Wednesday, March 11, 2015

KRISHNA YAJURVEDA

'Ved Vaani : 

================ from Krishna Yajur Veda ================

(Explanation by Jagadguru Sri Bharati Tirtha Mahaswami Ji, Peethadhipati, Dakshin Aamnaya)

Teaching from the Yajurveda :

From the Yajur Veda, we get multifarious teachings.The Yajurveda contains a number of arthavādās (portions which are not to be taken literally, which are in the form of stories, for the purpose of highlighting a certain value, practice, or certain knowledge). From such arthavādās, we however get several important teachings. 

In the 3rd khāṇḍa, 1st praśna of Taittiriya Samhita, we have the mantra :

प्रजापतिर्कामयत प्रजासृजेयेति स सर्पानसृजत | 

........ Taittiriya Samhita 3.1.1

Brahmāji had the desire to create human beings, for that he did tapas. However, when he did tapas for progeny, he did not get what he desired, but only snakes appeared.

Therefore he did tapas again.

स तपो तप्यत | वयाग्स्यसृजत | 

........ Taittiriya Samhita 3.1.1

The second time he did tapas, birds appeared. Brahmāji was not satisfied once more, so he did tapas again. Then finally human beings appeared. Now, this is an arthavāda, a story portion in the Yajur Veda. But we learn something from this. The teaching here is that if we start any activity for śreyas , any good activity, we should not leave it until it is completed and its result is obtained. This teaching appears in other śāstrās literally -

विघ्नैः पुनः पुनरपि प्रतिहन्यमानाः | 
प्राराब्धं उत्तमगुणाः न परित्याजयन्ति ||

Amongst the human beings, there are three types. There are some who start some Dharmic activity, they undertake that saṁkalpa , that commitment. In between the performance of that activity, some obstruction or problem arises. Once that comes, these people stop continuing that Dharmic activity because they do not have the interest in facing the problem and overcoming it. This is one category of people, a mediocre category.

A worse category are those who don't even start such Dharmic activities because they feel that there is no point in doing it as anyway obstacles are going to come and they cannot be bothered to handle them.

प्राराभ्येते न खलु विघ्नभयेन नीचैः |

Thus, the worse category of people do not even start any good activity fearing obstacles, while the mediocre category of people start the activity but leave it in between. However, the best category, the uttamās, overcome all obstacles and problems and complete the activity which they have undertaken. Thus, the story of Brahmāji reveals this teaching to us, for just like these uttamās, Brahmāji also undertook a Dharmic enterprise and persevered through several obstacles to overcome them and finally achieve his goal.This is one teaching we gain from the Yajur Veda .

Amongst the many other teachings in the Yajur Veda , there is also another very important one.The Yajur Veda gives us another arthavāda, a story portion, to teach us that if there is a satsanga happening somewhere, then we have to take the initiative ourselves to go there and become a part of it. We should not wait for anyone's invitation to go there. The arthavāda in the Yajur Veda tells us about the palāśa tree did this.

देवा वै ब्रह्मन्नवदन्त | तत्पर्ण उपाश्रुणोत् | 

........ Taittiriya Samhita 3.5.7

It seems the Devas were doing Brahma-vichāra, discussing the highest knowledge that is the knowledge of Brahman. That time, this palāśa tree went there and was listening to this.

The Veda says that because the palāśa tree went there and was listening to this divine discussion, it has got lot of glory and greatness. Therefore, one should use the palāśa tree and its constituents to prepare a certain material called juhū which is used in the yajnās.The palāśa tree got this glory because it went by itself to participate in the satsanga.The point here is not to question how the palāśa tree can walk, how it can go and listen to something, etc. This is an arthavāda, a story portion. However, the grand teaching we obtain here is that wherever a satsanga is happening, we have to go there and participate in it by ourselves without waiting for any special invitation from someone.The reason is that by going to the satsanga we can get to know several good Dharmic ideals.

Thus, in this manner, we get several teachings from the arthavādās present in the Yajur Veda. Apart from this we get many direct teachings also. 

For example, in the Taittirīya upaniṣad, we come across the teachings -

वेदमनुचचार्योऽन्तेवासिनमनुशास्ति | सत्यं वद | धर्मं चर | स्वाध्यायान्मा प्रमदः | 

...... Taittiriya Upanishad, Shikshavalli, Anuvaka 11

(One has to speak the truth always. One has to follow Dharma always. One has to respect and honor one's parents. One has to revere one's ācārya very much. One has to serve one's guests well. If one gets any confusion regarding what is Dharma, one has to approach the great Dharmic heros, perform the actions as done by them, and go in the same path as they have.)

In this manner we obtain several teachings from the Yajur Veda.

Teaching from the Sāma Veda :

Similarly if we take the Sāma Veda , the teachings we obtain from it is no less. Just because it is set in a musical fashion, that doesn't mean that there are no teachings for us in the Sāma Veda . 

To illustrate this, we can take up the Setu Sāma. In the Setu Sāma, we have a very essential upadeśa given to us. The Setu Sāma says that for a human being to attain śreyas , complete fulfillment and security, there are four obstacles. If the four obstacles are removed, then one gets śreyas. The four obstacles are krodha (anger), lobha (greed), asatya (lack of truth), and aśraddhā (lack of śraddhā ). These four are obstacles in the path to śreyas and they should be removed.

Krodha (anger) should be removed by the practice of akrodha, which is nothing but kṣamā or patience. By the practice of patience, krodha should be removed. Lobha (greed) should be removed by the practice of dāna (giving). 

The Veda says, 

" एषा गतिः एतदमृतं स्वर्गछ ज्योतिर्गछ "

If you remove these four inner enemies, then you can enjoy not only the temporal happiness available in svarga but also the highest happiness which is union with the Lord. Having told this, the śruti , the Sāma Veda addresses us, " he catura " (हे चतुर), " O intelligent one, understand this teaching and implement it in your life. This is a teaching available to us from the Sāma Veda.

" Om Shanti Shanti Shanti "'===== from Krishna Yajur Veda ========
(Explanation by Jagadguru Sri Bharati Tirtha Mahaswami Ji, Peethadhipati, Dakshin Aamnaya)
Teaching from the Yajurveda :
From the Yajur Veda, we get multifarious teachings.The Yajurveda contains a number of arthavādās (portions which are not to be taken literally, which are in the form of stories, for the purpose of highlighting a certain value, practice, or certain knowledge). From such arthavādās, we however get several important teachings.
In the 3rd khāṇḍa, 1st praśna of Taittiriya Samhita, we have the mantra :
प्रजापतिर्कामयत प्रजासृजेयेति स सर्पानसृजत |
........ Taittiriya Samhita 3.1.1
Brahmāji had the desire to create human beings, for that he did tapas. However, when he did tapas for progeny, he did not get what he desired, but only snakes appeared.
Therefore he did tapas again.
स तपो तप्यत | वयाग्स्यसृजत |
........ Taittiriya Samhita 3.1.1
The second time he did tapas, birds appeared. Brahmāji was not satisfied once more, so he did tapas again. Then finally human beings appeared. Now, this is an arthavāda, a story portion in the Yajur Veda. But we learn something from this. The teaching here is that if we start any activity for śreyas , any good activity, we should not leave it until it is completed and its result is obtained. This teaching appears in other śāstrās literally -
विघ्नैः पुनः पुनरपि प्रतिहन्यमानाः |
प्राराब्धं उत्तमगुणाः न परित्याजयन्ति ||
Amongst the human beings, there are three types. There are some who start some Dharmic activity, they undertake that saṁkalpa , that commitment. In between the performance of that activity, some obstruction or problem arises. Once that comes, these people stop continuing that Dharmic activity because they do not have the interest in facing the problem and overcoming it. This is one category of people, a mediocre category.
A worse category are those who don't even start such Dharmic activities because they feel that there is no point in doing it as anyway obstacles are going to come and they cannot be bothered to handle them.
प्राराभ्येते न खलु विघ्नभयेन नीचैः |
Thus, the worse category of people do not even start any good activity fearing obstacles, while the mediocre category of people start the activity but leave it in between. However, the best category, the uttamās, overcome all obstacles and problems and complete the activity which they have undertaken. Thus, the story of Brahmāji reveals this teaching to us, for just like these uttamās, Brahmāji also undertook a Dharmic enterprise and persevered through several obstacles to overcome them and finally achieve his goal.This is one teaching we gain from the Yajur Veda .
Amongst the many other teachings in the Yajur Veda , there is also another very important one.The Yajur Veda gives us another arthavāda, a story portion, to teach us that if there is a satsanga happening somewhere, then we have to take the initiative ourselves to go there and become a part of it. We should not wait for anyone's invitation to go there. The arthavāda in the Yajur Veda tells us about the palāśa tree did this.
देवा वै ब्रह्मन्नवदन्त | तत्पर्ण उपाश्रुणोत् |
........ Taittiriya Samhita 3.5.7
It seems the Devas were doing Brahma-vichāra, discussing the highest knowledge that is the knowledge of Brahman. That time, this palāśa tree went there and was listening to this.
The Veda says that because the palāśa tree went there and was listening to this divine discussion, it has got lot of glory and greatness. Therefore, one should use the palāśa tree and its constituents to prepare a certain material called juhū which is used in the yajnās.The palāśa tree got this glory because it went by itself to participate in the satsanga.The point here is not to question how the palāśa tree can walk, how it can go and listen to something, etc. This is an arthavāda, a story portion. However, the grand teaching we obtain here is that wherever a satsanga is happening, we have to go there and participate in it by ourselves without waiting for any special invitation from someone.The reason is that by going to the satsanga we can get to know several good Dharmic ideals.
Thus, in this manner, we get several teachings from the arthavādās present in the Yajur Veda. Apart from this we get many direct teachings also.
For example, in the Taittirīya upaniṣad, we come across the teachings -
वेदमनुचचार्योऽन्तेवासिनमनुशास्ति | सत्यं वद | धर्मं चर | स्वाध्यायान्मा प्रमदः |
...... Taittiriya Upanishad, Shikshavalli, Anuvaka 11
(One has to speak the truth always. One has to follow Dharma always. One has to respect and honor one's parents. One has to revere one's ācārya very much. One has to serve one's guests well. If one gets any confusion regarding what is Dharma, one has to approach the great Dharmic heros, perform the actions as done by them, and go in the same path as they have.)
In this manner we obtain several teachings from the Yajur Veda.
Teaching from the Sāma Veda :
Similarly if we take the Sāma Veda , the teachings we obtain from it is no less. Just because it is set in a musical fashion, that doesn't mean that there are no teachings for us in the Sāma Veda .
To illustrate this, we can take up the Setu Sāma. In the Setu Sāma, we have a very essential upadeśa given to us. The Setu Sāma says that for a human being to attain śreyas , complete fulfillment and security, there are four obstacles. If the four obstacles are removed, then one gets śreyas. The four obstacles are krodha (anger), lobha (greed), asatya (lack of truth), and aśraddhā (lack of śraddhā ). These four are obstacles in the path to śreyas and they should be removed.
Krodha (anger) should be removed by the practice of akrodha, which is nothing but kṣamā or patience. By the practice of patience, krodha should be removed. Lobha (greed) should be removed by the practice of dāna (giving).
The Veda says,
" एषा गतिः एतदमृतं स्वर्गछ ज्योतिर्गछ "
If you remove these four inner enemies, then you can enjoy not only the temporal happiness available in svarga but also the highest happiness which is union with the Lord. Having told this, the śruti , the Sāma Veda addresses us, " he catura " (हे चतुर), " O intelligent one, understand this teaching and implement it in your life. This is a teaching available to us from the Sāma Veda.

swami vivekanand

================== 12th January, 2015 ==================
" One day I found that my mind was soaring high in Samadhi along a luminous path. It soon transcended the stellar universe and entered the subtler region of ideas. As it ascended higher and higher I found on both sides of the way ideal forms of gods and goddesses. The mind then reached the outer limits of that region, where a luminous barrier separated the sphere of relative existence from that of the Absolute (The Supreme Brahman). Crossing that barrier, the mind entered the transcendental realm where no corporeal being was visible. Even the Devatas dared not peep into that sublime realm, but had to be content to keep their seats far below. The next moment I found Seven venerable sages seated there in Samadhi. It occurred to me that these sages must have surpassed not only men, but even the Devatas, in knowledge and holiness, in renunciation and love.
Lost in admiration, I was reflecting on their greatness, when I saw a fraction of that undifferentiated luminous region condense into the form of a divine child. The child came to one of the sages, tenderly clasped his neck with his lovely little arms, and, addressing him in a sweet voice, attempted to drag his mind down from the state of Samadhi. The magic touch roused the sage from his Super-Conscious state, and he fixed his unmoving, half open gaze upon that wonderful child. His beaming countenance showed that the child must have been the treasure of his heart. In great joy the strange child said to him, "I am going down. You too must go with me." The sage remained mute, but his tender look expressed his assent. As he kept gazing on the child, he was again immersed in Samadhi. I was surprised to find that a fragment of the sage's body and mind was descending on earth in the form of an effulgent ray of light. No sooner had I seen Naren than I recognized him to be that sage. "
(From The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna Paramhamsa)
Sri Ramakrishna would often say that Vivekananda was the 'Amsa Avatara' or fractional incarnation of the foremost Sage among the seven great Sapta Rishis.
Swami Vivekananda was born at 6:33, a few minutes before sunrise, on Monday, January 12, 1863. It was the day of Makarasamkranti, when special worship is offered to the Ganga by millions of devotees. Thus the future Vivekananda first drew breath when the air above the sacred river not far from the house was reverberating with the prayers, worship, and religious music of thousands of Hindu men and women.
Before Vivekananda was born, his mother, like many other pious Hindu mothers, had observed religious vows, fasted, and prayed so that she might be blessed with a son who would do honour to the family. She requested a relative who was living in Varanasi to offer special worship to the Vireswara Siva of that holy place and seek His blessings; for Siva, the great god of renunciation, dominated her thought. One night she dreamt that this supreme Deity aroused Himself from His meditation and agreed to be born as her son. When she woke she was filled with joy.
The mother, Bhuvaneswari Devi, accepted the child as a boon from Vireswara Siva and named him Vireswara. The family, however, gave him the name of Narendranath Datta, calling him, for short, Narendra, or more endearingly, Naren.
One day, after His vision in Samadhi, Sri Ramakrishna saw the ray of light travelling in the sky from the city of Varanasi towards Calcutta when He was on the garden of Dakshineswar Kali Temple. He understood that the Rishi whom He saw in Samadhi has incarnated. Then He recognized Narendranath as that Sage meeting him for the first time.
" My ears are almost seared listening to the cheap talk of worldly people. Oh, how I have been yearning to unburden my mind to one who will understand my thought ! "
Then with folded hands he said : " Lord ! I know you are the ancient sage Nara — the Incarnation of Narayana — born on earth to remove the miseries of mankind. "
One day the Master, unable to speak even in a whisper, wrote on a piece of paper: 'Narendra will teach others.' The disciple demurred. Sri Ramakrishna replied: 'But you must. Your very bones will do it.' He further said that all the supernatural powers he had acquired would work through his beloved disciple. A short while before the curtain finally fell on Sri Ramakrishna's earthly life, the Master one day called Naren to his bedside. Gazing intently upon him, he passed into deep meditation. Naren felt that a subtle force, resembling an electric current, was entering his body. He gradually lost outer consciousness. After some time he regained knowledge of the physical world and found the Master weeping. Sri Ramakrishna said to him: 'O Naren, today I have given you everything I possess — now I am no more than a fakir, a penniless beggar. By the powers I have transmitted to you, you will accomplish great things in the world, and not until then will you return to the source whence you have come.'

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

BEFORE PHARAOHS- EVIDENCE OF ADVANCE CIVILIZATION IN EGYPT-CONNECTED WITH HINDUISM


by Edward Malkowski
June 15, 2013

from NewDawnMagazine Website









There is no other place on Earth like Egypt’s Giza Plateau.


Anyone with even a slight interest in history and civilization is aware of this fact. For on this plateau there stands the Great Pyramids and their sculpted guardian, the Great Sphinx.

Although there are plenty of theories, no one really knows who built the Giza Pyramids or carved the Sphinx, or when they were constructed.


Any statement as to who built them, or when they were built, is pure theory. In light of all the various theories concerning these mysterious structures, I don’t think the theoretical nature of the pyramid builders can be emphasized enough.

What stands out at Giza more than anything else is not only the magnitude of the construction of the pyramids, but the internal design of the Great Pyramid; three chambers, of which one is subterranean, and their connecting passageways. The passageway that leads to the so-called King’s Chamber rises to a height of thirty-six feet!


On the other hand, all other passageways were not built tall enough to accommodate the average man or woman.

There is also the unique configuration of the King’s Chamber as well as the Queen’s Chamber. Both of these contain two shafts, one on each side of the chamber.


The Queen’s Chamber contains a corbelled niche built into its east wall, and the King’s Chamber’s ceiling is composed of five granite slabs stacked one atop the other. Why these chambers were constructed in this manner is unknown.

The official theory is that the pyramids were tombs, and that King Khufu kept changing his mind where his burial chamber was to be placed; thus, the reason for three chambers in the Great Pyramid.


However, in comparison to typical Egyptian burial methods (the mastaba and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings), the Giza pyramids, and particularly the Great Pyramid, do not fair well within the Egyptian concept of a tomb.





The Ancient Egyptian View of the Afterlife
The Egyptians believed in an afterlife, and the tomb was an important part of that belief.


As the tomb of King Tutankhamun testifies, the deceased’s chamber of internment was to be decorated with art and filled with that person’s possessions. Why they practiced this ritual was not for superstitious reasons, as one might suspect. It was practical, according to their beliefs, and aimed at preventing that person’s energy (spirit) from being re-absorbed into Nature’s spiritual force.

For the ancient Egyptians, Ba animated a living person, whereas Ka was the energy emanating from that person.


Although not an exact analogy, the Ka and the Ba are what traditional Western thought might refer as spirit and soul. Another important aspect of Egyptian belief represented immortality, the ankh, depicted as the crested ibis.

The Ka, represented in art by up-stretched arms, was believed to be the part of man’s consciousness and energy (man’s spirit or inner quality) that related to the immediate world. It is the part of us connected to the physical body; where it lived, its possessions, as well as the people he or she was acquainted with.


The Ka can be likened to one’s personality, which upon death is separated from the body, and naturally seeks a way to once again take form. The Ba, represented by a winged human head, or sometimes a human-faced bird, represented the part of consciousness that is immortal.

When someone passed away, it was their goal as well as the hope of the family, that the deceased’s Ka would seek a way to remain united with their Ba. To help accomplish this eternal union, the possessions of the deceased were gathered together by the family and placed in the tomb with the mummified body.


Mummification prevented the body from decomposing and returning to the soil of the Earth, whereas the tomb, with the deceased’s possessions, served as a ‘home’ for the Ka.


As a result, the Ka maintained its identity in the spiritual world and could seek out its Ba in order to achieve ankh, which resulted in the resurrected and glorified form of the deceased beyond the limits of an earthly realm.





Pyramids and the Concept of the Egyptian Tomb
Like the pharaonic tombs carved into the Valley of the Kings, royal mastabas built during the early dynasties - some as early as 3000 BCE - were also designed with ‘home’ in mind, as that home relates to a person’s Ka.


Case in point: from the sixth dynasty, Mereruka’s mastaba was crafted in mansion-like proportion with thirty-two rooms and adorned with statues and art depicting, for example, scenes of wildlife along the Nile River.

The traits of Egyptian domestic life, so beautifully incorporated into the design of their tombs, are not found in the Giza pyramids. The Giza pyramids contain no art or hieroglyphics of any kind, very uncharacteristic of Egyptian tombs.


So why is it the case that the Giza pyramids are generally considered to be tombs of fourth dynasty Pharaohs?


The reason is because of an association of the Giza complex with another development ten miles south at Sakkara where the Egyptians really did build tombs as pyramids.

At Sakkara in 1881, the French Egyptologist, Gaston Maspero (1846-1916) discovered that the subterranean chamber of the Pepi I Pyramid (second ruler of the sixth dynasty) was engraved with hieroglyphics.


Over the course of subsequent explorations, it was discovered that a total of five pyramids at Sakkara also contained inscriptions, from the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth dynasties of the Old Kingdom.


In 1952, Dr. Samuel A.B. Mercer (1879-1969), Professor of Semitic Languages and Egyptology at the University of Toronto, published a complete English translation of "The Pyramid Texts" in a volume of the same name.


According to Mercer, The Pyramid Texts contained ‘words to be spoken’ concerning funerary ritual, magical formulae, and religious hymns, as well as prayers and petitions on behalf of the deceased king.1

With the pyramids at Sakkara being confirmed as tombs the associative logic came to be that all pyramids must be tombs.


Furthermore, since there are two cemeteries (mastaba fields) to the east and west of the northernmost Giza pyramid, assuming that all pyramids are tombs was a likely conclusion. However, the condition of the Sakkara pyramids - most of which are believed constructed after the Giza pyramids - poses serious problems in this logical association.


Of the pyramids at Sakkara only Djoser’s ‘Step Pyramid’ is in good condition, although not really a true pyramid. (The Step Pyramid was originally a mastaba that was modified into a pyramid.)


All other pyramids at Sakkara, most of which belong to the fifth and sixth dynasties are in ruins today and resemble mounds of rubble.

According to a consensus of Egyptologists, Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Sakkara was constructed during the third dynasty and was the forerunner to the fourth dynasty pyramids on the Giza Plateau.


After pyramid development at Giza, for whatever reason, the focus of pyramid building shifted back to Sakkara.




The Great Pyramid - A Device

The easily observable and obvious differences in the Giza pyramids and the Sakkara pyramids, which were all supposed to have been built during the same era, are a problem.


Clearly, the construction techniques, as well as materials, for the Giza pyramids were different than those at Sakkara, or else we would expect pyramids at both sites to have stood the test of time in a similar manner. They did not. The important point is why.


Did the engineers and construction workers of the Old Kingdom not pass along their methods from the fourth to the fifth dynasty? It seems they did not, which is a very curious occurrence given the stability of Egyptian civilization.


It may also be the case that the fourth dynasty Egyptians did not build the Giza pyramids. No other pyramid in Egypt (the world for that matter) is like the Giza pyramids, and in particular the Great Pyramid.


Additionally, there is no direct evidence to support the claim that the Great Pyramid, or the other Giza pyramids were tombs. Nor is there any record left by its builders as to what it was for or when it was built.


This creates a problem of explanation.

  • If the Great Pyramid was not a tomb, then what was it?
  • A mystical temple for initiation ritual, or a public works project designed to unify the country?
  • Or, was it something else entirely?

Theories are abundant, but the only theory I am aware of that covers all aspects of the Great Pyramid’s interior design, is Christopher Dunn’s theory that it was a device.


According to Dunn, the Great Pyramid was a machine for producing power by converting tectonic vibration into electricity.

There are a number of reasons to accept Dunn analysis.

  • First, he explains the interior design and all other evidence within the Great Pyramid in a cohesive manner.
  • Second, he demonstrates the technical skills required to accomplish precision construction.
  • Third, Dunn’s expertise and career is in the precision fabrication and manufacturing industry, which makes him uniquely qualified to express a professional opinion on the techniques and tools of the Giza pyramid builders.

The fact is, modern construction companies could not build the Great Pyramid today without first inventing specialized tools and techniques in order to deal with blocks of stone that vary in weight from ten to fifty tons.


Such an endeavor would be on a magnitude equivalent to building a hydroelectric dam or a nuclear power station requiring tens of billions of dollars in resources.


Although our modern economy is different than that of the ancient world, the resource required now as compared to then is the same! The stone must be quarried and moved and the workers must be paid.


The fact that an extremely large amount of resources were dedicated to Giza pyramid development over a long period of time demands, in my opinion, that pyramid building was utilitarian, and not for any fourth dynasty pharaonic vanity of having the largest headstone in the world.





Prehistory - Evidence and Perspective
For me, the evidence clearly tells a very different story of early dynastic Egypt.


Sometime around 3000 BCE, the establishment and growth of permanent settlements in the Lower Nile Valley led to the development of civilization.


Why Giza and the surrounding area were chosen as the focal point for early Dynastic Egypt was because ‘civilisation’ had been there before, as the three pyramids and the Great Sphinx testify. Without knowing what the pyramids were designed for, the early Egyptians also assumed they must have been tombs.


As a result, they rejuvenated the Giza Plateau and turned it into a Necropolis, then expanded to Sakkara where they built tombs in pyramid form, albeit of lesser quality and not brandishing the skills the original builders of the Giza pyramids demonstrated.


Pyramid building, even the smaller ones at Sakkara, was resource intense, so the Egyptians reverted to burying their nobility in the traditional mastaba.

This scenario, which calls for an earlier civilization with advanced technical skills, poses another problem. It does not fit the standard model of history. However, the notion that an earlier civilization existed does not rest on the Giza pyramids alone.


There is also the Sphinx, which in 1991 was geologically dated to between 7,000 and 9,000 years old by the team of John Anthony West and geologist Dr. Robert Schoch.


Add to that the megaliths of Nabta Playa in southwestern Egypt, which is believed to have been a star viewing diagram, according to astrophysicist Dr. Thomas Brophy, that relates not only the distance from Earth to the belt stars of Orion, but their radial velocities as well.


Another ‘head scratching’ discovery is the 1260-ton foundation stones of the Baalbek temple, west of Beirut in Lebanon, one of which was left in its quarry.

Clearly history has its secrets, but there is enough evidence to validate, as theory, that civilization is much older than we have previously believed. History, according to the ancient Egyptians themselves, confirms this.


According to the Papyrus of Turin, which is a complete list of kings up to the New Kingdom, before Menes (before 3000 BCE) the:

…venerables Shemsu-Hor, [reigned] 13,420 years

Reigns up to Shemsu-Hor, 23,200 years 2

These two lines in the king’s list are explicit.


According to their documents, the total years of Egyptian history goes back 36,620 years. The argument that the years in the king’s list do not represent actual years, but some other, shorter, measurement of time seems more of an attempt to explain away than to explain.


The ancient Egyptians employed a sophisticated calendar system that involved a 365-day year, which was periodically corrected through the predictable and cyclical nature of the star Sirius.


Every 1,461 years, the heliacal rising of Sirius marked the beginning of the new year. A single Sirius cycle corresponds to 1,461 years, where each year is equivalent to 365.25 days. In essence, the marking of the New Year at the heliacal rising of Sirius was the ancient Egyptian’s ‘leap year.’


Of course, determining the length of Sirius’ cyclical nature requires stellar observation over thousands of years which means the origins of pharaonic Egypt, or its source of knowledge, must originate in the remote past.

Late twentieth century Egyptologist Walter Emery seems to have agreed in principle that the origins of ancient Egypt date well into prehistory.


Emery believed that ancient Egypt’s written language was beyond the use of pictorial symbols, even during the earliest dynasties, and that signs were also used to represent sounds, along with a numerical system. When hieroglyphics had been stylized and used in architecture, a cursive script was already in common use.


His conclusion was that:

All this shows that the written language must have had a considerable period of development behind it, of which no trace has as yet been found in Egypt.3

Ancient Egyptian religion also testifies to a considerable period of development.


Their religion, which is more of a philosophy of nature and life than it is a ‘religion,’ is based on a level of sophistication that, in all respects, appears more scientific than it does mythical.





Symbolism and Nature - The Method of Egyptian Thought
From a modern Western perspective their religion has been billed as primitive and polytheistic, and appears as a mythological menagerie of gods.


Nothing could be further from the truth. The source of this misunderstanding stems from the Egyptian word 'neter' (neteru) being translated into Greek as ‘god,’ which later took on the Westernized meaning of deity.


The true meaning of neter was to describe an aspect of deity, not a deity to be worshipped. In essence, neters referred to principles of nature in a practical scientific way.

Yet, the meaning of a specific neter was communicated in a visually symbolic manner. When a human was depicted with an animal head, this signified the principle as it occurs in man. If the whole animal was depicted it was a reference to a principle in general.


Alternatively, a human head depicted on an animal represented that principle as it relates to the divine essence within mankind, not any person in particular, but the archetypal; as the immortal Ba is represented by a human-faced bird.

Another example is Anubis (the jackal), who presided over the process of mummification.


He did so as a representation of the decomposition or fermentation process. In nature, the jackal keeps its prey and allows it to decompose before consumption. Therefore, he who presided over the mummification ritual was depicted in art as a man with the head of the jackal, thereby representing man’s death as the digestive principle found in nature.


From a universal perspective, the decomposition of a body is, to Nature, digestion.


Hence, those organs associated with digestion, after being removed from the deceased, were placed in a Canopic jar with a lid shaped in the image of the jackal’s head.





Before the Pharaohs
The 'sudden emergence' of Dynastic Egypt, at the beginning of the third millennium BCE, is one of civilization's greatest mysteries.


How did this supposedly primitive North African culture organize itself into a civilization of such magnificence? One aspect that I believe has been overlooked is that mankind - anatomically modern humans - has been around for a very long time.


According to recent genetic studies, all people today are the descendents of a single African woman who walked the Earth 150,000 years ago. According to geneticists, her mitochondrial DNA exists in all of us.

This is a long time, 147,000 years, for our ancestors to have remained in a relatively primitive state. In my opinion, the evidence, some of which is incredibly anomalous (in particular the Great Pyramid) suggests they did not remain primitive.


Given the evidence of ancient Egypt’s technical abilities (their monument, temples, and other crafted artifacts still exist), as well as their sophisticated symbolism in describing Nature, it appears that in establishing a dynastic society, the Egyptians of the third millennium BCE benefited from a legacy of knowledge.

Skeptics of this approach to history, of course, would want to know where the evidence of this technical and prehistoric civilization is.


If such a civilization existed, surely there would be overwhelming evidence to support its existence. If an exclusively uniformitarian approach to geologic formation were generally accepted as fact, I would agree with the skeptic.

However, mass extinctions, as a result of environmental catastrophism because of volcanism, asteroid or comet impact, or stellar (gamma) radiation, now seems to be a reality.

According to geologists there have been five large mass extinctions in Earth’s history:

  1. Ordovician (440-450 mya)
  2. Devonian (408-360 mya)
  3. Permian (286-248 mya)
  4. Triassic (251-252 mya)
  5. Cretaceous (144-65 mya)

Although all of these cataclysms occurred well before the modern human form, there are two global disasters that occurred relatively recently.

Approximately 71,000 years ago Mount Toba, in Sumatra, erupted spewing an enormous amount of ash into the atmosphere. It was the largest volcanic eruption in the last two million years, nearly 10,000 times larger than the Mount St. Helen’s explosion in 1980.


The resultant caldera formed a lake 100 kilometers long by 60 kilometers wide, with devastating and lasting climatic consequences. A six-year long volcanic winter followed, and in its wake an ice age that lasted for a thousand years. With its sulfuric haze, the volcanic winter lowered global temperatures, creating drought and famine decimating the human population.

According to geneticist’s estimates, the population was reduced to somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 individuals. Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Utah, Lynn Jorde, believes it may have been as low as 5,000.4

Even closer to our time is the mysterious cataclysm at the end of the Ice Age, only 10,000 years ago. No one really knows if it was the result of natural phenomenon or an asteroid impact. What is known is that the climate drastically altered life for those who lived at that time.


It is a known geologic fact that at the end of the Ice Age many North American species became extinct, including the mammoth, camel, horse, ground sloth, peccaries (pig-like hoofed mammals), antelope, American elephant, rhinoceros, giant armadillo, tapirs, saber-toothed tigers and giant bison. It also affected the climates of lower latitudes in Central and South America, as well as Europe in a similar way.


Those lands have also revealed evidence of mass extinction. Yet, the mechanism that brought on this Ice Age ending cataclysm remains a mystery.

If an ancient technical civilization existed during the remote past, what would be the likelihood of that civilization surviving a global catastrophe intact? Estimates from the Toba eruption are not encouraging. Neither are the scenarios that astronomers and climatologists build today for a theoretical asteroid impact.

According to the archeological evidence, anatomically modern man (Cro-Magnon) appeared in Western Europe 40,000 years ago.


Where they came from has been a long-standing mystery. The logical deduction is that they migrated from Africa. However, such a migration requires a host culture, of which there is no evidence.

Nevertheless, a likely location for this host culture would have been along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, which were likely a series of fresh water lakes during the remote past.

If ancient civilization existed in the region of the Mediterranean, it would not have survived the conflagration that turned those lakes into a salt-water sea.

If that were indeed the case, the remnants of those who lived on the perimeter of that civilization would appear to us, today, as anomalies such as the Giza pyramids and the giant stones of Baalbek.

Cro-Magnon cultures of Western Europe, although once a part of a great Mediterranean civilization, would also appear as an anomaly.


For us, it would be as if they appeared from nowhere.



Footnotes

1. Samuel A. B. Mercer, 'The Pyramid Texts', 1952, p.2.
2. René Schwaller de Lubicz, 'Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy', 1982, p.86.
3. Walter B. Emery, 'Archaic Egypt', 1961, p.192.
4. ‘Supervolcanoes’, BBC2, 3 February 2000, also see www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/supervolcanoes_script.shtml

How the Spirit World Helped a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

Ouija: How the Spirit World Helped a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

By John Chambers

Sois sage dear heart & set my teachings down
If you do not your world will be undone
& heaven itself turn to one grinning skull.1

These lines appear in the poem “The Will,” by James Merrill (1926-1995), arguably the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century. Critics rarely mention that for most of his life Merrill was deeply involved with discarnate entities on a Ouija board, and that the poet’s 550-page masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover (Knopf, 1982), is based entirely on his conversations with those spirit guides. Fully one-third of the book consists of direct quotes from the numerous spirits with whom, with varying degrees of belief, ambivalence, and denial, Merrill hammered out the problems of the universe.
The lines quoted above are channeled from “Ephraim,” the first spirit guide with whom Merrill communicated on the Ouija board. Ephraim’s words place a crushing burden on the poet’s shoulders. The spirit is telling Merrill that if he doesn’t tell the world everything the spirits have told him, the world will be “undone,” i.e., destroyed. And that isn’t all: “heaven” (the “afterworld,” the “divine”) will be destroyed as well.
Ephraim seems to be implying (this is borne out by other quotes in The Changing Light at Sandover) that the afterworld exists, but that it needs man to give it definition, to give it shape and purpose. Behind this outlandish assertion lies the strange assumption that the spirits come to us, via the Ouija board or by whatever means, not because we need acknowledgement and answers, but because they need acknowledgement and answers. The German phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger has said, “God needs Being;”2 Ephraim’s statement seems to bear this out.
Over the past 160 years, the West has seen a great flowering of interest in, and practice of, channeling, i.e., receiving messages ostensibly from the spirit world. During this period, four literary/philosophical figures of stature have, by dint of lengthy encounters with the spirit world and the records they’ve kept of those encounters, provided us with valuable information concerning the nature of channeling. James Merrill is the most recent of these four.
The first was Victor Hugo (1802-1885), author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. Hugo’s feverish conversations with a hundred and twenty discarnate entities on Jersey island in 1853-1855 were at the centre of a sudden, ecstatic, upsurge of interest in channeling in England and France beginning in 1852. Instances of Ouija board-type channeling already went back a long way: In Rome, in 371 CE, a group of noblemen used an olive wood tripod supporting a circular metal dish with the alphabet engraved on the rim (a ring on a thread was suspended overhead) to obtain a message whose content led to all of the participants’ being executed for treason.3But from the time of the consolidation of Christianity up till the early nineteenth century, there are few records of such séances, no doubt because such activity usually led to a burning at the stake. By 1848, the grip of religion had relaxed sufficiently to allow the Fox sisters, of Hydesville, New York, who were channeling raps from the afterworld, to capture the attention of the world and bring about the birth of Spiritualism in the US and England and Spiritism in France.
The Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) was a third dominating literary influence to become immersed in channeling. In 1925, Yeats published A Vision, a summary of his three years of talks with the spirit world through the agency of his wife Georgie’s automatic writing. Nobody was much interested; by this time the anti-mystical influence of Freud and a growing disillusionment stemming from World War One had dampened interest in channeling. (In 1992, the University of Florida published all 4,000 pages of the transcripts of Yeats’s talks with the spirit world.) In 1916, the Swiss philosopher-psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), who had broken with Freud and was already exploring other dimensions of reality, had a frightening encounter with the spirit world whose full details became known only in 2008 with the publication of Jung’s personal diary, The Red Book. (There had been some mention of the encounter in Jung’s 1962 autobiography.) Carl Jung was the fourth towering figure of our times to take the phenomenon of channeling seriously.
James Merrill and his lifetime companion David Jackson first used a Ouija board in 1955. (The planchette, a three-legged marker sliding over the letters of the board, had by now replaced the three-legged table, tapping with one leg, that Victor Hugo used.) By this time the influence of Jung, with its focus on transpersonal realms of archetype and collective unconscious, had superseded that of Freud. The wisdom of the East was opening up to seekers in the US and Europe. The stage was set for a second great upsurge of interest in channeling, one that reached its peak in the early 1980s and has only recently begun to wane.
People tend to either dismiss channeling completely or hang on the spirits’ every word. This is too bad, since the truth of channeling is not only complex, but may be far different from anything we have imagined so far. Carl Jung found this out in the summer of 1916. One day, a huge host of unhappy spirits of the dead seemed to stream in and occupy his living room. Before he could ask them anything, they hurled questions at him: “What is the nature of man?” “What is the nature of the universe?” “Who is God?” “Is God dead?” They told Jung that the dead know nothing beyond what they know at the moment of death.4
Was this an isolated incident? To say that the spirits come to us because they need help, and not the other way round, seems like a preposterous assertion. Yet there are hints here and there, especially in the writings of Hugo, Jung, Yeats and Merrill, that to pose such a question is at least to embark on a fruitful inquiry. This writer can’t hope to do anything more than point the reader in a few directions. To explore in depth what the spirits told James Merrill seems like a good way to start.

James Merrill

The future author of The Changing Light at Sandover was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, the second son of Charles Edward Merrill, co-founder and senior partner of the investment brokerage firm of Merrill-Lynch. The younger Merrill grew up in a milieu of wealth and privilege. He attended the best schools in New York and New Jersey and graduated from Amherst College with highest honors after having taken a leave of absence to serve in World War Two.
At 28, Merrill, with several volumes of poetry under his belt and a well-received off-Broadway play, had established himself as a talent to be watched. That was when he and David Jackson, living in Stonington, Connecticut, came across a Ouija board, began playing with it, and watched with bewildered amusement as the heart-shaped marker moved rapidly from letter to letter of the alphabet laid out in two curving rows on the brown, placemat-sized, board. Ephraim had arrived; he claimed to be a bisexual Greek Jew strangled to death at age 32 in 36 CE at the court of the Emperor Tiberius;5and he was charming and witty enough to hold the attention of the ultra-sophisticated, very intelligent, very well-read, and very skeptical Merrill and Jackson. Their attention rarely wandered as, over the ensuing months, years, and decades, a steady stream of equally captivating spirits came gliding across the Ouija board to beguile them with enchanting tales of our multidimensional reality.
By 1975, the hard-working Merrill had garnered a reputation as America’s leading poet. In that year, he put together his first volume of poetry devoted almost exclusively to his Ouija board adventures. Published in 1976 as Divine Comedies, it earned him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1978, Merrill published Mirabell: Books of Number, a continuation of the Ouija board saga; and in 1980 the final volume, Scripts for the Pageant, for which he earned a National Book Award. All three books were published together in 1982 as a single, 550-page poetic epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. James Merrill died suddenly of an AIDS-related heart attack on February 6, 1995. He was not quite sixty-nine.

The Spirits on Ancient History

Over more than thirty years, the spirits communicated to the two men a dazzling vision of our world as one set in motion by a God who is only one of a pantheon of gods, and who, like the deity of the Gnostics, has all but withdrawn from His creation. Our world, the spirits told them, was shaped and is controlled in its human and non-human dimensions by four archangels who are aided in their task by the discarnate spirits of a sentient species, long extinct, that preceded ours on earth. Reincarnation is a definitive, abiding principle of our world and the other levels of reality to which it is linked. But our universe is a troubled one; the gods are at war with one another, and our own God is failing for reasons that have entirely to do with us, his human creation. Only Merrill and Jackson – and all of us together – can help Him survive.
The spirits call this God “God B,” or “God Biology.” The “youngest brother” of many gods, He was, eons ago, made custodian of the Milky Way galaxy and charged with the task of seeding our planet with sentient life.
Four archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Emmanuel, and Raphael, work at his side. It was they who moulded our world, bringing it through geological age after geological age until it had been properly prepared for habitation.
Two “root races” preceded our own, although that term – familiar to students of Madame Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, Edgar Cayce and their depictions of the Lemurians and the Atlanteans – is not used by Merrill’s spirit guides.
The first sentient species God placed on earth was a race of intelligent, immortal, winged humanoids living in what is now China. The spirits allude to this species’ central city… a vast obsidian pile gleaming on the plain rutted by his machines. The winged humanoids destroyed themselves in an atomic war of such violence that God had to throw up a shield of positive matter6 – the Himalayas – to protect our planet from radioactive fallout.
The second species, whom the spirit guides call the Atlanteans, was a race of unusually intelligent half-men/half-horses, resembling the centaurs of mythology. On the one hand these centaurs, in the beginning a grazing, pastoral breed, were limited in their ability to manipulate the environment because they had forelegs with hooves, not hands with opposable thumbs. On the other hand, this didn’t seem to hinder them from breeding a species of winged feathered servants by feeding uranium into the eggs of green grass flies. The centuries flashed by. The centaurs’ forehooves evolved into stubby fingers and they were able to store their grain in silos, using refracted sunlight to control the temperature. They continued to breed their winged servants in incubators, speeding them through 6,000 generations a year. When the servants emerged from their incubators, they were as tall as their masters, humanoid in shape, pitch-black in colour, and with burning red eyes. They resembled giant upright bats – and (coincidentally, or not) the “mothmen” described by John Keel in The Mothmen Prophecies.
These bat-creatures became the centaurs’ engineers, constructing their masters’ arenas and cities and running their heating and lighting plants.
There was a problem. The centaurs were immortal, and the Atlantean continents had become crowded with fenced-off areas containing all of the older generations of the centaurs down to the most primitive and ancient. The young, “witty” centaurs had taken to tormenting the very old trapt in their primitive form.7 The centaurs came up with a solution: They would annihilate the previous generations using atomic bombs. And they would get their servants, the bat-creatures, to do it for them.
The servants faithfully carried out their duty. But now the bat-creatures, being themselves immortal, and proliferating quickly, began to fear that their masters would do the same thing to them. They rose up against the centaurs and, using atomic bombs, slaughtered all but a few.
The bat-creatures now set out create an empire in the air. They forced the surviving centaurs to build landing strips and antigravitational skeins – continent-wide “crusts” sculpted with latticed cities and smooth plains. They forced the centaurs to man “anchor points,” huge stones glowing with radiation. This radiation, beamed up, would hold the floating continents in place in the ozone layer.
The bat-creatures enjoyed their empire in the air for a thousand years. But earthly vegetation had encroached more and more thickly on the anchor points, which could no longer be manned by the centaurs since they had evolved into ravenous longnecked creatures / reptilian heads [ripping at] greenery – dinosaurs.8
The radiation moorings frayed; the bat-creatures, arrogant and complacent, ignored this. Then one beam tore, then another; there was a sudden cataclysmic unravelling of the moorings; and the bat-creatures’ latticed cities shimmered, shred, and plunged to earth. All died; and all were damned, first for killing the centaurs, then for neglecting the mooring points. The bat-creatures, now a useless squeaking thinking cloud shunning light,9 were condemned by the four archangels never to take life again but to labour constantly in the service of mankind.
God B took the fate of his first two creations (and of the bat-creatures) very seriously. He decided that what had brought about the downfall of these species was their immortality. Being immortal, they could kill each other only with nuclear weapons. And, being immortal, they had not overcome the need to fight because they had not been able to learn properly – because immortality had provided them with no deadlines.
And so God brought homo sapiens, ourselves, into the world, and gave us mortality and a cycle of reincarnations.

The Spirits on Reincarnation

In The Changing Light at Sandover, the spirits have a great deal to say about reincarnation. They explain that all nature is suffused with soul; that “Mother Nature” is the resting place of soul,10 and that the reincarnational cycle of which humankind is a part demands that we live lives as animals, plants, and even rocks, as well as men and women. Merrill is told he is now living his 268th and last incarnation. Jackson is told that he has lived 289 lifetimes and must live several more. He is understandably dismayed, since this means he will be separated from Merrill.11
The spirits explain that, “Soul falls into two / Broad categories: run-of-the-mill / souls who / Life by life, under domed thicknesses, / Plod the slow road of Earth – billions of these / Whom nothing quickens, whom no powers indwell / …The other soul belongs to an elite: / At most two million relatively fleet / Achievers…”12
The souls of the two million elite, whom the spirits call the movers and shakers of mankind, enjoy a privilege not available to the other souls on earth: they spend time between lifetimes being recalibrated. This process, called cloning, takes place in the “Research Lab” and is carried out by the shades of multitudes of bat-creatures who labour without rest. Merrill is told that, between this lifetime and his last, these workers
wafted him hither, added the humus of / the Jew plus the gene of a chemist (& failed musician)
with the result that
et voilà U are not JM [James Merrill] what u might want to be / but a productive 5.5.13
“5.5” is Merrill’s talent rating, so to speak, a component of his Basic Formula. A talent rating quantifies the soul’s aptitude for serving mankind; Merrill, a partial 5,14 is very high on the scale.
Esoteric essences, called soul densities, may be injected into souls between lifetimes; one such is shooting, a special quality found only in plants. It is a cool upward thrust of / carbons. An intensity that might translate as pride; its insertion gives the soul, when reborn, spectacular vitality but a short lifespan. The poet Edwin Muir, the novelist Yukio Mishima, and the horticulturist Luther Burbank, all benefited from this lively brand of Lab cloning.15
In some schools of thought, such as Hinduism, and some channeling experiences, such as that of Victor Hugo, the rebirth of human being into animals, plants, and especially rocks, is seen as a punishment; according to Merrill’s guides, it’s a gift, an opportunity for enlightenment and exploration – a saintly elevation.16 The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), eventually one of the spirit guides on Merrill’s Ouija board, has been reborn as a soul romping through the mineral world; the spirits report one night that, Our witty poet surfacing off Alaska as a vein of pure / radium has havocked a nosy radio ship. 58 in lifeboats!
Most of the world’s population – the “run-of-the-mill / souls who/ Life by life, under domed thicknesses / Plod the slow road of Earth”17 – spend no time in the Research Lab but instead “get a short pep-talk, then rejoin the race.”18It seems that Earth’s population explosion beginning in the nineteenth century has stretched the amount of available soul matter thin. The spirits tell Merrill that to rectify the situation,
We have in the past century had to resort to / souls of domestic animals, most recently the rat./ By 2050 these too will be exhausted, & then?/ Wilder strains, mountain cats & forest monkeys. So / now u / Begin to see how without visibly interfering / We of the Lab must go about our work.19
Only the souls of the elite two million are eventually able to graduate from the cycle of reincarnation. Then they move upward through nine levels of afterworld purity. Those that reach the top are the best that humanity is capable of. They are incorporated into a kind of celestial blood bank from which transfusions of their soul-matter are made available on the basis of need to earth’s most talented mortals, especially its geniuses. The spirits explain that,
Since mid 19th cent. souls of the great scribes / Have been used 1/9 on earth reincarnated, 8/9 / as let us say safety deposits. We mine them… Proust / is deservedly enshrined. Tap him & as a statesman / at a dull banquet he converses, seems to be himself / But part of his mind literally wanders: Out on loan!20
(Victor Hugo’s spirit guides describe a roughly analogous procedure to the French poet.)
Merrill and Jackson are told that the shade of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud shared its soul matter with that of the living British-American poet T.S. Eliot; this afterworld-to-earth Vulcan mind meld gave birth to Eliot’s famous poem The Wasteland. W.H. Auden’s shade, often present at the séances, is connected to the living Merrill in the same way, while the largely silent presence of the shade of W.B. Yeats has the same kind of relationship with the mortal David Jackson.21

The V Group of Gifted Souls

A group of spectacularly gifted souls, numbering five and called “the Five” (or, “the V”), play a very particular role in the advancement of humanity. When we’re born, we have no memory of our past lives – except for the V. These five souls reincarnate again and again remembering every detail of all their previous lives. They are the spiritual leaders of mankind, whose “immortal” names are Laduman, Soriva, Rachel, Torro and Von.22 They take life again and again as athletes, artists, scientists, politicians and religious leaders.
The spirits explain:
These have lived centuries & live today heldover lives / Not in the scheme you know of the 9 stages. Remaining / Aware of it all, knowing the fruitlessness of speaking / Of their knowledge, they return to earth charged with / Energy / Beyond the norm.23
The Five began as “reincarnations” of the archangels Michael, Raphael, Emmanuel and Gabriel, each of these archangels representing one of man’s five (“V”) senses. Michael is “God’s seeing on earth;” his earthly incarnations include Akhnaton, Madame Curie, and Galileo. The Archangel Raphael is God’s hearing on earth, and has been reborn as Homer, Mohammed, Mozart, and an East German astrophysicist (alive today, but anonymous), inter alia. The archangel Emmanuel, God’s touching on earth, has spent time among us as Montezuma, Noah, and George Cotzias. (Cotzias is a scientist/friend of Merrill who had been engaged in unlocking the genome governing aging and now speaks to Merrill from the afterworld.)24 Sometimes these supercharged beings return to earth to live completely anonymous lives. (These often our choicest agents, declare the spirits).25

The Spirits on a Curious Period in Ancient Egypt’s History

The first two representatives of God B’s V were the twinned souls of Akhnaton and Nefertiti. The lifetime in ancient Egypt of this strange twinned soul is of particular importance, and the spirits spend some time explaining it to Merrill. His account in The Changing Light at Sandover reads like ancient Egyptian history seen through hallucinogenic glasses, or the acid trip of a genius.
Akhnaton/Nefertiti were married at age thirteen and ruled for eighteen years, according to Merrill’s spirit guides. The royals oversaw a switch in religious belief and a leap forward of all the sciences. Polytheism was abolished; the temple priests were strangled; the slaves were freed; and the worship of a single god was introduced. A surge of creativity sweep across Egypt: Physicians found great cures; there were no fevers / A generation was born a hand taller than its parents / Light storage much like the battery was invented / both palaces and humble homes were lit and heated by the sun.26 Harnessing the power of the sun, the Egyptians controlled the tides up and down the Nile and closed the Straits of Gibraltar, allowing just enough water in to turn the Mediterranean into a tranquil lake.
The crowning achievement of this epoch was the erection of a fifteen-metre-high rock crystal pyramid with dimensions sculpted in such a way as to harness every ray of the sun and enable Akhnaton to rule the world. For one year, 1,500 workers polished the capstone to perfection. On the night before it was to be lowered onto the top of pyramid, Akhnaton, watching with Nefertiti on a barge decorated with diamond pyramids, was so intensely thrilled his physicians fed him opium each hour.27
The setting-in-place of the capstone, attempted at the first moment of dawn, was a cataclysmic failure. The proportions of the pyramid were a fractional millimetre wrong;28 there was a violent, fiery explosion, and the crystal pyramid rose, fell, then melted into a lake of molten crystal (which, the spirits tell Merrill, is still there, solidified beneath Thebes). Far away on the island of Crete, the volcano Thera erupted, destroying the city of Minoa. Akhnaton and Nefertiti, their twinned soul unutterably harrowed, cut their wrists, held their arms over the side of the barge, and bled to death into the Nile. The devastation was such as to render the surrounding deserts infertile for 1,200 years.
This fiery ending to monotheistic Egypt (provoked by no less than His beloved, first two, “twinned,” V souls) devastated God B and made him rethink his plans.

God B & the “No Accident Clause”

Up until this time, it seems, mankind had complete free will; “Chance” prevailed upon the earth. God B now decided to invoke the “No Accident Clause,” that is, to remove an element of free will from the souls of the elite two million who guide the destinies of man. Hitherto, these movers and shakers were free to do whatever they liked – to remain open to the randomness of the universe. But God B now moved from a policy of, so to speak, total deregulation, to one of some regulation, commanding his archangels to clone certain controls into his ruling elite. As scholar Judith Moffett tries to explain, “Apparently the No Accident clause means that what happens to [God’s chosen] souls is planned and purposeful to the minutest detail.”29
From the 14th century BCE to the 20th century, then, mankind has not had complete free will; through the movers and shakers of humankind, God B has exercised a high degree of control over our lives. But now the No Accident Clause is unravelling. This is because religious and moral standards are eroding quickly in our time, and also because human beings not belonging to the elite are increasingly acquiring the money, the power and the leisure time to do great damage, e.g., to buy and sell atomic bombs. Accidents have begun, the spirits tell Merrill. Like the first faint twirls of smoke / We see all the old signals.30
The spirits hint that God B fears that mankind, his third sentient species upon earth, may also be about to destroy itself with atomic bombs. He has prepared for this contingency. A fourth sentient species, which God calls Alpha Man, waits in the wings. This race will be immortal (after a little time), winged, and without genius. The divine spark of genius is responsible for mankind’s greatest achievements, and also for his most hideous disasters; if homo sapiens fails, there will be no more genius. The new race of Alpha Man will – if it is needed – Swim & glide, / A simpler, less willful being. Duller too? / If so, is that sharp edge not well lost / Which has so variously cut and cost?31

James Merrill on the Spirits

What did James Merrill think about all this? Did he think the spirits really existed, and that the stories they told were really true?
In an interview with this writer, the poet claimed to have “maintained an attitude of perfect ambivalence toward the spirits for twenty-five years,”32 never being quite able to accept them, and never being quite able to reject them. Either these “communicators,” as he called them, using Yeats’s terminology, were outside us working on our minds, which was fantastic, or they were inside us working through our total consciousness, which was also fantastic. We were all far more than we knew.
What was the reality of these spirits? The poet said they often seemed to him to be metaphor and reality – subatomic reality – both at the same time. They were literally who they said they were – and they were also powers, energies, manifesting from “within the atom,” the elemental forces of nature itself. The bat-creatures’ story of building cities into the sky was exactly that. But it was also, somehow, the story of a fatal destabilising of the atom – or an account of the extension of man’s brain, in an earlier phase of our evolution, through the addition of a cortex.33
Merrill insisted all his life that the spirit guides, if they possessed a measure of objective reality (and he tended to believe they did), were dependent for the expression of that reality on pictures and ideas created by the mind of man. These powers/energies would be “invisible, inconceivable,” he said, “if they’d never passed through our heads and clothed themselves out of the costume box they’d found there.” It followed from this that the spirits would manifest themselves differently from culture to culture, from epoch to epoch, from person to person. “A process that Einstein could entertain as a formula might be described by an African witch doctor as a crocodile,” said Merrill, adding that, “what’s tiresome is when people exclusively insist on the forms they’d imagined. Those powers don’t need churches in order to be sacred. What they do need are fresh ways of being seen.”34
He wasn’t just “making it all up,” Merrill insisted. “I worked very hard,” he said, “in putting the poem together, to try to persuade the reader that these things actually happened… What does rather sadden me are the critics who think that we were pretending – that we didn’t have the experience.”35
It seems that the disasters attended man on earth have also attended God B; that God’s welfare is intimately bound up with that of his creations.
Towards the end of The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill and Jackson are brought into the presence of God. The spirits empower them to use the Ouija board to “listen” to His “song.” What the Ouija board spells out is:
Ive brothers hear me brothers signal me
alone in my night brothers do you well
I and mine hold it back brothers I and
mine survive brothers hear me signal me
do you well I and mine hold it back I
alone in my night brothers I and mine
survive brothers do you well I alone
in my night I hold it back I and mine
survive brothers signal me in my night
I and mine hold it back and we survive 36
The shade of W.H. Auden, listening in from the Other Side, tells them the Deity is like a shipwrecked sailor, alone / keeping up his nerve on a life raft.37
Even such urbane and skeptical Ouija board adventurers as Merrill and Jackson are shocked and saddened by this encounter. It sets them to thinking; and, in this brief discussion, we can take up only one thread of that thinking.
In the beginning, Merrill had thought the spirits were himself and David Jackson. Then he thought they were a kind of amalgam, some otherworldly energy necessarily filtered and distorted through his mind and sense organs.
He had become increasingly aware that the spirits shifted and changed the more he got to know them, as if he were in some sense the author of this drama – and as if they too were the authors.
Merrill now recalled the time when the spirit guide who spoke to them most often revealed that, when he began to serve them through the Ouija board, his form on the Other Side was as a black-and-white centaur. But, he says, as he had grown to love them, and they had grown to love him, he suddenly found himself transformed into a Technicolour peacock. He tells them:
B4 [before] our meetings I was nothing no time passd but now / yr touch like a lamp has shown me to myself & I am / me! [the peacock].38
The mortals’ “touch like a lamp” has been sorely lacking in mankind’s relations with God. There has been a reverse transformation: Over the past few centuries, our increasing indifference to God has drained Him of His power. Earlier “Great Scribes” (to whose number, the spirits tell Merrill, he belongs) have described, in function of the fullness of their faith, a God very different from what Merrill and Jackson have seen. The spirits tell Merrill this when, speaking directly in the afterworld to two deceased friends of the Ouija board adventurers, Maria and Wystan, while Merrill and Jackson listen in through the Ouija board, they say:
Dante heard that song [God B’s desperate “shipwrecked sailor” plea] / The lyrics may be changing / Dante saw the rose in fullest bloom / Blake saw it sick / You and Maria [deceased friends of JM and DJ, observing from the other side] who have seen / The bleak unpetalled knob / Must wonder, can it last till spring? / Is it still rooted in the sun?39

How the Spirit World Relies on the Living

At séances, in some religious philosophies, in accounts of experiences in other aspects of multidimensional reality, other hints peek through that the paranormal beings with whom we speak need us as much as we need them. At a séance conducted by prominent South Florida medium Marilyn Raphael, one of the more forceful spirits, a frequent visitor at these séances, stated:
We as inhabitants of the spirit world no longer have what you call a light around us. You are our light. The light is created by the living. The disembodied soul has no energy to create light. When we come into your room, we feed on your light and your energy. Now once we feed on your energy, we feel your thought patterns. You create the vision for us to see ourselves. Your energy is what we here live from. We become the apparition, we become the dialogue, we become the writer of ourselves when we can have your energy. But we do not take your energy unless we are invited.40
It is as if humankind were the sense organ of God; as if it were only through the human imagination, functioning in the incarnate mode, that the spirit world can sense and see itself. And, if that is so, then the exhortations of these beings to humankind to survive and expand are in a sense cries for help; they, too, are fighting to survive.
Dannion Brinkley writes in Saved by the Light his classic account of a near-death experience, that, while communicating with a group of Light Beings, he was seized by “the amazing realisation that the Beings were desperately trying to help us, not because we were such good guys, but because without us advancing spiritually here on earth, they could not become successful in their world.”41
In Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Harvard Medical School Professor of Psychiatry and Pulitzer Prize-winning author John E. Mack wonders if the alien abductors aren’t extensions of ourselves seeking redemption through reintegration with us. “The alien identity seems to be connected in some way with the soul of the human self,” he writes, “and one of the tasks the abductee then confronts is the integration of their human and alien selves, which takes on the character of reensoulment of their humanity.”42
Even astral-traveller Robert A. Monroe, in his three autobiographical volumes, hints at the importance of man to other dimensions of the universe when he says that we secrete an astral substance, called Loosh – that only we secrete – that is essential to beings in many levels of the universe, who periodically, and surreptitiously, come and “harvest” us.
On a more conventional note: the importance of man to God was understood very well by the Kabbalistic scholars of long ago. Gershom Scholem, world authority on Jewish mysticism, sums it up:
“Opposite poles, both man and God encompass within their being the entire cosmos. However, whereas God contains all by virtue of being its Creator and Initiator in whom everything is rooted and all potency is hidden, man’s role is to complete this process by being the agent through whom all the powers of creation are fully activated and made manifest. What exists seminally in God unfolds and develops in man… Man is the perfecting agent in the structure of the cosmos… He is also the ‘transformer’ who through his own life and deeds amplifies these forces to their highest level of manifestation and redirects them to their original source.”43
James Merrill’s spirit guides might have been dictating this.

Footnotes

1. Merrill, Divine Comedies, 41; 2. Heidegger, 291; 3. Dodds, 222; 4. Chambers, Secret Life of Genius, 215-217; 5. Merrill, Sandover, 8; 6. Ibid., 459; 7. Ibid., 168; 8. Ibid; 9. Ibid., 122; 10. Ibid., 389; 11. Ibid., 143; 12. Ibid., 139; 13. Ibid., 145; 14. Ibid., 143; 15. Ibid., 151; 16. Ibid., 309; 17. Ibid., 511; 18. Ibid., 139; 19. Ibid., 145-146; 20. Ibid., 189; 21. Ibid., 217, 219; 22. Ibid., 131; 23. Ibid; 24. Ibid., 142-143; 25. Ibid; 26. Ibid., 227; 27. Ibid., 126; 28. Ibid., 127; 29. Moffett, 198; 30. Ibid., 476; 31. Ibid., 512; 32. Personal Communication, January 1978; 33. Moffett, 191-192; 34. Merrill, Recitative, 68; 35. Radio Interview, “Voices and Visions,” 1985; 36. Merrill, Sandover, 360; 37. Ibid., 362; 38. Ibid., 155; 39. Ibid., 363; 40. Unpublished manuscript: Night Out on the Earth Plane; 41. Brinkley, 46; 42. Mack, 49; 43. Scholem, qtd. in Reincarnation, 191-192.

Works Consulted

Dannion Brinkley, Saved by the Light: The True Story of a Man Who Died Twice and the Profound Revelations He Received, New York: Harper Collins, 2008.
E.R. Dodds, Professor, “Supernormal Phenomena in Classical Antiquity,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 55, Part 203 (March 1971): 189-237.
C.A. Buckley, “Quantum Physics and the Ouija-Board: James Merrill’s Holistic World View,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 26 (2) (Spring 1993): 39-61.
John Chambers, “The Channeled Myths of James Merrill,” The Anomalist 5 (Summer 1997): 41-58.
John Chambers, The Secret Life of Genius: How Twenty-Four Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds, Rochester, VA: Destiny Books/Inner Traditions, 2009.
John Chambers, Night Out on the Earth Plane, Unpublished Manuscript.
John Chambers, Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius’s Hidden Life, Rochester, VA: Destiny Books/Inner Traditions, 2008.
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Eknowning), [Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis], Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, New York: Scribners, 1994.
J.D. McClatchy, ed., Recitative, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986.
James Merrill, “The Art of Poetry, 31: James Merrill,” The Paris Review 84 (Summer 1982): 184-219.
James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
James Merrill, James Merrill: Voices from Sandover, Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, FFH 4182, VHS, 1990.
James Merrill, Radio Interview, “Voices and Visions”: A Guided Tour of Revelations,” Documentary, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1985.
James Merrill, “The Will,” Divine Comedies, New York: Atheneum, 1976, 41.
Judith Moffett, James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Gershom Scholem, qtd. in Reincarnation: A New Horizon in Science, Religion, and Society. Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams, New York: Julian Press/Crown Publishers, 1984
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