For the first time since his massive volume The
Occult (1971) Colin Wilson has another bestseller, at least in
England. And, with any luck, come spring, that achievement will
be repeated here when the fledgling New York publishing house
Fromm International unveils the U.S. edition of Wilson's From
Atlantis to the Sphinx (though not necessarily with that title).
While bestsellers may not be an everyday
achievement for Wilson, though he's had more than his share,
distinguished books apparently are. In the forty years since
originally bursting on the scene with his much acclaimed The
Outsider he's averaged about two books a year, enough to earn him
mentions in Who's Who and the Encyclopedia Britanica along with
various other honors including visiting professorships at several
American colleges.
Especially interested in the supernatural he
wrote The Occult as an investigation of unexplained phenomena.
Initially, something of a skeptic, he recalls, I became
absolutely convinced of the reality of the paranormal. Many
subsequent related works earned him a considerable reputation in
the field. A fascination with the invisible dimensions of human
experience has also prompted works on the psychology of crime,
human sexuality and his own unique form of existential
philosophy, making him something of an authority on those areas
as well.
In the new book he argues that thousands of
years before ancient Egypt and Greece held sway there was a great
civilization whose ships traveled the world from China to the
South Pole (which was then free of ice), and whose advanced
knowledge of science, mathematics and astronomy was passed on to
descendants who escaped to, among other places, Egypt and South
America. Wilson believes the ancients possessed a completely
different knowledge system from our own, which he believes was at
the root of the achievements which so puzzle our modern minds. At
the heart of his argument is the current research, especially
surrounding the Giza plateau in Egypt, which threatens to
overturn conventional theories of the origins of civilization.
Since reading in 1979 Serpent in the Sky, John
Anthony West's interpretation of the work of renowned
Egyptologist R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Wilson has actively
followed the most important developments in the field. He reports
on the ensuing geological studies redating the Sphinx to as old
as 12,500 years, as much as 8,000 years older than conservative
Egyptologists believe, and the evidence developed by Graham
Hancock and Robert Bauval of astronomical keys indicating
advanced ancient knowledge (discussed in their new book The
Message of the Sphinx, Keeper of Genesis in U.K.). A close friend
and virtual neighbor, Wilson has followed Hancock's work closely
since well before his monumental Fingerprints of the Gods (see
Atlantis Rising #4) as well as that of Bauval, Rand and Rose
Flem-Ath (Wilson wrote the introduction for their When the Sky
Fell) and, of course, West. In From Atlantis to the Sphinx,
Wilson sets out to chronicle the unfolding story and the
implications of the new discoveries, and goes on to attempt
something of a reconstruction of the lost wisdom of ancients.
In September Wilson presented some of his
research at the University of Deleware for the Return to the
Source conference sponsored by the Society for Scientific
Exploration. A few weeks prior, however, Atlantis Rising had
spoken with him early one morning at his Cornwall home.
Fortunately, seven a.m. was not too early for clear thinking. In
fact, he assured us, every day of hard writing for him begins
about the same time.
Staying in touch with West, Hancock and Bauval
remains part of his routine. Within days he had been to Hancock's
for lunch with Bauval and West, and is fully abreast of
developments in the ongoing controversies over new research at
the Sphinx which is apparently going forward without the
participation of the group despite their contributions to the new
discoveries (as reported in London's Daily Mail as well as
Atlantis Rising #8). Apparently following up on the earlier
researches of West and geologist Robert Schoch, the current
investigation is said to be seeking a chamber beneath the Sphinx
to be opened on live worldwide television later this year. The
chamber is believed by some to be the celebrated Hall of Records,
the discovery of which was prophesied by Edgar Cayce. However,
Wilson reports, his friends aren't really concerned about being
excluded, as long as the entire situation comes out in the open.
The present somewhat arbitrary behavior of Egyptian antiquities
authorities, though, is taken as grounds for suspecting the
integrity of any ultimate outcome. Wilson believes the
authorities have recognized the tremendous potential for profit
in the entire situation, and have moved to capitalize.
As he explains in From Atlantis to the Sphinx,
the machinations of official Egyptology have often been something
other than exemplary. Despite overwhelming evidence of
sophisticated engineering in the construction of the monuments of
the Giza plateau and throughout Egypt, the establishment has
persisted in claims that only primitive methods were employed,
thus ruling out any suggestion that some kind of superior science
inherited from a more sophisticated period, albeit a forgotten
one, was involved. Most of Wilson's speculation concerns just how
sophisticated the ancients may have actually been, not only in
matters of engineering, but in many other areas as well.
He is especially interested in the capacities
of mind which the ancients must have possessed. In the book he
argues that they must have had superior development of the left
hemisphere of the brain, the intuitive side. Examples of such
development have remained till the present but have been
relegated to the domain of shamans and prophets. He cites the
case of Gilbert Islanders who in dream states are able to summon
porpoises who then appear in great numbers to be killed and
eaten. Citing vast contemporary research confirming the reality
of telepathy and other so-called paranormal phenomena, Wilson
suggests that the modern right-brain dominated society which we
have created has forced us to unlearn many things we once knew.
It seems to me we've deliberately got rid of jungle
sensitivities. The reason, he believes, is clear, we don't really
need them. What we've done is to plunge into this sort of narrow
rational consciousness, which has brought us to the point that we
don't know who we are. In Wilson's mind there's no doubt that the
ancients knew who they were.
However, while some have suggested that the
ancient Egyptians possessed nothing less than a science of
immortality, Wilson sees things a little differently. Obviously
they didn't have real immortality or they'd be around now, he
points out, but adds, I suspect their whole aim was immortality.
That was the aim of their religion...The Egyptians believed
absolutely totally in life after death, as all ancient people
did, but as to a real science of immortality? No.
Despite his demurs, though, he wants to expand
on the topic which has interested him since his teens when he saw
Bernard Shaw's play Back to Methuseleh. The idea of living to be
300 absolutely obsessed me. His own novel The Philosoper's Stone
played around with the idea and he's become convinced that even
today human beings possess a certain power which switches on at
certain moments.
His idea is that we possess a kind of robot
which has the purpose of performing certain tasks for us. You
learn to type slowly and consciously and then the robot takes
over and does it quicker than you could, and you learn to drive
or whatever. The robot, he explains, is what makes humans the
most advanced creatures on earth but it is also the source of
most of our problems, because we are always being taken over by
the robot, and when we don't want to be. We listen to a symphony
and it moves us deeply. The third time we listen to it, it's the
robot listening instead of us. The normal person, he believes, is
about 50% robot and about 50% real person. In curious moments of
happiness, in great moments of intensity, what happens is you
suddenly become 51% real you and 49% robot. And I'm sure that in
mystical experience you become something like 55% real and only
about 45% robot. That's what mystical experiences are. If we
could only switch into such moods, he thinks they are what
psychiatrist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences, all the
time, he believes we would be capable of amazing things. I've got
a feeling that all these so-called psychic faculties take over in
those moments when we are non-robotic.
As for the notion of surviving the death of the
physical body, Wilson accepts that it's probably true but doesn't
think it is particularly relevant or important. Unlike
Dostoevesky who thought that the truth of life after death could
be the most important thing that we could know, Wilson believes
the most important questions are how to live now we're here, how
to escape the robot, how to live on a sort of higher level? If we
become preoccupied with life after death, he thinks we're wasting
our time.
To Wilson the present world with all it's
difficulties offers special challenges which have the potential
to strengthen our hidden capacities. Human suffering he sees as,
in large measure, due to the fact that we've forgotten who we are
and that we are trying to recover what we have lost. That
recovery, though, shouldn't be so difficult.
If we could get the right point of view, so to
speak, suddenly these latent powers would become accessible to us
all the time. Certain that he's on to something big, he expands,
It really does seem to me that one of the basic problems with
human beings is that they experience wonderful moments of
insight, for example, children at Christmas, when they feel the
whole universe is absolutely glorious, and they feel that surely
no one would ever want to die, but the trouble is, you know
perfectly well at Christmas that within a couple months in the
middle of February you'll be grimly bored and begin to long for
the coming of the holidays around August. The need is to sustain
the drive and purpose of the high moments during the low ones.
The highs, it seems to him, amount to a kind of three-dimensional
consciousness, contrasting with the ordinary two-dimensional
humdrum consciousness. And he sees modern nihilistic existential
pessimists like Samuel Beckett and Jean Paul Sartre as trapped in
the 2D experience. In contrast, the thoroughly optimistic Wilson
believes that we are on the threshold of a time when we will be
able to find the kind of balance between modern rational thought
and ancient intuitive knowledge that will enable us to become
masters of the peak experience. Simply learning the true
antiquity of ancient civilization may do much to help us on our
way, as he reminded us, when we tried to probe an intellectual
riddle which puzzled us.
In his book, Wilson relates the Giza
construction scenario proposed by Hancock and Bauval which has
the Sphinx built around 10,500 BC as indicated by geological
evidence and corroborated by the precessional time of the Age of
Leo, and then approximately 8,000 years later the completion of
the Great Pyramid as indicated by the astronomical alignment of
air-shafts within the pyramid. Wilson also cites Rand Flem-Ath
and Charles Hapgood's research on Earth Crust Displacement which
places the destruction of Atlantis at about 9,500 BC, or about
1000 years after construction of the sphinx, as reported by Plato
and confirmed by evidence of animal extinctions such as the
mammoths in Siberia. Earth Crust Displacement would have
dramatically altered all astronomical observational phenomena and
since the Hancock/Bauval timetable relies on a predictable path
for celestial objects, which have remained constant to the
present day, we couldn't help wondering how the apparent conflict
could be resolved rationally. Wilson agrees that it is all very
puzzling and points to other destruction scenarios for Atlantis
including collisions with meteors. It seems to me, he says, that
Atlantis did in fact go down in a number of catastrophes... But,
in any event, he thinks the question is really unimportant at
this stage. The most important thing he believes about the
research of Hancock, Bauval, Flem-Ath and others is, what it does
seem to indicate is that knowledge of the heavens and so on is
far older than we thought, and that man really knew an enormous
amount, maybe as long as 30,000 BC...and if we can actually begin
to grasp this, really feel that this is what happened, I think
that simply that perspective on human history is going to cause a
change of consciousness and a different way of looking at
history.
Nevertheless, he does not see a wholesale
rewriting of the history books any time soon, What I do think
will happen, he chuckles, is that this kind of thing will
gradually snowball, and a certain point will come when quite
suddenly it's accepted knowledge. And then, and only then, will
you get the academics who have this kind of vested interest to go
along.
Since Wilson has focused many times in his
career on forensics (he's written in depth about Jack the Ripper
and other notorious criminals) we wondered if he ever thought of
Atlantis as perhaps the victim of a great murder, a crime which
we might live to see reenacted, and that our problem is amnesia
resulting from the trauma of the first enactment. I would agree
completely, he declares, it seems to me that Plato was right.
Something almost certainly had gone wrong with Atlantis,
spiritually speaking, before its destruction, which makes me feel
that people like Graham and Robert and John West and myself are
doing our best, as it were, to sound the alarm before it actually
happens. We're like someone digging frantically to raise some
kind of barrier before the flood comes. I've no doubt whatever
from my studies of crime that we are moving into an age in which
mass murder and this kind of thing is going to become more and
more commonplace, things like that affair in Belgium which at the
moment seems to me to be a horrific example of the kind of thing
that is beginning to happen and which inevitably happens as a
civilization becomes more and more free, more and more liberal
and so on. We can't put back the clock. There's no way of doing
that. What we can do, and with a little luck, is really
understand the implications of all this. It seems to me that
there's a great counterweight to these problems and that
counterweight is this kind of knowledge that we're speaking
about. If this kind of knowledge could be established for
everyone to understand, then suddenly we would begin to see our
civilization back on the rails, no longer in danger of meeting
the same kind of fate as Atlantis.
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