The first part of my title is a well known expression in scientific discussions. It was discussed in a recent Medium article by Gem Jackson who calls it the ‘Sagan Standard’ after the famous scientist, the late Carl Sagan, who coined it during the Cosmos TV series in 1980. Jackson describes it as “an essential tool for better thinking”, “a sensible rule, which lies at the heart of the scientific method, principles of legal proof and rational thought more generally. It takes into account that evidence alone is not sufficient to establish belief — the quality and quantity of evidence must be able to bear the weight of the claim being argued”.

    It is very hard to argue against this, when expressed in those terms. Such statements are not without their difficulties, however. The main problem is, who gets to decide what is an extraordinary claim, and what constitutes adequate evidence? These should be completely objective, independent observers, who have consistently demonstrated the ability to think critically. Do such people exist, or is this just an ideal to be aspired to? We certainly would not want to leave such decisions to extreme skeptics, those obstinately resistant to persuasive evidence; this might well hinder the progress of scientific inquiry. More relevant to this article, is that an accurate description of Sagan? How objective and independent was he?

    The context for his statement was the question of alien visitations. Here is the full quote: “What counts is not what sounds plausible. Not what we’d like to believe. Not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence, rigorously and sceptically examined; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Jackson elaborates: “Sagan argues that despite the thousands of witness testimonies, supporting claims that aliens have visited Earth, such a belief is so extraordinary the standard of proof is correspondingly increased”.

    So here we have the belief of one skeptic being allowed to override the evidence provided by thousands of eye-witness testimonies. We therefore have to ask the question, is the belief in alien visitation really as extraordinary as Sagan claimed? (I am here having to assume that Jackson’s commentary is correct. He quotes Sagan as saying “not what one or two witnesses claim”, then continues: “Sagan argues that despite the thousands of witness testimonies…”)

    I assume that these thousands of testimonies refer to UFO sightings, and those are not necessarily indicative of alien visitation. Let’s remind ourselves of what the acronym stands for, Unidentified Flying Objects. So these could be vehicles created either by humans or by aliens; I think that exhausts the possibilities.

    These objects are often reported to move at speeds impossible for any known humanly created flying machine, change direction in ways impossible for any known humanly created flying machine, and fly silently, something which no known humanly created flying machine can do. Therefore, if these UFOs have been created and are being flown by humans, then some unspecified government or governments are involved in some truly amazing projects. Doesn’t the public have a right to know about this? What would be the secret agenda behind this? The most likely scenario would be the development of a programme of highly sophisticated weapons. A second possibility would be some kind of space travel programme they don’t want us to know about.

    These scenarios are far-fetched — they would certainly be extremely extraordinary claims, requiring extremely extraordinary evidence — so the more likely alternative is that these vehicles are indeed the creation of aliens, since we have no idea what level of technological achievement they might have achieved.

    By a strange coincidence, as I was reflecting on Jackson’s article in relation to Sagan, another Medium article (click here) appeared which also mentioned Sagan’s aphorism in relation to the UFO phenomenon. This was by Carolyn Brouillard. It is very interesting, and I recommend reading it in full.

    On the principal question of whether the UFO or ET hypothesis is truly extraordinary, she quotes Professor David Deming: “A claim or theory is not ‘extraordinary’ solely because it is novel, unusual, or is in disagreement with human consensus… An ‘extraordinary’ claim is one that is contradicted by a massive amount of existing evidence”. On that basis Sagan would appear to be completely wrong, since he is arguing against alien visitation on the basis of his personal opinion that this is a novel or unusual claim, when in fact it is supported by a massive amount of evidence (thousands of witness testimonies).

    She then goes on to agree with what I just wrote, that the ET hypothesis is the most credible explanation for UFOs: “In fact, answering the question of what else they could be if not a product of advanced intelligence is more problematic”. She then makes the case. Her first point is the appearance of deliberate engineering. She then makes a similar argument to mine above with more details: anti-gravity lift, sudden and instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocities without signatures, low observability or cloaking, and trans-medium travel. She argues that these objects are unlikely to have been engineered by human governments, and then reveals that she has been on two UFO Sighting Tours. On both occasions flying objects responded to telepathic and visual attempts to engage.

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    I’m now going to discuss in more detail (the late) Carl Sagan. He was involved in various SETI projects, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The general idea is to scan for signals of any kind, more specifically radio signals, from other solar systems. Ufologists presumably find this project somewhat humorous, since they would argue that, if you want to find evidence of alien intelligence, then the best place to start looking, given the thousands of sightings, would be the Earth itself. After all, the basic claim of SETI is that, as far as we know, we are alone in the universe, but wonder if other similar civilisations might exist elsewhere.

    Evidence that those involved in SETI seem to be wilfully blind is provided by Dr. Roger Leir in his book UFOs Do Not Exist: The Greatest Lie That Enveloped the World¹. I have chosen to mention this, rather than the many other available books by credible authors, because of his provocative, but ambiguous, title. When I first looked at it, I wondered whether the first part was a statement, and that UFOs were the greatest lie. It turns out that the other interpretation is intended; the greatest lie that has enveloped the world is that UFOs do not exist. The author gains credibility in that astronaut Edgar Mitchell has endorsed it by providing a preface where he writes: “the evidence that we have been visited by beings from some of those distant worlds is becoming overwhelmingly obvious to those who look carefully at the evidence” (p 5). Unlike Sagan, he clearly does not think that this is an extraordinary claim.

    This overwhelming evidence has obviously escaped the attention of those involved in the SETI project. We are therefore left to wonder whether this organisation is merely a propaganda tool of NASA in particular, and the American government in general, whose purpose is to dupe the public into believing that ideas about UFOs and alien visitation are silly nonsense to be dismissed out of hand. It is not exactly a secret that this propaganda machine, known officially as Project Blue Book, existed. It was revealed in detail by Allen Hynek in his UFO Report². The cover describes him as “the leading Air Force consultant on Project Blue Book, and the world’s foremost expert on UFOs”. The book “distills over 12,000 sightings and 140,000 official Project Blue Book pages”, and “reveals what the Government suppressed and why”. (This book is a follow-up to his earlier The UFO Experience: a Scientific Inquiry³, which goes over similar material.)

    In the 1960s Sagan had written “that interstellar space flight at ‘relativistic speeds’ (speeds near the speed of light) is a possibility”; he “calculated that interstellar visitors may encounter the solar system on an average of once every 10,000 years, with the last visit possibly in historical times”; he “speculated that records of such a visit might exist in Earthly oral tradition”; he “made his own amateur excursion into the realm of myth, folklore, ethnography, and anthropology to look for such a record”; he “seriously proposed a search for alien artifacts on the surface of the Moon and other planets in the solar system by means of high-resolution photography”; he suggested that this should be “done with support from a grant by NASA”⁴.

    Fast forward nearly 20 years, and what do we find? Photographs have been taken of Mars which suggest a face carved in rock, and also pyramid structures. Attention was focused on one particular photograph, known as 70A13, which had been enhanced, and appeared to confirm this. Two researchers Vincent Dipietro and Gregory Molenaar did some scientific analysis, but got nowhere in their efforts to get published or make presentations. Sagan then offered to help by reviewing their material but, having done so, then wrote an article in Parade magazine in which he dismissed their work out of hand.

    At this point Professor Stanley McDaniel enters the scene. He had become interested in the questions around the Mars photos, and had made some investigations of his own. This is how he summarises his conclusions up to this point: “As my study of the work done by the independent investigators and NASA’s response to their research continued, I became aware not only of the relatively high quality of the independent research, but also of glaring mistakes in the arguments used by NASA to reject this research. With each new NASA document I encountered, I became more and more appalled by the impossibly bad quality of the reasoning used. It grew more and more difficult to believe that educated scientists could engage in such faulty reasoning unless they were following some sort of hidden agenda aimed at suppressing the true nature of the data”.

    He was especially appalled by Sagan’s article, which he describes as “the most shockingly blatant piece of disinformation I have ever seen: one written not by an obscure NASA Public Information employee, but by a prestigious member of the 1976 Viking Lander Imaging Team, Dr. Carl Sagan”. He was therefore moved to write a book on the whole subject The McDaniel Report⁵, from which the above quotes were taken (P xvi-xvii).

    He later writes: “Among the efforts to discourage interest in the Martian anomalies, one stands out in particular. It involved Dr. Carl Sagan, a member of the 1976 Viking Lander Imaging Team and therefore a de facto spokesman for NASA on this topic. Dr. Sagan’s contribution is important not only for its medium, an article in a nationally distributed newspaper supplement, but also for its historical positioning, which gives it the appearance of a pivotal piece designed to discourage interest in the topic just as the data began to look impressive… The weight of Dr. Sagan’s considerable authority in the planetary science community may account for the otherwise inexplicable confidence placed by NASA in the many fallacious arguments documented here” (p 148).

    McDaniel provides details of the history leading up to the article, which establishes exactly what Sagan knew in advance of writing: “This chronology establishes that on various occasions, starting at least one year prior to publishing the article in Parade magazine, Dr. Sagan was made aware of the nature of the investigation, the identities and qualifications of the investigators, the use of image processing techniques in the investigation, and the role of Viking frame 70A13 in confirming that the facial characteristics were not merely a ‘trick of light and shadow’ ” (p 149).

    McDaniel then provides an analysis and critique of Sagan’s article. Since this is somewhat lengthy, I’ll begin by quoting his concluding summary, so that readers can get a quick impression of his opinion of Sagan’s work: “After having seen the report of the Independent Mars Investigation Team, and having viewed quality processed photos including 70A13, Dr. Sagan produced an article in a national news magazine containing a misleading, colorized and unidentified version of frame 70A13 which he presented as a disconfirming photo, He failed to name the investigators and omitted all reference to their qualifications, the data upon which their work was based, methods of photo enhancement used, and conclusions reached. Instead he promoted the perception that some ‘amateurs’, ‘zealots’, and a ‘science writer’, peering at low-resolution photos and unable to tell the difference between transmission errors and real data, imagined a ‘face’ on Mars simply because of some uncontrollable psychological compulsion, or because they are not intelligent enough to tell the difference between an eggplant and a face” (p 154).

    The obvious consequence of his failure to name any of the investigators was that this prevented readers from checking on his statements; if they could have checked, they would have discovered the investigators’ professional qualifications.

    Sagan had therefore “employed five main propaganda devices”; he had:

• failed to mention the serious research carried out on the subject
• engaged in ad hominem attacks
• presented a naïve psychological theory to explain why researchers mistakenly see a ‘face’ on Mars
• developed an overblown version of NASA’s ‘Happy Face’ argument
• displayed an “allegedly disconfirming photograph which acts as a substitute for the nonexistent frame in which, NASA alleged, the Face ‘disappears’. The photograph turns out to be a version of frame 70A13 that has been selected and printed in a way that minimizes the facial features” (p150).

    McDaniel then elaborates on this material over four pages, giving all the relevant details. He describes this as Sagan leading his readers down a logical slippery slope, “a kind of effort to hypnotize the reader”. He concludes that the article “grossly offends the ethics of science reporting”. It “falls in the category now known as ‘debunking’ — undermining a serious inquiry into unusual phenomena by the use of propaganda methods”.

    One further interesting detail on that theme is as follows. Sagan failed to mention the use of image enhancement which brought out the details in the photographs being investigated: “The use of an essentially unprocessed version of 70A13, with no mention of the analysis and enhancements performed on it by DiPietro and Molenaar, is something no scientist, acting responsibly, ought to allow — whether writing for a lay audience or a professional one” (p 155). Sagan even had a frame “already known to confirm the facial characteristics and to add significant detail” edited, therefore distorted, so it ended up being a frame represented by him as a disconfirming photo. Unsurprisingly, no records of the work done on this photo were retained by the organisation responsible, which was headed by Sagan. This can surely only be construed as a deliberate attempt to deceive.

    McDaniel further adds: “Apologies are due, however belated, from Dr. Sagan to the researchers whose work he saw, and pointedly ignored, in his effort to lump those interested in the Martian anomalies with ‘amateurs’ and ‘flying saucer zealots’. There is no sign, however, that Dr. Sagan has mended his ways. As late as 1993, in a public lecture, Dr. Sagan is reported to have used the (same) ploy… as evidence that the imagery had been misinterpreted”.

    Extraordinary though this may seem, despite this unrelenting and damning critique of Sagan, and therefore by implication of NASA, I understand that McDaniel later backtracked somewhat. He formed his own organisation called the Society for Planetary SETI Research, which stated that no NASA conspiracies existed, and that their attitude to the Cydonia (Face on Mars) issue had been honest but stupid, thus not a deliberate cover-up.

    Therefore, just as Sagan by 1980 had completely distanced himself from his earlier statements advocating genuine search for extraterrestrial intelligence (not the SETI variety), so also McDaniel turned volte-face, reversing his damning conclusions. One wonders what could have made them both change their minds so drastically. Did they both receive a visit from the notorious Men in Black? Only joking.

    Returning to my starting point, Gem Jackson asks what you say to people whose beliefs fly in the face of overwhelming evidence. He is referring to the many thousands of Trump’s supporters who believe, despite the lack of evidence, that the recent Presidential election was rigged. He could just as easily be saying that of Sagan, however. We can readily agree that truly extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We now see, however, that the claim for the existence of UFOs, and therefore the strong possibility of alien visitation, is not extraordinary at all. On the contrary, it seems quite likely, otherwise why would NASA make such determined efforts to suppress the data. Sagan’s aphorism would therefore seem to have been merely a tool in NASA’s disinformation campaign.

APPENDIX

    Some highly significant evidence has emerged recently. In December 2020 Haim Eshed, the head of Israel’s space security programme for nearly 30 years, now retired, stated publicly that the American government has been in communication, and has an agreement, with a “galactic federation” of aliens, but has not revealed this to humanity at large because it is believed that we are not yet ready. Indeed he claims that “aliens from all over the universe are already walking among us”.

    Perhaps not the last point, but his first claim is believed by many so-called conspiracy theorists, whose suggestions can easily be, and usually are, dismissed. It’s not quite so easy to dismiss this when it is said by a space security boss. So, what reasons do we have to disbelieve him? (What follows is based purely on this newspaper article. I have not checked the details any further.)

    One of his claims is superficially hard to accept, that the agreement includes an “underground base in the depths of Mars”, where American astronauts and alien representatives mingle. That is hard to believe if we assume that the Americans were transported to Mars by NASA, which would have required a cover-up and deception on a grand scale. I assume therefore that, if the claim is true, they must have been taken there secretly in some of the thousands of UFOs that apparently roam around our planet.

    A second objection is that Eshed’s claims are made in a new book The Universe Beyond The Horizon. It is possible therefore that he is making this all up, in order to boost his income in retirement. This seems somewhat unlikely to me; why would such a distinguished and reputable scientist want to ruin his reputation by descending to the level of a crackpot conspiracy theorist? This accusation has nevertheless been made by Nick Pope, a former British Ministry of Defence UFO investigator, who has been quoted as saying that the claims were either a “practical joke or publicity stunt to help sell” Mr Eshed’s book. We should note that this is presumably pure speculation without any inside knowledge, a typical debunker’s tactic.

    We might wonder what motivated Mr. Eshed to break ranks and reveal what is presumably intended to be a closely guarded secret. His side of the story is that he now has “nothing to lose” having received his “degrees and awards”, adding that his claims previously would have been ridiculed, but that now the “academic landscape has changed and because he was a well-respected figure in academia”. Are these good enough reasons to break presumed oaths of secrecy and threaten global security? I’m not sure.

    It is speculated or believed by ufologists (for example on Medium Bryce Zabel, many articles including this one, and Carolyn Brouillard) that we are on the verge of a spectacular disclosure regarding UFOs and ETs. Perhaps Eshed has been instructed to prepare the ground with his revelation.

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Footnotes:

1. The Book Tree, 2014
2. originally 1977, my copy Souvenir Press, 1998
3. Corgi, 1974
4. as quoted in McDaniel’s book. The source is ‘Direct Contact among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight’, 1963, reprinted in The Quest for Extraterrestrial Life, ed. Donald Goldsmith, University Science Books, 1980, p 213.
5. North Atlantic Books, 1993

    That was the title of a talk that I attended last Saturday (February 29th 2020) at the Theosophical Society London, given by Gary Lachman, prolific writer on spiritual and esoteric topics. (It is also the title of a book by him, for reviews click here.) That has inspired me to write this article, which will be partly about my readings of Wilson, to acquaint anyone unaware of him with this significant writer, and partly a review of Lachman’s talk.

    Colin Wilson is one of my favourite authors. He investigates and writes intelligently in an open-minded way about controversial topics, which could leave him open to ridicule by scientific sceptics. Reading him is an adventure in the discovery of how the universe really works, as opposed to how such sceptics think it works. It’s also interesting to note that Lachman’s book inspired Jack Preston King, a popular writer on Medium.com, to adopt Beyond the Robot as one of his pseudonyms.

    The advance publicity of the talk said: “From his bestselling debut with The Outsider in 1956, to his death in 2013, Colin Wilson — a friend and mentor — was one of the most incisive, stimulating, and prolific writers and thinkers in recent times. His oeuvre covers an astoundingly wide range of interests, including philosophy, psychology, literature, the paranormal, mysticism, consciousness, criminality, literature, and history. At the central core of Wilson’s work is the insight that ‘there is something wrong with human consciousness,’ a problem Wilson investigated thrillingly in books like The Occult, Mysteries, A Criminal History of Mankind and novels such as The Mind Parasites and Ritual in the Dark. This talk, based on my book Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, will focus on the fundamental questions at the heart of Wilson’s lifelong study of ‘the mechanics of enlightenment,’ and argue that his conclusions offer a tremendous hope for the future”.

                                                                                           Gary Lachman

    I first became acquainted with Wilson following a weird period in my life, which could loosely be described as a spiritual awakening. I then started to read widely about all sorts of subjects that I would previously have considered out of bounds. One such book was The Occult, but I no longer remember how I came across it.

    Since then I have read Afterlife¹, which introduced me to the work and writing of psychotherapist Adam Crabtree. The title of his book Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality² is self-explanatory. This is a salutary lesson for any materialist who hangs on to the notion that consciousness is a by-product of the brain. Crabtree went on to join a team of writers responsible for two incredibly important books Irreducible Mind³, and Beyond Physicalism⁴. (I’ve described the former briefly in an earlier article, click here.)

    Afterlife also introduced me to Wilson van Dusen, a clinical psychologist involved in work similar to that of Crabtree’s. Perhaps his most important book is The Presence of Other Worlds⁵. There is one chapter related to Crabtree’s work called ‘The Presence of Spirits in Madness’. The following account comes from Wilson: “The patients felt as if they had contact with another world or order of beings. ‘Most thought these other persons were living. All objected to the term “hallucination” ’… His patients seemed to experience two distinct kinds of ‘voices’; he speaks of these as the ‘higher order’ and the ‘lower order’… The lower order are basically tormenters. But about one-fifth of the hallucinations seem to be of a higher order, and they… seem concerned with helping the patient… While the lower order ‘is consistently non-religious and anti-religious’, jeering at the least mention of religion, the higher order ‘appeared strangely gifted, sensitive, wise and religious’ ”⁶.

    Isn’t that fascinating? This is obviously a controversial suggestion, but it leads me to wonder whether the modern generation of vociferous and aggressive new atheists have been possessed unknowingly by these lower order spirits.

    Wilson’s book Mysteries⁷ contains much interesting material. Here I’ll focus on one extraordinary topic. Readers will perhaps be familiar with the theory of C. G. Jung that alchemy was not really about the literal transmutation of lead into gold, but that the texts were symbolic descriptions of psychological and spiritual transformation. This is now perhaps considered to be the most likely explanation. In Mysteries, for the first time, I was introduced to the idea that alchemy can also be understood literally.

    Wilson’s account focuses upon a young woman Mary Anne South. This is a brief summary of the salient material. She and her father were fascinated by ancient texts and their wisdom, including the ceremonies known as the Mysteries (e.g. Eleusinian). As is well known, these traditions taught secret knowledge to initiates, which they were forbidden to reveal upon pain of death. She wrote a book entitled A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery With a Dissertation on the More Celebrated of the Alchemical Philosophers, which was published. At the time her father was too absorbed in his own work, and merely glanced at the manuscript.

    Later he read the book. “His reaction was instantaneous. He went to enormous trouble to call in the copies that had been sent out, made a pile of all available copies… and burnt them”. His attempt to eradicate completely the book’s existence was unsuccessful, however, and it was eventually reprinted. (Several editions are currently available. I haven’t read it, so I don’t know if they are the full, original text.)

    Why did he have this extreme reaction? It is interesting that, upon reflection, Mary Anne seemed to agree with her father’s decision, for after he died “she made no effort to have the book reprinted, although she admitted that its destruction had been a ‘crushing sorrow’ ”. It seems that he thought she had been revealing secrets from the ancient Mystery traditions which they had guarded so zealously. As Wilson observes: “Her long ‘Preliminary Account’ is a history of alchemy showing that there is plenty of evidence to prove that alchemists really could transmute base metals into gold”⁸. He then goes on to explore this possibility.

    Also worth reading is Alien Dawn⁹, an open-minded and intelligent investigation into the UFO phenomenon, described in the jacket notes as “Wilson’s own attempt to piece together a vast, complex jigsaw puzzle, whose components include poltergeists, lake monsters, ancient folklore, time slips, out-of-body experiences, mystical awareness and psychic travel to other worlds, as well as allegations of worldwide government cover-ups. It is the most comprehensive bird’s eye view of the subject ever undertaken, and the conclusions Wilson draws are of overwhelming significance to us all”.

                                                                                               Colin Wilson

    I’ll turn now to Gary Lachman’s talk. As noted above, it was entitled ‘The Life and Work of Colin Wilson’. It was scheduled to last two hours. Given that Wilson was such a prolific writer, and explored in depth such a wide range of topics, only time would tell whether this would be manageable. As it turned out, this was too ambitious; Lachman reached his planned halfway point after about 80 minutes. There was then some discussion as to whether the talk should be extended, or whether he should be invited back at a later date to give the second half. As it turned out, following a short break, we had a brief summary of the second half, which turned into a question-and-answer session. Hopefully there will be the suggested return visit.

    This actually suited me, because it became obvious that Wilson’s work was divided into two phases. I was much more familiar with the second part: the occult, the paranormal, parapsychology, and so on. I was aware of, but less familiar with, the first phase, which began with The Outsider, and which dealt with existential issues of consciousness and freedom. As the title of that book suggests, there are certain people who somehow simply do not feel at home, comfortable in the world. I was struck by two phrases: “the outsider sees too deep, and too much, and what he sees is chaos”, and “civilisation has not found a place for such people; they see through the world, the falseness”. (Obviously, if we are ever going to address the world’s problems seriously, we will need many more such people.)

    Lachman told us that Wilson was from a working-class background, had no university degree, yet was incredibly widely read (and was obviously very intelligent). The Outsider was a surprise bestseller, which suggests that it struck a chord with its themes of angst and alienation, yet Wilson was never accepted by the literary establishment or the press, and became a persona non grata, a pariah. (This surprised me because I had always thought of Wilson as a best-selling author. It seems, however, to confirm his thesis, that the world will reject those who see through it for what it is, and they will remain outsiders.)

    Lachman did not make this connection explicitly, but his presentation of Wilson’s ideas reminded me strongly of the ancient Gnostics’ contempt for the world, and their struggle for deeper consciousness. So, much of the content of his works was concerned with techniques for waking people up from their habitual complacency. Playing Russian Roulette, although perhaps not recommended for everyone, seemed to have the required effect upon Graham Greene. Abraham Maslow believed that what he called peak experiences only happen spontaneously, and could not be induced. Wilson rejected this, and sought to find techniques to make them happen.

    Here are some random key phrases from the talk:

• “if freedom is threatened in detail, you then know how important it is”.
• “when we have freedom, we don’t know what to do with it”.
• “the confrontation with death energises life”.

    This first part of the talk turned out also to be a whirlwind tour of recent Western philosophy and literature. Figures not mentioned in this article so far were: the Romantic poets, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse, William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, H. G. Wells, Edmund Husserl, Kathleen Raine, A. N. Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, T. S. Eliot, Gurdjieff, and Samuel Beckett.

    So Lachman’s book on Wilson promises to be very informative, and highly interesting to anyone interested in spirituality, expanding consciousness, the paranormal etc. Lachman also made me aware for the first time that Wilson was a critic of Darwinian biology. I’m looking forward to reading up on that!

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Footnotes:

1. Grafton Books, 1987

2. Grafton Books, 1988

3. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010

4. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015

5. Wildwood House, 1975

6. as footnote 1, p20–23

7. Panther, Granada Publishing, 1979

8. Mysteries, p400–405

9. Virgin Publishing, 1998

    On June 9th I’ll be giving a talk in Leeds entitled Time for a New Paradigm — the Reunification of Science and Religion. One of my central themes, quoting Robert Cox, will be that “the ancients were much more intelligent than we have supposed them to be. In particular… many ancient cultures once shared a genuine spiritual science…which in certain ways rivals and even surpasses the most advanced physical theories of today”¹.

    If that is true, despite what many modern scientists may claim, and despite their attempts to dismiss ancient peoples and their thinking as primitive and mythological, it’s possible that modern science is only just beginning to catch up with the wisdom of the Ancients.

    One obvious example of this advanced science is the Great Pyramid of Giza. Many Egyptologists, along with numerous TV documentaries, claim that this was built on the instructions of Pharaoh Khufu (also known as Cheops) to serve as his tomb around 2,500 B.C.E. This dating is the subject of some debate and controversy, some researchers arguing that it was built earlier. I don’t intend to enter that debate here, since I have nothing to add which could advance the argument any further. Obviously, if it were built earlier, it would not have been the project of Khufu, but someone else. Again, there is much debate on that topic, and on how it was built, which I also won’t add to here.

    What is possible, however, since the Great Pyramid is still with us, is to examine it as it is, and draw our own conclusions. One person who did just that was Peter Tompkins. His book Secrets of the Great Pyramid² was first published in 1971. That was some time ago now and, since many younger people may be unaware of that research, I thought it would be a good idea to post a brief article now to outline the main points.

    Here are a few quotes from the introduction:

• “Does the Great Pyramid of Cheops enshrine a lost science? Was (it)… designed by mysterious architects who had a deeper knowledge of the secrets of this universe than those who followed them?”
• “The foundations were almost perfectly oriented to true north, its structure incorporated a value for π accurate to several decimals and in several distinct and unmistakable ways, and its main chamber incorporated the ‘sacred’ 3–4–5 and 2-√5–3 triangles (a² + b² = c²) which were to make Pythagoras famous, and which Plato in his Timaeus claimed as the building blocks of the cosmos”.
• “The Pyramid’s angles and slopes display an advanced understanding of trigonometric values, (and) its shape quite precisely incorporates the fundamental proportions of the ‘Golden Section’, known today by the Greek letter φ (pronounced phi)”.
• “Recent studies of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the cuneiform mathematical tablets of the Babylonians and Sumerians have established that an advanced science did flourish in the Middle East at least three thousand years before Christ, and that Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus and other Greeks reputed to have originated mathematics on this planet merely picked up fragments of an ancient science evolved by remote and unknown predecessors”.
• “The Great Pyramid, like most of the great temples of antiquity, was designed on the basis of a hermetic geometry known only to a restricted group of initiates, mere traces of which percolated to the Classical and Alexandrian Greeks”.
• “The Pyramid has been shown to be an almanac by means of which the length of the year including its awkward .2422 fraction of a day could be measured as accurately as with a modern telescope. It has been shown to be a theodolite, or instrument for the surveyor, of great precision and simplicity, virtually indestructible. It is still a compass so finely oriented that modern compasses are adjusted to it, not vice versa”.
• “The Great Pyramid is a carefully located geodetic marker, or fixed landmark, on which the geography of the ancient world was brilliantly constructed, that it served as a celestial observatory from which maps and tables of the stellar hemisphere could be accurately drawn; and that it incorporates in its sides and angles the means for creating a highly sophisticated map projection of the northern hemisphere. It is, in fact, a scale model of the hemisphere, correctly incorporating the geographical degrees of latitude and longitude”.
• “(The builder of the Great Pyramid) knew the precise circumference of the planet, and the length of the year to several decimals — data which were not rediscovered till the seventeenth century. Its architects may well have known the mean length of the earth’s orbit round the sun, the specific density of the planet, the 26,000-year cycle of the equinoxes, the acceleration of gravity and the speed of light”.

    Some of the above is not disputed by advocates of the orthodox viewpoint, but is “attributed to chance”. I leave it to the reader to judge whether all the above, if it is indeed true, could be attributed merely to chance. Let’s suppose that it is indeed true — Tompkins has done a detailed analysis and believes that it is. The most obvious question would therefore be, if the Great Pyramid was built as a tomb, why was all the above deemed necessary? Is it not much more likely, in the light of all the above, that the pyramid was not built as a tomb? As Tompkins says: “These and other recent discoveries have made it possible to reanalyze the entire history of the Great Pyramid with a whole new set of references: the results are explosive. The common — and indeed authoritative — assumption that the Pyramid was just another tomb built to memorialize some vainglorious Pharoah is proved to be false”.

    The next questions are therefore:

• How was all this precise information incorporated, given the way orthodox thinkers believe it was built, with the technology available at the time? Who was responsible for ensuring this precision?
• Why was all this information incorporated into the Pyramid, suggesting that it was built for a completely different purpose, now unknown to us?

    Or were some ancient geniuses merely showing off? In either case, as Cox said above, the Pyramid is clear evidence that the ancients had access to advanced scientific knowledge and technology, and were therefore much more intelligent than we have supposed them to be. Perhaps modern science has much to learn from them.

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Footnotes:

1. Creating the Soul Body, Inner Traditions, 2008, Pix

2. Harper & Row. I am quoting the Harper Colophon edition, 1978

    David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive has just been re-released on 35mm, which is apparently how he always intended it. I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to tell the difference, but it was a good excuse to revisit it, so I went on Saturday night. As it happens, this format only seemed to make it appear more dated. This did not matter, however; even though this was at least the fifth time I’ve seen it, it remained as compelling as ever.

    The film has been deemed cryptic and hard to understand. When it first came out, the Guardian sent six film critics to watch it, asking them to say what the plot was. They all said something different. Despite this, in a poll of film critics in 2016, it was voted the best film of the millennium. I don’t know if you had to claim to understand it in order to think this, but I admire their judgment.

    Why is it so hard to understand? Clearly because Lynch wants it to be difficult, to be a challenge. It is in the tradition of various esoteric texts which are deliberately obscure in order to make the reader, or in this case the viewer, wake up from their slumbering, unconscious state.

    It is a lesson in spiritual cosmology, telling the story from the point of view of four different levels: the unconscious mind (personal and collective), hidden organising principles outside space-time, the material world, and God. The film addresses the issues of incarnation, possibly karma, the nature of the unconscious mind (Freud and Jung), and has many references to ancient spiritual traditions including Plato, Kabbalah, and the ancient Mysteries.

    The main ingredient of the plot is a woman (adopted name Rita, but Camilla in the material world) suffering from amnesia following a car crash, trying to remember who she is, being helped by another woman (Betty, real name Diane) whom she has met by chance. This amnesia is an allegory of the process of an incarnating soul, which forgets during the process of birth its previous lives, any karma it may have accumulated, and the preconceived plan for the present existence. (It’s interesting that Lynch compares birth into this world to a car crash!) The film then depicts the process of her gradually waking up to all these factors, and accepting her (unpleasant) fate.

    The film tells the story in images and seemingly unrelated scenes – Lynch is also a painter. That is one reason why it is difficult; there are no words or conventional plot to help the viewer understand. The story, as it takes place in the material world, only begins about three-quarters of the way through, Rita having been sucked into a black hole which transports her from Diane’s unconscious psyche into the material world, and Diane having been instructed to wake up by a creepy cowboy figure (a modern American version of Hermes, the messenger of the gods). This led one of the six critics mentioned at the beginning to say that everything up that point had been a dream. This is inaccurate, because it was really the totality of the unconscious mind being depicted; dreams were only part of the story.

    Everything in the film up to that point has been more or less incomprehensible, because the viewers didn’t know this at the time, thinking they were watching events in the material world, although most of these had a suspiciously unreal feel to them. It all has then to be reinterpreted once that revelation has been made, provided of course that you can remember everything you have seen, even though you didn’t understand it at the time. This is an almost impossible task, and it therefore makes sense to watch the film more than once, in order to reinterpret all this material. In the light of this knowledge, some of the earlier scenes are revealed as dreams, fantasies, wish fulfilments, unresolved negative parental complexes, and compensations for conscious attitudes (thus basic elements of Freudian and Jungian psychology). We also make the astonishing discovery that the two women, who appear to be separate beings in the material world, are interconnected at a deeper level, that in some sense they are the same person, both seeming to emanate from the same spiritual source.

    There is also a film within the film – Diane is an aspiring actress who wants a part in a film that is being made. In this spiritual allegory, the director represents the conscious ego, which thinks that it is in control of its life, but gets very, very upset when it discovers that it is in fact being controlled by forces beyond the material world, which, from a traditional spiritual perspective, you might call the higher self, organising principles, or the Laws of Karma. In Mulholland Drive, however, these are presented as malevolent, demonic entities.

    I’ve made a big fuss about how hard the film is to understand. It has to be said, however, that it is heavily influenced by Plato’s allegory of the cave, which is similar to the Eastern concept of maya, the illusion of taking the material world to be reality. Mulholland Drive invites us to wake up from that dream. If we had watched the earlier parts of the film from a spiritual perspective, everything would have been clear from the outset.

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(I was so excited by the film when I first saw it that I wrote a song about it. You can find it on youtube, click here.)