We can be sure that our ancestors of 4000 years ago found it far easier to induce peak experiences, for they were relaxed and close to nature. Then came the ‘Fall’ into left-brain consciousness, which induces a kind of tunnel vision. Yet, as Maslow’s research demonstrated, it is not difficult for healthy human beings to throw off the tunnel vision and regain consciousness of freedom. His students found it perfectly easy, just as Kelly’s audience at the computer conference found it easy to achieve group consciousness.
What is the lesson of the peak experience? This is easy to describe. It brings a sense of delight and courage—in fact, we see courage as being of central importance. We also see that the peak experience depends on a high degree of inner pressure—which is the opposite of ‘depression’. And if we wish to live in such a way that we have regular peak experiences, we need to maintain a sense of drive, purpose, optimism. We induce ‘depression’ by allowing ourselves to experience a ‘sinking feeling’. It is like letting air out of a tyre. And when we feel cheerful and optimistic—say, on a spring morning, or setting out on a journey—we create a sense of high inner pressure by filling ourselves with a confident feeling of meaning and purpose. We do it ourselves. We imagine that the external world causes our problems, and sometimes, indeed, it does present us with real difficulties. But most of our problems are self-induced; we permit ourselves to become negative, or merely ‘blank’.
I am arguing that it was necessary for human evolution for us to escape from that pleasant collective consciousness that characterised our ancestors. It had enormous advantages, but it was essentially limited. It was too pleasant, too relaxed, and its achievements tended to be communal. The new left-brain consciousness was far harder, far more painful and exhausting. In Dostoevsky’s Possessed, the character Svidrigailov says that he dreamed of eternity the other night, and that it was like a narrow room full of cobwebs. This is the symbol of left-brain consciousness. And yet when galvanised by courage and optimism, it is capable of a far greater intensity—and sense of control—than right-brain consciousness.
Moreover, as Maslow realised, healthy people are always having experiences of right-brain consciousness—for the peak experience is right-brain consciousness. In spite of being trapped in the left brain, healthy and optimistic human beings can easily regain access to right-brain consciousness.
In other words, left brainers have the choice. They can induce right-brain consciousness. But the typical right brainer finds it very distressing to try to induce left-brain consciousness—the kind of purposeful concentration required, for example, to solve a difficult mathematical or philosophical problem. Which means that, at this point in evolution, left brainers have the advantage.
This is why these insights into past civilisations, to which this book has been devoted, are so important. We have been inclined to see them as less efficient versions of ourselves—superstitious, technologically inadequate, deficient in reason and logic. Now it has become clear that this was a mistake. In some ways, they actually knew more than we do. Compared to their rich collective awareness, modern consciousness seems barren and constricted. They also knew more than we do about the hidden powers of the mind. In some ways they were far more efficient than we are. To really understand this comes as something of a revelation, which teaches us a great deal about what it means to be human.
It makes us understand, to begin with, that evolution has actually given us far more than they had. Right-brain awareness tends to be passive; left-brain awareness is active. Right-brain awareness is like a broad, gently flowing river; left-brain awareness is like a powerful jet of water. Above all, left-brain awareness has the power to contemplate itself, as if in a mirror. To understand the men of the remote past is to understand something very important about ourselves—including how much reason we have to be satisfied with the place to which the last 3500 years have brought us. For we have not lost what they have; we still have it—but we also have a great deal more. Our chief disadvantage so far has been that we didn’t know that we had it—or, insofar as we did know, failed to understand what could be done with it.
It is difficult to conclude a book like this, for it involves making the reader see why man has reached the most interesting point in his evolution so far. The ancient Egyptians would have understood the problem perfectly: they knew that there are certain things that have to be shown. The same was true of the Zen teachers, who understood that the flash of insight cannot be achieved by explanation; it has to come spontaneously.
It might help if we try considering again Maslow’s young mother watching her husband and children eating breakfast. She was ‘lucky’ before the beam of sunlight came through the window. But the sunlight made her aware that she was lucky, and she went into the peak experience. The peak experience depended upon achieving a kind of bird’s-eye view that made her conscious of what she already possessed.
The same is true of the next step in human evolution. It has already happened. It has been happening for the past 3500 years. Now all we have to do is recognise it.
Images
The sarcophagus of Cheops in the King's Chamber, the Great Pyramid The Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid The Sphinx and the Pyramid of Chefren at Giza The Sphinx The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, Mexico A view of the ruins at Teotihuacan Cave painting at Lascaux. France, 20,000 BC showing Shaman hunting magic. The bison is speared in the stomach Also in Lascaux, cave painting of urus (an extinct tribe of cattle), horses and deer
Notes
1 EGYPTIAN MYSTERIES
1 Some of these articles are quoted by Christopher Bamford in his introduction to Schwaller’s first book, A Study of Numbers, 1917.
2 P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 1950 (p. 27).
3 Columbia Encyclopedia.
4 Lancelot Hogben, Mathematics for the Million, 1936.
2 THE NEW RACE
1 Herodotus cites a story to the effect that because Cheops and Chefren were so wicked, the Egyptians preferred to call the pyramids after a shepherd named Philitis, ‘who at the time fed his flocks about the place’, which certainly implies that it was green. And in an article called ‘When the Sahara was Green’ (in The World's Last Mysteries, 1977), Henry Lhote, a respectable scholar, also says that the Sahara was green in 2500 BC.
2 Flinders Petrie, however, says in his book, Naquada and Balias (1896): ‘The wheel must have been well known to the Egyptians at this time [of Naquada].’
3 INSIDE THE PYRAMID
1 Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramids, 1971 (p. 59).
2 Zechariah Sitchin, The Stairway to Heaven, 1980 (p. 271).
3 Those who are interested in the various crank theories about the Pyramid will find an excellent summary of them in Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, 1959.
4 Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Pyramids, 1974.
5 Margaret Murray, The Splendour that was Egypt, 1949 (p. 97).
7 FORBIDDEN ARCHAEOLOGY
1 Nigel Calder, Timescale, 1984 (p. 241).
2 ‘The confined life of winter was followed by a nomadic camping existence, during which the hunters housed themselves in shallow, well-located rock shelters... They were always on the march, in the wake of the herbivorous animals they hunted.’ Raymond Lantier, quoted by Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilisation, 1972 (p. 371).
8 MORE FORBIDDEN ARCHAEOLOGY
1 Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 1957.
2 Harvalik’s experiments are described in Christopher Bird, The Divining Hand, 1979.
3 René Schwaller de Lubicz, Sacred Science, 1961 (p. 164).
9 OF STARS AND GODS
1 Anne Macaulay, Science and Gods in Megalithic Britain (not yet published). I am indebted to Dr Macaulay for allowing me to read the book in typescript form.
2 Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilisation, 1972 (p. 280).
3 The answer is to immerse the crown in a vessel brimful of water, and measure the overflow to determine
its precise volume. Then take exactly the same volume of pure gold, and weigh it. If the crown weighs less, it is not pure gold.
10 THE THIRD FORCE
1 Colin Wilson, An Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries, 1949.
2 ‘Physical Mediumship in Russia’ included in Incredible Tales of the Paranormal, ed. Dr Alexander Imich, 1995.
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Index
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Colin Wilson, From Atlantis to the Sphinx
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