From Atlantis to the Sphinx Read online

  After thinking about it, the superintendent suddenly realised what was wrong.

  In the spring, Mother Earth is pregnant, and must be treated gently. The Indians remove the steel shoes from their horses; they don’t use their wagons or even wear white man’s shoes because they don’t want to break the surface of the earth. The agricultural extension agent, not knowing about this and probably not thinking it important if he did, was trying his best to get the Indians to start ‘early spring plowing’.

  Like most ‘civilised’ westerners, the agent no doubt regarded the notion of the earth as a pregnant mother as some kind of quaint superstition, failing to realise that for the Indians, it is not an idea or belief, but something they feel in their bones, so that an Indian’s relationship with the earth is as intimate as his relationship with his horse—or, for that matter, his wife. To regard this as a ‘belief’ is to miss a whole dimension of reality.

  We can also see that the ancient Egyptian must have felt precisely this about his relationship with the earth, and with the Nile that enabled him to stay alive by flooding it every time Sothis returned to the dawn sky. It was not a matter of superstition, but of a deeply experienced relationship with the earth and the heavens, a relationship that could be felt as distinctly as the midday sun or a cold wind. Egypt was, as Schwaller is never tired of pointing out, a sacred society.

  Hall’s understanding of this relationship becomes increasingly clear as he talks about the Quiché Indians and their sense of time. Inheritors of the Maya calendar system, they live simultaneously by two calendars, one secular and one religious. Their ordinary calendar—as we know—is the same Julian calendar that the ancient Egyptians used, of 360 days with five days ‘spare’. Their sacred calendar has 260 days made up of various periods. The two calendars interlock, so they return to ‘square one’ every 52 years, when the sacred calendar has repeated itself 73 times. When a normal year is over, the sacred calendar is well into its second year; so it could be said to go on turning endlessly, like a wheel.

  Each day, Hall explains, has special characteristics—just as, in ancient Egypt (according to Schwaller) each hour had its special neters—

  and it takes a special shaman-diviner to provide a proper interpretation of the day. This is particularly important when critical decisions are contemplated. Not only does each of the twenty days have a proper name and character that is divine, but also a number. The ‘nature’ of the days change depending on the numerical accompaniment, as well as the actions or moves contemplated during that particular day. A ‘good’ day in one context may be bad in another. There are favourable and unfavourable combinations, and it is the combination that determines how the day should be interpreted.

  Again, it is important to realise that all this is quite distinct from a ‘belief’. The ‘right-brain’ state of mind permits deeper perception. For example, ‘an important feature of Quiché divination is the use of the body as sender, receiver and analyser of messages’. So a Quiché shaman feels the pulse in different parts of the patient’s body in order to reach a diagnosis and effect a cure. It sounds—as Hall admits—‘hogwash’, yet it works. And Hall goes on to tell a story of a psychoanalyst who also learned to use his body as a receiver and analyser of messages. He was dealing with a seductive but very violent female patient who might try to smash his skull with some heavy object without warning. The assaults occurred when the psychoanalyst was most relaxed and trusting. Then he noticed that his own pulse rate was giving him warning of the attacks; it began to increase a few seconds in advance. All he had to do was to make sure he paid attention to it, and he was ready to ward off the blow. He was picking up some kind of signal—telepathic or otherwise—and his pulse acted as an alarm clock.

  It is because there is a ‘telepathic’ (or ‘collective unconscious’) element in the lives of Native Americans that they recognise the importance of thought. Hall explains that when the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico plan to build a house, they wait until the ‘right thoughts’ are present. ‘The Pueblos believe that thoughts have a life of their own, and that these live thoughts are an integral part of any man-made structure, and will remain with that structure forever. Thoughts are as essential an ingredient as mortar and bricks. Something done without the right thoughts is worse than nothing.’

  This is obviously part and parcel of the attitude that makes the Hopi put such immense effort into the sacred dance, in an effort to ensure that it is ‘successful’. They recognise that there is a subtle sense in which human thoughts, human attitudes, imprint themselves on what we do. In traditional magic—for example, Tibetan—there is a belief that ‘thought forms’ can be brought into existence by a long effort of concentration. (In Tibet they are called tulpas.) Such thought-forms may be benevolent or otherwise.

  But Hall also points out that the ‘right thoughts’ that are needed to build a house are not simply those of its future owner, but of everyone concerned in the building. It is essentially a joint venture. ‘When a Pueblo Indian builds a house, it reaffirms the group.’ Again, we sense that the Pueblo Indians share a ‘collective unconscious’ like that of Cordova’s Amahuaca Indians of Brazil, and that it is quite unlike the compartmentalised mind of the ‘AE’ westerner. Our ‘left-brain’ consciousness strands us in a far more bleak and boring universe than the Indian.

  If we can grasp this, we can see that it is not a question of Indian credulity, but that we suffer from what William James called ‘a certain blindness in human beings’. The AE westerner lacks a sense that the Indian possesses, just as a blind man lacks a sense possessed by a man who can see.

  This sense, Hall argues, is due to the Indian slowing-down of time. We all have some conception of this—for example, the way that, under the right circumstances, a glass of wine or whisky can relax us and make everything look more real and interesting. This enables us to understand how our ‘left-brain’ time has the effect of making things slightly unreal. What is so hard for us to understand is that a long period of ‘right-brain’ time can make us aware of another reality. Hall likes to remind us ‘that this reality... exists as something distinct from what I or anyone else says or thinks’.

  What is so important about The Dance of Life is that it makes us aware that the ‘other’ way of perceiving the world is not some vague and ‘occult’ concept, but a reality that can be studied scientifically. Hall’s colleague William Condon came to this conclusion via a study of philosophy—specifically Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl was concerned to deny the view that has become a cornerstone of western philosophy: that meaning is ‘in the mind’. Condon wrote: ‘There is a genuine coherence among the things we perceive and think about, and this coherence is not something we create, but something we discover.’

  Condon got hold of a 4½-second clip of film made by Gregory Bateson of a family eating dinner, and realised that by studying it closely, he could discover all kinds of things about the family and its relationships. He was so fascinated that he spent a year and a half running the film over and over again until he wore out 130 copies of it.

  Hall pursued the same method. He shot some footage of a film of the Indian market in the plaza in Santa Fe, then studied it frame by frame, astonished by how much it revealed of the different attitudes of the Indians, the Spanish-Americans and the Anglo-Americans. One 30-second shot of a middle-class American woman talking to a Pueblo Indian woman behind a stall was a mini-drama in itself, as the American woman held out her arm, her finger pointed like a rapier, in the face of the Indian, until the Indian turned her head away, an unmistakeable look of disgust on her face. Later, Hall asked unprepared students to, watch the footage without telling them what to look for. Usually it took days, while the bewildered and bored student stared at the film in a state of awful frustration—until, suddenly, it broke through. Once it had broken through, the student could discern endless depths of meaning in the film. Like Crowley’s ‘student’ Jane Wolff, a new level of perception had suddenly emerged.
/>   Hall points out that this kind of perception is natural to Japanese culture, and can be found in the Zen tradition, which attempts to create insight by the same method of ‘frustration’. It is not simply a new level of perception that emerges, but a new level of doing and being. Eugen Herrigel describes in Zen in the Art of Archery how his teacher taught him to allow ‘it’—the ‘other self’—to fire the arrow. Herrigel’s teacher fired his arrow down a long, dark hall, with only a candle illuminating the target, and still split a target arrow in two.

  St Augustine said: ‘What is time? When I do not think about the question, I know the answer.’ This is essentially the principle of Zen, and the principle that underlies the lives of the Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo and Quiché described by Hall.

  In the last section of the book, Hall speaks about Cro-Magnon man, and about Alexander Marshack’s discoveries of the ‘moon-marks’ on the 35,000-year-old bone, as well as about the stone circles studied by Thom and Gerald Hawkins. And it is at that point, as he speaks of the essential continuity of their culture and that of the Native American Indians, that it becomes clear that he has in mind a completely different kind of evolution from Darwin’s survival of the fittest.

  In one of the most important pages of The Dance of Life, Hall describes how one of his students decided to film children in a playground. To avoid making them self-conscious, the student filmed them from an abandoned car. When he viewed the result, it at first seemed disappointing—just children playing. But after repeated viewings at different speeds—which was part of the technique taught by Hall—he observed that one lively little girl seemed to be affecting everybody else in the playground. As she skipped and danced and twirled, her rhythms seemed to be conveyed to every group she approached.

  After watching it dozens of times, the student began to sense an underlying beat, as if watching a kind of ballet. Moreover, the beat struck him as familiar. He called on a friend who was a rock enthusiast, and asked him to watch the film. After a while, the friend took a cassette from a nearby shelf. When played alongside the film, the children seemed to be dancing to the rock music, as if it had been specially written for them. ‘Not a beat, not a frame, was out of sync.’ What had happened, Hall thinks, is that the children were dancing and playing to some basic musical beat of life, which the composer had also ‘plucked out of the air of the time’. Which is why Hall uses for this chapter the title of the whole book, ‘The Dance of Life’. There is, he believes, some basic rhythm of life—a quite definite rhythm, which could be defined in musical terms—to which our modern left-brain awareness leaves us deaf.

  Now this, clearly, is what Schwaller is talking about in the chapter of Sacred Science called ‘Magic, Sorcery, Medicine’. ‘The higher animals, as well as the human animal, are totally bathed in a psychic atmosphere which establishes the bond between the individuals, a bond as explicit as the air which is breathed by all living things... Every living being is in contact with all the rhythms and harmonies of all the energies in his universe.’

  But is there any way to turn this rather vague and abstract statement into something more concrete and down to earth? After all, harmonies and rhythms can be measured in the physicist’s laboratory, and described in terms of amplitude or wavelength. Can we not be more precise about them?

  This is a question which, almost by accident, came to preoccupy an ex-advertising salesman named Michael Hayes.

  Ever since late childhood—spent in Penzance, Cornwall, where his mother owned a hotel—Hayes had been preoccupied with the question of why we are alive, and what we are supposed to do now we are here.

  In 1971, at the age of 22, he went to live in Mashad, Iran, where his brother was in the senior management of an international trading company. These were the years before the Shah was deposed, when Iran was still swarming with hippies. During his seven years in Iran, Mike Hayes—as he prefers to be known—took the opportunity to travel to India, Pakistan, Kathmandu and Afghanistan. It was during this time that he was introduced by a hippie friend to the ideas of Gurdjieff—via Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous— and began to think more purposefully about the basic problems of human nature.

  In Mashad he had been deeply impressed by the great mosque of Imam Reza. It was obvious from the sheer number of worshippers, and their devoutness, that for them religion was a living reality, as it had been for the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages. And travelling in India and Pakistan, were he had a chance to come into contact with Hinduism and Buddhism, he again had this sense of the tremendous vitality of the religious tradition. It took him by surprise for, apart from hymns at school and an occasional visit to church, his childhood had not been particularly religious. The sheer size of these religious territories impressed him, and the effect of the religious founders on their followers. ‘... I decided that there was very definitely something supernatural about all this. Whoever they were, these “saviours” of mankind certainly knew how to make their presences felt.’

  Back in England, he felt that it was time to catch up on his education, which he could now see had been less than thorough. He signed on for a course in extramural studies at Leicester University, and it was there that he attended some classes on DNA and the genetic code.

  DNA is, of course, a thread-like material in living cells which carries genetic information, such as whether a baby is born with brown or blond hair, blue or brown eyes, and so on. It transmits this information by means of a code, which was finally cracked in the early 1950s by James Watson and Francis Crick. They showed that the DNA molecule has a spiral structure, and looks rather like two spiral ladders held together by rungs made of four chemical ‘bases’ called adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. These bases are strung together in what looks like a random order—perhaps AGTTCGGAA—but it is the order of these bases that makes the difference between brown hair and blond hair, etc. When a cell splits into two—which is how it reproduces—the ‘ladder’ comes apart, and each half attracts to itself various molecules of the bases that are floating free, until there are now two identical ladders. This is how living things reproduce themselves.

  It was when he learned that 64 is the number in which the four bases can form into triplet units called RNA codons that Mike Hayes had a vague sense of déjà vu. The number 64 awoke vague memories. The same thing happened when he learned that these codons correspond with the twenty amino acids necessary for the manufacture of protein—but since there are also two which are the coded instruction for ‘start’ and ‘stop’, the basic number is 22. This again seemed vaguely familiar.

  Then he remembered where he had come across the number 64—in the I-Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which is used as an oracle. And the basic unit of the I-Ching is, of course, a ‘triplet’ of lines, either broken or unbroken, corresponding to the principles of Yin and Yang, which might be regarded as darkness and light, or the male and female principles, or the moon and the sun.

  — — ———

  — — ———

  — — ———

  — — ———

  — — ———

  Hayes recalled that when he had studied the I-Ching in his hippie days, he had wondered vaguely why the number of its ‘hexagrams’ (each one made up of two trigrams) should be 64—eight times eight—and not seven times seven or nine times nine. And now he learned that each of the triplet units of RNA links up with another triplet in the DNA molecule. So the ‘double helix’ of information in the heart of all reproductive cells is made up from 64 hexagrams, as in the I-Ching. Could this really be just coincidence?

  Since his extramural course left him with time to kill, he began looking more closely into this ‘coincidence’. Of course, it seemed unlikely that Fu Hsi, the legendary creator of the I-Ching, had stumbled upon some kind of mystical insight into the ‘code of life’. But it seemed worth investigating.

  If it was not coincidence, then there should be eight trigrams hidden in DNA. And when he learned that this was so, M
ike Hayes began to feel that he had stumbled upon something that could be very important indeed.

  Then he recalled where he had seen the number 22. This was nothing to do with the I-Ching, but with Pythagoras, the Greek ‘father of mathematics’. The Pythagoreans regarded the number 22 as sacred because it represented three musical octaves, and the Pythagoreans saw music as one of the basic secrets of the universe. Of course, an ordinary musical scale has seven notes—doh, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti—and a final doh of the next octave completes it and begins the next octave. But three octaves—and the Pythagoreans also attached a mystical significance to the number three—begins on doh, and ends on another doh 22 notes later.

  Mike Hayes had played the guitar since his early teens, so knew a certain amount of musical theory. In the quest that followed, it proved to be of central importance.

  But at this early stage, in the late seventies, a suspicion was beginning to form in his mind: that these numbers involved in the DNA code might express some basic law of the universe. He was in the position of Edward T. Hall’s student who realised that the children in the playground were dancing to some basic rhythm of life, a rhythm that is totally unsuspected by the rest of us. Mike Hayes came to believe that rhythm is basically musical in nature. And this, in turn, meant that he was a kind of Pythagorean.

  Pythagoreanism is sometimes called ‘number mysticism’, and Pythagoras attached great importance to the numbers three and seven, and to the laws governing musical notes. Gurdijieff had also spoken of the ‘Law of Three’ and the ‘Law of Seven’. The Law of Three states that all creation involves a ‘third force’. We are inclined to think in terms of dualities: positive and negative, male and female, good and evil. Gurdjieff—who derived the idea from the Sankhya philosophy of India—stated that, instead, we should try to think in terms of three. Positive and negative merely counterbalance one another, but if anything is to come of them, they must be given a push by a third force. An obvious example would be the catalyst in a chemical reaction. Oxygen and sulphur dioxide do not naturally combine; but if passed over hot platinised asbestos, they form sulphur trioxide, from which sulphuric acid is made. The platinised asbestos remains unchanged.