16
The Shapeshifters
In this era of scientific rationalism, the subject of psychokinesis is, not surprisingly, a virtual nonstarter. Even though we frequently hear or read about individuals who have, or have had, supernatural powers, very few people have actually seen, or even laid claim to seeing, proof of such things. So if we exclude party tricks, table-turning, spoon-bending, fakirs on beds of nails, and other such forms of light entertainment, there is really very little in the way of what we might call the genuine paranormal in the day-to-day life of modern man. But possibly this is simply a sign of the times: the overt rationalism of science over the last few centuries may have dulled our extrasensory abilities almost to the point of atrophy. As Ouspensky said, phenomena of a higher order seem to require a certain degree of emotional energy for their observation and study, and this would automatically preclude ordinary experimental methods. This is not to say, of course, that scientists as a whole are unfeeling, only that experimental observers’ personal level of inner development, including their emotional state, is not yet considered an essential factor in objective scientific investigation.
Paradoxically, however, quantum physics, the quintessential science of rationalists, is a veritable hotbed of the paranormal, with its non-locality, superconductivity, and the peculiar phenomenon known as “quantum tunneling,” which involves specterlike virtual particles popping up everywhere, out of nowhere, only to disappear again nanoseconds later, leaving no measurable trace.
In the quantum world, practically anything is possible, even if highly improbable, so why not so in the meso- and macrocosmic worlds, where everything is, after all, made up of quantum systems, and where exactly the same laws of physics apply?
Obviously individual quantum effects are too small to leave observable traces on ordinary sense-objects. A chair remains pretty much the same chair no matter how many “nonlocal” photons are absorbed or reflected by it. If the chair behaved like a single microcosmic entity— like an atom of some kind—things might be very different. It could be a chair one moment, a shimmering mass of waves and interference patterns the next, or perhaps both things at once. Alternatively, if our atom-chair were to interact with a single photon, it might suddenly change into another kind of chair, one of a different color perhaps, or of a different materiality.
We noted previously how superconductivity belies experimental logic: the conductor may suddenly and inexplicably change its state entirely. Under normal conditions a superconductor is simply a mass of typical quanta: protons, neutrons, and electrons; whereas in its supercooled state, the whole entity subsequently begins to behave like a single unified system with quite extraordinary properties. So superconductivity is in fact a paranormal phenomenon. The conductor itself, although made of exactly the same stuff as you or me, is a conduit, leading, quite literally, to a higher dimension, in which a given electric current, in meeting absolutely zero resistance—the ultimate passive state—can potentially flow on to infinity.
Admittedly this kind of observation still leaves us very little to go on in our quest for evidence of psychic powers. But if today the paranormal is conspicuous principally by its absence, this does not seem to have been the case in ages long past. The scriptures, for example, by which I mean the major bodies of religious and esoteric wisdom, all speak of the miraculous as if, at one time, it was almost commonplace. Similarly, the legends and myths surrounding the great civilizing heroes of the dawn of history—Osiris and Thoth in Egypt; Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, and Kukulkan in the Americas; the Aryan Manu, Fu-hsi of Chinese tradition; or Orpheus and Amphion in Greek legend—all feature these figures’ supernatural powers. Half men, half gods, these civilizers could apparently move mountains. Certainly they must have been tough cookies to have survived the most geocataclysmic period in the history of Homo sapiens sapiens, not only the bitter climate of the last ice age, but also its final, rapid meltdown and the subsequent catastrophic flood.
This alone is a remarkable achievement, but this giant of a race not only outlived a seemingly endless hell on earth, they then went on to build like giants, leaving a wealth of archeological evidence as proof of their still unexplained mastery of stoneworking. Such individuals must have been the most organized, resilient, and resourceful ever to have existed. No time then for squabbles, fighting over possessions, petty neuroses, or living in the past. Life was serious, and for a person to have survived the deluge would have required, as a matter of course, nerves of steel, an unswerving will, a mind as clear as crystal. A quantum mind, perhaps, the kind that sees the world—and its pitfalls—non-locally: that is, from all sides at once, from “above,” so to speak, from the plane of light, or even from the perspective of dimension six, the ultimate vantage point.
What dangers might such a mind face? Possibly only one: the Fall described in the Hebrew Scriptures and other ancient texts, the fall from grace, from overarching, “nonlocal” consciousness to the ordinary time-laden psychological currency of today.
Significantly, there is an old Native American text indicating that the great civilizers definitely did see things in a way very different from our own. This passage comes from the Popul Vuh, the sacred book of the Maya. The italics are my own:
They saw and instantly they could see far; they succeeded in seeing; they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. The things hidden in the distance they saw without first having to move. Great was their wisdom; their sight reached to the forests, the rocks, the lakes, the seas, the mountains, and the valleys.1
This describes, quite clearly, perception of a nonlocal kind, a mind that “sees” at a great distance as if there were no intervening space. Their sight “reached to” everything, as if from all sides at once.
Upon first reading this text, I was immediately struck by the similarity between the kind of “sight” with which the Mayan gods were empowered, and the telepathic experiences of Ouspensky, during which, it may be recalled, he was not only able to communicate with Gurdjieff, but also simultaneously to “see” him sitting in his train compartment, heading for Moscow.
The text of the Popul Vuh continues, describing the mysterious fall from grace of this race of supermen, who had evidently displeased the gods. A divine order was duly proclaimed: “Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth.”2 And then: “Their eyes were covered and they could see only what was close; only that was clear to them.”3
But before the Fall, these people, according to legend, could not only see non-locally, they also had awesome psychokinetic powers, induced through special forms of music, with which they were able to move gigantic blocks of stone as if they were made of polystyrene. There is no direct evidence to support the mythmakers’ version of the methods used then, before even the wheel and the pulley were invented. Nevertheless, according to widespread archaeological evidence, ancient builders possessed a level of expertise that seems eerily out of step with the established history of architecture.
Remember, in what are probably the oldest known buildings in Egypt—the Sphinx and Valley Temples and the Oseirion temple near Abydos—the average size of the limestone blocks is a staggering two hundred tons. These enormous blocks have been positioned one on top of another with extreme precision, yet the Sphinx enclosure, confined within an area enclosed in natural bedrock from which the statue itself was carved, would have been too small to admit a large number of workmen during construction of the adjacent temples. It is now accepted by the more progressive members of the archaeological community—at least in private—that the Oseirion and the temples of the Sphinx enclosure may predate the Fourth Dynasty by a considerable length of time. It seems as if, the further back you go, the more impressive and baffling the buildings are. Nevertheless, the Egyptians of the Third and Fourth Dynasties, the successors of these mysterious master-builders, also displayed spectacular stone-handling skills.
The Great Pyramid speaks volumes, of course, with its sheer magnitude and precision. The finely dressed and precisely positioned granite blocks hauled high up into the King’s Chamber each weigh upwards of thirty tons. The chamber’s mathematical exactitude is also interesting, particularly in light of the musical theory of transcendental evolution. Being exactly twice as long as it is wide, it gives rise to the ratio 2:1, which is the ratio that defines the first and last notes of the octave. Another interesting fact is that the GP itself, as well as having the familiar classical pi relationship incorporated in its dimensions and proportions, also appears to embody the “Greek” value of phi, which naturally occurs in the relationship between the Great Pyramid’s base and the length of its apothem or slope; that is, half the base length is in the ratio 1:1.618 with the length of the apothem. Phi, like pi, is an irrational number (1.61083); the geometrical proportion derived from it—known to the Greeks as the Golden Section—was considered by the Pythagoreans to have a particularly distinctive aesthetic quality, a visual harmony of great value when expressed in architecture. It was subsequently incorporated in the structure of the Parthenon, whose ruins even today inspire in us all a deep sense of beauty and harmonic proportion. The Greeks, of course, could feasibly have been working from a long-extant blueprint, once the property of the ancient Egyptians, and that, even then, if the Egyptians themselves are to be believed, was a legacy from a much more remote era, called in the Pyramid Texts Zep Tepi, the “First Time.”
A little later on we can take a closer look at this Golden Section, and we shall see that phi, like pi, has applications way beyond the parameters of geometry and architecture. We shall also see how, in light of the creation process described by the Hermetic Code, there is a subtle but significant connection between the two ratios.
It is now generally accepted that the dimensions of the so-called sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber also incorporate exact mathematical values and proportions: an internal volume of 1,166.4 liters and an external volume of exactly double, 2,332.8 liters. Again, we can see here another example of the 2:1 ratio found in the structure of the ubiquitous octave. This remarkable artifact was apparently cut and hollowed from a single block of exceptionally hard granite with measurable precision. How did the stonemasons do this?
As we noted in chapter 3, the archaeologist William Flinders Petrie was impressed by the skill and expertise of the craftsmen responsible, but was at a loss to explain how the work was carried out. He surmised that the sarcophagus itself must have been cut out of the mother block with long straight saws, perhaps with bronze blades tipped with jewels harder than granite. However, as Petrie himself admitted, the only jewel hard enough to cut granite so efficiently would have been diamond, which, as far we are aware, was not known in Old Kingdom Egypt.
Petrie further puzzled over the method used to hollow out the sarcophagus, proposing, from the evidence, that hollow, tubular “drills” up to 12.5 cm in diameter were used to cut circular grooves in the granite, the cores of which could then have been chiseled away with relative ease. Again, these strange drills, powered by heaven knows what, are envisaged as having been jewel-tipped. After examining a number of other drill cores collected at Giza, Petrie estimated that the amount of pressure applied, shown by the speed at which the drills had evidently cut through the granite, would have required a load of at least one, or maybe two, tons.
Thus, according to Petrie, the ancient masons used tubular drills, their teeth tipped with something as hard as diamond and applied with pressures of up to two tons, revolving at speeds great enough to cut through granite as if it were as soft as soapstone. As to how such devices were set and kept in motion, Petrie could offer no explanation, but it would seem safe to assume that he had firmly ruled out pedal power. In any case, wheels and pulleys were supposedly unknown in ancient Egypt (an established archaeological “fact” that might seem hard to reconcile with the use of high-powered, circular drills). Somewhat mystifyingly, not a trace of any of these saws or drills has ever been found.
Petrie was equally perplexed by a number of Fourth Dynasty diorite bowls from Giza, on which, he observed, the engraved hieroglyphs had been drawn with a remarkably fluid, free-flowing hand, showing no signs of having been forcibly ground or scraped out. The lines of the inscriptions are extremely fine—a fiftieth of an inch wide—indicating that the cutting tool must have had a needle-sharp point. Bearing in mind that diorite is one of the hardest stones on earth, so that the point of the instrument used must have been a good deal harder—and again, supposedly applied with an enormous amount of pressure—it is difficult to explain how such fine motifs were so easily and smoothly inscribed. It is true that a modern tool could engrave designs on diorite with relative ease, but such a process would not leave rough edges to the lines. On the bowls identified by Petrie, however, there were such rough edges: the diorite had been “ploughed out,” as if as soft as virgin soil.
Perhaps the most baffling examples of the Egyptian stonemason’s art are the stone vases found in chambers underneath and around Zoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqarah, many of which date from centuries before the Fourth Dynasty. As I mentioned in chapter 3, Graham Hancock examined many of these anomalous artifacts: some of them had long, thin, elegant necks and widely flared interiors, often incorporating fully hollowed-out shoulders. As Hancock says, this kind of workmanship must have been accomplished by the use of some “as yet unimagined (and indeed almost unimaginable) tool.”5 Such an instrument would have to have been narrow enough to pass through the slender necks, strong enough to have scoured out the stone itself, while at the same time capable of exerting precise upward and outward pressure in order to shape the interior curves and shoulders. Hancock uses the word scoured to describe how these vases might have been hollowed out, but it would be interesting to see if the interior of the vessels, like the finely grooved hieroglyphs on the diorite bowls, was in fact “ploughed out,” rather as if the stone, at some stage in the process, had temporarily become soft, pliable, fluid. But then, even if a tool for such a process had existed, this would still not explain how the craftsmen were able to gauge the progress and accuracy of their work, which proceeded, as it were, “in the dark,” inside the stone.
The implications of all this are staggering, for we are not merely talking here of a stone-carving technology greatly in advance of its day, but one that is superior to our own. As Hancock says, no stone carver alive today would be able to match the workmanship of these stone vases, even if he were using the most advanced tungsten-carbide tools.
Speaking of which, whatever happened to all the tools that are supposed to have been used by these preeminent artisans? As we have noted, no traces of the long “bronze saws” have ever been unearthed in Egypt. The same applies to the hardened, tubular “drills” supposedly used to hollow out great blocks of granite. What is more, nothing approaching such devices has ever been depicted in any tomb relief; neither have they been described or even mentioned in any text.
And yet, the evidence that tools of this kind were used seems convincing. Examining one particular drill core, Petrie noted that the spiral of the cut sank one inch in a circumference of six inches, suggesting a rate of stone “ploughing-out” that he described as astonishing.
Many features of the Great Pyramid itself are equally extraordinary. It is extremely doubtful that even an army of modern stonemasons, using only ropes, levers, ramps, and handheld tools, could ever match such architectural mastery and precision. Measurements taken of its internal proportions and angles, of external alignments and dimensions, have been described as displaying a near-perfect symmetry. It should be remembered, however, that the Giza plateau suffered a violent earthquake in the thirteenth century. It is entirely conceivable, therefore, that prior to this the pyramid’s overall symmetry might, in fact, have been even more precise.
In the BBC publication Secrets of the Lost Empires, Mark Lehner, described as one of the leading experts on the Giza Pyramids, says that the Old Kingdom masons used only copper chisels and punches, even to dress the harder granite and basalt blocks. His explanation as to how soft copper tools (Petrie was unaware that bronze was not in use in Egypt prior to 2185 BCE) could be used to cut and hollow out such incredibly hard stone is that the workmen probably used quartz sand in a wet slurry: it was actually the quartz that did the cutting. As evidence he cites the discovery of some cuts in the basalt of the Khufu/Cheops Mortuary Temple that still retain a dried mixture of quartz sand and gypsum, apparently tainted green from the copper saws. This proposition is almost, but to my mind not quite, feasible, for we would have to envisage a very large number of copper saws used in the cutting of even one megalithic block, as the quartz would have to have cut both ways, eating away the much softer copper tools a great deal faster than the granite was cut. Also, the presence of so much wet slurry in a hand-powered cutting process would surely have had a deleterious effect on the precision of the work. The near-perfect symmetry of the granite sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber makes one wonder whether it really could have been achieved in this way. Furthermore, there is still the question of Petrie’s estimation of the speed at which some of the granite drill cores had been cut, not to mention the extreme amount of pressure that must have been applied to the point of contact. As for how the engraved diorite bowls already discussed, and the remarkable stone vases described by Hancock, were produced, we have yet to hear of a plausible explanation.
Making no mention of these annoying little anomalies, Lehner describes how he conducted field experiments to demonstrate how he thinks the pyramids themselves were built. With a crew of forty-four, including a master stonemason, it was intended within a six-week time-scale to quarry and assemble 186 limestone blocks into a small pyramid, nine meters at the base and six meters high. Of course, modern construction equipment was employed in the operation. Flat-bed diesel trucks transported the blocks, weighing from three-quarters of a ton to three tons apiece, and a massive earth-mover was used as a crane to lift and maneuver them, slung from steel cables. In addition, the workmen used iron hammers, chisels, and levers, whereas the Egyptians, according to Lehner, had only copper tools and wooden levers.
In the event, Lehner and his colleagues did manage, within the six-week deadline, to construct a crudely dressed pyramid consisting of the specified number of blocks. This prompted Lehner to conclude confidently that the Pyramids of Giza, spectacular though they may be, were “very human monuments, created through long experience and tremendous skill, but without any kind of secret sophistication.”6 At no time did the project attempt to cut and dress granite blocks in the manner suggested by Lehner as that most likely to have been used by the Egyptians. It might be useful to see a practical demonstration as to how this was accomplished, not with iron or even bronze tools, but with the copper implements supposedly used by Khufu’s masons. I find it hard to accept that relatively soft copper tools, even if used in conjunction with quartz sand in slurry, could ever cut efficiently through just about the hardest substances on Earth. Unless, that is, there was another, hidden factor.
According to Lehner, the Great Pyramid itself, a “very human” monument as he calls it, was built within Khufu’s forty-year reign. So let’s just think about this for a moment: forty years seems, on the face of it, a very long time for the construction of a single building. But, quite apart from the granite blocks, there are approximately 2,300,000 individual blocks of limestone incorporated in this structure, each weighing, on average, two and a half tons.
So, if all 2,300,000 of these blocks were quarried, transported, and set into position in the allotted time (40 years, or 14,600 days), then the rate of laying down—2,300,000 divided by 14,600—is 157 blocks per day. Dividing 157 by a working day of, say, 12 hours gives a construction schedule of 13 blocks every hour, one set in position every four and a half minutes or so, nonstop, that is incessantly, day in, day out, often in extreme heat, through all four seasons, for forty continuous years.
Already the incredible seems to have become a reality, but we haven’t yet finished piling up the statistics. For example, it is unlikely that the building work was maintained at a constant rate for twelve months of the year. The annual flooding of the Nile would not only have hindered work on the Giza plateau, it would also have demanded that a substantial proportion of the available workforce be employed in the seasonal agricultural projects necessary to sustain themselves.
So let’s reasonably assume that the builders worked constantly, not for twelve, but for eight months of the year or, alternatively, eight hours a day. We now have to envisage them laying down more than nineteen blocks every hour—about one every three minutes. But even then, if Lehner and his colleagues are correct in their assessments of the time involved and the volume of work done, we could quite reasonably halve this allotted time yet again. The reason? It is assumed that the limestone blocks (not to mention the thirty-to fifty-ton granite blocks situated high up inside the core masonry) were hauled up a wraparound spiral ramp built from gypsum and limestone chips—in mass almost equivalent to that of the pyramid itself. So, while the builders were busily hauling up and laying down the blocks, others were presumably adding millions of tons of extra material to the very same ramp in order to increase its height.
Remember there were no cranes, earth-movers, or diesel trucks, no cables, no iron tools—only ropes and wooden levers. As for lunch breaks, vacations, strikes, and all the other very human needs of a large workforce, there seems to have been little room left for such time-wasting in the life of the Fourth Dynasty pyramid builder.
Given all this remarkable statistical data, one is inevitably left wondering what kind of “human” enterprise we are considering here. It is not, in my view, one that could be matched today, muscle for muscle, stone for stone. Even if we doubled the proposed construction period to an unlikely eighty years, we would still have to envisage the blocks of the Great Pyramid being set into position at an unbelievable rate of, at the very least, nine or ten every single working hour. Lehner’s team, if we include the accepted periods of respite, managed to lay down 186 blocks into the form of a very crude pyramid in six weeks, or 1,008 hours. This is the equivalent of laying down about one block every five hours or so, or one block every three hundred minutes. From the statistical evidence alone, we can see that the difference between the rate that the Egyptians laid down their blocks and that of Lehner’s team makes the efforts of the latter seem nothing short of pathetic. Remember also that, unlike Lehner’s team, the Egyptians had only copper tools and wooden levers, and supposedly had to build and maintain the massive spiral ramp up which the blocks were to be hauled. At the same time they needed to ensure that the pyramid itself, completely enveloped by this alleged ramp, was kept in perfect alignment, not only with the cardinal points, but also with the key stars above the Nile Delta. In addition, the workmen also had to ensure that the angle of each slope remained at 51 degrees, 51 minutes, which is the angle that would naturally result if the relation of the pyramid’s height to the perimeter of its base was exactly the same as the ratio between the radius of a circle and its circumference.
In spite of its almost unbelievable level of precision and craftsmanship, we can still agree with Lehner on one fundamental point: the Great Pyramid is a very human monument. What he fails to emphasize, however, is that there are many possible degrees of “humanness,” and that the degree of evolutionary development attained by the Fourth Dynasty Egyptians must, on the basis of the evidence they have left behind them, have been of an order in certain ways vastly more advanced than our own. We are not talking here simply about organizational skills and technological ability, but rather of the fundamental physical, emotional, and mental capacities of thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of highly developed, highly coordinated individuals, men who must have been in possession of long-lost powers of the human will.
Skeptics may argue, along with Lehner perhaps, that this is not so, that, given time, manpower, and finance—and the will, of course— modern man could replicate anything the Egyptians accomplished, even without modern equipment. But think again: this is a single building enterprise involving about six million tons of limestone and granite blocks, supposedly quarried entirely by hand, transported in barges, and then physically hauled up a narrow ramp, with the blocks being carefully positioned at the rate of several every working hour, eight hours daily, month in, year out, for four whole decades. I would suggest that modern man, if he were to attempt such a feat, would first have to rediscover certain skills and attributes that the Egyptians had and we definitely have not. As individuals, the people directly involved in the project must have been more than just physically fit: they must have been capable of sustaining their incredible physical output for very long periods, continually, incessantly.
So, exactly what kind of physical power was it that these masons were able to exert? They were not giants, after all: there are no broad-shouldered titans among the teams of workmen depicted in tomb reliefs.
We have already mentioned Colin Wilson’s suggestion that the “group-mind” technique might have been instinctively applied—a combination of sheer determination of will and effort, of a belief that the gods could make the blocks lighter (encouraged, perhaps, by priests chanting), and of a concerted concentration on the maneuver in hand. We can add to this another possible factor acknowledged by everyone— the familiar phenomenon of what is known as second wind. We know that athletes involved in prolonged physical events—marathons, intensive tests of endurance, and so on—can sometimes experience a sudden transformation in their energy output and rhythm of movement, whereby they can breeze along maintaining the same momentum, but with apparently very little physical effort. Like superconductors, they suddenly reach a stage where they can “change gear,” and subsequently continue to function at a much more efficient rate. In superconductors, of course, the switch from one state to another is an ultimate transition, equivalent to accelerating up to the speed of light in the time it takes to blink. Second wind appears to be a similar phenomenon, much less of a quantum leap, perhaps, than the transformation from ordinary state to superconducting state, but certainly a transcendental step in the right direction. If we suppose, therefore, that those involved in the actual construction of the Great Pyramid were able to induce in themselves, at will, something very like this, then possibly the cumulative effect of an entire, close-knit team of men working at this much more efficient rate might be sufficient in itself to “lighten their loads” considerably—even without divine intervention. Then again, second wind itself might be just one of many states of “humanness” attainable through the development of individual will. There might be a third degree, a fourth, and so on.
The final possibility, understandably too far-out to be taken seriously by most modern investigators, is that there may have been a genuine psychic factor involved—at least in some of the more difficult and demanding tasks. We are talking now of real, direct, psychokinetic effects in which the mind itself somehow resonates at frequencies powerful enough directly to influence physical quantum systems en masse, to make hard stone temporarily fluid for example.
As we have noted, yogis have consistently claimed that such things are indeed possible. Yogananda went much further, claiming that physical objects can actually be materialized at will—provided one has a will, of course—an idea that, as we have seen, has recently been touched upon by the modern researchers mentioned in previous chapters: Stanislav Grof, for example, who has tried to visualize a process whereby the mind influences the “generative matrix” of things, or David Bohm, who suggested that psychokinetic effects might be set in motion by individuals focusing on “meanings” compatible with resonances underlying the wave-functions controlling all material systems.
But, of course, even if material systems can somehow be influenced by psychokinetic energy, hollowing out the widely flared interiors of stone vases with narrow swanlike necks would still indicate a degree of craftsmanship incomprehensible to us. Let’s say, for example, that we gave a modern craftsman a relatively soft material, like graphite, say, or even wood, and commissioned him or her to replicate, by any conceivable technological means, one of the stone vases examined by Hancock. Could it be done? Possibly, eventually, but such a task would inevitably involve the use of electrically powered machinery, perhaps fiber optics of the kind used in microsurgery for seeing inside the vessel, together with remote sensors to gauge the accuracy of the work in progress— and probably other custom-made tools of a kind not yet invented. If we were really to put our hypothetical craftsman to the test and ask him or her to equal the skill and dexterity of the ancient Egyptians by fashioning a vase made of actual diorite or some other extremely hard stone, we might even imagine the additional application of some form of ultrasonic cutting mechanism like that discussed by the modern toolmaker Christopher Dunn. And all this, remember, to create something that “primitive” man made by the thousands in the third millennium BCE, or even earlier.
So we have a whole array of mystifying evidence, all of it “written” in stone, that the orthodox archaeologist is unable to explain satisfactorily. However, in other evidence painstakingly “dug up” and then promptly disregarded by historians—namely the legends of the builder gods of ancient cultures—we are told time and again that “magic” was involved in the handling of stone, and that this magic somehow involved the use of music. Clearly, if there is any truth in these myths, we are considering here the use of “tools” quite unlike anything we know of or can reasonably imagine—mysterious musical devices with magical or supernatural powers. As we have noted, the only explanation currently on offer is that these techniques had a strong psychological element, perhaps something of the kind alluded to by Grof and Bohm, mental tools that Gurdjieff described as vibrations—“inner octaves”—and that his Hindu contemporary Yogananda called “creative light rays.” And music and light are, of course, two of the most fundamental manifestations of the Hermetic Code, the universal symmetry first revealed by the builders themselves.
As we saw in the previous chapter, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the “desire body” of the individual—what Rodney Collin called the soul, or the molecular body—can pass effortlessly right through rock masses, boulders, and mountains. Presumably this would also include stone vases, sarcophagi, and even great, monumental pyramids. We, of course, have no proof that the soul even exists, never mind that it might be capable of “miraculous action.” But then, as Ouspensky said, phenomena of a higher order cannot be perceived in ordinary states of consciousness, so even if the world is positively teeming with these molecular shapeshifters floating effortlessly through anything that we would call “material,” who in this present era of scientific rationalism would ever know?
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, however, was compiled possibly two thousand years before the modern scientific quest, before the tentative and guarded ideas of such as Copernicus or Kepler, Galileo, and Newton began seeping in through the cracks of the old, crumbling structures of the formal papal dogma. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is traditionally considered to be a description of the properties of the soul observed by “souls” who had personally experienced such “miracles” between reincarnations, like the Buddha himself. In any event, however we view its validity, the assertion that the “desire body” of the individual is a reality is quite straightforward and unambiguous.
We can speculate further, deeper. If these reported sightings of the soul are indeed valid and the “desire body” is endowed with what is described as “miraculous action,” then what might the entity at the evolutionary stage described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead as the “clear-light of the ultimate reality”—Collin’s “electronic” body—be capable of? According to the Tibetans, at this stage in the cycle, anything is possible.
Could it be, then, that the marvelous Egyptian artifacts found at Saqqarah were created by supernatural means, that is by people whose minds, as Collin says, were capable of “splitting the atom” and internally generating psychokinetic energies that could somehow temporarily neutralize the electromagnetic force, thus making granite or diorite soft enough to “plough through” with any moderately rigid instrument? Sadly, we may never know. We have the evidence, much of it inexplicable, that way back then something odd was in the air: exactly what, we can only speculate.
It seems reasonable to suppose, however, that the extraordinary mental and physical powers of the Egyptian elite were in some way linked to what Gurdjieff would call their level of being. As we have seen throughout the whole of this book, all roads eventually lead to the Giza necropolis, so it is to the creators of it that we must inevitably look for a final answer.