philosopher's Stone, and the other hidden and more concerned with the development of a devotional system. The mundane transmutation of metals was merely symbolic of the transformation of man into something more penect, through an exploration of nature's potential. The psychologist Jung realized this and regarded alchemy as the predecessor more of modern psychology than of modem chemistry. In his autobiography he makes it clear that he considers the roots of his psychology of the unconscious to have been firmly planted in the alchemical treatises that he spent ten years of his life studying. The elusive Stone was credited not only with the power of turning base metals into gold, but with the power also to prolong human life indefinitely. Colin Wilson describes this aspect of the search as "man's attempt to learn to make contact, at will, with the source of power, meaning and purpose in the depths of the mind, to overcome the dualities and ambiguities of everyday consciousness." (342)
The origins of alchemy lie in early agricultural communities, when technology had not yet been segregated from other aspects of daily life and the craftsmen who made metal farming implements and the dyes for weaving, carried out their trades to the accompaniment of religious and magical rites. The Egyptians, the. Greeks, and the Arabs all contributed . their skills and philosophies, and some great discoveries were made. In the Bagdad Museum are some stones found in a remote part of Iraq and classified as "ritual objects," but that have now been shown to be the / Page 177 / scores of electric batteries invented two thousand years before Galvani. (240) Some pieces of bronze, dredged up off the shores of Greece at Antikythera and dated sixth century B.C., turn out to be components of an early computer for calculating astronomical positions. (333) So many of our proudest new achievements seem to have been anticipated", by the alchemists and their contemporaries that "one wonders what other lost skills we have yet to rediscover.
In the Mayan city of Chichen Itza, in Yucatan, are hundreds of feet of reliefs, many carved almost in the round, by a people without metal tools. In the walls of the Incan city of Cuzco, in Peru, are vast blocks of stone of irregular shape that have been so perfectly cut that they jigsaw together without room to fit a knife blade between them. (290) Engineers and architects stand in awe of these achievements, which, with all our technical skills, we find hard to duplicate today. It may well have been done by a scientific development that has since been lost and smacks almost of psychokinesis. The Incas may have known how to soften stone. Colonel Fawcett, the British explorer who ultimately disappeared into the jungles of the Amazon, records in his diaries that on a walk along the river Perene, in Peru, a pair of large Mexican-type spurs were corroded to stumps in one day by the juice from a patch of low plants with red, fleshy leaves. A local rancher described them as "the stuff the Incas used for shaping stones." There are reports, too, of a small, kingfisher-like bird, probably the white-capped dipper Cinclus leucocephalus, which nests in spherical holes in the Bolivian Andes and bores these out of solid rock on the banks of mountain streams by rubbing a leaf on the stone until it is soft and can be pecked away. It seems that the Incas knew enough about chemistry to extract and distill this same substance. An excavation of a burial ground in central Peru turned up an earthenware jug containing a / Page 178 / black viscous fluid that, when spilled on the ground, tutned the rocks on which it fell into a soft, malleable putty.
This is the kind of discovery that most delighted the alchemists. In the course of working toward a higher consciousness, they learned almost by accident how to control matter and to liberate energy, so it is by no means impossible that in one of their texts are instructions for making generators like those of Robert Pavlita. Perhaps one of them was long and thin and looked like a magic wand.
One thing magic and science have in common is that both operate on the assumption that there is some scheme of order and regularity in the universe. Both attempt to discover this scheme by establishing relationships between things that are superficially different, and by analogical reasoning. The search for order is the only way life can survive in a cosmos tending toward maximum disorder. In man the search becomes more complex, because he looks not only for order but for meaning, so that he may be sure of being able to rediscover or even re-create that order. Superstition is one of the prices we pay for our habit of constantly scanning for patterns in everything. As Konrad Lorenz puts it, magic rituals have "a common root in behaviour mechanism whose species-preserving function is obvious; for a living being lacking insight into the relation between causes and effects it must be extremely useful to cling to a behaviour pattern which has once or many times proved to achieve its aim, and to have done so without danger." (203) In other words, if success follows a complex set of actions and you do not know which parts of the whole perform~nce were the vital ones, it is best to repeat all of them exactly and slavishly every time, because "You never know what might happen if you don't."
So the Pedi, in South Africa, believe that infection can be cured by eating grain that has been chewed by a cross-eyed / Page 179 /
child and hung for three days in a gourd shaped like a snake that is suspended from a particular tree that grows near the water. And they are right, because under these conditions the grain grows a mold like Penicillium, with antibiotic properties, but the child's eyes and the gourd's shape and the species of the tree do not necessarily have anything to do with the cure. In just this way, alchemy stumbled on some great truths but produced theoretical structures in which the line of reasoning between cause and effect was cluttered up with all sorts of irrelevant mystical and magical red herrings. This has discouraged modem science from investigating the source material, which is a pity, because we can probably still learn a great deal from a discipline that flourished for over two thousand years and included devotees such as Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Ben Jonson, and even Isaac Newton.
The role of sympathetic magic and of superstition in psycho kinetic phenomena is undoubtedly a large one, but I believe that, even without these props, we now have enough evidence to warrant the serious consideration of PK as a biological reality. There is a long way to go before we understand how it works, but we can already begin to think about its evolutionary implications. In man the ability seems to be manifest mainly in children, or essentially childlike personalities, and then most often as a casual, almost accidental effect. It>is apparantly important to believe that the mind can influence matter, or at least not to disbelieve that it can. This suggests that its origins lie in some more primitive condition, which is preserved in the unconscious and later smothered by acquired cultural and intellectual pressures. But learning to produce PK effects on demand, by a conscious physical process, is probably a new development altogether.
We have no evidence as yet to suggest that any other species is capable of producing psychokinetic effects. We / Page 180 / describe them as "mind over matter," but consciousness may not be a necessary precondition for PK. It is possible that many organisms at all levels of development are capable of generating the force fields that seem to be responsible for action at a distance. If this is true, then the ability could well turn out to be a major biological determinant, forging even closer bonds between life and its environment than even the most visionary ecologists dreamed possible.
I suspect that Supernature holds many such surprises in store."

 

SUPERNATURE

Lyall Watson

1

973

MATTER AND MAGIC
Page 177

"In the Mayan city of Chichen Itza, in Yucatan, are hundreds of feet of reliefs, many carved almost in the round, by a people without metal tools. In the walls of the Incan city of Cuzco, in Peru, are vast blocks of stone of irregular shape that have been so perfectly cut that they jigsaw together without room to fit a knife blade between them. (290) Engineers and architects stand in awe of these achievements, which, with all our technical skills, we find hard to duplicate today. It may well have been done by a scientific development that has since been lost and smacks almost of psychokinesis. The Incas may have known how to soften stone. Colonel Fawcett, the British explorer who ultimately disappeared into the jungles of the Amazon, records in his diaries that on a walk along the river Perene, in Peru, a pair of large Mexican-type spurs were corroded to stumps in one day by the juice from a patch of low plants with red, fleshy leaves. A local rancher described them as "the stuff the Incas used for shaping stones." There are reports, too, of a small, kingfisher-like bird, probably the white-capped dipper Cinclus leucocephalus, which nests in spherical holes in the Bolivian Andes and bores these out of solid rock on the banks of mountain streams by rubbing a leaf on the stone until it is soft and can be pecked away.

 

THE DEATH OF FOREVER

Darryl Reanney 1991

Page 265

"When I began this book, I spoke of a 'gap at the centre' in Western civilisation due to the breakdown of the old faiths. The clear implication was that this gap needs to be filled. But with what? I repeat, I believe it can only be filled by a renewed sense of the sacred. By this, I do not mean a new set of beliefs, which will inevitably harden into dogma. I mean an experiential sense of trust and caring, / Page 265 / a renewed feeling for beauty in whatever form it may be found. To give this experiential message some 'shape' it will, I think, be necessary to develop a new story for our time, based on science. I say 'story' because science in its present form gives no human dimen-sion to the truths it creates and illuminates. We need a parable, not a textbook, a poem of reality so rich and beautiful that its meaning will transcend the words it uses.
An example may help. The timescale of evolution is framed in numbers so vast that they literally lie beyond comprehension. Who can really get a feel for a number like 10000 000 000 years ago? However, all of us can sense the meaning of deep time from a story I read when I was a boy, in Arthur Mee's Childrens' Encyclopedia:

Faraway, in the West of the world there is a mighty granite rock,
a mile high, a mile wide and a mile deep. Once every hundred
years a little bird comes to the rock and sharpens its beak on the
granite. And when the bird has worn the rock away, that will be
one day in eternity."

"And when the bird has worn the rock away, that will be
one day in eternity."

 

SUPERNATURE

Lyall Watson

1973

Page 177

" There are reports, too, of a small, kingfisher-like bird, probably the white-capped dipper Cinclus leucocephalus, which nests in spherical holes in the Bolivian Andes and bores these out of solid rock on the banks of mountain streams by rubbing a leaf on the stone until it is soft and can be pecked away."

"by rubbing a leaf on the stone until it is soft and can be pecked away."

 

ADVENT

163 164 167 167 168

 

5	KRSNA	63	18	9
6	AVATAR	63	18	9
5	HORUS	81	27	9
-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-
5	ROUND	72	27	9
4	HOOP	54	27	9
-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-
3	SUN	54	9	9
5	VENUS	81	18	9
7	JUPITER	99	36	9
-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-
4	BALL	27	9	9
7	SPHERES	90	36	9
-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-
3	SHE	32	14	5
2	HE	13	13	4
5	SHE + HE	45	27	9
-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-
3	GOD	26	17	8
7	GODDESS	73	28	1
10	GOD + GODDESS	99	45	9
-	-	-	-	-
10	NAMES OF GOD	99	45	9
-	-	-	-	-
4	GODS	45	18	9
6	DIVINE	63	36	9
6	PUREST	99	27	9
4	LOVE	54	18	9

 

HOW YOU HAVE FALLEN FROM HEAVEN BRIGHT STAR OF THE MORNING FELLED TO THE EARTH

 

AUM MANI PADME HUM

ALL

HAIL THE JEWEL AT THE CENTRE OF THE LOTUS