Introduction

This book is the product of a personal journey of discovery, a trip that began when I was about seven or eight years old. This, significantly, was when I first chanced to think about that ultimate question in life: death. I remember feeling greatly disturbed that I was unable to comprehend this truly awesome prospect. What made matters worse was the fact that the adults around me were not only equally clueless in this respect; it seemed to me that they didn’t even want to think about it. But then this was England in the mid-fifties, and the grown-ups had just survived a horrendous global war. For many of them the unspeakable facts of death must have been an all-too-prevalent and uncomfortable reality, so it is not surprising that I was usually given short shrift whenever I asked one of the available big people to show me the netherworld on a world map.

As it turned out, and for reasons I cannot explain, I have been drawn to ponder this question many times over many years. So, if nothing else, the subject has been a recurrent reminder to me of the transient, apparently futile nature of individual existence. But it has also, I think, been a primary factor in determining one of my major motivations in life—to try to understand the meaning and purpose of our being, to establish some kind of meaningful perspective from which to view our true position in the cosmic scheme of things. Basically, I simply want to know what is going on around me. Don’t you?

So, what is this thing death, this future happening looming over the horizon of our lives like some conceptual black hole? Can the process be elucidated, defined in terms we can understand? My answer is a cautious yes, and I shall explain why in due course.

As for death’s equally mystifying opposite, the counterbalance we loosely call life, this too cries out to be understood. Evolutionists think they have cracked it by charting the increasingly complex interactive development, over four thousand million years, of the RNA and DNA molecules—which is fine, as far as it goes—but where does the evolution of consciousness fit into the Darwinian picture? Indeed, can it fit? That is, is it possible to explain the thought processes of the modern hominid in terms of the current theory of evolution? Actually I don’t personally know of any evolutionists out there who are aware of this fact, but the answer, once again, is yes. As I see it, the systematic, biomolecular process involved in the evolution of DNA is a perfect model of the working of the healthy human mind.

So what I currently have to offer is an ambitious, but serious, proposition, which is that life and death are in a certain and unique way entirely comprehensible.

As I said, what follows is the record of a personal journey, but this is also, by its very nature, an account of the entire evolutionary journey of the conscious hominid. What began for me in the fifties, with what might be called a chance thought, has been happening to thinkers for many thousands of years. So, in effect, I have merely tuned in to an already existing stream of ideas, a channel of intelligent information whose list of presenters and past contributors reads like a roll call of the immortals—scientists, philosophers, saints, mythmakers, saviors.

We will therefore have to go back in time to trace the origin of this “thought” of mine: back to ancient Egypt and Greece, and to China, India, Palestine, Arabia, and the Americas. One of the principal reasons for looking back is that most of these ancient cultures developed a religion, or a mythology, to explain the mystery of life and death. Indeed, this almost wholly preoccupied the earliest peoples. And, significantly, although different cultures over the millennia have expressed their ideas in apparently diverse ways and idioms, they all agree on one fundamental point: that there is an existence after death. As it happens, the originators of all the major belief systems also concurred on one other fundamental point in respect of life.

But first things first. My own personal account is the warp of this metaphysical design, so we must for the time being stick to the minor plot; the greater weft will be woven in chapter by chapter.

In the early sixties, I dutifully went to grammar school, obtained mediocre GCE passes, and subsequently took up a position selling advertising space for a local newspaper. Disillusionment soon crept in. A large workplace can be a quagmire of trivia and petty jealousies and, to avoid being sucked in, I became a corporate drifter, aimlessly careerhopping from one meaningless job to another.

Meanwhile my alter ego was heading off on a completely different trail. By the time of the late sixties, he was already blowing in the wind, unwittingly heading for a second memorable jolt. This happened when, quite by chance, I came across a certain psychedelic agent called purple haze.

Purple haze was the name given to a particularly pure batch of LSD that hit the streets of my town in the winter of 1968, one tiny tablet of which happened to come my way. It cost me thirty bob and about eight earth hours, but such was its impact upon me that it changed my whole life, for, quite suddenly, after this one, mind-blowing experience, I became absolutely convinced of the existence of other dimensions beyond my own tiny, subjective conceptual domain. This newly found awareness made life appear much more interesting. But more perplexing.

More trips inevitably followed, always, without exception, profoundly illuminating, producing in me such powerful waves of emotion that I felt I could very easily be swept out to some mystic sea and be gone forever. Whether these glimpses into other worlds were real or imaginary was a question I never bothered to ask, but my perceptions were so vivid and incomparably impressive that they made my molelike working life seem like a form of penal servitude.

It has been more than twenty years since I last took a trip, and I have no intention of taking another in the foreseeable future. Neither do I recommend the use of psychedelics to anyone. I am merely reporting here. My own “transgressions” were directed largely by circumstance. This thing—this drug—was new and radical, and virtually everyone in my peer group was experimenting with it. Obviously, in another time and another place, with different peers, I might have taken an alternative route to the present.

So, to get to the point, which is to explain why my psychedelic experiences should be of such importance to my story. It has all to do with the impressions I had then. To be sure, very little remained of the total experience after each of these illicit forays into inner space, but certain key impressions did remain indelibly imprinted on my mind.

The first was that everything solid or material—houses, trees, rocks, mountains, people—were all possessed with a kind of inner light of their own. That is, I clearly perceived that these things, or objects, were composed, literally, of sparkling, vibrant, “particles” of light.

It is entirely possible, of course, that this is not so—that “things” are not composed of light at all—and that the impression was simply a drug-induced false consciousness. However, when the hallucination, or whatever it is, appears to be infinitely more striking and meaningful than anything so-called reality can throw up, then I think I have good reason to pay heed to it—which, indeed, I have done ever since. And, in fact, although I was unaware of this at the time, I was later to discover that my impression was corroborated by two quite different and independent sources.

In the first instance, Einstein had already shown that light quanta, i.e., photons, were “particles.” Second, the idea that matter is simply one particular form of light has been common currency among the holy men of the East for centuries.

The second major impression (or hallucination) had to do with time—or, rather, the absence of it. I could never explain it, not even to myself, but in these altered states time seemed to stand still. I remember that the word eternal came to mind more than once when I was attempting to describe this condition.

Interestingly, this particular notion—that there are “timeless” realms, or dimensions, of existence—is not at all unique. In fact, it is part and parcel of practically every major religion and mystical belief system known. If you think of familiar scriptural concepts like heaven, eternity, time without end, the realm of Him that liveth for ever and ever, and so on, all these so-called religious notions seem to suggest that legions of contemplatives have in the past had glimpses or feelings similar to mine. Further, as with the earlier impression that matter is made up of vibrating particles of light, this second idea of a “timeless” form of reality has also been quite clearly expressed in independent sources. For example, through the development of modern quantum theory, it has been discovered that, in the “world” of the subatomic particle, time as we know it (or as we think we know it) has no place: it is statistically meaningless.

For me, this idea of an “eternal” dimension of existence was especially appealing, because it seemed to hint at a possible way out of the time-laden quicksand in which we hapless mortals become immersed. That is, if there was any substance at all to my extratemporal experiences, then maybe we—you, me, everyone—need never truly die.

I have always been an avid reader, but over the years my taste changed with my circumstances. So, by the end of the sixties, works of fiction, classic and popular, were gradually replaced by books on science and what my elder brother Tony laughingly called “all that esoteric stuff.” He was right, of course. The hippies were on the move, traveling in droves to the East, reading books by and about countless Indian holy men, Sufis, Western occultists, and Lobsang Rampa and Erich von Däniken to boot. I readily joined in the party, reading all kinds of spiritual and philosophical fare. Much of it I found pretty ineffectual: hearsay, vague allusions, apocryphal stories, parables, and outright guesswork—but all in all I was temporarily hooked, greatly impressed by the vast numbers of mostly sincere writers from all walks of life attempting to understand the nature of consciousness. Of all intellectual pursuits, the exploration of the human mind seemed to me to be the most worthwhile. If we could reach journey’s end on this one, all other questions might fall neatly into place, side by side with their answers.

The trouble was, although a lot of the books circulating in the seventies contained many interesting ideas, after reading them I still had no idea what was really going on in people’s heads. So many writers claimed to have all the answers, but when it came down to the nittygritty, everything seemed to end with a question mark. I had no inkling then that a major clue was in the offing, but I was soon to find a man who had some important answers. What is more, he wasn’t entirely unique.

Usually with my wife, Ali, I made several trips to the East during the seventies. Often we would stop off and visit my brother, who at that time was living in Mashad in northeastern Iran. Tony, who never stopped traveling throughout the whole of his abbreviated life, had at this stage in his journey married and converted to Islam.

This was in the days of the pro-Western Shah, and Iran had a booming economy, affording plenty of opportunity to anyone with an entrepreneurial flair. And yet, despite all this, the people remained deeply religious, especially in Mashad, one of Iran’s holy cities, home of the great mosque of the much-venerated Islamic saint Imam Reza, the fourteenth imam in a direct line of high initiates that began with the Prophet Muhammad himself.

During these visits, I was always struck by the intense fervor and passion of Muslim worshippers there. Their tears were obviously very real, and their emotions seemed to be charged with a vitality of a kind seldom encountered in Christianity. To these people, prayer was a genuine, wholehearted celebration, a loud, proud, public affirmation of their devotion to Allah and His Prophet.

I must admit that my interest in Islam, although it impressed me greatly, never passed beyond an observational level. What intrigued me most about it was the sheer emotional power that this metaphysical phenomenon had so effectively harnessed. There was a self-evident force at work here—not a force that could be empirically measured according to established scientific criteria, but a real source of power nonetheless, one so energetic, in fact, that it could somehow cause millions of people from different ethnic backgrounds all over the world to simultaneously move, speak, and act in concert. Perhaps the most curious thing about this remarkably well-coordinated mass movement of human beings is that it was all set in motion by one man.

When I try to picture Muhammad in my mind, I see a person of true genius, the light of Allah sparkling in his eyes, a clear vision of the future march of Islam stretching out before him. Here, quite evidently, was a man who knew exactly what he was doing, an individual who understood the workings of the human mind like few others. How else could he have created such a powerful living movement? Luck? Accident? I really don’t think so. There is a weird kind of magic afoot here, and it comes to us today in the form of a tangible supernatural force—the mysterious power of Islam. Now, this force exists, it cannot be denied, and I am saying that the person who purposefully created it was—and indeed still is—without doubt a giant among men. Irrefutable evidence to support this view is provided daily, weekly, continuously for all to see, when millions of Muslims all over the world emulate their leader by taking time to align themselves with this great spiritual source. Similar individuals have appeared elsewhere in history, and we shall be meeting some of them in this book, but in my view the Prophet was the last.

After my initial brush with Islam I soon started to recognize certain similarities with the other great religions. In particular, they had all apparently been set in motion by single individuals, then, incredibly, had subsequently inspired the voluntary participation, over thousands of years, of millions, billions of people.

So eventually it became clear to me that there are very real forces profoundly affecting the human brain at work within these religious and philosophical movements. Think of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and so on. Nowhere in the entire “civilized” world is it possible to avoid some kind of contact with one or other of these apparently incomprehensible influences. They emanate from every church, mosque, synagogue, and temple.

Now, recognizing the existence of such forces is one thing, but understanding how and why they operate so effectively is quite another. I pondered over this unfathomable mystery for years, reasoning that the founders of the major religions must have had one fundamental factor in common, which enabled each of them dramatically to affect the lives of whole races of people—but what this was, I had not the least idea.

A BREAKTHROUGH

Then in France, some time in the mid-seventies, a fellow traveler called John Mullins told me about a book he had read recently which had impressed him very much. I asked my wife to send me a copy from England. It was a propitious move. The book in question, In Search of the Miraculous, was an account by the Russian writer Pyotr Demianovitch Ouspensky, of his meetings with George Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian teacher of “esoteric wisdom” whom he met in Moscow in 1915.

Ostensibly the book is a record of talks given by Gurdjieff to his pupils over a period of about eight years. I had never heard of Gurdjieff or his principal pupil prior to this, but after reading Ouspensky’s brilliant piece of reportage from cover to cover, stopping only to eat, drink, and catnap, I can truthfully say that encountering the teachings of this man was one of the most important stages in my entire voyage of discovery. I could write a book on this book, but that would be a digression—and in any case I would simply be diluting what is easily obtainable from any good bookshop. The main thrust of Gurdjieff’s teaching, however, I will briefly mention here, because it is relevant to this part of my tale.

Basically he taught that the universe and everything within it is made up of vibrations, resonating, interactive “signals,” which permeate through all kinds, aspects, and densities of matter. This almost immediately struck a familiar chord in me, because it reminded me of my earlier impression that all matter is made up of sparkling (vibrating) particles of light. What really made me sit up, however, was Gurdjieff’s explanation of how these vibrations move through matter, time, and space.

Gurdjieff said that all processes, all “vibrations,” both in the world and in man, are governed by two fundamental laws—laws that were understood in the remotest antiquity.

The first is the law of three, which says that every action, every phenomenon in the universe, is the direct result of the mutual interaction of three forces: active, passive, and neutral. If you ever do something so basic as change a three-pin plug, or use a catalyst in a chemical experiment involving two other compounds, or watch a referee do his job, or examine the structure of an atom, you will recognize immediately the action of these three forces. They are fundamental, everywhere; quite literally, universal. If you have only two forces—active and passive—the result is either deadlock or destruction, but if a third, reconciliatory force is introduced, anything and everything can happen. Gurdjieff said that this concept was the basis of the Holy Trinity of Christian tradition. This in turn implies, of course, that Christianity itself was formulated by people of a scientific turn of mind, people who understood the principle of the three interacting forces, the forces of creation. And, of course, the Trinity, in one way or another, is a fundamental component of virtually every major religion, a fact that suggests that “science” itself—the science of creation—is indeed rooted in the distant past. Scholars may argue that the Trinity was in fact denied by certain monotheistic religions such as Judaism or Islam, which assert emphatically that there is only one God. But consider this: the most significant act of creation in the whole of Islamic tradition was the revelation to Muhammad of “God’s words,” which were subsequently compiled as the book known as the Koran. We thus have two participants, Allah and His Prophet. We should note, however, that Muhammad is said to have received his revelations not directly from God Himself, but through an intermediary, the archangel Gabriel—enter the third force. This exact principle is described in the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” You can’t get much clearer than that. Creation is the result of three forces. This is the first law.

The second ancient law is the law of octaves. This says that all vibrations moving through matter, and through man, develop—that is, ascend, descend, grow stronger, weaker, and so forth—precisely as a musical octave develops, that is, in proportional steps of seven or eight. Now, this development, apparently, does not proceed uniformly, in a smooth ascension or descension, but erratically, with certain regular “glitches” in the line of motion. Just like a musical octave, in fact.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the structure of the octave, or the major musical scale, the notes Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, Do are each separated by a series of intervals or tones, five of which are whole, and two of which are only half-tones, like so:

or, as illustrated by the keys of a piano:

The half-tones—between the notes mi–fa and ti–Do—are the glitches just mentioned. Said Gurdjieff, “The seven-tone scale is the formula of a cosmic law which was worked out by ancient schools and applied to music.”¹

Exactly how ancient these schools were is never specified, but Gurdjieff in his own writings suggests that the Pythagoreans, usually credited as being the originators of practical musical theory, had actually rediscovered a long-lost science.

During his talks, Gurdjieff gives Ouspensky many examples in nature demonstrating the action of the forces described by the two fundamental laws. These forces, for example, dictate the structure of white light, the seven colors of the spectrum, and the sevenfold symmetries of the periodic table of chemical elements. He also describes the physical structure of the universe in musical terms, even including in his unique worldview the biological and psychological composition of the human being. All of these phenomena, Gurdjieff said, are essentially musically structured. His evidence, as presented to Ouspensky, was for me extremely compelling, and I instinctively felt that here at last was a real nugget of spiritual knowledge, a genuine, 24-carat kernel of truth. And I was right, as we shall see.

Of course, knowledge is one thing, but understanding how best to use it is quite another. This is what made Gurdjieff unique among all the people whose ideas I had previously encountered, because he didn’t simply present original and interesting knowledge, he applied it in an entirely practical and comprehensible way.

I must try to keep things simple at this stage, as my preliminary story is not yet finished. All one needs to know here is that the practical aspect of this knowledge—the core of which is musical theory—is based on a systematic application of these “musical” rules as something like a code of personal conduct. The theory is that, by doing this, by introducing musical rhythms and elements into our lives in an orderly and disciplined way, it is possible for us to evolve, to become more and more conscious (i.e., harmonious) at a much faster rate than is normally envisaged by evolutionists. We can call this the principle of “transcendental evolution,” which holds that a harmonious individual is like a fully evolved octave and is capable, through the final “note” Do at the top of the given scale, of striking a single new note, or impulse, into a greater scale above. This greater scale, or dimension, the ancients called heaven. Darwinists take note: what is being implied here is that there are certain limitations to current evolutionary theory, that it is, at best, incomplete.

In between life’s periodic distractions, I studied Gurdjieff’s ideas for several years, on and off. I read everything by and about him that I could find. He apparently drew his ideas from a number of ancient traditions, as referred to in Ouspensky’s book—Egyptian, Christian, Buddhist, Dervish, Hindu, and so on. Of course, these were, broadly speaking, the very same religious movements that had intrigued me for years, which I had surmised were sources of strange metaphysical power that could quite literally move legions of the faithful.

There was an obvious and important link here, but for some time its real significance escaped me.

In the early eighties life slowed down. We had two young children by then and, as there were inevitably a number of conspicuous gaps in my CV, finding a regular and amenable occupation proved difficult. These were days of high unemployment, and the corporate drifter found himself up against stiffer opposition than he had expected. In the end, after several halfhearted attempts to reenter the professional workplace, he decided to go back to school, taking exploratory extramural courses in numerous and often tedious and uninspiring subjects. There was, however, one short course—a module dealing with the biomolecular world, with DNA and the genetic code—that ultimately turned out to be exactly what I had been looking for.

This was in the summer of 1984. I had been reading a great deal at this time, both textbook stuff and books of my own choosing. One week, genetics or astronomy, perhaps, or a droning essay on Karl Popper; another week, John Michell, Colin Wilson, or Idris Shah, or possibly a couple of chapters of Gurdjieff’s monumental epic Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. This multilayered tome is over a thousand pages long and no easy read, with sentences the length of paragraphs, paragraphs pages long, and dozens of obscure new words invented by the author—for the express purpose, one suspects, of making reading it an even more difficult task. Gurdjieff advised his followers to read it three times (presumably in accordance with the law of three). The fact that I undertook this daunting task may say something about me that I wouldn’t care to hear, but I completed it, nevertheless, in several stages, over a period of about five years.

I need not comment on the book itself. As with Ouspensky’s, I could write a lengthy treatise on it—or try to—and even then would possibly succeed in conveying only a small fraction of its intended meaning. The point I want to make here is that Gurdjieff’s ground-breaking ideas were well to the fore in my mind. In fact, practically all of the thoughts and ideas I have mentioned so far were jiggling around in my head, like ephemeral, dancing genes: life . . . death . . . light . . . timelessness . . . matter . . . vibrations . . . religion . . . force . . . Gurdjieff . . . music.

It was virtually all there, like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw, but the overall picture still eluded me.

Now let’s return to the genetic code. Probably most of you will at least have heard of this chemical arrangement, used by the DNA in the cells of your body to manufacture amino acids, the building blocks of all organic life.

In order to give myself a kind of visual aid, an image of the code in action, I had drawn up a diagram incorporating the key numbers of the biochemical components involved in the process. These were 4, 3, 64, and 22. That is, there are four kinds of chemical bases. It takes three of them to make what is known as a triplet codon, an amino acid template, of which there are exactly sixty-four variations. Each of these codons correspond to one or another of twenty-two more complex components, namely, the twenty amino acids and the two coded instructions for starting and stopping the process of synthesis. In my diagram, the number 64, the number of tripletcodon combinations (4 × 4 × 4), was represented by a square grid, eight divisions across and eight down, like a chessboard.

It struck me immediately that there was a curious kind of symmetry involved with these particular number combinations, one that was entirely familiar to me and that I had seen many times before. I realized, in fact, that the whole diagram echoed the format of the famous Chinese work known as the I Ching (Yi King), whose sixty-four basic texts are each identified with a six-line symbol called a hexagram.

The I Ching, the so-called Book of Changes, was one of the more popular works circulating among “New-agers” in the sixties and seventies, and I had browsed through it several times. It was intended for use as an oracle: you pose a question, toss three coins, and note the way they fall. A preponderance of heads gives an unbroken line—“yang,” positive; tails a broken line—“yin,” negative. There is an older method of consultation using a clutch of forty-nine yarrow stalks, but the principle is the same. Repeat the action six times and you will have called up one of the hexagrams. The accompanying text supplies your answer. Although I was never drawn to actually consult the I Ching, I had always been intrigued by its structure.

As I said earlier, the key numbers of my genetic diagram were 4, 3, 64, and 22.

Let’s begin with the number 4, the number of fundamental chemical bases in the genetic code (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine) upon which the whole process of amino-acid synthesis depends. The I Ching, I discovered, embodies exactly the same principle. The sixty-four hexagrams are actually constructed from four, basic, two-line symbols known as the Hsiang. These in turn were derived from the two fundamental lines, one broken and one unbroken, known respectively as yin and yang.

Next, the number 3. The genetic code, as was evident, obeyed the law of three forces, which is why only triplet codons are evident in the process of creation. The three forces are initially represented in the Book of Changes by the two original yin and yang lines, and a third factor called the Great Extreme: that is yin (negative, female), yang (positive, male) and neutral, the third, invisible or “mystical” ingredient, the tao. This greater trinity is fundamental to the whole system, but the number 3 also occurs in a way that corresponds exactly with the genetic code, because each of the hexagrams is described as being composed of two “trigrams,” two three-line signals.

We now come to the number 64. As we have noted, the I Ching is composed of sixty-four hexagrams. At first glance it seems as if the genetic code deviates from this pattern, with its sixty-four triplet units. However, it should be noted that the genetic code functions as a dynamic system, and as such should be viewed as an ongoing, evolutionary process, in which every part is connected both with the simpler processes below and also with the more complex components above. Thus we can see that there is, in fact, another side to the codon template, the amino acid itself, which must also, by its very nature, be tripart in structure. So we have one triplet codon and one amino acid—a biochemical “hexagram.” Incidentally, triplet-codon templates originate inside the DNA molecule, as copies of segments of its internal structure; this means, of course, that DNA itself is also composed of sixty-four biochemical hexagrams.

By this time, having recognized so many similarities between the IChing and the genetic code, I was convinced that I was on to something of profound importance, and my emotional state reflected this: I was highly charged. No way, I thought, could the identical features of these two apparently disparate systems be the product of mere coincidence, for they were not only identical in structure; it seemed that they each had a common purpose, which was to facilitate the process of evolution. Just think about this for a moment: the genetic code is used to create a greater organic structure; the I Ching, the Book of Changes, is supposedly used to create a greater, more enlightened being. The principle is exactly the same.

With a greatly increased respect for it, I returned to the I Ching several times—not to read it or to consult it, but to concentrate on its structure. I felt that its real secrets must lie in the symbolism expressed in its format and that the accompanying texts were simply an embellishment, merely repeating, in longhand, what the hexagrams were already telling me.

Now these hexagrams, as I said earlier, just like the biochemical hexagrams of the genetic code, each consist of two trigrams, two three-line symbols, one above, one below. The trigrams, eight in number, were derived from the four Hsiang, by successively placing over each of them the two original broken and unbroken lines. When these same two lines are placed over the eight trigrams, the result is sixteen figures of four lines. Repeat the process once again and you get thirty-two figures of five lines, and a final similar movement produces the sixty-four hexagrams.

Unlike the four- and five-line figures, the eight trigrams, known as the kwa, are given particular prominence in the system. I mused over these for a long time, juggling with their numbers. Eight threes. Three eights. Twenty-four. I needed twenty-two. Close, but not close enough. Certainly the number 8 was an integral part of the overall symmetry, being the square root of that magical 64; but why did the sum of the trigrams not conform to the twenty-two codon signals of the genetic code? Why twenty-four? Why eight?

It was an exhilarating moment when the light finally dawned and the answer, which came filtering through in the form of the tiniest of thoughts, exploded silently inside my head: “Heptaparaparshinokh.”

This peculiar word is one of Gurdjieff’s creations, and it is repeated many times in Beelzebub’s Tales. It means, quite simply, the law of octaves, the law of seven (sometimes expressed as the law of eight),² the law by which, he had said, everything proceeds. Everything? Including the genetic code and the I Ching?

So there it was; obviously the symmetry I had been looking at was musically based. It had to be. Here was my chessboard: eight divisions across, like an octave; eight divisions down, another octave; and sixty-four divisions across the grid, an octave squared.

I then remembered what Gurdjieff had written in Beelzebub’s Tales about the origins of musical theory. He said that the Greeks only rediscovered the science, and that its true origins were far more remote in time. No dates are given, but what he had to say about its originators turned out to be extremely pertinent. Beelzebub informs us that, a very long time ago, there once lived two brothers—princes—in ancient China. These men were direct descendants of a high initiate who survived the cataclysm that destroyed ancient Atlantis, and it was from his teachings, passed down through the generations, that they learned of the law of octaves.

According to most commentators on ancient Chinese history, the creator of the trigrams was a legendary sage called Fu-hsi, thought to have lived in the third millennium BCE. King Wen of the Chou dynasty and his son, Tan, the Duke of Chou, added the texts much later, around 1140 BCE. Princes, kings, dukes . . . it all sounded very familiar.

In the same section of Beelzebub’s Tales there is a detailed account of how these ancient men of genius verified for themselves the law of octaves (aided by experiments with light, prisms, and other, strange paraphernalia), and how, subsequently, this knowledge became lost. As I recalled how the I Ching was being so casually used simply as a pocket fortune-teller, I could see how true this was. These people never acknowledged the “music” inherent in the system. They “played” it without even knowing.

But now I felt that I had found it again, the secret of life, no less, the music of life, the music in you and in me, in the I Ching and the genetic code—and even, if Gurdjieff’s claims hold true, in the cosmos itself.

And the number 22? It fits perfectly, as can be seen from the Pythagorean version of this ancient science. This number was one of the key numbers of their system, principally because of its musical aspect. It represented, in fact, three octaves of vibrations, or notes, three sets of eight—twenty-four components.

If you look at a twenty-two note scale in diagrammatic form, you will see that the first octave is made up of the eight familiar fundamental notes: Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, Do. The eighth note, Do, however, is also simultaneously the first note of the second octave. So the two octaves overlap. Similarly, the eighth note of the second octave—again Do—is also the first note of the third; so these again overlap. In this way we see that the twenty-two divisions actually represent what is, in reality, a manifestation of twenty-four interrelated components—three individual octaves, or 8–8–8:

Now see what happens when we apply to the phenomenon described above the first law of nature—the law of three forces—which tells us that each of the individual octaves are themselves tripart in structure, composed inwardly of three octaves each. This produces nine subordinate octaves:

Nine octaves, of course—from the first base note, Do, to the last— contain precisely sixty-four fundamental notes.

INTERIM

The story I have just related is only the beginning of the next, which even now is still unfolding. From that time onward, the summer of 1984, I spent several years exploring the mazelike annals of history. I automatically assumed that, if the Chinese and the Greeks were “tuned in” to this ancient science referred to so frequently by Gurdjieff, then it was probable that so were some of the other traditions and civilizations he mentioned. As it turned out, the evidence was overwhelming. Everywhere I looked I saw musical symbols beaming back at me: every known major religion and esoteric tradition in recorded history had embraced this science as a code of conduct, a harmonious mode of being. Here, in fact, was the missing common factor I had long felt existed, that magical ingredient that had given religious movements the power to affect the minds and hearts of billions in such a profound and extraordinary way. They were all unerringly based on the principle of harmony, a harmony that is echoed in, literally, every single cell of our bodies, in our DNA and in the genetic code. This is, therefore, a natural harmony, one that must naturally appeal to the deepest and innermost instincts of DNA’s ultimate creation: Homo sapiens sapiens.

Remember, DNA has been successfully using this method of evolution for billions of years. And now look what it is capable of. What began in the primeval soup with a single-celled organism has culminated in the creation of the conscious human being. That’s quite a leap, even if it did span four thousand million years.

And then, somewhere along the line—very recently by evolutionary standards—a group of extremely gifted individuals somehow came to realize that the best way forward was to get right back down to basics, to a musical mode of being that was in harmony with the natural evolutionary processes of nature. This, surely, is Science with a capital “s”; it is the science, and in one way or another, it touches all others. And, as we shall see, in terms of the cumulative effect it has had upon the human race, and of the numbers of people who, over several thousand years, have been drawn to study its principles, it genuinely has no peer.

Now, these ancient men of genius, the first practitioners of the noble art of right living, subsequently disseminated their superior knowledge far and wide, across the entire globe, across millennia of time. The results of my researches into this extraordinary cultural phenomenon were finally published in 1994 in my first book, The Infinite Harmony.

The book begins with Old Kingdom Egypt, where the symbol of the octave first appeared in the form of their pantheon of eight gods, four male (yang) and four female (yin), said to have materialized on the fabled Island of Flame, the primary source of light. There were, in fact, three coexistent creation myths in Old Kingdom Egypt, and in all of them the octave format is paramount. Furthermore, as with virtually every major religion, Egyptian theology embraced a trinity of three major deities: Osiris, Isis, and Horus—an expression of the law of three, and the triple octave, composed of twenty-two notes. In fact, the mathematical convention pi (p), expressed numerically as 22/7, is first and foremost a symbol of the triple octave, an encoded description of the law of octaves and the law of three forces. Orthodox historians will tell you that this formula wasn’t known in Old Kingdom Egypt, but this, as I have shown elsewhere, is an entirely false assumption. Indeed, the pi formula was not only known by these people, it was applied in a wholly practical way in respect of their day-to-day activities, and can be identified quite clearly in important administrative documents of the Old Kingdom.³ This is quite apart from the evidence of the Great Pyramid itself, of course, the structural proportions of which accurately express the mathematical value of “classical” pi.

Incidentally, the pi relationship has also been discovered in the dimensions and proportions of the so-called Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán in Mexico and, most recently, in the structures of Stonehenge in England and the “step pyramid” of Silbury Hill in southern England—details that suggest that the dissemination of the knowledge of this musical code was a genuine worldwide movement. Later on we can look at these relationships in more detail.

Subsequent sections of The Infinite Harmony are devoted to tracing the ongoing development of this musical influence, which flows like a river of pure thought through all the major belief systems in history, including Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and the alchemical schools of the Middle Ages. But then, as if this extraordinarily potent stream of ideas flowing unhindered through earlier times were not a remarkable enough phenomenon, later in this book we shall note how the main tenets of this ancient teaching are now finding conceptual niches within the framework of the most advanced, systematic disciplines of our own age. We see this not only in the science of genetics, as just discussed, but also, as will become apparent, in particle physics and even astrophysics and cosmology.

The final chapter of my first book takes a detailed look at the musical structures of the biomolecular world, the realm of DNA and the genetic code, of amino acids and protein macromolecules.

Now this musical symmetry is real, it exists for all to see, and I don’t believe I have contrived it in any way. I have merely looked at the facts as presented to me by experts in their respective fields, and then strung them together into what I see as a clearly recognizable musical pattern. Music is life; life is music: this is what I have learned from the facts. But of course the most important, and perhaps controversial, fact of all those arising from my research is that the musical symmetry dictating the evolution of the human gene pool was not only identified by ancient peoples, it was actively employed in their daily lives as a complete way of being, a “religion.”

As the first recorded version of this archaic science first appeared in the Nile delta about five thousand years ago, I have called this musical symmetry the Hermetic Code, after Hermes Trismegistus, the Greek name for Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom. This musical symmetry, as I have said, is precisely what the formula pi was designed to express; that is, the law of seven and the law of three—the triple octave, composed of twenty-two notes. And remember, the law of three tells us that each of the individual octaves so expressed is also tripart in structure: it is composed of three “inner” octaves, making nine octaves in total—exactly sixty-four fundamental notes, the square of the constant number, 8. This is the Hermetic Code, a universal formula that, as we shall find out, encompasses within it practically everything.

Having thus outlined my preliminary ideas, it is now time for us to embark on a greater journey of discovery—to new territories that I myself have yet to explore fully. Therefore much of the discussion that follows is to a large extent speculative in nature. We shall be dealing with “facts,” of course, many of them astonishing—unbelievable even—but empirical data, however pertinent, can take us only so far. If we wish to go to realms existing beyond the bounds of “logical” thought—which is where this narrative is intended to take the reader— then we may have to temper our “knowledgeable” worldview with liberal measures of two of the most elusive of human faculties: instinct and intuition.

Instinct, as most people understand it, is a gut feeling, something in one’s bones. I am sure that we have all experienced this impulse in one way or another. Instinct may well be the primary cause of the emergence, over the past five millennia, of the inordinately powerful religious movements referred to earlier. These are long-held traditions, essentially rhythmic in form and method, and they are steadfastly adhered to by billions of ordinary people even now. These religions were founded, as I have explained, on the principles of musical symmetry, a symmetry that is so clearly evident in our DNA—literally in our bones. This could mean that the inclination to pray, for example, on every seventh day may, to a large extent, be the product of instinct. The “holy” Sabbath is the seventh day/note in an octave of time; the eighth “note”—Sunday in Christianity—is also the first day/note in the next “octave,” the next week. Clearly this essentially “religious” division of time is no arbitrary invention. It is musically based. It has “rhythm,” it has “soul”; it is a perfect example of real “live music,” of the Hermetic Code in action.

Now intuition, on the other hand, is generally believed to operate from what we call our subconscious minds—a seemingly inexplicable, faster-than-light process of instantaneous recognition, flashing on and off in sparse, random bursts, conveniently providing us with sensible answers to “impossible” questions—and very often when we least expect them. If this has never happened to you, the idea might seem too vague or fanciful to be taken seriously. To dispel any doubt, consult the recognized experts, by which I mean trained and disciplined thinkers in virtually all fields of scientific investigation, past and present. I think you would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of these individuals working today who would deny the existence of the intuitive process in the functioning of the questing human mind. Indeed, as we shall see later, modern scientific enquiry thrives on it.

To put all this simply, I am asking readers to open their minds and try to put aside all preconceptions about, well, almost everything. I realize, of course, that this is a tall order in these troubled and confused times, but the expansive, sometimes dizzying journey we are about to make requires that we be, as it were, “fleet of foot,” relatively free from dogma and conceptually ready for anything. Having said all that, there is one crucial fact that we need bear in mind: that the Hermetic Code, the blueprint of all creation, has been known and understood as such since the dawn of our civilization.

As will become clear, the originators of this code discovered a spectacular sphere of existence, its expanse far beyond the confines of today’s imagination. It stretches backward and forward in time, to infinity: through historical time (as far as it goes), through geological time, to the first stirrings of life on earth—and even further still, through cosmological time, to the origin of the universe itself, the big bang. This remarkable worldview also encompasses all kinds of space: the inner space of the molecule, the atom and the subatomic particle, the space you and I perceive as “real” space, and the greater scales of space above us—the space of the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, the galactic supercluster. In truth, there is not a single phenomenon that is excluded from this all-encompassing cosmic plan, not even life, death, and the ultimate fate of our expanding universe.

Obviously, therefore, at certain stages in this investigation we shall have to look at some of the weird and wonderful notions of modern science—in particular, some of the key advances made in particle physics, astrophysics, genetics, and evolutionary theory. As a nonscientist, I trust that my interpretations of these complex, sometimes perplexing, ideas, will be clear enough for most readers to follow. In any event, they are necessary excursions, as a basic understanding of recent scientific thought will enable us to compare it with some of the theories of ancient times. There are a number of surprises in store, for today’s science appears in many ways to be simply reiterating what has gone before. This is not, of course, what scientists themselves want to hear, and, as a blatant trespasser, I would not expect them to give these ideas a warm reception.

So, where do we begin such an apparently impossible journey across an infinity of time frames and even dimensions? It is probably best to start with our feet firmly on the ground—on bedrock—in the land and time of Old Kingdom Egypt. The reason is clear: because the pi convention first emerged here, both in the architecture and in written form.