17
“Al-Chem”—the Egyptian Way
Exactly how the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom attained such a high degree of physical and mental development is, of course, a matter of conjecture. My own view, discussed in some detail in The Infinite Harmony, is that they did this by following to the letter the original precepts of Thoth, a doctrine that describes a process of self-development enacted according to musical principles, resulting in the creation of a very special type of individual. However this may have been conducted in practical ways, it is clear that the system employed by the ancient Egyptians really worked, for these people succeeded in uniting harmoniously like no other nation in history. They were, as the Greeks would have termed it, homonoic in the fullest sense, people entirely of one mind, singularly dedicated to the task of transmitting their highly advanced knowledge out into the collective consciousness of the whole of mankind. And in this, as history bears witness, they succeeded admirably, for the Hermetic Code itself, the symbolic key to the Egyptian view of creation, subsequently became the blueprint from which all of the major religious doctrines of the world have been drawn.
Historians tell us that to the ancient Egyptians religion was an entire way of life, a mode of being quite unlike any code of conduct practiced today. The concept of an afterlife, of an existence in the celestial home of the gods, was very much more than just an imaginative belief system sustained by blind faith and primitive superstition. To these people, the afterlife was an attainable reality, one that could be realized by following the primary example of Osiris and Thoth and the many other deities described as the founding fathers of Egyptian culture and religion.
The symbolism invoked in the myth of the Judgment Hall of the Dead, in which Thoth/Hermes is a pivotal figure, explains the Egyptian concept of individual harmony as a passport to the afterlife very clearly.
In the collection of papyri known for convenience as The Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is said that the ka, or the spiritual double of the deceased, wanders through the darkness of the underworld in search of the Judgment Hall and takes on the name of Osiris in the hope of being restored to life, like Osiris himself. The subject then enters the vast Judgment Hall, where Osiris, described as having ten times the stature of the dead man’s spiritual double, sits ready to oversee the proceedings. Between them is a giant pair of scales. Subsequently Anubis, the jackal-headed god (usually associated with Sirius, the “Dog Star”), and the hawk-headed Horus, son of Osiris (associated with the sun), wait to superintend the ritual. Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe (whose symbol is the moon) stands in attendance ready to record the result.
As we see, the symbolism described so far is unmistakably hermetic, an expression of the universal law of triple creation, the same law that was later encoded in toto in the later Revelation of St. John, who depicted the Woman in Heaven, the queen of creation, wearing a crown of stars (Anubis), a robe fashioned from the fabric of the sun (Horus), with her feet resting squarely on the moon (Thoth).
To continue with the underworld ritual, a single feather, symbol of the goddess Ma’at, whose name means “truth,” is then placed on one pan of the scales, and the dead person’s “heart” on the other. Only if the two pans remain perfectly balanced, that is, only if the individual’s “heart” is in perfect harmony with Truth/Ma’at, can the ka win the favor of Osiris and ultimately achieve immortality.
So this concept of universal harmony describes the principle of acting out harmonious sequences of conduct and development in space and time. This was the central theme of the “Egyptian way”: the science of music, of alchemy, the way of the gods. As we have noted, this “way” was reflected quite clearly in the three major creation myths of the Old Kingdom, Memphite, Hermopolitan, and Heliopolitan, which all describe the miraculous appearance of an enlightened group of eight principal deities. Exactly the same underlying format, namely the octave, was also the basis of the annual performance of the sacred Osirian mysteries, the first “passion play,” traditionally reenacted in the form of an eight-act drama. Indeed, it is very likely that everything the Egyptians did, whether building pyramids, enacting sacred rituals, or simply walking down a causeway, was invariably performed to the accompaniment of this universal music.
Even to this day, many orthodox Egyptologists still refuse openly to admit that the pi symmetry was known and used by the ancient Egyptians. In fact, we have persistently been told that they had no mathematics as such—a claim that might seem hard to reconcile with the absolute geometrical symmetry and precision of the Great Pyramid and with the exact mathematical relationships evident in the King’s Chamber and the granite sarcophagus. Curiously, the dimensions of the Great Pyramid yield proportions with a value closer to “mathematical” pi (3.14159) than to the “classical” approximation (3.142857 rec.). However, with the original casing blocks now missing, and the whole structure shaken by a major earthquake several hundred years ago, it is impossible to determine whether the original angle of slope was intended to express the more accurate mathematical value of pi or its symbolic equivalent.
In any event, it was the classical convention that played the key role in Egyptian metaphysics. As we have seen, the Egyptian “model of the gods” was based on the phenomenon of light itself (after which, remember, the Great Pyramid was originally named), which modern science has since shown to be an electromagnetic manifestation of pi. It is an octave of resonance, with eight fundamental divisions in its overall structure: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and, of course, the transcendental white. But it also has three “primary” wavelengths: red, yellow, and blue, frequencies that make it possible to subdivide further this fundamental octave into three subsidiary scales, that is into a tripleoctave format. Therefore pi, like light itself, is everywhere.
And so this universal symmetry—the Hermetic Code—was seen both as a model of perfection and as a description of a precise mode of being, an essentially musical system of conduct through which consciousness is, in effect, able to complete the course of its development and so transcend onto higher dimensions, greater “scales” of psychological “resonance.” We have already noted a practical application of this “music in action” in the records of Old Kingdom administrative procedure, where the vizier to the pharaoh, the high priest and keeper of the mysteries, was given direct control over all twenty-two “nomes” (districts) of Upper or Southern Egypt, while his deputy, still perhaps undergoing various intermediate stages of initiation, was given subsidiary control over just seven nomes.
This unique “musical” relationship between the two priests is particularly interesting, because it brings us back to an idea discussed in earlier chapters, in which I proposed that all creative processes, whether they occur below in the microcosmic world of the self-replicating cell, or above in the double helix of the mind of the shaman or master mason, are, in fact, organic in nature. Remember, hermetic is genetic. It follows, therefore, that the process of passing on knowledge from one individual to another, from teacher to pupil, master mason to apprentice, was, in a very real sense, an organic system, one that involved disciplined, harmonious conduct and, of course, the subsequent systematic dissemination of the “immaculate” concepts by which they were guided. Being, as it were, “psychologically sound,” these original concepts were quite naturally replicated faithfully, “religiously,” in every succeeding generation. Thus, despite two interim periods of destructive social anarchy, the Egyptian way of life continued virtually uninterrupted for three long millennia. This longevity, I believe, is the result of what is, in reality, an organic process, whereby the original, highly potent ideas of the gods of the First Time, exactly like successful genes in the biological heritage of dominant, evolving species, were repeatedly and faithfully “copied” in the evolving metaphysical “gene pool” of the collective Egyptian psyche.
We know that in the natural course of Darwinian evolution successful genes can survive all manner of catastrophes: ice ages, rapid meltdowns, deluges, earthquakes, cometary impacts. In the same way, the hermetic ideas we are dealing with here—the metaphysical equivalent of successful genes—have survived all kinds of social upheaval: wars, dark ages, periods of total ignorance and barbarism, inquisitions, revolutions, and so on. Therefore we are not speaking in metaphor: we are talking about organic processes of creation and evolution, both microcosmic and macrocosmic, which are identical in every way, with a difference in scale only. This, of course, is precisely what is being referred to in the hermetic dictum quoted many times before: “As above, so below.” We can take this quite literally: the genetic code of the microcosm is the medium through which greater organisms evolve, and exactly the same pattern is repeated in the “cosmos” above, where the Hermetic Code describes the process by which consciousness grows and develops. There is a passage in a collection of post-Christian texts known as the Corpus Hermeticum that comes close to expressing the same idea. The god Thoth is here speaking to his son, Tat: “My son, Wisdom is the womb, conceiving in secret, and the seed is the true good.”1
As I have said, I believe that practically everything the Old Kingdom Egyptians did was performed to the accompaniment, so to speak, of the esoteric music composed by the founding fathers of Egyptian culture, the so-called gods of the First Time. This implies, of course, that the entire Great Pyramid construction project itself was also conducted in accordance with the same principles. In other words, the whole project must have developed organically, which is to say that the Great Pyramid in effect “grew” out of the collective efforts of these very special people. We know that living organisms developing from microscopic embryos increase their bulk and complexity exponentially, two cells dividing into four, four into eight, and so on. Possibly, therefore, the building of the Great Pyramid began relatively slowly at first but, as the construction workers became more and more adept at their craft, more “in tune” with the tasks in hand and with one another, the rate at which the blocks were laid down would have increased accordingly, perhaps building up to a final crescendo of activity of a kind that we today can barely imagine. Indeed, were it not for the hard stone evidence at Giza staring us in the face—nearly two and a half million pieces of it—most people of a rational turn of mind would consider such a feat improbable, at least within the time span allowed by orthodox Egyptologists.
We have already established that the exact number of years taken to enact this remarkably harmonious performance is unknown, as indeed are the methods used, so it is not possible to explore an incidental pet theory of mine, which is that there might have been some sort of correlation between, on the one hand, the successive stages of construction and development of the structure and, on the other, the harmonic ratios of musical theory. Nevertheless, if the whole project, from start to finish, is viewed—as the Egyptians viewed almost everything—as a hermetic phenomenon, then we can say that the Great Pyramid itself, the first and foremost of the seven wonders of the ancient world, also represents the final “note” of the completed scale of enactment. And the final note of any major scale, as we know from musical theory, has transcendental properties, because it is also the first note of the greater scale above. In exactly this way, the Pyramid of Khufu/Cheops can in fact be regarded as a genuine transcendental phenomenon, whose universally harmonious proportions and alignments are, even today, five thousand years after they were created, striking strangely familiar chords in the minds of anyone prepared to take time and listen.
So we see that the Great Pyramid is in reality much more than a mere building. It is a life-bearing, organic phenomenon, an “immaculately conceived,” metaphysical “gene strand” of extraordinary resilience and potency, in which is encoded the secret of life itself.
I certainly don’t expect a favorable response from the orthodox Egyptology establishment regarding my musical/organic interpretation of the “Egyptian way.” But this does not concern me unduly. The important point is to get one’s ideas aired, to “sow the seeds,” and then let nature take its course—a process in which I have a great deal of faith. If one ends up as no more than a weed in Eden, there is still the possibility of a flowering of some kind. Surely this is better than sowing nothing at all.
So, while I may not be “in sync” with orthodoxy—or even, for that matter, with the ill-defined group of “New Age” thinkers at the cutting edge of the Great Debate—everyone seems to agree on one fundamental and very important point, which is that the Egyptian civilization was unique and very special. Even orthodox historians are given to using superlatives and poetic metaphor to describe the works of the first masons of this remarkable culture.
John Romer, for example, one of the most respected authorities on ancient Egypt, describes the pyramids in a way I find particularly apt in respect of the ideas discussed in this book: “the nuclear reactors of ancient Egypt, the throne of the sun itself.”2
In a sense, of course, there is more truth in this statement than Romer himself would care to acknowledge, for the Great Pyramid— “The Lights”—is indeed a nucleus of creative, intelligent data, an undiminishing beacon, whose illuminating beams of metaphysical “light” are, even to this day, radiating constantly out into the darker world of the ordinary human psyche.
As suggested in a previous chapter, the Giza necropolis was designed as a mirror image of the sky above the Nile Delta, and the Great Pyramid itself, as well as being the repository of the wisdom of Thoth, also functioned as a kind of ceremonial launchpad for the ascending, star-bound soul of the initiate. This vital connection with the heavenly sphere, the stellar scale of existence, is generally accepted by everyone. Romer himself expresses it: “By piling form on form the Egyptians had created a shape so dramatic that, in unison with its commanding position at the horizon, it joined heaven to earth, earth to heaven.”3
In certain texts, the pyramids are sometimes referred to as the “Mounds of Horus”—an understandable name, given the fact that Horus himself was essentially a solar deity. There is one verse of the Pyramid Texts that describes how Horus, Osiris, and other mythical deities first initiated this whole process of transcendental evolution. “There come to you . . . the gods who are in the sky, and the gods who are on earth. They make support for you upon their arms; may you ascend to the sky and mount upon it in this its name of ‘Ladder.’”4
The “Ladder” in question is, of course, the ladder later perceived by the Hebrew Scriptures patriarch Jacob, the “rainbow covenant” of the Israelites, the phenomenon of light.
The Egyptians, it seems, had realized long ago that light is the vehicle of consciousness, the medium through which the mind is able to transcend on to the stellar scale of existence. As I have said, they did not simply believe that this was so; they knew it, because they had firsthand experience of heaven. How else could they have possibly come to terms with such mind-boggling concepts as timelessness and infinity, concepts that, even in the earliest periods, were an integral part of Egyptian metaphysics, as the passage quoted in chapter 2 from the Old Kingdom poem referring to the godking clearly shows: “His life-span is eternity, the borders of his powers are infinity.”
It should be noted that the relatively recent ancestors of the author of this verse were supposedly primitive farmers, and that Egyptian civilization at this time was allegedly barely a couple of centuries old—younger, in fact, than our own. Yet here we have a scribe contemplating ideas of such an exalted and sophisticated nature that, were you to attempt to discuss them today with your neighbor, you might predictably be met with, at best, a glazed expression. Curiously however, in scientific circles— among quantum physicists, astrophysicists, and the like—such concepts as eternity—a timeless dimension—and the infinite, spaceless realm of the nonlocal, quantum field are common currency. Similarly, if one were able somehow to travel at the speed of light and so see the world through the “eyes” of the Holy Ghost—the photon quantum—the “heavenly” realm of the Egyptian god-king would spring magically into view. Time would be perceived to dissolve into eternity, and space would enfold into a nonlocal world of the kind observed by Ouspensky, with no borders, no “sides” to it.
Another significant feature of Egyptian metaphysics that has a distinctly modern ring to it is the idea of the constant squared being the key to all creative processes. In chapter 5, I discussed briefly the mathematical trick devised by Einstein’s one-time tutor, Herman Minkowski, by which he used the value of the square of the constant (speed of light) as a means of determining the amount of pure energy stored in any given mass. As we have seen, this idea seems to have been uncannily foreshad-owed by Egyptian metaphysicians, who associated “The Lights”—the Great Pyramid—with what was to become known in Ptolemaic Egypt as the Magic Square of Mercury and the number 2,080, the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 64. Sixty-four is the square of the constant number, 8, the number of full notes in the major musical scale and the number of gods involved in the early myths concerning creation. And today, of course, we find that sixty-four also is the maximum number of RNA triplet-codon combinations comprising the genetic code, the symmetry employed by DNA in the creation of all known forms of life. Furthermore, it is surely no coincidence that the Hermetic Code itself, the classical convention 22/7, can be further subdivided into three inner formulae, thus producing from the original “triple octave” a composite figure of nine octaves, sixty-four notes. As we noted also in chapter 4, this same number has even cropped up in the superstring theory of subatomic quanta, which are described rather mystifyingly as one-dimensional “strings” of vibrating energy, and which are theorized as having 64 degrees of movement associated with them.
The number 64 appears also in other ancient number systems. In the tarot for example, there are fifty-six Minor Arcana cards (the number cards) and twenty-two in the Major Arcana (the picture cards). The Major Arcana is a symbolic representation of the triple octave, an expression of the formula pi. And according to the law of octaves, this triple octave is also, on another scale, a single octave comprising eight fundamental notes. If we subsequently add these eight fundamental notes on to the Minor Arcana figure, we are left with the magical sixty-four. Then we have the I Ching, of course, which I discussed in the introduction of this book—an exact blueprint of the genetic code itself, with its sixty-four hexagrams and eight fundamental trigrams. Another interesting example is the old British measure of ground area—the acre—640 of which constitute a square mile.
In the last chapter I mentioned the “golden mean” proportion, denoted by the Greek letter 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. Like pi, phi is a naturally occurring ratio. It is expressed in a well-known series of numbers known today as the Fibonacci series, named after the thirteenth-century mathematician who first noted them. Each number in the series is the sum of the two preceding ones, like so: 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1 = 3, 3 + 2 = 5, 5 + 3 = 8, 8 + 5 = 13, followed by 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, and so on to infinity. If we divide any given number with the one preceding it, an approximate value for phi is obtained, which is usually rounded off to 1.618. So, for example, 233 divided by 144 gives 1.618055555556. The higher the numbers used, the greater the accuracy obtained for the value of phi.
We noted previously how this proportion has a distinctive aesthetic quality when incorporated in architecture, of which the Parthenon and the Great Pyramid itself are the best-known examples. But there is also another significant aspect of the golden mean proportion, one that has a direct bearing on the central theory of this book. It seems that phi, like pi, also manifests in the natural, organic world, the world created by the genetic/Hermetic Code. As examples of this, we see the developmental stages of the spiral seed-patterns of the fir cone and the sunflower. Any two of these stages taken together always correspond with two consecutive numbers of the Fibonacci series. The same is true of the spiral growth pattern of the nautilus shell. The point is that this phi relationship as it manifests in the organic world is intrinsically connected with the growth and development of spirals, helices, of which the most prominent in the whole of nature is, of course, DNA. And DNA, remember, is composed of precisely sixty-four components. We should note also that all of the other “life forms” discussed in previous chapters—principally the four-dimensional structure of the human brain and of the “solar” and the “galactic” helix—are all spirals. Possibly there are harmonic geometrical and mathematical patterns in the development and growth of all of these helical structures, but this is a question that requires more space to investigate than I can currently afford.
For me, I think the most impressive feature of this Egyptian world-view, of an infinite realm inhabited by the gods above, is the fact that these people appear to have actually devised a way for individuals to experience this alternative reality for themselves, to become “gods” in their own right. We are referring here, of course, to the way of the alchemist described by the theory of transcendental evolution, a theory based on the concept of harmonizing one’s inner faculties according the principles of musical theory, and of striking metaphysical “notes” up into greater “scales” of existence.
Surely even the most skeptical observers would have to admit that the formulation of an idea as farreaching as this, one that has practical as well as theoretical applications, is in every sense a remarkable achievement. Indeed, as I said in my last book, the Hermetic Code itself is possibly the brightest idea ever conceived by man, the original “immaculate conception.” As such, this concept represents an intellectual advancement of utterly staggering proportions, one which, in terms of the kind of natural selective evolution envisaged by neo-Darwinists, can accurately be described as a genuine macromutation of the hominid mind.
To summarize: in my view the Egyptians of the early dynasties were a giant of a race, people who walked the earth with their feet firmly on the ground, but whose minds and spirits knew no physical boundaries. They existed in the infinite cosmic ocean; they were “quantum tunnellers,” “superconductors,” denizens of the plane of light above and of the quantum field—the “underworld”—below.
And their secret? How did they gain access to the nonlocal dimension so effectively? How did they become conscious to such a degree that they were able to see the universe from all sides at once, from above and below, inside and out?
The myths tell us quite clearly that they did this by adopting the harmonic principles of music as a code of conduct, a systematic, “religious” method of harmonious psychological development, the original tenets of which were ingeniously encoded in the “immaculate” pi convention. This, surely, is the mother and father of all disciplines. It is alchemy, the “Egyptian way,” the science of the followers of the enigmatic Osiris and Thoth, civilizers of “the First Time,” who taught that all creative, life-bearing processes, including the ultimate flowering of human consciousness, are products of the action of the forces described by the two fundamental laws of nature—the law of three forces and the law of octaves. The law of three, as we have seen, states that every-thing created is the result of the action of three forces: active, passive, and neutral. This is, I think, precisely what lay behind the symbolism of the three major deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the origin of the all-embracing trinity, with Osiris (male, active), Isis (female, passive), and Horus, the law-conformable (neutral) product of the union of the first two. The second fundamental law, the law of octaves, states that all things created are composed within of eightfold symmetries— hence the broader Egyptian pantheon of eight principal gods, said to have appeared simultaneously (non-locally?) on the fabled “Island of Flame.”
THE FINAL ANSWER
The Egyptians are believed to have had a national motto, which inLatin translates as memento mori, “remember you must die.” The word die is generally taken literally, but I suspect that there was more to it than that. After all, these people did not believe in the total extinction of the human being. They believed fervently in a life after death, a life among the stars, with Osiris, Isis, Horus, Thoth, and all the rest. So why did their national motto not reflect this belief? Why not “remember you can live forever?” One can only assume that these people did not need reminding of what to them was the self-evident reality of the afterlife. Old Kingdom Egyptians were almost totally preoccupied with it, as the myths and the precise, star-bound alignments of their architecture clearly show. The reference to “dying,” therefore, may have some other, more esoteric meaning, and I suspect that this was precisely the same meaning as that alluded to in the passages from Gurdjieff’s book of aphorisms mentioned in the last chapter, one of which read, “When a man awakes he can die; when he dies he can be born.” Memento mori, therefore, was probably intended to remind initiates not of their mortality, but of the way in which immortality can be achieved; that is, by dying to the illusory, material world, by regularly adopting a passive role in the cosmic scheme of things. There is a well-known biblical quotation that expresses the very same principle: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The organic inference here is particularly appropriate, because genetic processes, as we have seen, are hermetic; therefore “fruits” of any kind, whether above in the mind or below in the living cell, are created in exactly the same alchemical way.
So “dying” in life (meditating, making oneself receptive to greater cosmic influences) was seen as a way of preparing individuals for death as we think of it, a natural event, which to the Egyptians was seen not as a terminal event but rather as an organic transition in an ongoing evolutionary process. We might call this transition a macromutation of the human spirit, an ultimate, mind-altering meta-morphosis, through which consciousness transcends on to an infinitely greater scale of existence. This is the scale alluded to in the symbolism of the two-winged caduceus, the magic wand of Hermes, a graphic representation of the greater “double helix” in the sky. This principle is clearly expressed in this verse from the text known as the Corpus Hermeticum:
Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is made in the image of Heaven, or so to speak more exactly, in Egypt all the operations of the powers which rule and work in Heaven have been brought down to earth below? Nay, it should be said that the whole Cosmos dwells in this land and its temples.6
So the Giza necropolis was designed as a kind of mirror image of the Egyptian Duat, of the sky, principally to emphasize humankind’s star-bound destiny. It is significant that the word Duat also meant “underworld.” Now, perhaps, we can understand why. Above and below—the plane of light and the quantum field—are one and the same nonlocal dimension. And incredible as it may seem, the Egyptians appear to have been aware of this.
Continuing for the moment with our organic perspective, it is evident that these people somehow succeeded in breaking free from the Darwinian mode of evolution common to all, and quite literally macromutated, evolved transcendentally, into a nation united, into a greater, single, homonoic “organism.” What we are trying to envisage here is a kind of metaphysical “chromosome,” a living, multidimensional structure, whose life-bearing data—ideas, precepts, concepts, rituals, and myths—were designed or created solely to build, on a macrocosmic scale, even greater organisms, “gods” if you will, “Tetrads in the sky.”
We, today, are the inheritors of these metaphysical “genes” and, although our general mode of evolution is characteristically Darwinian—“naturally selective”—I believe that buried within the collective consciousness of the human race there remains an underlying tendency to evolve transcendentally, just as the Egyptians did. As we have seen, these enigmatic people not only evolved into a race apart, they left behind them all the data required for us to follow in their wake. They planted “seeds” as they passed through this world, seeds of wisdom, of symbol, myth, and legend; seminal ideas, which, over the millennia, have periodically germinated and come to fruition, and which today are once again beginning to produce a whole “new” variety of conceptual flora.
Modern science, for example, which seems to me to have been born out of an instinctive need for the human mind to overcome the desolate, stultifying climate of the Inquisition, is now poised to enter its transcendental phase. Accordingly our attention is once again turning to things “above,” to the cosmos itself, and to things “below,” to the quantum field and the nonlocal realm being explored in scientific communities worldwide.
The early pioneers of the modern scientific movement—Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and so on—began this present phase of metaphysical growth when they started to observe the heavenly bodies and to understand the forces controlling them. The ensuing process of scientific enquiry culminated in the ideas of Albert Einstein, whose own attention was eventually to focus, perhaps inevitably, on the constant light of the sun. In a sense, therefore, through the concepts of this modern genius, the great Egyptian sungod Ra has triumphantly returned, bringing with him a glimmer of understanding, a timely recognition of the eternal, spaceless dimension in which he reigns supreme.
So the ancients’ description of the constant realm of the god-king, formulated by people to whom, one suspects, “transpersonal experiences” were readily accessible, was subsequently reborn under its modern guise of Special Relativity, the theory that finally turned logical thought upside down, and that ultimately gave rise to the “new” scientific vision of a nonlocal universe.
But, as we have noted, this modern “genestrand” of ideas is actually a mutated form of the original “immaculate conception.” In reality the basic components of the Egyptian way, exactly like the dancing genes in the DNA of a newly fertilized ovum, have simply been “jiggled about,” but they remain essentially the same components, the same genes. Even in King Solomon’s day, it was understood that the esoteric traditions of the Judaic religion were simply echoes of a much older theme: “and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us.”7
Throughout recorded history there have been other, quite distinct, mutations in human thought, characteristic variations in the evolving species of nations. The Chinese, the Indian, Persian, Greek, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic codes of life—all of these metaphysical “creatures” have been born and have thrived in their own day as dominant gene-strands. Today these same genes are in a passive or recessive mode; scientific ideas and concepts have now superseded them. It may be argued that the Christian and Islamic traditions are still dominant, active, but I would suggest that this is due largely to extreme fundamentalist elements of a type that Jesus and Muhammad, both of whom were relative paragons of compassion and tolerance, would be unlikely to countenance if they were around today. But, in any event, all of the major religions and esoteric traditions are still there, still alive (literally) in the great gene pool of human consciousness. In subsequent generations they may even become dominant again, may each undergo a sudden resurgence or renaissance, as the human brain continues to develop and to adapt to environmental variables.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this ongoing “metabiological” process of thought is that the ancients had it exactly right, that the entire cosmos—the real universe, as opposed to the four-dimensional physical shadow perceived in our ordinary states of awareness—is indeed a living, breathing creature like you, whose life-blood is none other than consciousness itself. This in turn suggests that the whole universe, like any organic body, is pulsating through-out with life.
Sri Aurobindo said that if a single point in the universe were unconscious, then the whole universe would have to be unconscious. Scientifically we can interpret this to mean that if the “mindlike” qualities of the photon or the electron were removed, if “nonlocal quantum correlations” were to cease, the whole cosmos would become a dark and lifeless void. Fortunately the great ancient sun god is currently alive and well and gloriously omnipotent, and as long as this universal archetype continues to inhabit our dreams and to be the principal vehicle of our perceptions, the human race, it seems, will never be alone.
So it is very likely that science fiction has been nearer to fact than many people imagine and that there are “aliens” out there. If the universe is a zoon, an immense, six-dimensional creature going around by the name of God, there must be. But these extraterrestrials, no matter what form they might take, are our brothers and sisters, metaphysical “proteinbuilders” just like ourselves, created by, and acting under, the direct influence of “gods” of star-strung, serpentine “chromosomes.”
Now, here’s a thought. If we are ultimately to turn science fiction into reality and communicate directly and coherently with our extraterrestrial counterparts across billions of light years of space, then the connection, one suspects, will somehow have to be made, not through the use of impossible-to-build “warp factor” starships, or hypothetical “wormholes” in the curved fabric of space-time, or even radio waves, but through the metaphysical frequencies of the nonlocal, subquantum (“underworld”) channel of communication. The Egyptians, of course, have already made contact with other beings; they have “died” and journeyed to the underworld and passed the ultimate test of truth. And so, too, have all the other remarkable teachers of hermetic wisdom mentioned in this book, individuals whose thoughts, ideals, and concepts still flourish unceasingly in the collective consciousness of the human race as it grows, a shimmering, multidimensional pyramid of resonant data, up toward the heavens. These great souls have already been born into spirit; they are, in a sense, already “out there,” communing with the godlike inhabitants of the starry world, waiting patiently for us to join them in the celestial celebration that never ends, a party to which, it seems, we have all been cordially invited.
So when you think you’re ready, you might care to rendezvous at the Giza terminal. Even if you get there only in your wilder dreams, it all adds up. The more positive thought patterns we transmit out into the nonlocal energy field (the plane of light, the “book of life”), the more we will ultimately get out of it. Our input, however, if it is to have any lasting effect, will have to be homonoic, that is, conducted through a genuine union of minds. Like the pyramid builders we will all have to pull together and start integrating in a true spirit of cooperation and openmindedness. Presumably the cumbersome ego will have to be completely discarded. Remember the feather on the balance in the Judgment Hall of the Dead, the symbol of Truth. What earth-bound ego could possibly pass such a test of its real substance? None.
So think of the stages of evolution enacted in the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly as the evolving entity sheds its dense, gravity-bound chrysalis and ultimately flies up into the sky, to a new life. Perhaps, through living simply in compliance with the basic laws and forces of nature, this could be you, the eagle-beast of Revelation, soaring to places ordinary mortals can only dream about.
Collectively, as the human race fast approaches the new precessional Age of Aquarius, we are facing a crucial and momentous decision: either we evolve in harmony, transcendentally, united as one, in a higher dimension, a greater scale of being, or we remain fragmented, divided, isolated in time and space, a timid, provincial race dead from the neck up, enslaved by economic obligations, eking out a meager existence on a sad little planet littered with fossil dinosaurs, dodos, and countless other extinct species.
For my money, and for the sake of all around me, I feel strongly inclined to go for the former option, to follow in the footsteps of the Egyptian high priest. We can do it if we want to. It is basically a state of mind, but one that, as the concept of the eternal trinity implies, can only manifest through the harmonious interaction of the three fundamental forces of nature: active, passive, and neutral, and in that order. Ordinary thought processes switch from active to neutral and back again, endlessly. In this lies our greatest folly, because the genuine passive element is always absent, which means that the mind is never fully receptive, never able to assimilate external data in sufficient quantities to stimulate growth. Remember the pyramid ritual, the opening of the mummy’s mouth at the foot of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber, aligned to Sirius, star of Isis, the passive force of the trinity. This is alchemy pure and simple, a description of the vital process of opening the mind, of “waking it up,” so to speak. This, of course, is precisely what genuine and sincere prayer, meditation, and numerous other yogic practices were designed to do—to introduce the passive element into the processes of mind, without which there can be no rhythm, no real harmony. So here’s a tip: keep your “sabbath,” your period of “rest”—you can’t be fully in tune with nature without it.
Significantly, we need only look to the microcosm, to the evolution of DNA, to realize that the Egyptians themselves must have “sung” like proverbial angels, for the “pyramid ritual” is, in fact, performed repeatedly by all chromosomes, the “minds” of the biomolecular world. When the chromosome is ready to act, it first relaxes the tension of one of its two nucleotide chains; that is, it becomes temporarily passive. This, effectively, opens up the double-helix structure, causing the paired bases within it to separate, at which point, something quite “magical” occurs. Free nucleotide bases floating around in the surrounding cyto-plasmic membrane are taken in by the chromosomes. The chromosome then combines these bases into “triple-octave” units—RNA codons, the microcosmic equivalent of concepts—and subsequently ejects them again to carry out a specific evolutionary function, which is to act as templates for the manufacture of amino acids, the building blocks of life.
And what do all self-respecting, self-replicating cells do with these building blocks? They build “pyramids,” of course: living ones, immense, six-dimensional organic structures capable of building even greater pyramids . . .