3
Music over Matter
No one has yet convincingly explained how the architects and engineers of the ancient world managed to build on such a monumental scale. This applies equally to structures on both sides of the Atlantic, many of which have been shown to display remarkably similar design features. In the ancient city of Tiahuanaco in the Andes, as in Egypt, blocks weighing more than two hundred tons are commonplace. There is one construction block that has been estimated by Graham Hancock to weigh as much as 440 tons. Also in Peru, the citadels of Sacsayhuaman and Machu Picchu contain similar megalithic stones that have been cut and carefully positioned with a degree of precision that even modern construction engineers would be hard pressed to match.
Equally mysterious is the presence of truly giant pyramids on both continents. The Great Pyramid is arguably the most notable, being the largest solid stone edifice ever constructed by man, having a base area of over thirteen acres. However, the great Pyramid of the Maya at Cholula in Mexico, despite its core consisting not of blocks of stone but of rubble, is in fact more than three times as massive as the Great Pyramid. Its base covers an area of forty-five acres, making it easily the largest building on the planet.
Now, fashioning and carefully placing hundreds upon hundreds of huge blocks of stone to conform to precise geometrical and astronomical alignments is an art in itself, but the immense scale of these enterprises is not the only puzzle. There is also the question of how these craftsmen actually carved and cut the stone. William Flinders Petrie examined the red granite “sarcophagus” in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid and noted that it had been hollowed out to such a fine degree of accuracy that its external volume is exactly twice its internal volume. And this was achieved with one of the hardest stones on earth. The method used, according to Petrie, was some kind of tubedrilling mechanism, rather like a section of drainpipe with exceptionally hard teeth set into the rim. How such an implement might have been powered is a question that only compounds the mystery.
Petrie surmised that the sarcophagus itself had been cut from the mother block with a “saw” at least two and a half meters long, though no evidence of such an implement has ever been found—except for the serrated marks, of course. Petrie also found evidence of the use of circular saws and even lathes; but again, only the manufacturing marks on numerous stone artifacts remain as proof that such tools ever existed.
In any event, even if drills and lathes were in common use in ancient Egypt, this would not explain the discovery of a large number of hollowed-out basalt vases found in and around the Third Dynasty Saqqarah necropolis and dated to around 4000–3000 BCE. As Hancock describes in Fingerprints of the Gods, some of these elegantly curved vessels with widely flared interiors have long, slender necks too narrow for even a small finger to be inserted. And yet they have some-how been hollowed out with unbelievable precision.
It has been suggested by a modern toolmaker called Christopher Dunn, who has studied the baffling stonework of the Egyptians in some detail, that the craftsmen responsible for some of the work may have had a technology based on high-frequency sound. Basically Dunn believes that the workmen may have employed some kind of ultrasonic tool bit capable of vibrating at a rate thousands of times faster than a pneumatic drill. However, even if such a mechanism were used, as in the case of the proposed drills and saws and lathes mentioned above, we would have to assume that the Egyptians could somehow produce the power necessary to drive such devices.
Whatever may be the case, it is becoming increasingly evident that, contrary to the beliefs of orthodox archaeologists, the craftsmen responsible for some of these mysterious artifacts certainly did not use crude copper chisels, adzes, and simple wooden mallets to do the job. As Dunn has noted, these people were capable of producing smooth, flat surfaces on granite or basalt to an incredible accuracy of a thousandth of an inch or more. He demonstrated this to Robert Bauval in the Cairo Museum by placing a high-precision metal gauge against a side of the ancient relic known as the Ben-race-memory-Ben Stone and shining a light against the line of contact. That no light was visible from the other side indicates an engineering accuracy equal to that of the present day.
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Dunn’s idea of the use of high-frequency sound is that it implies the application of a concentrated form of resonance, the raw material of music, the principles of which, as we have seen, were the mainstay of Egyptian metaphysics. So possibly these people used their knowledge of cosmic harmony and vibrations to assess—or maybe “feel”—what kind of ultrasound frequency would be required to work a given material. After all, everything vibrates, resonates, and it may be that the Egyptians had found a way of creating sympathetic frequencies that depended not so much on a powerful energy supply but more on an understanding of the subtle, interrelated structures of these inherent symmetries.
Such a notion may at first seem somewhat abstract, but later we shall see that the Hermetic Code provides us with a rather ingenious description of the mechanism by which these “inner” symmetries can be understood. This is further supported by the ideas of Gurdjieff, some of which I shall be discussing in detail in chapter 12, and also by some of the ideas of a number of modern scientists in disciplines as diverse as clinical psychology, neurophysiology, and even that seemingly inviolable sanctum of all empirical science, nuclear physics.
Unfortunately Dunn’s ultrasound theory, if correct, would still not explain how such massive stones, such as those incorporated in the Valley Temple at Giza and the Osireion at Abydos, once cut and shaped, were then moved into position.
Colin Wilson has suggested that the builders might have employed a method similar to the popular party trick in which a subject sits on a chair and four volunteers place one finger underneath each armpit and knee and try to lift him or her. Without any preparation, the result is as one might expect, and the subject, unaffected, stays put. If, subsequently, the volunteers all place their hands on the top of the subject’s head, first their right hands and then their left hands, and then concentrate hard for a minute or so, when they simultaneously remove their hands and try once more, the subject can sometimes be lifted high off the ground with very little apparent effort. It’s as if four people concentrating in unison can somehow exert a new, much more powerful kind of force. One volunteer alone would find difficulty in lifting a quarter of the weight of a fully grown subject with a single index finger, yet four together can not only lift four times that weight, they can often do it with astonishing ease.
Wilson suggests that this “group-mind” phenomenon was possibly a basic way of life to the ancient builders of Egypt, who saw nothing extraordinary in moving great chunks of stone in this way, perhaps believing that the gods were making the blocks lighter, and that no special effort was required other than acting in unison, in harmony with one another.
With regard to the party trick mentioned above, one wonders whether the mind of the subject might also be involved. There is a certain amount of pressure on the subject’s head from the hands of the volunteers, and when that pressure is released the subject naturally feels a sensation of becoming suddenly lighter. If this were a contributory factor in the experiment, it would raise further questions relating to the raising of inanimate blocks of stone, which could not, one would assume, participate in the experiment in any way.
Extensive tests have, in fact, been conducted under laboratory conditions, the results of which indicate that psychokinesis, or the ability to affect physical objects with the mind, is in fact a statistically verifiable reality.
In a series of experiments conducted in the 1970s, Robert Jahn of the Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science and the clinical psychologist Brenda Dunne used an instrument called a random-event generator (REG) to test the psychokinetic abilities of a large number of volunteers. Triggered by the process of decay of a radioactive material, which is an unpredictable, natural process, a REG is an automatic selector—a “coin flipper”—that produces a completely random series of binary numbers. Volunteers were asked to sit in front of the device and concentrate on trying to make it produce an abnormally large number of either “heads” (1) or “tails” (2). Subsequently Jahn and Dunne’s results clearly showed that, simply by concentrating on the REG, the volunteers were able to influence the binary output to a small but statistically significant degree.
In another series of tests they used a kind of pinball machine in which 9,000 marbles were allowed to roll around 330 nylon pegs and cascade out of 19 exit holes into bins. Once again, over the course of many trials, they found that most of the subjects were able to produce a small but significant change in the average number of balls falling into each bin.
Jahn, a professor of aerospace sciences, was at first skeptical and reluctant to involve himself with these experiments, but he was eventually so impressed by the results that in 1979 he founded the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, where researchers have continued to produce strong statistical evidence in favor of the existence of psychokinesis. Furthermore, as the above-mentioned experiments have shown, it looks as though the ability to produce detectable psychokinetic influences is not limited to the few, but is something that most of us can do.
Another, rather more unusual example of psychokinetic abilities is that which physicists call the Pauli effect, where merely the presence of certain individuals appears to cause machinery and equipment to malfunction. The classic example is the eponymous physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who would often and unwittingly cause sensitive equipment to go wrong, or glass apparatus to explode, simply by being there.
This effect may be similar, though not identical, to the one I described in The Infinite Harmony, where the psychologist Carl Jung caused a piece of heavy furniture to split apart with a force that appeared to emanate from his solar plexus. Sigmund Freud actually witnessed the incident, but when Jung declared that he had somehow been responsible, Freud bluntly refused to believe it.
There are fundamental differences between this “Jung effect” and that of Pauli. First, Jung was conscious of it as it was happening, because the “force” caused his solar plexus to heat up; second, while Freud was shaking his head in disbelief, Jung, feeling the force build up once more, was able to predict that it would happen again. Within moments there was another loud crack and the wood splintered a second time.1
Obviously these examples are not quite the same as the party-trick phenomenon, which relies on the concerted, conscious effort of a group, but they at least serve to remind us that there is probably a great deal more to the power of the human psyche than its recognized potential for reasoning, inventing, conceptualizing, and so forth.
When considering the possibility of the “group-mind” technique, Colin Wilson is not implying that the architects of ancient Egypt actually levitated their megalithic blocks. Rather, he thinks that the cumulative power of “group consciousness” was an everyday reality to the Egyptians, and that apparent physical forces, when applied in concert by a given group in this way (perhaps orchestrated by priests uttering magical incantations), could somehow be magnified to an unusually high degree.
Now it so happens that there is a very close parallel to Wilson’s idea in the legends and myths of the ancient Greeks. The Pythagorean philosophers, who clearly inherited their hermetic or “musical” knowledge from Egyptian sources, had a name for this “group consciousness,” homonoia, which translates as a “union of minds.” This state could be achieved, they believed, by emulating the divine actions of the god Apollo and the nine muses, the patrons of all the arts. Significantly, Apollo himself was depicted as the supreme musician, and the word music, derived from the word muse, originally referred to all aspects of learning. According to the Greeks, through this kind of harmonious union of minds, mankind could literally change the world.
The Pythagoreans believed that their mythological heroes and gods— including Pythagoras himself—were able to play special forms of music that could directly affect both sentient beings and non-sentient things. Orpheus, for example, is said to have moved rocks and even mountains with the power of his music; and another legendary hero, Amphion, with only his lyre moved rocks and stones to construct the walls of the ancient city of Thebes.
Interestingly there are exact parallels between these and some legends of the peoples of the pre-Columbian Americas. For example, one Mayan legend says that the construction of the Pyramid of the Magician at Uxmal in Yucatán was a relatively simple affair, that all the builders had to do was “whistle and the heavy blocks would move into place.”2 Another tradition tells how the blocks used in the building of the city of Tiahuanaco in the Andes were “carried through the air to the sound of a trumpet.”3
In his book In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky recounts a talk given by Gurdjieff concerning the literal truth of these musical myths. Gurdjieff states that “objective music,” as he calls it, cannot only destroy, as in the case of Jericho, but also create. Orpheus disseminating knowledge simply by playing the lyre is cited as an example, and further, he says, there could be such music as would freeze water, or even kill a man instantaneously.
Though not quite so dramatic, we see examples today of music, or sound vibrations, having a direct effect on people and things. Most people have heard of the soprano’s voice that, when pitched at a given level, can shatter a glass. Of course, a glass is an inanimate object, but certain sounds can also have a dramatic effect on people.
In particular, a new innovation in surgery known as high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) involves using powerful beams of ultrasound as a “virtual scalpel” that allows surgeons to operate deep inside the human body and to target very accurately and destroy malignant tumors. The precision of this technique is such that, unlike established cancer treatments like radiotherapy and chemotherapy, the operation can be carried out without damaging any of the surrounding tissue. And there are no apparent side effects. Early trials have proved very promising. To date, almost one hundred people in Britain have been treated with ultrasound for liver cancer, with positive preliminary results.4
Another example is the kind of sound that has recently been employed by a Swedish manufacturer of burglar alarms. It resembles that excruciating sound of a nail scraping down a blackboard, but not just one nail, many of them, with the sound magnified to an intolerable degree. Subjects in trials invariably ran out of the sound room within seconds, while those who tried to stick it out reported feeling physically sick. The maximum time anyone cared to endure it for was around fifty seconds. Personally I have not heard the sound produced by this diabolical machine, but I have been around enough blackboards to know that I certainly don’t want to. I only have to sit here and imagine it and I can literally make my teeth go on edge. This kind of “music” might not directly kill you, but, if prolonged, it could very possibly drive you mad enough to do the deed yourself.
In one of his own books, Beelzebub’s Tales, in chapter 41, “The Bokharian Dervish,” Gurdjieff speaks about a demonstration of “objective music” given to him by cave-dwelling ascetics in the mountains of Central Asia. During the course of the experiment, which involved playing obscure sequences of notes on an elaborately modified piano, he watched as a large abscess rapidly appeared on the leg of one of those present. When another series of notes was subsequently played, the abscess, which evidently caused the subject very real pain and discomfort, mysteriously faded away. In another demonstration, fresh flowers were made to wither and die within minutes.
Of course, the ancient musical legends describing the extraordinary abilities of master stonemasons could be pure fiction, although it is difficult to understand why so many identical myths—and there are many—should have emerged in such widely separated regions. And then we have the amazing architectural evidence itself, in sites the world over, which demonstrates a superior and currently inexplicable technological proficiency in the handling of stone.
All this actually proves nothing, however, and those of a scientific turn of mind will feel that such tales of “musical magic” are either allegorical, or that they are simply the stuff of imagination and superstition. Perhaps so. But even those at the cutting edge of scientific enquiry would agree that all their sacred laws are not yet written. There is currently in circulation a whole new batch of fantastic ideas concerning the nature of universal reality. These range from the macroworld of chaos and complexity theories implying an underlying cosmic unity, to the microworlds of superstrings and inter-penetrating loops in which even so-called empty space is seen as a woven fabric of unimaginably fine threads of . . . well, something or other. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, there is no end to the ingenuity and imagination of scientists intent on discovering the “theory of everything.”
Given such an open-ended scientific view of the world, it would seem that there is still time and space enough to accommodate the ancient notion of “musical magic.” After all, this “primitive superstition” has already found expression in the field of biochemistry, where we see that the respective musical symmetries of the genetic code and the Hermetic Code are identical in every respect. So then we hear that the people who first revealed the Hermetic Code also believed in the power of a strange kind of music that could “enchant” just about everything: trees, wild beasts, even rocks of the hardest stone. We can see how this could apply to trees and wild beasts, because the very essence of both the animal and vegetable kingdoms is music; it is the genetic code, which “enchants” just about every living thing. Rocks are another matter; they are not imbued with life as we know it. Could it be, then, that they are imbued with some form of life as we don’t know it? This is what the mythmakers say.
The Greek philosopher Thales, reputedly one of the teachers of Pythagoras, taught that the whole universe was alive and that even inanimate things like rocks and mountains possessed psychic attributes. The “builder gods,” Orpheus and Amphion, were said to have had the ability to tune in to this elemental consciousness, and so persuade inanimate objects to do their bidding. This notion could easily be discarded as simply another example of primitive superstition, until we learn that the idea that elementary atoms of matter might possess some kind of awareness of the world about them is now being seriously considered by physicists. Later we shall be exploring this newly discovered “quantum” reality in more detail. As we shall see, many of the scientific discoveries relating to this microcosmic wonderland may not, in fact, be quite as new and radical as most scientists believe.
Thus, according to Thales, the ancient builders of Egypt did not see things in the same way as we do. To them, everything was to some degree alive, conscious, “psychic.” Interestingly, this is an idea that is reflected quite clearly in the long-standing traditions of the great Indian yogi masters, many of whom are reputed to have possessed psychokinetic and telepathic powers.
The eminent Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, echoing Thales, stated that psychokinesis is possible only because matter is to some extent conscious. If matter were truly inert and lifeless, there would be no conceivable means of contact between the thinker and the object. Further, if a single point in the universe possessed zero consciousness, he said, then the whole universe itself would have to be unconscious.
Similarly, in his book Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramhansa Yogananda describes meeting numerous yogi masters who could materialize and dematerialize their own bodies and other objects at will. He claimed that such holy men can actually move at the speed of light and utilize “creative light rays” to bring into instant visibility any physical manifestation.5 Obviously Yogananda was referring here to a more subtle form of materiality than sandstone or granite, and this is a difficult concept for our logical minds to accept. But the world of the Indian yogi, like that of the Hopi shaman, is primarily a world of the mind, an alternative reality in which psychokinesis is seen as a perfectly accessible human function. This kind of abstract notion might seem far removed from the question of building with megalithic blocks of stone, but there is, nevertheless, an extremely important link between Yogananda’s view of the phenomenon of “creative” light and that of the ancient Egyptians, a link fundamental to our understanding of the whole cosmology of ancient man. We shall shortly be looking at this crucial connection in some detail.
Now, I’m not suggesting for a moment that buildings like the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx enclosure were simply “thought up” by gods, at least not without human intervention. But from the evidence at hand I feel reluctant to accept the uncompromising view of orthodox archaeologists who insist that there was nothing unusual about the methods of construction employed. Many of the stone blocks used by these ancient builders, remember, are several hundred tons in weight. The largest so far identified is the massive, free-standing foundation stone of the Temple of Baalbek in Lebanon, which is estimated to weigh a staggering 1,200 tons. Cutting and shaping a megalith of such monumental proportions is in itself an accomplishment that makes the patchwork concrete and steel structures of modern builders look positively Lilliputian, but then to move this block hundreds of meters to its present location is a technical maneuver that practically defies belief. The most powerful lifting gear used in the modern construction industry can lift hundreds of tons, and a trained team of workers have to spend weeks preparing the ground of the proposed site beforehand, examining the subsurface, leveling, laying down hard core, and so forth. Yet here we have a single, free-standing megalith whose estimated mass is over twice the maximum lifting capacity of even the most modern boom-crane. This in itself does not, of course, constitute proof of the use of paranormal powers on the part of the people who executed this remarkable feat, but it nevertheless raises fundamental questions concerning the orthodox view, that this block was moved purely by conventional means.
Colin Wilson, as we noted, has suggested that the “group consciousness” technique might have been employed in the manipulation of such blocks. He believes that the builders still used conventional means of construction—ramps, rollers, levers, ropes, and the like—but that the real power behind these methods emanated from the collective “vibrations” of the “group mind.” And this is precisely what is being implied by the Pythagoreans’ notion of a state of homonoia. To these thinkers, as with their Egyptian forerunners, homonoia, a collective unification of mind, body, and spirit, was an attainable reality. They believed that, when totally synchronized—as it apparently was in the old mystery schools of Orphic origin—the psychic energy generated in this way could somehow be used directly to influence matter, even gargantuan lumps of hard rock.
As Jahn and Dunne have demonstrated through their extensive tests, statistically discernible psychokinetic powers can be exhibited today by perfectly normal subjects using nothing more than their ordinary concentration. In other instances, such as the Pauli and Jung effects mentioned earlier, the results are sometimes dramatic, but often erratic and uncontrolled. Nevertheless, there are thousands of accounts from every age describing the paranormal powers of gifted individuals: in the legends of the builders of antiquity, in the scriptures of virtually every major religion, and in the many stories of the lives of saints and “psychics” the world over. Even supposing that many of these accounts might have been invented for effect or whatever, one feels that it would be stretching credulity too far to presume that there wasn’t a single grain of truth anywhere in the vast store of literature on the subject.
In the party-trick phenomenon, in which a set of minds enter into a homonoic state, it seems as if the cumulative force so generated is considerably greater than the sum of its parts. The volunteers being raised in this kind of experiment can often be lifted high off the ground with such disproportionate ease that they seem almost to be floating. And if this same method could also be used effectively on inanimate objects, then possibly, given the right circumstances, a large mass would require relatively few people to shift it. This is interesting, because it may provide a possible answer to a puzzling question raised by John Anthony West in a 1992 documentary film about Robert Schoch’s investigations into the weathering of the Sphinx enclosure. West noted that the enclosure, which is surrounded by steep-sided natural bedrock, is relatively small in view of the enormous size of the stone blocks that had to be maneuvered within it. There would have been insufficient room for teams of workers large enough even to drag a two-hundred-ton block, let alone lift it. If, however, something like the “group-mind” technique were the force behind their ropes and levers, a force considerably greater than the sum of its parts, then the paucity of working space might not have been a problem.
In any event, we have already ruled out the use of massive lifting devices and excessively large numbers of manual workers, so there has to be some other explanation: the “group-mind” technique, which, as we know, works on living subjects, is at least a theoretical possibility. And, as we have noted, something very similar was involved in the early Greek concept of a joint state of homonoia through which, it was believed, mankind could ultimately transcend to greater things, some kind of collective psychological harmony acquired via a thought system based, according to the Greeks, on the music played by the god Apollo. And this “music,” the art of the muses, was not simply concerned with the theoretical aspects of the science of harmonics—that is, the systematic definition by the Pythagoreans of the mathematical structure of the major musical scale—but also with an awareness of the greater cosmic order, with knowledge of the principles and practical applications of the Hermetic Code. It is this concept, I believe, that in some mysterious way lies at the root of the special form of music played by the heroes, Orpheus and Amphion, by the stonemasons of ancient Egypt, and by the “builder gods” of Central and South America.
So did these people really possess supernatural powers? We may possibly never know, but we are certain that they possessed extraordinary abilities. By the uninitiated, these highly advanced skills could easily have been construed as magic. Of course, the exact methods of construction used in ancient Egypt elude us still, and we ourselves, for all our accumulation of technological expertise, are left in a position not dissimilar to that of the early propagators of ancient myth, who evidently witnessed the actions of this highly developed people, but did not fully comprehend what they saw. Modern observers, who do not, by and large, believe in magic, obliquely refer to this forgotten science as the use of “unknown techniques.”
We noted earlier that all around the world there are legends and myths speaking of a time long ago when godlike civilizers used the power of music to build the first cities. According to such stories, these mysterious builders could move great blocks of stone simply by creating special forms of sound, by playing musical instruments, whistling, singing, or whatever. In Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru, and in numerous regions in Central Asia, where these legends abound, there is a single common factor that gives credence to all of them: the hard evidence, in all of these locations, of buildings incorporating truly gigantic stone blocks.
In his book Gods of Eden, Andrew Collins devotes three chapters to the subject of what he calls sonic technology, citing some of the mythological accounts already quoted, but including also accounts of travelers to Tibet in the first half of the twentieth century who witnessed the apparent levitation of stone blocks actuated by monks using numerous, specially contrived sound instruments. Published in the 1950s by a Swedish engineer, Henry Kjellson, one of these accounts concerns another Swede, a certain Dr. Jarl, who was invited by a Tibetan acquaintance to visit him at his monastery near Lhasa.
One day during this visit Jarl accompanied about 240 monks to a nearby meadow adjacent to a high cliff face. About 250 meters up the cliff was an entrance to a large cave, on the outer ledge of which were several other monks. Forty or so of the monks assembled below took up strategic positions in slightly more than a 90-degree arc around a large, cupped, stone platform. They then began to prepare a large number of instruments: thirteen drums, of varying size, with a skin at one end and open at the other, and six “ragdons,” described as three-meter-long trumpets. Subsequently a large stone about one and a half meters in length and one meter in height and width was dragged by yak to the cupped stone platform and manhandled onto it by attendant monks. The musicians then began playing, at first slowly and rhythmically, apparently “pointing” their instruments at the stone at the apex of the triangular shaped assembly. Gradually the noise from the drums and trumpets increased and then the tempo sped up so quickly that Jarl lost track of any rhythm. His account of what happened next sounds like pure fantasy. Allegedly the stone in focus at first began to wobble and then it rose from the ground with a rocking motion. As it rose, the drums and trumpets were tilted upward, aimed constantly toward the stone, which continued to rise in a long parabolic arc, until it ultimately crashed down with considerable force onto the ledge at the mouth of the cave, 250 meters up the nearby cliff face. For much of that day Jarl watched as the process was repeated five or six times an hour.6
As if. This is the response I would expect from most of you. Indeed, on first reading this account I experienced the same old knee-jerk reaction myself, living as I do in a predominantly secular environment, where “miracles” such as the one just described occur only in fairy tales. But at the back of my mind, I have this confounding piece of evidence, an undeniably real artifact, whose very existence gnaws at the core of my reason. This is the 1200-ton stone megalith of the Temple of Baalbek in Lebanon, a perfectly shaped block almost twenty-five meters in length, with a mass nearly two and a half times greater than anything that could be lifted by the largest boom-crane on Earth. At some period in ancient history, long predating the Greek structures on the site and before even the simple wheel had been invented, this veritable monster was somehow transported several hundred meters from the quarry of its origin to its present location high above sea level. Three comparatively smaller stones, each weighing something approaching 600 tons, were also carved and transported with it.7
So we have hard evidence, great, monstrous lumps of solid stone standing as high as five-story houses, which attests to a stone-raising technology vastly more sophisticated than our own. We might expect that modern engineers could, given sufficient time and funds, build a boom-crane capable of raising such a mass upward, but by what conceivable means could they then, without the application of the wheel, apply a sideways motion to these megaliths, covering not just a few yards, but hundreds of meters of undulating terrain? It seems to me that until the experts can come up with a plausible answer to this great mystery, we would do well to keep an open mind as to the methods used.
The above story of the mysterious Dr. Jarl and the Tibetan monks, however improbable, at least fits the bill, because it attests to a stone-raising technology that relies not on ropes, wheels and pulleys, but on purposefully created vibrations of sound. Furthermore, if Jarl’s account is genuine, it seems that there may have been more to the events he witnessed than simply the use of sonics. He describes, for example, how the two hundred or so monks not directly involved with playing the instruments stood in rows eight to ten deep behind the arc of musicians, carefully following the flight path of the stone blocks as they rose up toward the cliff face. Jarl was unable to establish their true role in the proceedings, suggesting that they could have been either trainees or replacement players, or that they were engaged in the kind of “group-mind” enterprise discussed earlier in this chapter, meaning that they were effectively using some kind of psychokinesis to direct the flight of the stones.
Jarl’s entire account is very sober and detailed, recording numbers, distances, angles, dimensions, and even technical specifications relating to some of the instruments themselves. As Collins says, not unreasonably in my opinion, there seems to be too much detail in this report for it to be dismissed as total fantasy.
Collins goes on to cite another account recorded by Kjellson, that of an Austrian filmmaker by the name of Linauer who also visited a Tibetan community sometime in the 1930s. Here again we have a very detailed account describing the use of custom-made instruments of sound—in this case a large gong made of gold, iron, and brass and a stringed instrument, also made of different metals and shaped something like a large mussel shell, which apparently was not played as such, but somehow worked in conjunction with the low, short-lived sound vibrations emitted by the gong. Collins suggests that the “silent” stringed instrument may have transmuted the sound of the beaten gong into the ultrasonic range, which somehow caused the effects allegedly witnessed by Linauer. He reported that when these two instruments were activated they enabled the monks to lift heavy stone blocks with just one hand and very little apparent physical exertion. Linauer was also told by the monks that similar instruments existed that could actually disintegrate physical matter. This brings to mind Gurdjieff’s claim that “objective music” could do unimaginable things, freeze water, for example. More ominously, it could make flowers wither and die within minutes, cause physical aberrations to manifest rapidly in the structure of physical organisms, or even, as in the case of the warrior patriarch Joshua’s assault on Jericho, cause great stone walls to disintegrate, to crash to the ground in pieces.
In chapter 6 of his book, Collins further examines evidence in sacred buildings all over the world of an extraordinary knowledge of acoustics.
In Mexico, for example, there is the nine-stepped pyramid known as the Castillo, a temple dedicated to Viracocha/Kukulcan, which is one of the main structures of the Mayan complex at Chichén Itzá in north Yucatán. If you stand at the foot of this pyramid and shout, the sound vibrations echo and transmute into an eerie shriek that emanates from the top of the building. Alternatively, if you speak in a normal voice while standing on the summit, you can be heard quite clearly by people on the ground as much as 150 meters away.
Similar strange acoustic properties have been identified in the nearby Great Ball Court, a large field 160 meters in length, flanked by two temples, where a faint whisper at one end can be heard quite easily from the opposite end.8
There are further examples of unusual acoustic properties in other Mayan structures. One is the Temple at Tulum on the Yucatán coast, which gives off a long, low howling sound when the wind is at a certain velocity and blowing in a particular direction. Another intriguing example is the Temple of the Magician at Uxmal, built, according to Mayan legend, by a mysterious race of dwarfs who only had to whistle in order to make the heavy blocks of stone rise into the air.9 If you stand at the base of this pyramid and clap your hands, the sound emerges from the top as an eerie chirping, quite unlike the original sound vibrations. At another famous site at Palenque, which consists of three principal pyramids, it is possible for three people to stand one at the top of each of them and engage in a three-way conversation.
Possibly Collins’s most interesting observations concern Egypt, and in particular the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. Many observers have noted how voices sounded in this chamber have unusually resonant properties. It is as if this effect, among many others of course, was intentionally created. Collins suggests that this unusual sound property might have something to do with the fact that the “Pythagorean” 3–4– 5 triangle is incorporated into the chamber’s whole design.
This fact can be observed by describing a diagonal from one lower corner of the end wall up to the opposite top corner, which, if the baseline of the floor is included, results in a perfectly proportioned 3–4–5 triangle. The same applies to the huge block of granite incorporated in the wall immediately above the entrance to the chamber. The fact that the chamber is exactly twice as long as it is wide means that the 3–4–5 symmetry is an intrinsic feature of its whole structure.10
As Collins notes, this particular geometrical configuration expresses three significant harmonic proportions that together produce the keynote in a major scale, as with the notes (based on the scale of C major) D (re), E (mi), and G (so), for example, which generate the vibrations of the keynote C, i.e., the magical Do, which appears at the beginning and the end of every major scale. The combined frequencies of these three notes relate to one another in the same way as the combined ratios of the 3–4–5 triangle.
The red granite “sarcophagus” in the chamber also possesses unusual acoustic properties. When Flinders Petrie organized a team of workmen to lever one end of the sarcophagus up off the ground some twenty centimeters, so that he could take accurate measurements of its dimensions, he just happened to strike the tilted coffer with a hard implement and was impressed by the deep, resonant sound it produced, rather like a bell.
Another interesting feature of this coffer is that its external volume is exactly twice that of the internal volume. And this ratio of 2:1, as we noted, corresponds to the length of the entire chamber in relation to its width. In musical terms, of course, this proportion is highly significant, because it expresses the ratio between the two extreme notes of the major musical scale, where the last note, Do, of the octave vibrates at twice the frequency of the first note, also Do. In view of the vast number of possible variables in dimensions that the builders could have opted for, I think we can reasonably assume that these proportional symmetries did not occur simply by chance. Indeed, given the fact that the Hermetic Code was the central theme of Egyptian metaphysics, one would be extremely surprised and puzzled if such harmonic proportions were not present, in the King’s Chamber or anywhere else. The whole of the Great Pyramid itself, remember, is a massive representation of the pi symmetry, the “trinity of octaves,” so it would have been perfectly natural for the designers to have incorporated expressions of the same musical system in its most impressive internal features.
In a later chapter we shall be looking again at these lost techniques of the builders of the Giza necropolis. As I have said, I believe these methods were based on a complete understanding of the universal harmonies described by the Hermetic Code, but this in itself remains a rather abstract idea, a bit like the hippie notion of tuning in to “good vibrations” as a means of inducing a sense of well-being. There is much more to the Hermetic Code than that, however. It is a universal formula with many facets, and certain of them, as we shall see, are by no means vague or abstract, but scientific in every sense of the word. But in order to appreciate the full implications of this belief system, we first have to examine some of the wider applications of the code itself.
Finding a theory capable of unifying the whole body of our empirical knowledge into a coherent whole—a “theory of everything”—is currently the ultimate scientific goal. Now, I’m no specialist, but after a great deal of painstaking thought and deliberation, I have come to believe that the Hermetic Code could well be what we are searching for—the answer to practically all of our most fundamental questions on life and the universe. Obviously this is hardly a minor claim in the great evolutionary debate, but throughout my years of questing I have always borne in mind that I am propagating here not my ideas, but those of the enigmatic “god of wisdom” Hermes/Thoth, one of the greatest minds ever to have existed.
In order to appreciate just how far-reaching this belief system really is, we must for the time being return to the present and examine some of the fundamental discoveries of modern science. Some of the concepts about to be discussed are extraordinary to say the least, and may at first seem difficult to grasp, illogical even. But there will be no mathematics involved here—we need only have a general idea of the nature of the strange world now being described by scientists, enough to enable us to compare it with the star-strung universe of the Egyptian high priest. Therefore, as a starting point, we shall be looking into the nature of what is perhaps the most important and familiar phenomenon in existence. This is light, the “creative rays,” which, Yogananda claimed, could somehow be manipulated by the trained mind of the yogi. This is saying, in effect, that there is some kind of accessible interface between mind and light.
Now these “creative rays” are actually composed of what are today known as light quanta, or photons, subatomic components classified as “virtual” particles, which means that they have no measurable mass. As we shall see in the following chapter, photons have been shown to exhibit some strange, almost ghostlike properties. And they are not alone: there are, down in the physicist’s microworld, other minute components engaging in paranormal activities, in particular electrons, the particles that give all infinitesimally small atomic nuclei a hard, voluminous outer shell and hence the property of materiality as we know it. Moreover, the photon, as well as existing in the form of visible light and other rays of the electromagnetic spectrum, is also the “force carrier” of all electromagnetic interactions, which means all interactions between particles of matter, between electrons. In other words, when matter forms or decomposes by interacting with environmental conditions, it does so through the constant emission and absorption of photons. Light, therefore, as well as being a type of radiation capable of inducing in us visual sensation, is also the universal agent of change. Therefore if Yogananda’s claim is correct, that these “creative rays” can somehow be influenced by the trained mind, we already have a possible explanation as to how psychokinesis might work.
Yogananda, who always followed closely the progress of modern science, noted that the word “impossible” was becoming less prominent in man’s vocabulary. That was back in 1946. Since then it seems to have disappeared altogether, leaving in its stead a plethora of “improbabilities.” Physicists know that, in the quantum world of subatomic particles, the impossible can and does happen. For example, it has been discovered that certain categories of virtual particles are created out of “nothing” in what most people think of as “empty space,” borrowing energy from some unidentifiable cosmic storehouse only to disappear without trace nanoseconds later after paying back the energy loan. Billions of these massless entities are apparently popping into and out of existence in every cubic centimeter of space in a manner that might reasonably be described as ghostlike. So if you don’t yet believe in the paranormal, either talk to a physicist or turn the page.