Evidence of earlier civilisations

How and why civilisations have come and gone led William Eigles (in ‘In defence of catastrophes’) to present the findings of Robert Schoch to explain past “planetary changes of the epochal kind.”

Schoch, in ‘Voices of the Rocks: A scientist looks at catastrophes and ancient civilisations’ (co-authored with Robert McNally) claims that “instead of evolution and cultural change being a gradual process over many millennia (the uniformitarian viewpoint), natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, and extra-terrestrially sourced impacts (asteroids, comets, meteorites) have significantly and often abruptly altered the course of human civilisation (the catastrophist perspective).” He says “I just followed the evidence.”

Eigles: “Schoch’s personal work in re-dating the Sphinx to … 7000-5000 BCE time span … led him … to postulate the existence of sophisticated cultures far earlier than had been previously supposed.”

“Countering the claimed absence of evidence for any such notion, he cites some intriguing evidence of technical flint mining from 31,000 BCE; sophisticated Neolithic villages in Egypt dating to 8100 BCE; and, most recently, the astronomically aligned Napta megalith circle found in the Nubian Desert of the southern Sahara dating to 4500-4000 BCE. Remains of ancient sites elsewhere in the Near East, such as Jericho in Israel from 8300 BCE, and Aatal HAyAk in Anatolia, Turkey, from the seventh millennium BCE, serve to buttress his argument that peoples of even earlier antiquity possessed impressive organisational skills, technical knowledge, and engineering prowess.

Additional evidence exists outside Egypt – in the Americas and Europe – as well: in particular, the astronomically correlated painted imagery discovered on cave walls in Lascaux, France, which has been dated to ca.15,000 BCE – stunningly earlier still.”

This paradigm shift to catastrophism “… is based principally on the abrupt shifts in the fossil records of plant and animal communities in the earth that have been observed by various researchers, indicating relatively rapid mass extinctions of life on the surface of the planet at various points in the past (such as the disappearance of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period sixty-five million years ago.”

In spite of research findings such as the above, there are those who keep asking “Where is the evidence?” One sceptic reportedly said that he did not believe that there could have been a civilisation more advanced than the present one. Yet, our technically-advanced civilisation cannot apparently build megalithic structures like those in various parts of the globe which have been left behind by earlier advanced civilisations.

I do wonder – how do we compare morally with our predecessors? Further, could the term civilisation be applied to modern humans, whose propensity for exploitative greed for power and wealth is well documented?

(Eigles’ article is included in ‘Forbidden History’ edited by Douglas Kenyon)

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Has our history been debauched?

“… when it comes to explaining the origins of the human race on Earth, academic science has cooked the books.” This is said to be the conclusion reached by Richard Thompson and Michael Cremo (of ‘Forbidden Archaeology’). Douglas Kenyon (the founder of ‘Atlantis Rising’ magazine) quotes Cremo thus: “In every area of research, from palaeontology to anthropology and archaeology, that which is presented to the public as established fact is indeed nothing more than a consensus arrived at by powerful groups of people.”

This resonates with me. I have identified in earlier posts the Big Bang Theory of cosmology and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as neither proven nor quite credible.

Kenyon quotes Cremo further. “I thought there might be a few little things that have been swept under the rug, but what I found was truly amazing. There’s actually a massive amount of evidence that’s been suppressed.” In this context, I recall reading that skeletons of humans estimated to have been10 to 12 feet tall were discovered in the USA. They were sent for safekeeping; but none of them can now be found.

Comparably, in the nineteenth century, the then director of the US Bureau of Ethnology “… sent his ethnology emissaries to systematically destroy the mounds and any evidence they contained that pointed to non-native origins.” (Peter Bros in ‘The case for the flood’). “During the nineteenth century, evidence of both European presence and the existence of a prehistoric civilisation was being uncovered all over North America, primarily in the mounds that dotted the countryside east of the Rockies.”

Since Gavin Menzies, who wrote about the 7 Treasure Fleets of Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho which sailed around the globe in the 15th century, had mentioned that members of the Fleet had met settled communities on the US mainland (presumably on the Pacific coast) who could speak some Chinese (dialect or language not specified), the so-called Europeans mentioned by Bros may have been whitish, well-built people from North China.

John Kettler (in ‘The martyrdom of Immanuel Velikovsky’) describes the collective actions of certain renowned astronomers against Velikovsky’s work. “Velikovsky was systematically attacked in the scientific journals via distortion, lies, misrepresentation, claims of incompetence, and ad hominem attacks, while there never seemed to be space in which he could defend himself.”

Peter Bros: “The scientific process merely accepts theories as scientific fact as long as they have not been disproved.” He also refers to Charles Lyell’s theory of uniformitarianism that “geological processes occur gradually.” That means that catastrophes are not acceptable as explanations. Bros then describes Louis Agassiz as “enthroning himself as the inventor of the ice age.” So, a universal flood is now denied, in spite of “the universal flood being a part of the myths and traditions of more than five hundred widely separated cultures.”

As Kenyon wrote: “… the mythology of many ancient societies is filled with cataclysmic destruction of Earth and its inhabitants.” “… such cataclysmic destruction is a recurrent feature in the life of Earth …”
(Note: The authors quoted above are contributors to ’Forbidden History’ edited by Douglas Kenyon. The sub-title of the book is ‘Prehistoric technologies, Extraterrestrial intervention, and the Suppressed origins of civilisation.” A book worth reading!)

Revising ancient history

“Ever since Napoleon’s days, we in the West have been dazzled by the splendour of pharaonic Egypt – with its impressive pyramids, the mysterious Sphinx, and the magnificent and the magnificent treasures of Tutankhamen. We have also been impressed with the intellectual achievements of the learned elite of Sumer, which according to our schoolteachers, was responsible for the invention of writing, the potter’s wheel, wheeled carts, cylinder seals, cosmology, formal law, and bicameral political congress.

Most of the ‘first time ever’ claims for the Sumerians have in recent years been exposed as exaggerations or absurd. There is mounting evidence that neither Sumer nor Egypt quite deserve the pride of place among the ancient civilisations. Rather, the cradle of civilisation appears to lie beyond the fertile valleys of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

We invite the reader to join us in a journey of discovery, which in its implications, seems far more thrilling to us than the discoveries of Troy, the Elamite civilisation of Iran, the ‘lost’ civilisation of Dilmun on the island of Bahrain in the Arabian/Persian Gulf or, most recently, the discovery of what may have been the kingdom of Sheba in the extreme south of the Arabian peninsula.

As we will show, India is the giant that looms behind these early urban cultures.”

… “In his book Looking for Dilmun, Geoffrey Bibby rightly remarked that the Indus Valley civilisation is the Cinderalla of the ancient world.”

The above are extracts from the Preface to ’In search of the cradle of civilisation’ by Georg Feuerstein, Subash Kak, and David Frawley. The authors also said “India has emerged as the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth” and “Sanscrit is the oldest of any of the Indo-European languages.”

Further, “… the Indian population has lived in the peninsula for at least 50,000 years. The analysis of the genetic evidence suggests that the splitting of the Indic and European peoples took place as long as 9,000 years ago.”

Map 1 in the Preface shows that “all the early civilisations arose close to the Tropic of Cancer.” This reminds me of the claim (which I read some time ago) that a sustained blast of cosmic radiation about 40,000 years ago along the Tropic of Cancer caused two momentous changes in humanity.

The skin colour of humans living in a wide corridor centred on this Tropic was whitened; Europeans became coppery white, while East Asians became ivory white, with peoples in between presenting an intermediate colour.

Second, more significantly, cave art began to develop amongst those affected by the cosmic radiation about 40,000 years ago as well.

It apparently takes about 2,000 generations for any significant genetic impacts of radiation from cosmic cataclysms to become established.

Food for thought?

What we do not know cannot be

The 8-year old boy who asked his parents how the Universe came about (or words to that effect) is now 89 years old. He is still pre-occupied with this question, having spent the intervening years reading and thinking about the matter, but in a sporadic matter. Having lived through the Stationary State Theory of cosmology, and then the Quasi-stationary State Theory, he is now confronted by the Big Bang Theory.

While not quite as an aside, I am disappointed that not only the media but also some science writers treat theories as confirmed facts.

A cosmogony which claims that something came out of nothing, and which apparently cannot explain the source of the vast energy needed for the explosive expansion which allegedly resulted in the universe we think we know is not convincing. It is less convincing than a Stationary-State universe. The probability of a Big Crunch (and the possibility of Little Bangs and Little Crunches in between) leads me to contemplate Hinduism’s concept of long periods of cyclical expansion and contraction, with short cycles within long cycles.

The Big Bang Theory is so firmly believed in that alternative explanations cannot be contemplated. In physical science, however, previously-held theories have lost their gloss. For example, that all geological change is gradual; or that the end of the last (imputed) ice age adequately explains that belief held by about 70 oral cultural histories about a universal flood; or that ‘punctuated equilibrium’, rather than cosmic catastrophes, explains the sudden emergence of new fully-formed species. The possibility of an advanced human civilisation existing before the Flood cannot be countenanced, because there is no evidence.

A lack of evidence – verifiable evidence, of course – is sufficient to deny (with great certitude) any alternative hypothesis offered as a tentative explanation worth investigating. Thus, consideration of an all-pervasive aether does not fit prevailing explanatory paradigms. That this aether is comparable to Hinduism’s Consciousness as the First Cause would be a sufficient reason for scientists wedded to the current mechanistic material paradigm to reject it outright.

That the ancient Indians reportedly came up with statements about the physical universe which are now being verified by modern Western scientists can be challenging. In any event, the then conclusion about the Michelson-Morley experiment on the existence of the aether is reportedly being queried.

There is already a significant list of events and explanations which apparently cannot be. What of Lysenko’s proposal about the inheritance of acquired physical characteristics? Apparently, Darwin agreed with Lysenko. There is no evidence of a genetic path, right? What of epigenesis?

There is so much we do not know in the physical domain. Yet, we are already looking for a t.o.e. (a theory of everything). Does this cover the mental domain, or the ephemeral domain? Significantly, when a prominent research professor in chemistry was asked why he chose not to investigate whether the boundaries of his discipline could be stretched, his response was reportedly that it would take more than his lifetime to pursue the question.

Add up all the things which cannot be. Reminds me of those eminent people who have sought to prove the non-existence of God. Is it possible to prove absence?

The cradle of civilisation?

“In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India” is a 1995 book by Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, and David Frawley in which they argue against the theories that Indo-European peoples arrived in India in the middle of the second millennium BC (Indo-Aryan migration) and support the concept of “Indigenous Aryans” and the “Out of India theory”.

Contradicting earlier views of colonial historians, the authors argue that Vedic civilization grew out of the “Indus-Sarasvati civilization”, or “Indus Valley civilization”. The authors enumerate fifteen arguments for their revisionist views. Several of these arguments emphasize linguistic, architectural, cultural, agricultural, and technological continuity between Harappan culture, the Vedas, and post-Vedic Hinduism. They also argue that it is improbable that the Vedas were the product of a nomadic or semi-nomadic group.

Early opinion considered the Rigveda as containing memories of an earlier nomadic period, whilst the later Vedas were the product of a society native to India. The authors argue that this early viewpoint of the Rigveda is based on mistaken and speculative interpretations, and that in actuality the Rigveda also describes society native to India.
The authors leave open the view that India is the Urheimat (original homeland) of the Indo-Europeans (the “out of India model”), saying that “the Aryans could just as well have been native to India for several millennia, deriving their Sanskritic language from earlier Indo-European dialects.”

The authors find continuity in Indian spiritual and religious artifacts from Mehrgarh, one of the first cities in the world, to the present. Historical linguistics does not rule out elements of cultural continuity in spite of language change, so that such claims, likewise, are not in conflict with mainstream opinion. In the view of the authors, however, this alleged continuity rules out the later influx of another ethnic group.”

(From Wikipedia)

“For someone brought up on the western view of history, this book is a real eye opener. It also makes you realise how inadequate the term ‘bronze age’ is for categorising this period. The tools used at the time does not go anywhere near recognising the intellectual greatness of a people who through deep internal and external observation gain an understanding of astronomy, science, geometry, the ways of the mind & spirit, and to leave us with the legacy of such rich literature that I feel we are only just beginning to understand and has a wealth of knowledge that can benefit us today. I’m sure I will read this book many times and get something new out of it each time.” (Reviewer Kismet 964)

“ … The authors have described why and how the history of India was twisted by European historians. They explain the myth of the Aryan Invasion Theory created by them. Those historians could not accept the idea that a beautiful language like Sanskrit could be of Indian origin.

Authors also discuss in detail the antiquity of the Indus Valley Civilization. The civilization that was perhaps oldest in the world. Indus Valley had planned cities, underground gutter system, uniform measurements, navigation systems, trade with many countries in the known world and much more. …” (Extract of review by Jayesh Shah)

(Both reviews are from amazon.com. Both 5-star)

( Comment: Colonial writers would seem to have distorted any history which preceded those of their cultural and religious antecedents – Athens and Judaism. 

As well, colonial writers tended to describe the indigenous people their buccaneers over-ran (eg. the First Nation Peoples of North America and Australia) as nomadic.  That was after they had driven the indigenes from their settlements.

There is a great need to revise history factually.)

 

Grandiose time scales

Hinduism’s understanding of time is as grandiose as time itself. While most cultures base their cosmologies on familiar units such as few hundreds or thousands of years, the Hindu concept of time embraces billions and trillions of years.

The Puranas describe time units from the infinitesimal truti, lasting 1/1,000,0000 of a second to a mahamantavara of 311 trillion years. Hindu sages describe time as cyclic, an endless procession of creation, preservation and dissolution. Scientists such as Carl Sagan have expressed amazement at the accuracy of space and time descriptions given by the ancient rishis and saints, who fathomed the secrets of the universe through their mystically awakened senses.

(source: Hinduism Today April/May/June 2007 p. 14).
Professor Arthur Holmes (1895-1965) geologist, professor at the University of Durham. He writes regarding the age of the earth in his great book, The Age of Earth (1913) as follows:
“Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing concept of the Earth’s duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a sacred book.”

When the Hindu calculation of the present age of the earth and the expanding universe could make Professor Holmes so astonished, the precision with which the Hindu calculation regarding the age of the entire Universe was made would make any man spellbound.

(source: Hinduism and Scientific Quest – By T. R. R. Iyengar p. 20-21).

 

Alan Watts, a professor, graduate school dean and research fellow of Harvard University, drew heavily on the insights of Vedanta. Watts became well known in the 1960s as a pioneer in bringing Eastern philosophy to the West. He wrote:
“To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, ( A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.”

It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness.”

(source: Spiritual Practices of India – By Frederic Spiegelberg Introduction by Alan Watts p. 8-9).
Dick Teresi author and coauthor of several books about science and technology, including The God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni magazine and has written for Discover, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. He says
“Indian cosmologists, the first to estimate the age of the earth at more than 4 billion years. They came closest to modern ideas of atomism, quantum physics, and other current theories. India developed very early, enduring atomist theories of matter.

Possibly Greek atomistic thought was influenced by India, via the Persian civilization.”
The cycle of creation and destruction continues forever, manifested in the Hindu deity Shiva, Lord of the Dance, who holds the drum that sounds the universe’s creation in his right hand and the flame that, billions of years later, will destroy the universe in his left. Meanwhile Brahma is but one of untold numbers of other gods dreaming their own universes.

The 8.64 billion years that mark a full day-and-night cycle in Brahma’s life is about half the modern estimate for the age of the universe. The ancient Hindus believed that each Brahma day and each Brahma night lasted a kalpa, 4.32 billion years, with 72,000 kalpas equaling a Brahma century, 311,040 billion years in all. That the Hindus could conceive of the universe in terms of billions.

The similarities between Indian and modern cosmology do not seem accidental. Perhaps ideas of creation from nothing, or alternating cycles of creation and destruction are hardwired in the human psyche. Certainly Shiva’s percussive drumbeat suggests the sudden energetic impulse that could have propelled the big bang. And if, as some theorists have proposed, the big bang is merely the prelude to the big crunch and the universe is caught in an infinite cycle of expansion and contraction, then ancient Indian cosmology is clearly cutting edge compared to the one-directional vision of the big bang. The infinite number of Hindu universes is currently called the many world hypothesis, which is no less undocumentable nor unthinkable.

(source: Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science – By Dick Teresi p. 159 and 174 -212). For more refer to chapter Advanced Concepts).

(Source: ‘Hindu Wisdom’: ‘Surya’s Tapestry’)

The earliest civilisations

According to John Major Jenkins, a leading independent researcher of ancient cosmology:
“Our understanding of the true age of the ancient Vedic civilization has undergone a well-documented revolution. Feuerstein, Frawley, and Kak have shown conclusively (In Search of the Cradle of Civilization) that the long-accepted age of the Vedic culture—erroneously dated by scholars parading a series of assumptions and unscientific arguments to roughly 1500 BC—is much too recent.

Evidence comes from geological, archaeological, and literary sources as well as the astronomical references within Vedic literature. The corrected dating to eras far prior to 1500 BC was made possible by recognizing that precessional eras are encoded in Vedic mythology, and were recorded by ancient Vedic astronomers. As a result, the Indus Valley civilization appears to be a possible cradle of civilization, dated conservatively to 7000 BC.

Western India may thus be a true source of the civilizing impulse that fed Anatolia in Turkey, with its complex Goddess-worshipping city-states of Çatal Hüyük and Hacilar. However, there are layers upon layers of even older astronomical references, and legends persist that the true “cradle” might be found further to the north, in Tibet or nearby Central Asia.

The work of these three writers shows that biases and assumptions within scholarly discourse can prevent an accurate modeling of history and an underestimation of the accomplishments of ancient cultures. The analogous situation in modern Egyptology and Mesoamerican studies also requires that well-documented new theories — often exhaustively argued, interdisciplinary, and oriented toward a progressive synthesis of new data — should be appraised fairly and without bias.

Next to the Australian aborigines, the Vedic civilization is perhaps the oldest continuous living tradition in the world. Its extremely ancient doctrines and insights into human spirituality are unsurpassed. We might expect that its cosmology and science of time has been as misunderstood as its true antiquity. In looking closely at Vedic doctrines of time, spiritual growth, calendars, and astronomy, we will see that a central core idea is that of our periodic alignment to the Galactic Center.

And, according to these ancient Vedic beliefs, the galactic alignment we are currently experiencing heralds our shift from a millennia-long descent of deepening spiritual darkness to a new era of light and ascending consciousness. ”

(From the site ‘Hindu Wisdom’: ‘Surya’s Tapestry’)

Comment:  Regrettably,  some European scholars of the colonial kind, with their belief in the superiority of the so-called white race (excluding the East Asians who are more white) had difficulty in accepting any ‘inferior’ culture as older than that of the Athenian philosophers and that of the founders of Judaism. In the light of modern neo-colonialism flourishing within the aura of the defunct League of Nations, a revised historiography may need to await its day. 

 

Does Consciousness explain Reality?

My experience of Reality is three-fold: physical, mental, and ephemeral. Relatively few humans are likely to have had exposure to the ephemeral (spiritual) realm. This realm is both exciting and confusing.

Among the multiple facets of the inter-connections between these 3 realms is this issue: Is there an over-arching, all-encompassing, dimension into which all these 3 realms fit? Notwithstanding the apparently challengeable conclusion from the Michelson-Morley experiment (a very long time ago), is there something referred to as the aether which could provide an operational basis for illuminating these 3 realms operating in unison?

Interestingly, there are a number of scientists researching the aether. They are obviously working beyond the prevailing explanatory paradigms of science. I hasten to add that I accept the usefulness and reliability of the scientific method. However, it is necessarily limited to the mechanistic material realm of experience. It may, however, be useful in illuminating the mental realm – or parts thereof. It could not, under any circumstances, assist in perusing the mysteries of the spiritual realm. Beware (as someone wrote) vivisecting the songbird to identify the source of its trill.

My question about an over-arching dimension arose from my reading of Easwaran’s translation of the core Upanishads. Hinduism’s Upanishads offer a view of Reality through spirituality – not available at an equivalent depth from other religions. This is not surprising in view of its distant origins in time. The Vedas, their precursor, seemingly originated about 7,000 BC (dated by tracing a unique planetary configuration).

Hindu cosmology is complex, and allegedly inherited (but that is a separate issue). Human history before the Universal Flood (of about 11,000 BC) is uncertain – possibly covered in mud.

The relevance here of Hindu cosmology is the concept of Consciousness, and its role. Consciousness is posited as ever-existing, all-embracing, all-pervasive – like the aether. It is an un-caused First Cause.

In relation to my posts about the mind and the human soul, were our minds and souls to exist outside our bodies in some ephemeral (cloud) form (like information on the Internet), could they not be associated with (linked to, or part of) an all-pervasive Consciousness?

Furthermore, since everything in the Cosmos appears to be inter-connected, could that be explained by an all-embracing Consciousness (like a gossamer blanket which covers everything)?

Thus, the physical, mental and ephemeral realms of my experience may represent my awareness of a 3-tiered Reality reflecting an ever-existing Consciousness. That is, could Consciousness create and sustain all that is, in spite of not being adequately explicable to humans?

(Disclaimer: In this life I am a Hindu. In my previous life it appears that I have been a Muslim in Central Asia. Way deep in me is a memory of being a Jew in the Middle East. I have also been a Christian. As a free-thinker, I merely seek understanding of the place of humanity in the Universe. I have no axe to grind. My tentative beliefs and speculations are just what they are.)

 

What of the Afterlife?

First, what is the Afterlife? It is an assumed locale for the departing souls (spirits) from Earth. It may be the Heaven mentioned in certain religious documents. It would certainly not be the hell(s) imagined by those who seek to induce better moral behaviour on Earth by frightening their religious followers.

My first clairvoyant surprised me by saying of what he referred to as the ‘Other Side’, “It is not that different from here; and you will not meet God.” As a metaphysical Hindu believing in the reality of the reincarnation process (for the existence of which there is plenty of evidence), I view the Afterlife as an R & R Depot or a Way Station. It would give me a break from the hell of Earthly lives – like walking on a bed of hot coals to get to a grassy patch; and then repeating the process again and again.

Were one to be lucky to have a broadly programmed path of a personal destiny (as I am able to claim), then one may seek to learn (and understand), while in the Afterlife, the significance of human life on Earth, of Man’s place in the Cosmos, and what the Cosmos might be all about. I have been promised that I can continue my learning in the Afterlife. I do like that.

I must admit to having been pre-occupied in recent years (with Death patiently awaiting) with thoughts such as : where is this Afterlife located?; insubstantial entities will not need an environment of substance; I do not want to be involved with other spirits in the way this happens on Earth; and how will I be able to acquire the learning I seek?; and so on.

Then, I had a strange dream recently. I was in a physical environment of my liking (the details do not matter here) in what I felt is the Afterlife. I heard human voices in the distance, but no one came into view. Peace prevailed. As in my present reclusive life. This life was imposed upon me, but it is acceptable as consistent with the guidance offered by Hinduism. Hinduism recommends that, once one has completed one’s commitments to family and society, one could withdraw from society to live a life of contemplation and meditation.

For example, a cave in the Himalayan mountains had been the meditation home for 3 years of the yogi who had come down to Malaya to guide my widowed mother and I about our respective futures. Years later, when I detected a coherent pattern in my life, I wondered whether he had been sent to us. I remember that he was clearly at peace, and apparently unaffected by the cold of the mountain.

In my more comfortable retirement ‘cave’ I too have achieved peace (after a turbulent life). While the dogs do bark (and snap), this caravan will move on, ignoring those who foolishly insist that only their beliefs mist prevail. Certainty is, in my experience, not a human condition.

The message I received through my dream about the Afterlife is that spirits create their own environment in the Afterlife; and that any contact with other spirits can only be on a mutually-agreed basis. My spirit guide may have been responsible for this message. Strangely, I read about a similar perception at about that time. This coincides with scientist Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of ‘morphic resonance’ – “a process that involves action at a distance in both space and time.”

For ex ample, discovery by one person can be followed by comparable or similar discoveries by others, without any contact between them. I instance the way birds began to open the tops of milk bottles all over the world near-simultaneously.

I know from my real experiences that the Afterlife is nearby (therefore in an interacting dimension), and that it is the residence of spirits such as my uncle and those he referred to as ‘higher beings.’ I look forward to an interesting sojourn.

The mystery of Consciousness

Consciousness in humans is awareness. Seems right, does it not? Can I say anything comparable about animals and plants? Kirlian photography suggests a level of sensitivity in plants to being cut or burnt; some plants have reportedly shown such sensitivity even when a neighbouring plant is adversely treated. This is not good news for us, especially vegetarians. Is sensitivity equal to awareness? (Semantics can be a nuisance, can’t it?)
As for animals, judging by family pets, do they not display both awareness and sensitivity (as human do)?

Examining consciousness further: Are we conscious in deep sleep? Or, is there something we refer to as the subconscious which alerts us to possibly-threatening sounds? What about warning smells? Or, a dream which effectively warns about safety or security?

One night, in deep sleep in a strange room, I had what felt like a dream. My ‘dream’ was that my bed was collapsing while also tilting sideways? I jumped out of the bed, not quite awake, and switched on the light. What I saw was a big-framed picture, which had been hanging on the wall adjacent to the bed, had now slid to the ground with a crash, in the small space between the bed and the wall.

Was this the sequence of events? Sound of sliding, falling picture. I hear this in my sleep. My mind generates a warning in dream form. This led to my flight out of the bed. Was that evidence of consciousness during deep sleep?

Curiously, Eknath Easwaran, in his book ‘The Upanishads’, refers to the ‘states of mind’ of waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep as representing “layers of awareness, concurrent strata lying at different depths in the conscious and unconscious mind”. Awareness existing in layers? Awareness in the unconscious mind?

He also refers to ‘states of consciousness’: and challengingly asks – ”In the constantly changing flow of thought, is there an observer who remains the same?” The idea of an uninvolved observer within us represents the core of Upanishadic Hinduism. However, I can cite an experience which is suggestive of an internal observer.

As a young man, I once lost my temper (never before, never again). It was a highly-charged emotional reaction. Then followed a physical development: I was about to cause terrible harm to a fellow human. Suddenly, from somewhere in my mind came a thought: “What are doing, stupid?” (It was a very clear thought.) As a consequence, no harm occurred. On reflection – I seem to have been operating at 3 levels of consciousness.

Consciousness at a normal, operational, human level is certainly confusing. The following extract from Easwaran then takes consciousness from the Earthly level to the cosmic level. Relying on one of the Upanishads, he states “… the powers of the mind have no life of their own.  The mind is not consciousness; it is only an instrument of consciousness …”

So, what is Consciousness at the cosmic level? In a recent post, I asked “Does Consciousness explain Reality?” What a wonderful mystery.