From ATLANTIS to the SPHINX

by J. Douglas Kenyon
Issue #9 Cover




http://www.atlantisrising.com/issue9/ar9atlan2.html

For the first time since his massive volume The Occult (1971) Colin Wilson has another bestseller, at least in England. And, with any luck, come spring, that achievement will be repeated here when the fledgling New York publishing house Fromm International unveils the U.S. edition of Wilson's From Atlantis to the Sphinx (though not necessarily with that title).

While bestsellers may not be an everyday achievement for Wilson, though he's had more than his share, distinguished books apparently are. In the forty years since originally bursting on the scene with his much acclaimed The Outsider he's averaged about two books a year, enough to earn him mentions in Who's Who and the Encyclopedia Britanica along with various other honors including visiting professorships at several American colleges.

Especially interested in the supernatural he wrote The Occult as an investigation of unexplained phenomena. Initially, something of a skeptic, he recalls, I became absolutely convinced of the reality of the paranormal. Many subsequent related works earned him a considerable reputation in the field. A fascination with the invisible dimensions of human experience has also prompted works on the psychology of crime, human sexuality and his own unique form of existential philosophy, making him something of an authority on those areas as well.

In the new book he argues that thousands of years before ancient Egypt and Greece held sway there was a great civilization whose ships traveled the world from China to the South Pole (which was then free of ice), and whose advanced knowledge of science, mathematics and astronomy was passed on to descendants who escaped to, among other places, Egypt and South America. Wilson believes the ancients possessed a completely different knowledge system from our own, which he believes was at the root of the achievements which so puzzle our modern minds. At the heart of his argument is the current research, especially surrounding the Giza plateau in Egypt, which threatens to overturn conventional theories of the origins of civilization.

Since reading in 1979 Serpent in the Sky, John Anthony West's interpretation of the work of renowned Egyptologist R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Wilson has actively followed the most important developments in the field. He reports on the ensuing geological studies redating the Sphinx to as old as 12,500 years, as much as 8,000 years older than conservative Egyptologists believe, and the evidence developed by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval of astronomical keys indicating advanced ancient knowledge (discussed in their new book The Message of the Sphinx, Keeper of Genesis in U.K.). A close friend and virtual neighbor, Wilson has followed Hancock's work closely since well before his monumental Fingerprints of the Gods (see Atlantis Rising #4) as well as that of Bauval, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath (Wilson wrote the introduction for their When the Sky Fell) and, of course, West. In From Atlantis to the Sphinx, Wilson sets out to chronicle the unfolding story and the implications of the new discoveries, and goes on to attempt something of a reconstruction of the lost wisdom of ancients.

In September Wilson presented some of his research at the University of Deleware for the Return to the Source conference sponsored by the Society for Scientific Exploration. A few weeks prior, however, Atlantis Rising had spoken with him early one morning at his Cornwall home. Fortunately, seven a.m. was not too early for clear thinking. In fact, he assured us, every day of hard writing for him begins about the same time.

Staying in touch with West, Hancock and Bauval remains part of his routine. Within days he had been to Hancock's for lunch with Bauval and West, and is fully abreast of developments in the ongoing controversies over new research at the Sphinx which is apparently going forward without the participation of the group despite their contributions to the new discoveries (as reported in London's Daily Mail as well as Atlantis Rising #8). Apparently following up on the earlier researches of West and geologist Robert Schoch, the current investigation is said to be seeking a chamber beneath the Sphinx to be opened on live worldwide television later this year. The chamber is believed by some to be the celebrated Hall of Records, the discovery of which was prophesied by Edgar Cayce. However, Wilson reports, his friends aren't really concerned about being excluded, as long as the entire situation comes out in the open. The present somewhat arbitrary behavior of Egyptian antiquities authorities, though, is taken as grounds for suspecting the integrity of any ultimate outcome. Wilson believes the authorities have recognized the tremendous potential for profit in the entire situation, and have moved to capitalize.

As he explains in From Atlantis to the Sphinx, the machinations of official Egyptology have often been something other than exemplary. Despite overwhelming evidence of sophisticated engineering in the construction of the monuments of the Giza plateau and throughout Egypt, the establishment has persisted in claims that only primitive methods were employed, thus ruling out any suggestion that some kind of superior science inherited from a more sophisticated period, albeit a forgotten one, was involved. Most of Wilson's speculation concerns just how sophisticated the ancients may have actually been, not only in matters of engineering, but in many other areas as well.

He is especially interested in the capacities of mind which the ancients must have possessed. In the book he argues that they must have had superior development of the left hemisphere of the brain, the intuitive side. Examples of such development have remained till the present but have been relegated to the domain of shamans and prophets. He cites the case of Gilbert Islanders who in dream states are able to summon porpoises who then appear in great numbers to be killed and eaten. Citing vast contemporary research confirming the reality of telepathy and other so-called paranormal phenomena, Wilson suggests that the modern right-brain dominated society which we have created has forced us to unlearn many things we once knew. It seems to me we've deliberately got rid of jungle sensitivities. The reason, he believes, is clear, we don't really need them. What we've done is to plunge into this sort of narrow rational consciousness, which has brought us to the point that we don't know who we are. In Wilson's mind there's no doubt that the ancients knew who they were.

However, while some have suggested that the ancient Egyptians possessed nothing less than a science of immortality, Wilson sees things a little differently. Obviously they didn't have real immortality or they'd be around now, he points out, but adds, I suspect their whole aim was immortality. That was the aim of their religion...The Egyptians believed absolutely totally in life after death, as all ancient people did, but as to a real science of immortality? No.

Despite his demurs, though, he wants to expand on the topic which has interested him since his teens when he saw Bernard Shaw's play Back to Methuseleh. The idea of living to be 300 absolutely obsessed me. His own novel The Philosoper's Stone played around with the idea and he's become convinced that even today human beings possess a certain power which switches on at certain moments.

His idea is that we possess a kind of robot which has the purpose of performing certain tasks for us. You learn to type slowly and consciously and then the robot takes over and does it quicker than you could, and you learn to drive or whatever. The robot, he explains, is what makes humans the most advanced creatures on earth but it is also the source of most of our problems, because we are always being taken over by the robot, and when we don't want to be. We listen to a symphony and it moves us deeply. The third time we listen to it, it's the robot listening instead of us. The normal person, he believes, is about 50% robot and about 50% real person. In curious moments of happiness, in great moments of intensity, what happens is you suddenly become 51% real you and 49% robot. And I'm sure that in mystical experience you become something like 55% real and only about 45% robot. That's what mystical experiences are. If we could only switch into such moods, he thinks they are what psychiatrist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences, all the time, he believes we would be capable of amazing things. I've got a feeling that all these so-called psychic faculties take over in those moments when we are non-robotic.

As for the notion of surviving the death of the physical body, Wilson accepts that it's probably true but doesn't think it is particularly relevant or important. Unlike Dostoevesky who thought that the truth of life after death could be the most important thing that we could know, Wilson believes the most important questions are how to live now we're here, how to escape the robot, how to live on a sort of higher level? If we become preoccupied with life after death, he thinks we're wasting our time.

To Wilson the present world with all it's difficulties offers special challenges which have the potential to strengthen our hidden capacities. Human suffering he sees as, in large measure, due to the fact that we've forgotten who we are and that we are trying to recover what we have lost. That recovery, though, shouldn't be so difficult.

If we could get the right point of view, so to speak, suddenly these latent powers would become accessible to us all the time. Certain that he's on to something big, he expands, It really does seem to me that one of the basic problems with human beings is that they experience wonderful moments of insight, for example, children at Christmas, when they feel the whole universe is absolutely glorious, and they feel that surely no one would ever want to die, but the trouble is, you know perfectly well at Christmas that within a couple months in the middle of February you'll be grimly bored and begin to long for the coming of the holidays around August. The need is to sustain the drive and purpose of the high moments during the low ones. The highs, it seems to him, amount to a kind of three-dimensional consciousness, contrasting with the ordinary two-dimensional humdrum consciousness. And he sees modern nihilistic existential pessimists like Samuel Beckett and Jean Paul Sartre as trapped in the 2D experience. In contrast, the thoroughly optimistic Wilson believes that we are on the threshold of a time when we will be able to find the kind of balance between modern rational thought and ancient intuitive knowledge that will enable us to become masters of the peak experience. Simply learning the true antiquity of ancient civilization may do much to help us on our way, as he reminded us, when we tried to probe an intellectual riddle which puzzled us.

In his book, Wilson relates the Giza construction scenario proposed by Hancock and Bauval which has the Sphinx built around 10,500 BC as indicated by geological evidence and corroborated by the precessional time of the Age of Leo, and then approximately 8,000 years later the completion of the Great Pyramid as indicated by the astronomical alignment of air-shafts within the pyramid. Wilson also cites Rand Flem-Ath and Charles Hapgood's research on Earth Crust Displacement which places the destruction of Atlantis at about 9,500 BC, or about 1000 years after construction of the sphinx, as reported by Plato and confirmed by evidence of animal extinctions such as the mammoths in Siberia. Earth Crust Displacement would have dramatically altered all astronomical observational phenomena and since the Hancock/Bauval timetable relies on a predictable path for celestial objects, which have remained constant to the present day, we couldn't help wondering how the apparent conflict could be resolved rationally. Wilson agrees that it is all very puzzling and points to other destruction scenarios for Atlantis including collisions with meteors. It seems to me, he says, that Atlantis did in fact go down in a number of catastrophes... But, in any event, he thinks the question is really unimportant at this stage. The most important thing he believes about the research of Hancock, Bauval, Flem-Ath and others is, what it does seem to indicate is that knowledge of the heavens and so on is far older than we thought, and that man really knew an enormous amount, maybe as long as 30,000 BC...and if we can actually begin to grasp this, really feel that this is what happened, I think that simply that perspective on human history is going to cause a change of consciousness and a different way of looking at history.

Nevertheless, he does not see a wholesale rewriting of the history books any time soon, What I do think will happen, he chuckles, is that this kind of thing will gradually snowball, and a certain point will come when quite suddenly it's accepted knowledge. And then, and only then, will you get the academics who have this kind of vested interest to go along.

Since Wilson has focused many times in his career on forensics (he's written in depth about Jack the Ripper and other notorious criminals) we wondered if he ever thought of Atlantis as perhaps the victim of a great murder, a crime which we might live to see reenacted, and that our problem is amnesia resulting from the trauma of the first enactment. I would agree completely, he declares, it seems to me that Plato was right. Something almost certainly had gone wrong with Atlantis, spiritually speaking, before its destruction, which makes me feel that people like Graham and Robert and John West and myself are doing our best, as it were, to sound the alarm before it actually happens. We're like someone digging frantically to raise some kind of barrier before the flood comes. I've no doubt whatever from my studies of crime that we are moving into an age in which mass murder and this kind of thing is going to become more and more commonplace, things like that affair in Belgium which at the moment seems to me to be a horrific example of the kind of thing that is beginning to happen and which inevitably happens as a civilization becomes more and more free, more and more liberal and so on. We can't put back the clock. There's no way of doing that. What we can do, and with a little luck, is really understand the implications of all this. It seems to me that there's a great counterweight to these problems and that counterweight is this kind of knowledge that we're speaking about. If this kind of knowledge could be established for everyone to understand, then suddenly we would begin to see our civilization back on the rails, no longer in danger of meeting the same kind of fate as Atlantis.

1 komentar:

Anonim mengatakan...

"The most important thing he believes about the research of Hancock, Bauval, Flem-Ath and others is, what it does seem to indicate is that knowledge of the heavens and so on is far older than we thought, and that man really knew an enormous amount, maybe as long as 30,000 BC..."

32,000 years ago man was hardly even man. Human speech was nothing more than grunts and groans and "God" hadn't even been invented yet. As humans evolved, so did their speech and language, and the concept of "death" could then be understood to the point where religion began its nefarious course by burying the dead in a way that would keep alive their "spirit" (soul).

Samuel Beckett and Jean Paul Sartre were not "trapped" in a "2D world". They told it like it is: Man is a mutant, an evolutionary failure, and human life is a terminal illness.