From Atlantis to the Sphinx Page 33
Another simple example would be a zip. The left and right side of the zip need the fastener in the middle to make them combine.
But perhaps Gurdjieff’s most interesting illustration is of someone who wishes to change, to achieve greater self-knowledge, and in whom the forces of laziness act as a counterbalance. In this case, the breakthrough can occur through knowledge—a perception of how it can be achieved, which brings a new drive and optimism. In other words, the third force is a kind of kick, an outside force that alters the balance of a situation, breaks a deadlock.
The Law of Seven is illustrated by the seven notes of the musical scale; here the final doh somehow draws them together so they can move on to a higher octave. Again, the seven colours of the spectrum are ‘drawn together’ into white light.
When Mike Hayes began to study the major world religions, he was struck by how often the numbers three, seven and 22 recur. The legendary founder of Hermetic philosophy—identified with the Egyptian God Thoth—is known as Thrice Great Hermes. The number pi—the relation of the diameter of a circle to its circumference—which was supposed to have been discovered by Pythagoras, is 22 divided by seven.
In the story of Noah’s Ark, Noah is told by God to build an ark and take on board two pairs of every animal and bird. After seven days it begins to rain. When the flood starts to subside, Noah sends a raven to see what is happening. It fails to return, and after seven days, he sends a dove, which is unable to find land. After another seven days, Noah sends the dove again, which returns with an olive branch in its beak (the olive branch which has become the symbol of the most important of third forces—reconciliation). After another seven days he releases the dove again, and this time it fails to return, having found land.
Those who know their Bible will recall that there seems to be a contradiction about the number of animals. In 6:19, God tells Noah to take two of every creature on board. In 7:2 this has become seven pairs of ‘clean’ animals and only two of the unclean ones. But in verse 8, Noah goes on board with only two pairs of each. In fact, it hardly makes sense to take seven pairs of animals on board. Which suggests that the seven was inserted by some scribe simply in order to bring the ‘magical’ seven into the text. The same could also be true of Noah’s age, 600—the beginning of his seventh century.
Hayes points out that the story contains three periods of seven days—except that there is also a day when the dove returns, unable to find land, which brings the total to 22. The rainbow, the symbol of God’s reconciliation, has, of course, seven colours.
The same number mysticism can be seen in the Hebrew sacred lamp-stand known at the menorah, which has six branches on either side, with three cups on each, making eighteen. You would expect the central stem (the seventh) to have another three cups, making 21. Instead, it has four, making 22. Twenty-two cups divided by seven branches—the number pi.
Pythagoras also attached peculiar importance to a figure he called the tetrad—ten pebbles arranged in the form of a triangle.
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Pythagoras regarded this figure as a symbol of the supernatural, and Hayes sees it as a symbol of evolutionary ascent, with the topmost pebble as a symbol—like top doh—of the upward movement to a higher level (Plato calls the tetrad ‘the music of the spheres’). From the tetrad Pythagoras derives two more sacred numbers: ten (for the number of pebbles) and four (for the number of lines).
Hayes goes on to demonstrate how the symbol of the tetrad also occurs repeatedly in religion and Hermeticism. For example, a commentary on the Koran called the Tafsir describes the Prophet’s visit to the seven heavens, which begins with Mohammed mounting a quadruped which is neither donkey nor mule, then entering a mosque and lowering his head three times in prayer, after which the angel Gabriel offers him two vessels, one full of wine, one full of milk, and after he has chosen the milk, conducts him to the first heaven. So we have the quadruped—number four—followed by bowing the head three times, followed by the two vessels, followed by the first heaven—the numbers forming a tetrad. The quadruped is also symbolic; being neither donkey nor mule, it symbolises the third force or manifestation, so leading to the next line of the tetrad, the three. The two vessels of wine and milk are also symbolic, the milk symbolising gentleness, kindness (the Chinese yin principle) as against the more positive and assertive wine.
The results of Mike Hayes’s decade of study of religion were finally written down in a book called The Infinite Harmony, in which separate sections deal with ancient Egypt, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Buddhism (with its eightfold path), Confucianism, Christianity and Islam, as well as a chapter on alchemy and the Hermetic code, one on the I-Ching, and one on the genetic code. His basic argument is that the musical octave, together with the Law of Three and the Law of Seven, express some basic code of life and the law governing evolution. And he demonstrates that these numbers turn up with bewildering frequency in the world’s great religions (the Book of Revelation seems to be particularly full of number symbolism and musical symbolism).
Inevitably, the reader begins to wonder whether all this merely demonstrates the author’s determination to make the numbers fit the facts—for example, I found myself wondering why God made it rain for 40 days and 40 nights, rather than the seven or eight or 22 that might be expected (although the answer could lie in multiplying the two numbers of the tetrad, four and ten). Yet even accepting his argument at its lowest level, there can be no possible doubt about the strange recurrence of the numbers three and seven and eight throughout world religions, as if they all incorporate some musical principle.
But this, of course, is only the foundation of Hayes’s argument. Its essence is the notion that the ‘Hermetic code’ is also an evolutionary code—it is something to do with the way life manifests itself, and attempts continually to move to a higher level. Hayes believes that what he has glimpsed is something very like the ‘rhythm of life’ seen by Hall’s student in the film of the schoolchildren: the same hidden rhythm by which the Hopi and the Navajo and the Quiché still regulate their lives, and which the priests of ancient Egypt recognised as the creative force of Osiris.
In fact, the chapter on Egypt and the Great Pyramid is particularly convincing because—as we have seen—there can be little doubt that the Egyptians set out deliberately to encode their knowledge—such as the size of the earth. In some cases, it is hard to know precisely what the Egyptians were trying to tell us. We learn, for example, that in the antechamber to the King’s Chamber, there is a square granite relief whose area is exactly equal to the area of a circle, whose diameter happens to be the precise length of the antechamber floor. Moreover, when this length is multiplied by pi, the result is precisely the length of the solar year—365.2412 pyramid inches. It is difficult to understand why the architect of the Pyramid wanted to transmit this information, or to whom. On the other hand, it seems that the off-centre niche in the Queen’s Chamber, which has also baffled most writers on the Pyramid, is precisely one sacred cubit off centre, as if the architect was trying to tell us precisely what basic measure he was using. So the other encoded information may be just as practical.
Hayes also argues convincingly for the Egyptian knowledge of pi (which, we may recall, was supposed to have been discovered two thousand years later by Pythagoras). He cites, for example, a decree which appoints a certain high priest Director of all 22 nomes (districts) of Upper Egypt. Later, when the son is appointed, he is only Director of seven nomes. The symbolism seems to be obvious: father over son, 22 over seven.
He also points out the association of the Great Pyramid with the ‘Magic Square of Hermes’, 2080, which happens to be the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 64—the number of the I-Ching and the genetic code.
Schwaller de Lubicz’s years studying the Temple of Luxor left him in no doubt of its incredibly precise symbolism. His major work, The Temple of Man (not to be confused with the smaller Temple in Man,
also about Luxor) demonstrates beyond all doubt that the Luxor temple symbolises a human being, with various chambers corresponding precisely to various organs. Here again, the architect enjoyed playing with number codes, many of which Schwaller is able to decipher in the course of the three volumes. An ancient Egyptian mystic would no doubt have found the Temple, like the Great Pyramid, an amazing and continuous revelation. But in spite of Schwaller’s decoding, most of its meaning is now lost to, us.
As we have seen, Mike Hayes’s starting point was his observation of the odd similarity between the genetic code and the I-Ching.
The I-Ching is, of course, a book of ‘oracles’, which is consulted for advice. This certainly sounds like pure superstition. But the psychologist Carl Jung, who launched the book upon the modern world by introducing Richard Wilhelm’s translation in 1951, believed there was more to it than that. He argued that there is a hidden truth behind the I-Ching which he called synchronicity (in a small book of that title), an ‘acausal connecting principle’.
The I-Ching is consulted either by throwing down three coins six times, and noting the preponderance of heads or tails (tails for yin—a broken line—and heads for yang, an unbroken line). It can also be consulted by a method using 50 yarrow stalks, of which one is thrown aside, leaving 49, which we note is seven times seven. So it would seem that one method is based on the Law of Three, the other on the Law of Seven.
It must be borne in mind that when the Book of Changes first came into being, it was not a ‘book’, but merely two lines, a broken and an unbroken one, meaning respectively no and yes, and the questioner threw down the coins (or divided the yarrow stalks) only once. It seems to have struck the legendary inventor of the I-Ching, the sage Fu Hsi (believed to have lived in the third millennium BC), that the two lines can change their nature, becoming their opposite. Fu Hsi arranged the lines into trigrams, then hexagrams. He began with Ken, ‘keeping still, the mountain’. Then he contemplated these hexagrams, conceiving them as nets of forces, and tried to envisage the meaning of the changes within them. At that stage it was an exercise in pure intuition. Most of the hexagrams were probably not even named. A slightly later version of the hexagrams began with K’un, ‘the receptive’.
In about 1000 BC, King Wen had been imprisoned by the tyrant Chou Hsin, and it was there, after a vision in which he saw the hexagrams arranged in a circle, that he arranged them in their present form, beginning with the masculine hexagram Ch’ien, ‘the creative’, and adding commentaries. Wen was rescued by his son, who overthrew the tyrant, and Wen became ruler. Confucius added more commentaries about five hundred years later.
So the I-Ching began purely as symbols, contemplated for their inner meaning. This is clearly how Jung saw them.
The Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser notes (in his magnum opus The Ever Present Origin, 1949) that ‘the revision of the former book of oracles into a book of wisdom... indicates the decisive fact that around 1000 BC man began to awaken to a diurnal, wakeful consciousness’, which suggests that in China, as in the Mediterranean, some fundamental change in the nature of human consciousness had appeared.
It is only towards the end of The Dance of Life that Edward T. Hall mentions the name of Jung, whose idea of the collective unconscious seems to flow like an undercurrent through the book. Hall is also speaking about synchronicity—which he sees as a form of ‘entrainment’ (a term invented by William Condon, which means what happens when one person picks up another’s rhythm—in other words, sympathetic vibration). Hall sees synchronicity as a type of entrainment, in which events are experienced simultaneously by two people in different places. He cites a story about Jung, who was on a train, feeling oddly depressed as he thought about a patient with severe marital problems. At a certain point in this gloomy meditation, Jung happened to check his watch—and later learned that the patient had committed suicide at that exact moment.
But of course, this is not all Jung means by synchronicity. Neither are Hall’s personal examples of a colleague ringing him with information that he needed urgently, or of experiencing ‘in my own body sensations that were present in someone else’s body’. These could be explained by some kind of telepathy. Many examples of synchronicity cited by Jung are of coincidences so preposterous that they sound like fiction. A typical example concerns the French poet Émile Deschamps, who was given a piece of plum pudding by a certain M. Fortgibu when he was a boy. Ten years later, he saw some plum pudding in the window of a Paris restaurant, and went in to ask if he could have some—only to be told that it had been ordered by M. Fortgibu. Many years later, he was invited to a meal that included plum pudding, and remarked that all that was wanting was M. Fortgibu. As he said this, M. Fortgibu walked in—he had come to the wrong address.
Jung comments that ‘either there are physical processes which cause psychic happenings, or there is a pre-existent psyche which organises matter.’ What is implied is that such coincidences happen when the mind is in a state of harmony and balance. This is perfectly illustrated by a story told to Jung by his friend Richard Wilhelm, translator of the I-Ching. Wilhelm was in a remote Chinese village that was suffering from drought, and a rainmaker was sent for from a distant village. The man asked for a cottage on the outskirts of the village, and vanished into it for three days. At the end of that time, there was a tremendous, downpour, followed by snow. Wilhelm asked the old man how he had done it; the old man replied that he hadn’t. ‘I come from a region where everything is in order. It rains when it should rain, and is fine when it is needed. But the people in this village are all out of Tao and out of themselves. I was at once infected when I arrived, so I asked for a cottage on the edge of the village, so I could be alone. When I was once more in Tao, it rained.’
The story seems to be a perfect example of what Hall means when he speaks of the Indians’ harmony with nature. It is also an example of the harmony referred to in the title of Hayes’s The Infinite Harmony—the harmony that Confucius, and Lao Tse, the founder of Taoism, regarded as the essence of ‘right living’.
Yet we are still faced with the puzzling and totally illogical notion of a book—made of paper and printer’s ink—answering questions. One obvious possibility would be that the questions are answered by ‘spirits’, rather as with a Ouija board. But apparently the Chinese do not accept this notion. Jung explains their view by saying that ‘whatever happens in a given moment possesses inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment’, and mentions a wine connoisseur who can tell from the taste of the wine the exact location of its vineyard, and antique dealers who can name the time and place where a certain objet d’art was made; he even adds the risky analogy of an astrologer who can tell you merely by looking at you the sign you were born under and the rising sign at the time of your birth.
The I-Ching, then, may either be regarded as some kind of living entity, or as a kind of ready reckoner which is able to inform the questioner of the exact meaning of the hexagram he has obtained. It is, at all events, based upon the notion that there is no such thing as pure chance.
This notion sounds preposterous, but seems to be supported by quantum physics, in which the observer somehow alters the event he is observing. For example, a beam of light shone through a pinhole will cause a small circle of light to appear on a screen (or photographic plate) behind it. If two pinholes are opened side by side, there are two interlinked circles of light, but the portion that overlaps has a number of dark lines, due to the ‘interference’ of the two beams, which cancel one another out. If the beam is now dimmed, so that only one photon at a time can pass through, you would expect the interference lines to disappear when the plate is finally developed, for one photon cannot interfere with another. Yet the interference lines are still there. But if we ‘watch’ the photons with a photon detector, to find out what is happening at the holes, the interference pattern disappears...
Jung seems to be suggesting that, in the same way, our minds affect the patterns of the real world, unconsciou
sly ‘fixing’ the results. I have described elsewhere1 how, when I began to write an article on synchronicity, the most absurd synchronicities began to occur. The most preposterous of these was as follows. I described how a friend, Jacques Vallee, had been seeking information on the biblical prophet Melchizedek (pronounced ‘Mel-kizzy-dek’), because he was interested in a Los Angeles religious sect called the Order of Melchizedek. He could find very little. But when he took a taxi to Los Angeles airport, and asked the taxi driver for a receipt, she gave him one signed ‘M. Melchizedek’. Thinking that perhaps there were hundreds of Melchizedeks in Los Angeles, he looked in the vast telephone directory, which runs to several volumes. There was only one Melchizedek—his taxi driver.
After I had finished writing this story, I broke off to take my dogs for a walk. On the camp bed in my basement, I noticed a book that I did not recognise; it was called You Are Sentenced to Life, by W. D. Chesney, a Los Angeles doctor, and I knew it was my book because I had sent it to be bound. (My house contains over 20,000 books, so it is easy to lose track.) When I came back from my walk I opened it—and found myself looking at a page headed ‘Order of Melchizedek’—a copy of a letter from the founder of the Order to the author of the book. I felt my hair prickle. It was as if some fate had whispered in my ear: ‘If you think Jacques Vallee’s story is the strangest synchronicity you’ve ever heard of, how about this?’ It was as if synchronicity was setting out to convince me of its reality.
How can we explain synchronicities? Unless we dismiss them as ‘pure chance’, we are forced to Jung’s conclusion that the mind plays a more active part in forming reality than we realise. Or, as Jung put it, ‘there is a pre-existent psyche that organises matter.’