2

A Different Way of Seeing

Of the many recently published books investigating our cultural origins, there is one that is of particular interest with respect to the ideas being investigated here. This is Colin Wilson’s From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996), described by its publishers as an attempt to understand how the long-forgotten race of mariners and builders of prehistory “thought, felt, and communicated with the universe.” This position does, of course, presuppose that there was once a race of people existing in the so-called Neolithic era who were capable of contemplating the mysteries of nature and the universe.

Wilson begins with the ideas of Schwaller de Lubicz, which are detailed in a book called Al-Kemi, written by an American artist called André VandenBroeck, a former friend and pupil of Schwaller. VandenBroeck says that Schwaller believed the ancient Egyptians and their predecessors had a knowledge system that would be unrecognizable by modern man, a different way of looking at things that gave them a unified perspective on the universe and human existence. This ancient system of knowledge, according to Schwaller, provided a “method of accelerating the pace of evolution.”¹

No details of this method are given, presumably because Schwaller didn’t have any. But it nevertheless struck a resonant chord in Wilson’s mind, because the possibility of speeding up the evolutionary processes, particularly those involved in the structure and development of consciousness, has, as he says, been the underlying theme of all his own work.

Significantly, Wilson has also written several pieces on the life and works of Gurdjieff, notably in his highly acclaimed first book The Outsider (1957), and in his encyclopedic classic The Occult (1973). In a later book, The War Against Sleep (1980), he describes Gurdjieff’s “system” as “probably the greatest single-handed attempt in the history of human thought to make us aware of the potential of human consciousness.”² The “sleep” referred to in the title is what both Wilson and Gurdjieff would describe as normal consciousness. This is the kind that sees most of us through every normal day, a kind of low-resonance state of awareness that, at its lowest level, keeps us from bumping into furniture, jumping red lights, or murdering one another wholesale, and, at its peak, enables us to rationalize, to be logical, and so on. And, of course, it doesn’t always work.

But what Gurdjieff, Schwaller, and Wilson all say is that there are other, higher states of consciousness that can be reached, and which were somehow attained by such as the ancient Egyptians. Wilson says as much in his introduction to From Atlantis to the Sphinx: that in his view the Egyptians understood “some secret of cosmic harmony and its precise vibrations, which enabled them to feel an integral part of the world and nature.”³

Drawing on an idea first presented by Robert Graves in his book The White Goddess, Wilson suggests that there are two fundamental kinds of knowledge—what Graves referred to as solar and lunar. Our modern type of knowledge, he says, is rational, solar, and works with words and concepts, fragmenting and dissecting everything by analysis. By contrast, the knowledge system of ancient civilizations Graves saw as lunar, or a form of perception based on intuition, which somehow grasped things as a whole.

As an illustration of this latter form of perception, Wilson quotes a passage from Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous, in which Gurdjieff explains to his pupils what he sees as the distinction between “real art” and “subjective art.” According to Gurdjieff, a subjective work of art is merely a random, arbitrary creation, usually conveying very different impressions to different people. Real art, on the other hand, is as objective as any systematic science and invariably creates the same impression in everyone who understands the basic principles of objective expression, or art imbued with real meaning. Gurdjieff said the Sphinx was an example of real art, and that he had seen many others on his wanderings across Asia. No doubt the Great Pyramid would also have been included among these examples, although, rather curiously, he makes little mention of it in his own writings. The point is, both the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid do, in fact, arouse the very same basic response in everyone, persisting into our times in the form of an acute sensation of awe and wonder.

In his lesson, Gurdjieff mentions one particular and rather mysterious work of “objective art,” a certain strange statue he and his fellow travellers encountered in the desert at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan. At first, they all thought it was simply an ancient depiction of a god or devil. But after a while he and his companions began to feel that this was no ordinary figure, and that its composition was in fact extremely intricate and revealing in its design and structure. Gurdjieff said that they gradually came to realize that there was in fact a complex system of cosmology embodied in this figure, in its legs, in its arms, in its head—everywhere. In the whole statue, he said, there was nothing accidental, no feature without meaning.

Subsequently this sudden awareness of the statue’s esoteric content seemed to induce in his group a different and unexpected kind of perception, through which, he says, they were not only able to understand the symbolism of the figure itself, but also, in some strange, “holistic” way, to feel the thoughts and emotions of the people who had created it thousands of years ago.

Gurdjieff was, in fact, an inveterate storyteller (a trait he seems to have inherited from his father, who was an ashok—a bard of some renown), and he may well have invented an imaginary statue here purely for the purpose of exposition. But what is important is what is being conveyed in this story: the idea that objective art is based on intuitive, “lunar” knowledge, and unlike ordinary art, presents the viewer with a complete and coherent picture of the content and meaning of the work.

Much of Wilson’s book, like Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods, is concerned with the great enigmas of the past, some of which we discussed briefly in the last chapter. But, in the final section, after a long and highly informative journey through ancient history and remote prehistory, he returns to the question that lies at the root of all of his writings: What is consciousness?

Wilson sees the two fundamental kinds of knowledge, solar and lunar, or rational and intuitive, as operating in different regions of the brain, which consists of two major hemispheres: right and left. The right hemisphere, our lunar side, is responsible for our intuitive processes; the left controls our rational thoughts, our modern, solar functions.

As an example of ancient man’s “right-brain” consciousness, which, he suggests, still exists in an attenuated form today in certain so-called primitive cultures, Wilson cites observations made by the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his book The Dance of Life (1983). Hall spent several years studying the religious and social customs of several Native American tribes, in particular the Quiché, who are direct descendants of the ancient Maya, and the Hopi and Pueblo. He discovered that to many of these peoples, time, as we know it, has no meaning. In fact, the Hopi have no word for it and, in their language, verbs have no tenses. They have no yesterday and no tomorrow, perceiving only an “eternal present,” in which time virtually stands still.

On reading this, I was immediately struck by this notion of an endless moment, because it sounded more than vaguely familiar. It suggests, in fact, that the shaman of the Hopi, like those of many other American tribes, are given to using some kind of hallucinogenic agent in certain of their ceremonies. Certainly their view of time—or the absence of it—is very reminiscent of the extratemporal impressions I had during my “experiments” in the sixties and seventies. It also brings to mind a point I made in the Introduction: that the religious and mystical writings of every major culture, from Egypt right through to Islam, all refer repeatedly to the timeless dimension of heaven.

This notion of timelessness is thus an important link between the psychedelic or shamanistic experience and the mystical revelation, and could provide us with a valuable insight into the true nature of rightbrain, lunar consciousness.

So what does it mean to experience only an “eternal present”? Can such a reality be defined in a way that even “left-brainers” can comprehend? I believe it can. In fact, as we shall see, modern science has already provided us with a mathematically verifiable model of such a definition.

Obviously, by its very nature, a “timeless” reality is difficult to rationalize, and so might easily be disregarded as the stuff of primitive imagination or temporary hallucinatory madness—too nebulous to be real. But then there is another, equally nebulous, manifestation of human consciousness that is accepted by practically everyone, and this is our intuitive capacity. Intuition is not a logical process, but everyone “knows” it exists. Indeed, science itself thrives on intuition; it has been responsible for some of the most important discoveries of the modern age. And so, today, as particle physicists probe deeper and deeper into the apparently illogical nature of matter, they are only too aware that intuition is one of the most effective tools they have.

This is an odd state of affairs, in that we are positing here a thought process shared, though perhaps to greatly varying degrees, by very different psychological types: by the physicist and the shaman, or by what Wilson calls the scientist, the modern thinker, and the artist, the high priest of ancient days. Obviously there is a little bit of the “lost” artist in every scientist; and, as the physicist’s probings become ever more surreal and intuitive, the artist’s presence grows in stature. Perhaps, then, this is evolution, the process whereby the artist and the scientist come to coexist in equal measures.

According to Gurdjieff and Schwaller, however, ancient man had far more extensive mental powers than we have today, which suggests that there has been more than a slight hiccup somewhere along the way, something that caused an involutionary trend in our development. If true, one wonders how this could have come about, how a people so highly evolved could suddenly just lose the initiative, fail to pass on their knowledge to their descendants, and all but disappear from man-kind’s race-memory.

One possible reason, as Hancock has suggested, is that there was some great catastrophe, possibly caused by the extreme conditions of the melt-down at the end of the last ice age, that left only a few survivors of the evolved race—an elite, highly resilient minority, castaways in a new and forbidding wilderness populated by fierce and fearful hunter-gatherers. It would have been virtually impossible for these survivors to have immediately passed on their vast wealth of knowledge to primitive tribes. Yet they realized that somehow, if the less fortunate peoples of this earth were to have any chance of evolving at anything other than a snail’s pace, this knowledge had to be kept alive. And this meant dealing with, and controlling, the majority population, whose manpower they needed to utilize in their concerted effort to build on a scale so vast that only another great cataclysm could wipe out all traces of their endeavors.

The myths of the Fourth Dynasty Egyptians and the ancient Native Americans both refer to these superior-minded survivors as gods possessed of supernatural powers. These were the gods of the First Time—the “golden age”—who planted the seeds of ultimate wisdom in the minds and hearts of our ancestors, the primitive natives. They created complex cosmological creation myths and subsequently disseminated them worldwide; they built great works of “objective art,” monuments with specific dimensions, orientations, and alignments that, once decoded, would reveal every aspect of their knowledge in precise and graphic detail. And this knowledge, wholly encapsulated in the Hermetic Code, was subsequently embodied in the measurements of pyramids and other megalithic structures all over the world, and in virtually every major religious scripture.

And so then they waited, these gods, for the population to evolve. Gods living in eternity can do that. Presumably they are still waiting, waiting for their seminal message to germinate and come to flower. And who knows? Maybe the current upsurge in awareness of the extraordinarily advanced ideas of our most ancient predecessors is the first sign of a new bloom.

Of course, this is just one historical scenario, and it doesn’t bring us any nearer to answering the question posed by Wilson, i.e., how might these gods have perceived the world?

Strange as it may seem, we may possibly find at least part of the answer not at the dawn of history, but at the very frontiers of modern science. We have already noted how scientists are becoming, as Graves might say, more and more “lunar” in their mode of thought. The modern scientist is not a god, but he has at least learned to use his intuition in his quest for the truth about reality. And what he has discovered, for example in the microcosmic world of the subatomic particle, is extremely interesting, because the reality now being described in scientific terms brings us full circle, right back to the visions of the Hopi, the hippie, and the Egyptian high priest.

“Down there,” in the world of the elementary particle, time has no quantifiable meaning, no value; it simply doesn’t exist. This is the real world we are talking about here, the world defined by physicists in precise mathematical terms. Therefore the Hopi, in a very real sense, have it exactly right: timelessness is the primary reality. More than that, the ancient Egyptians, I believe, realized this also, as is evidenced by this ancient poem referring to the god-king:

His lifetime is eternity,

the borders of his powers are infinity.⁴

Lofty thoughts indeed for a people whose ancestors of only five hundred years before were simple, wandering nomads. I shall have more to say on this “modern” notion of timelessness later.

But in fact, as we shall see, there are other crucial shamanistic concepts that are equally at home in the modern scientific mind. Consider this. The most important part of Hopi ceremonial life is the dance— hence the title of Hall’s book. He writes that if the dance is performed correctly, to the participants everything—the entire universe—“collapses, and is contained in this one event.” Thus the Hopi’s experience of this alternative reality is not only timeless, it is spaceless, and implies a dimension in which everything—time, space, matter—can collapse into a single conceptual “eternal moment.” Once again we have a close Egyptian parallel in the reference to the god-king quoted above, whose life span we noted was described as eternity, and the borders of whose powers are infinity. Endless time . . . infinite space. . . . And this is just for starters. Later, when we take a more detailed look at other scientific discoveries, we shall see how this “primitive” notion of spacelessness also has quite distinct echoes in the present day.

Many Native American tribes consider the earth to be a living, matriarchal being. Some believe that she becomes pregnant every spring and should therefore be treated gently. Thus they will remove steel shoes from their horses and modern shoes from their own feet for fear of breaking the surface of the earth. As Wilson says, such a notion is not simply an idea or belief, but “something they feel in their bones, so that an Indian’s relationship with the Earth is as intimate as his relationship with his horse. . . . To regard this as a ‘belief’ is to miss a whole dimension of reality.”⁵

Wilson believes that the ancient Egyptians shared a similar kind of intimacy with nature, and with the land and skies of the Nile valley, perhaps partly due to their close relationship with the life-giving River Nile, whose annual inundation occurred just as the star Sirius/Sothis returned to the early morning sky after seventy days spent below the horizon. These regular and important events would have ensured that the Egyptians remained very much in tune with their environment, with the earth, with the sky, and with the rhythmic unfolding of the seasons.

So what Wilson is saying is that Egyptian knowledge was not simply based on superstition, but on “a deeply experienced relationship with the earth and the heavens.”⁶ As with the Native Americans, this contact with the world about them was something the Egyptians felt in their bones, and what they felt was the rhythm of nature. Schwaller shared a similar view, stating that “every living being is in contact with all the rhythms and harmonies of all the energies in the universe.”⁷ But Schwaller also believed that modern man had lost touch with nature’s rhythms and harmonies, and when he speaks of ancient knowledge providing a method of speeding up the evolutionary process, he clearly associates this method with the reestablishment of man’s former, intimate relationship with nature.

Now, Schwaller’s ideas are sound enough to deserve consideration, but Wilson, while obviously sharing similar views, was prompted to pose the following question: “But is there any way to turn this rather vague and abstract statement into something more concrete and down to earth?”⁸

In my view, there is, a wholly practical way of looking at the processes of the development of consciousness, the very “secret of cosmic harmony and its precise vibrations” that Wilson believes the Egyptians possessed. The Hermetic Code, the musical theory of transcendental evolution embodied in Egyptian myth and religion, in the I Ching, and in just about every major religious doctrine known, fits the bill perfectly. Wilson doesn’t actually say as much, but he then goes on to devote several pages to an impartial commentary on my first book, including details of the close correspondences between the structure of the I Ching, the pi symmetry, and DNA and the genetic code. I have to say that his studied appraisal of the ideas presented in The Infinite Harmony is very gratifying—particularly so since, as far as I know, he is the only published writer to have broached them to date. Whether he agrees with everything I say is, of course, another matter. When I spoke with him prior to publication of his book he hinted then that there would be no committal, no outright endorsement of my ideas. Typically, he has been true to his word. Nevertheless, this now gives me an opportunity to strengthen my case by filling in some of the gaps left in his commentary.

As we have noted, the musical symmetry described by the Hermetic Code is echoed, note for note, in our very bones, in our DNA and in the genetic code. Through the world’s religions, mankind has been instinctively living out the basic principles of this code for thousands of years. This is because it is a perfectly natural thing to do; it is the way of creation. The trouble is that somewhere along the line we forgot why we were holding the seventh day sacred and acting out “passions.” We have had timely reminders of our sorry state from individuals like Moses, Christ, the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Muhammad, which have helped to keep “the faith” alive, but such has been our lot that we have tended always to forget and switch back over to automatic pilot. This is how a great work of “living music” like the I Ching can end up being used as little more than a pocket fortune-teller.

The Egyptians, I believe, never forgot, but consciously persisted in the application of the principles of the Hermetic Code as a complete mode of being, a “religion” in the fullest sense. This is how they were able to develop their acute sense of belonging with the world and so become increasingly more conscious in it. I think this is precisely the “method” Schwaller was looking for.

The remarkable thing about the Hermetic Code is that it is not only a blueprint for our inner development; it also has very definite cosmic applications that provide us with a direct link to what Schwaller called “all the rhythms and harmonies” of the universe. This is how.

The theory of transcendental evolution, as I have said, is based on the knowledge of the structure of the major musical scale, and the idea that all life evolves ever upward, as the notes in a developing octave evolve into higher, more resonant scales of existence. Going up, in other words, toward the stars. In a broad sense, the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution accords with this concept. Over billions of years, bacteria have evolved “upward” into single-celled organisms; they in turn have evolved into multicellular structures, and these have evolved into all the complex animal life forms existing today. This continuous chain of evolution, from the free-floating bacterium to the free-thinking human being, is a transcendental process involving a continuous succession of quantum leaps from one scale of existence into a greater scale above.

I’m not suggesting, of course, that the ancient Egyptians knew all about biomolecular events in the microcosm—at least, not through an accumulation of fragmented facts experimentally verified by prehistoric biologists and geneticists. What I am saying, however, is that the Egyptians probably took all this for granted, that they already intuitively understood what was going on inside them, or “down there.” As a matter of fact, the originator of the Hermetic Code—Thoth, Hermes, whoever—left us with one simple yet incredibly astute dictum that sums up the theory of transcendental evolution perfectly: “As above, so below.”

“Above” we have the Hermetic Code as expressed through the pi convention, 22/7, composed of three octaves, each of which is itself composed of three octaves, a total of sixty-four inner notes. “Below” we have the genetic code, whose structure is not merely similar to the Hermetic Code, but is identical right down to the very last detail. Not only that, but both codes, as we noted when discussing the I Ching in the introduction, share a common purpose, which is to facilitate the processes of creation, of evolution onto a higher scale of existence. In the case of the genetic code working within your body’s cells, this higher scale is represented by your whole being and, in particular, your mind. But in the case of the Hermetic Code operating within “cells” of some kind in an infinitely greater “body,” the next, higher scale must lie far beyond the confines of the brain, somewhere . . . up there.

The established neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, of natural selection through random mutation, attempts to explain only the evolutionary development of physical bodies in the local biosphere of our planet. It is an unfinished theory. The theory of transcendental evolution, however, gives us the whole picture; it tells us that the evolutionary chain of life doesn’t end with the human being struggling to survive in a competitive terrestrial environment. The truth is, where the ongoing evolution of mankind is concerned, as the Egyptians knew full well, the possibilities are limitless. That is, nature’s evolutionary processes, encoded within the musical structure of DNA and the genetic code, continue to evolve higher still, beyond the confines of the physical brain encased in the skull, into metaphysical scales of existence that ultimately encompass the entire universe.

We noted in the previous chapter that ancient man was intensely interested in the stars, in precession, and in immensely long cycles of time. Now we can see why. The ancient Egyptians weren’t simply admiring the view; they were staking their claim in the greater scale above, paving a way to heaven. Cosmology with a capital C.

In the world of computers, virtual reality, and endless information highways, the modern mind is more often than not inclined to look back on these times with superiority. Even today, historians continue to portray ancient Egyptians as manic “tomb builders,” highly gifted but superstitious stargazers, whose monumental architectural designs, however ingenious, are totally devoid of any esoteric meaning. But as we have seen, these remarkable people in fact had a complex cosmology superior even to our own, one that included within it the cosmologist himself.

Our modern cosmologists assiduously study everything “up there.” That is their job. What lies “below” is no concern of theirs. But this partial view presents problems, as with the Egyptologist who meticulously searches the sands for telltale shards of pottery and other fragments, but who knows nothing about astronomy. This is the tunnel vision of specialization that prevents many “experts” from seeing holistically. As a result of this imbalance, scientific knowledge has become segregated; it is not a part of our everyday lives. We might look up and think about astronomical questions occasionally, but on the whole our world is predominantly terrestrial, confined and circumscribed in relation to the vastness of the universe around us.

Now consider the world the ancient Egyptians inhabited, which not only included the land of their birth, but also the earth itself, the sun, moon, and planets, and even the ever-changing constellations. This is an all-encompassing vision. And the civilization capable of perceiving it showed its stature through the grandeur of this vision. The Egyptians had their sights set firmly on the heavens, their sole raison d’être being an intense, concerted effort to assist mankind on its transcendental journey to the stars, to the greater scale above. And to make absolutely sure that their message carried, they skillfully encoded the fundamental principles of their extraordinary life science in the dimensions, proportions, and alignments of massive stone monuments built with unsurpassable precision, many still acknowledged as the greatest man-made structures on earth.

As we shall see later, the cosmological perspective of Egyptian metaphysics is, in fact, the basis of ancient man’s entire belief system, and may even be, as many commentators now suspect to be the case, a legacy from an even earlier period of civilization existing in what we currently refer to as prehistory. But before we can ascertain how their musical method of self-development might have given them direct access to the greater cosmos, we first need to consider more earthly matters, which will be the subject of the next chapter. The main question arises from the established historical fact that virtually all of the cyclopean monuments created at the dawn of our history were built before the wheel was invented. So how was this accomplished?