INVESTIGATION OF ALTERNATIVE WORLD VIEWS

GUIDE TO EXAMINATION OF ALTERNATIVE VIEWS

2011-11-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

IF YOU'RE NEW TO SOULSPEAK, YOU MAY WANT TO CHECK OUT THE SOULSPEAK DIRECTORY

IF NOT,

LET'S GO BACK

AND BACK

TO THE VERY BEGINNING

1. WHY I CREATED
THIS INVESTIGATIVE BLOG

2. MY UNIQUE BACKGROUND
AS A POET,
VIDEO ARTIST,
AND WRITER

3. AN EXAMPLE OF
HOW TO APPROACH
THE DISTANT PAST
CORRECTLY:
NOAH'S ARK.

4. MY CHALLENGING
VIDEOS SERIES
ON
ALTERNATIVE THINKING

5. WHAT ANCIENT
ART CAN TELL US:
THE SPHINX
& GIZA PYRAMIDS:

6. BOOKS ON
PRELITERATE
MYTHS
AND CULTURES.

7. A NEW WAY
TO LOOK AT
ATLANTIS.

8. UFOS AND
ALIEN
VISITATION/
ABDUCTIONS

MORE TO COME
IN THE FUTURE

SCYLLA@C, SS1

UFOS and ALIEN VISITATIONS / ABDUCTIONS

2011-11-01T12:20:00.001-07:00

Summary:

At the center of Alternative Thinking on UFOs and Alien Visitations/Abductions is the proposition that:

1) Aliens in UFOs visited earth in prehistoric times to create the human race.

2) Aliens assisted early humans in developing those early preliterate cultures. Aliens also assisted in the design and construction of their great stone monuments symbolizing those early cultures (Stonehenge, Sphinx, pyramids, Incan walls, Meso-American pyramids etc.) because early humans were not mentally or technically capable of building them.

MY RESPONSES TO PART 1

I know of no preliterate myth or carving that shows an alien- like God appearing either out of the "mist" or from a vehicle of some type to create human beings.

Human creation is always a part of a general creation myth describing the birth of earth and the heavens and its first God-like inhabitants. All of those creation myths begin with chaos or thought or the earth elements eventually forming those first Gods and eventually human beings. For a good review of them I suggest you see the Wikipedia discussion of them.

Yet for those who insist they have found ( or imagined) or had a vision of an Alien creation of human beings, all I can say in return is that while such a view of human creation is theoretically possible, given the fact that the reasons for our transition from animal to human will always remain in the realm of mystery and never be pinned down in a factual manner, I see it as a very weak theory of human creation.

I'm not talking here about "human" being defined as upright stance and brain size here; what really distinguishes the human animal from all the other animals: a human's ability to create stories: to reach back in memory and create a little world with a beginning, middle and end that allow humans to communicate very complex truths such as Macbeth and E= MC2.

This definition of human may surprise you, but it is a very old one and bears up under investigation. Tool-making, fire-creation, logic , etc. are really the result of our ability to communicate ideas via stories. Recent studies of chimpanzees show that while they can use tools such as sticks, they don't have the means, or interest, to pass the idea on to others afterwards.I suggest you take a look at at ALICE HICKEY: Between Worlds, as it is central to the book.

Yet if we merely resign ourselves to merely physical factors, I see it as highly improbable (given the growing scientific evidence) that such an Alien/human creation theory will ever outweigh the scientific theory on the natural evolution of the human species. I say this recognizing that the existing scientific evidence is somewhat sketchy and still somewhat limited to factors such as upright stance, walking stride, thumb, and brain cavity size and shape. Yet it can’t be ignored.

It's a question of which theory ( and supporting evidence) is stronger. Right now, I'd side with conventional science on the physical evidence that some form of ape became human but my deepest conviction is that the reasons for our becoming human ( and how that transition took place) will always be in the realm of mystery. Always.

This is very important, because physical characteristics really do not define what a human is, and therefore can't define the reasons why and when and how some primates became human, in other words, the physical characteristics of the primate that was to become human and the physical characteristics of the primate that became human would be the same, given that a large amount of time did not exist between the two.

What I am suggesting, and what I believe, is that the various mythic conceptions of the creation of humans are far more compelling than either the Alien theory or the various Scientific evolutionary theories.

Who are you going to believe on this matter of man coming into existence: the great metaphoric creation myths that indicate the truly mysterious nature of human creation, or some hastily concocted visitation scheme that misinterprets those early myths by taking them to be factual statements, or the scanty physical evidence of Science.

The great metaphoric creation myths were story poems—metaphoric stories issuing from the collective unconscious. These ancient metaphoric stories are as illusive as dreams when it comes to interpreting them. We can only feel their truth and be content to leave it at that.

If you would like to investigate a creation myth (The creation of human consciousness) that was made from a preliterate mindset, I suggest you take a look at ALICE HICKEY: Between Worlds.

MY RESPONSES TO PART TWO

There are a few glyphs, carvings and translations of preliterate myths that could be interpreted as Aliens visiting earth to instruct human beings in advanced thinking. But these are very skinny interpretations that could just as easily be interpreted as metaphoric representations of an unconscious entity or intuition doing the same thing.

After all, that is the way all human knowledge has advanced since the beginning of time, by intuition, either by a sudden insight interrupting our conscious minds or by an even more startling insight that arrives via psychic event, such as a vision.

We can see this even in modern times.

Einstein once said of intuition: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

A well-documented case of intuition concerns Frederick Kekule's (1829 - 1896) discovery of the structure of benzene. Kekule saw the answer in a dream of a snake coiled and biting its tail. In an intuitive flash, he realized that the molecular structure was characterized by a ring of carbon atoms. Benzene is a 6 carbon ringed compound with 6 hydrogen atoms with the carbon-carbon bonds arranged alternately single and double. This discovery opened the way to modern theories of organic chemistry.

My own experiences with intuition makes me favor the interpretation of these preliterate "Aliens teaching human scenes" as metaphoric representations of the arrival of an insight. After all, that is the way the preliterate mind operated, it expressed ( and interpreted) events in terms of metaphors.

If you are not aware of the difference between preliterate consciousness ( which was imitative/metaphoric) and modern consciousness ( which is explaining, factual) I suggest you read Julian Jaynes' The Origin of human consciousness in the Bi-Cameral mind. Or my own ALICE HICKEY: Between Worlds.

Once you are familiar with how the preliterate mind worked, you'll begin to see that all the art ( carvings, oral myths) left us are metaphoric in nature and not statements of fact as so many alternative thinkers take them to be. It is a big, big mistake to see them as statements of facts.

All that aside, there is still the alternative position that the great prehistoric stone monuments could not have possibly been built by Stone Age humans.

This position is widely held by many alternative thinkers. Yet they are completely ignorant of the artistic and anthropological evidence of the high native intelligence and construction capabilities of early prehistoric (Stone Age) humans.

I see most of these alternative views as being no more than highly speculative, imaginative exercises made possible by the fact that prehistoric cultures (having no writing) left no evidence as to how and why their great monuments were constructed as well as no written evidence as to how the nature of those cultures and how they evolved.

For example, there exist no such alternative views concerning the construction of the Parthenon (even though less than 2000 years separate it from Stonehenge) for the simple reason that the literate Greeks left voluminous written evidence of the particulars of its construction. Yet it is no less spectacular an achievement than Stonehenge.

Here are the details behind my responses:

The most significant Alternative World Views to have emerged over the past 50 years are these two:

(1) UFOs and

(2) Alien Visitations / Abductions.

Although scientists have for the most part dismissed UFOs and Alien Visitations / Abductions as nonsense, these alternative views continue to thrive and are wide ranging.

Right now, I want to take up a special part of those wide-ranging views, one which posits: extra-terrestrial beings (Aliens) transported themselves to earth via UFOs in prehistoric times in order assist the human race in their development as well as in the creation of their early cultures and the large stone monuments symbolizing those cultures.

I’ll call this special part of the existing alternative theories: Early Alien Visitations

The central position of Early Alien Visitations is that Aliens are superior beings from some unknown part of the universe who came to earth long ago to assist us and who have continued to visit in order to further instruct us and evaluate our progress.

Early Alien Visitations is based on several assumptions, which never seem to be questioned. I am going to state those assumptions now.

Here are the assumptions:

Assumption 1. That all of the preliterate stone carvings, cave drawings and oral myths that came into existence hundreds if not thousands of years before we learned to read and write (3300-1000 B.C. depending on the culture) have been seriously misinterpreted by our literate western scientific culture.

These misinterpretations are due to the fact that we failed to see that the many recorded appearances of various Gods in preliterate times were, in reality, recordings of physical visits by advanced beings from some other (or alternative ) part of the universe. Instead, we mistakenly saw them as spiritual (psychic) visitations.

Assumption 2. That preliterate humans and very early literate humans (Egyptians, Sumerians circa 3300 B.C.- 2500 B.C.) didn’t possess the skills necessary to design, engineer and build their monumental sculptures and structures, e.g., pyramids in early literate Egypt ( 2500 B.C) and monumental stone sculptures e.g., Stonehenge ( built in stages from 2950-1600 B.C.) in preliterate Bronze Age Britain.

Assumption 3: That there is no other universe (e.g., a spiritual or psychic universe) than the physical universe, a view it holds in common with our modern scientific view of the universe.

Let’s take each of those assumptions and see if they have any weaknesses.

The easiest one to test is Assumption 2 (lack of skills). There is no hard scientific evidence this is so. It is merely hearsay by alternative thinkers who almost to a man seem to have no scientific or anthropological knowledge of the native intelligence of preliterate humans. Nor do they seem to have have any practical heavy-stone construction and engineering knowledge worth mentioning.

I'm sorry to say this, but most of them are basically well-meaning couch potatoes who have fabricated a rather sloppy position which holds that humans living in preliterate and early literate cultures lacked the intelligence, organization and problem-solving ability necessary to design and construct large stone structures.

First of all, the hard scientific evidence to date is that early humans were every bit as smart as we are, and that this intelligence was evident from the time some part of the human species homo sapiens left Africa 40, 000 years ago. This position is based primarily on the skull cavities of these humans having a size similar to our own, indicating equal brain size, and also, but to a lesser degree, on the quality of art they produced.

Here is the crux of my position: there are only 1400 years, an extremely small span of time, between the literate Greek homo sapiens who constructed the Parthenon (circa 430 B.C.) and the preliterate Britons homo sapiens who constructed the final monumental stones (sarsens and lintels) of Stonehenge (circa 1800 B.C.) .

Assuming there was a uniform distribution of native intelligence (logical ability, memory, problem solving) across the entire range of homo sapiens in Europe (since there is no anthropological evidence to the contrary) our preliterate Stonehenge Britons would be every bit as natively intelligent as the Parthenon Greeks.

Nor is it possible to posit that the Greeks went through a selective and extremely rapid evolutionary change (increase) in native intelligence over that 1400 year period and thereby jumped ahead of the Stonehenge Britons, since no evidence exists that such a gigantic evolutionary step did take place, but more importantly, that it could have taken place in such a short period of time..

Just so you’ll have a time scale for the important periods: Stone Age begins: 40,000B.C. / Bronze Age begins: circa 3000 B.C / Iron Age takes over circa1300 B.C.

Literacy generally began around 1200 B.C. for most cultures ( give or take several hundred years) with much earlier dates of 3300 B.C for the Egyptians and Sumerians.

Since no one has been foolish enough to suggest that the huge granite and marble Parthenon was engineered by aliens, it seems obvious that it is equally foolish to suggest that Stonehenge was engineered by Aliens, since both groups of homo sapiens were equal in native intelligence.

Everything follows from that, i.e., the problem-solving ability of both groups would also have been equal and both would have found solutions to carving and transporting large stones, lifting them, putting them in place.

Let me put it to you this way, if you dropped the Aristotle of 300 B.C. Greece into the plains of 1800 B.C. Stonehenge and pitted him against one of the builders of Stonehenge in a contest of stone construction problem-solving using only the tools available in 1800 B.C. Britain, it would be a draw, or possibly Aristotle might lose, being a philosopher with little practical construction experience.

Thus while their native intelligence would be the same, and therefore their problem-solving ability the same, we do have to consider that there are some important cultural differences that account for the finished beauty of the Parthenon and the rough aesthetic of Stonehenge.

Part of the difference is that the Parthenon Greeks of 430B.C. had been literate for 500 years ( since 900 B.C.) while the Stonehenge Britons of 1800 B.C. would have to wait another 2000 years so for the Romans to bring them a written language ( Latin) from which they could eventually fashion their own ( French, German, English).

This means is that there are written records of the actual construction of the Greek Parthenon that simply make it impossible for alternative thinkers to attribute extraterrestrial assistance in the construction of the Parthenon.

This holds for any literate culture. Egypt developed early writing around 3500 B.C.and had 1000 years of literacy behind them by the time the pyramids were built. Why alternative thinkers keep attributing extraterrestrial assistance to the construction of the pyramids when voluminous written and hieroglyphic records exist concerning their construction is simply beyond me.

However, since there were no written records in preliterate cultures, such as Stone Age Britain, alternative thinkers are free to make it up in any way they please for edifices such as Stonehenge.

But a written language per se, is not really the point. The point is that concurrent with the advent of writing, there came the ability to accurately record thoughts and events of all kinds, and out of that grew not only a huge amount of reference material, but more importantly, a consciousness that eventually wanted to examine and report on everything, which in turn gave birth to mathematics, history, science, medicine etc.

Out of that, of course, eventually came a sense of art and architecture that could be passed down in great detail to future generations and in turn modified generation after generation, so that by 430 B.C, an extremely detailed tradition would exist, such as we see evidenced in the design of the Parthenon.

The native intelligence of the Greeks didn’t increase or change; what changed was the way the Greeks looked at the world because of literacy, i.e., they began to examine it and record everything around them.This logical, examining way of knowing the Greeks termed logos.

Needless to say, the knowledge that came with literacy grew slowly at first then like a chain reaction until it was encyclopedic by 430 B.C. (500 years after the advent of Greek literacy.)

A good metaphor would be that writing allowed the Greeks to fly up over the Greek world and observe it at long range.

The Stonehenge Britons however, had no way of doing this, of accumulating factual knowledge in great detail.

They only had their oral story poems, which were very poor vehicles for recording facts, but excellent vehicles for imitating and expressing the mysteries of life and death.The Greeks called this preliterate way of knowing Muthos.

For our Stonehenge Britons, Muthos immersed them in their all-consuming, spiritual preliterate culture. You might say they couldn’t see the forest for the trees

But here’s the important point: they didn’t want to see the forest for the trees because they didn’t really care about accumulating factual, physical knowledge. Preliterate consciousness was more concerned with artistically imitating and expressing the mysteries of human existence.

I’ll say more about this critical difference later, because unless you understand the preliterate mind, you’re going to misunderstand the meanings of all their all mythic story poems, which is exactly what has happened with many of our alternative thinkers.

We shouldn’t let this preliterate disinterest in explaining things convince us for one moment that these preliterate humans weren’t as natively intelligent as we are. Rather, their intelligence was intensely focused on spiritual matters, and the artistic imitations of those concepts.

We’ll see shortly that their artistic achievements were so accomplished as to leave no doubt as to their native intelligence being equal to that of the a Parthenon Greeks..

But to get back to the point at hand: Greek literacy resulted in a highly developed Greek sense of architecture, which is a partial way of explaining the architectural differences between the Parthenon and Stonehenge.

But the other thing that made the real difference between the Parthenon and Stonehenge were the tools each culture had to work with.

We shouldn’t be fooled by the crude stone sculptures and rock carvings done by Stone Age humans. They had neither bronze nor iron tools to work with—only other stones. You try it sometime.

The surviving Stone Age dolmens, stone structures, and rock carvings are really the only art form that could have been created with stone tools and the only ones that could have survived over the millennia.

Finally let me say this because it’s the elephant in the room: the Stonehenge Britons probably didn’t care about “finishing” their stones as the Parthenon Greeks did.

What was really important to the preliterate Stonehenge Britons were the spiritual implications of these stones, as stones.

It should be obvious to anyone by this time that outside of the stone burial structures built by many of these cultures, stones—as stones—were also used in a spiritual, even a healing way, by prehistoric cultures.

For example, there is increasing archeological evidence that the smaller, more numerous bluestones inside the larger sarsens at Stonehenge were used as part of a healing process. Why we don’t know, but it seems now that they were.

This may seem like so much nonsense to us now, because we’d rather think of Stonehenge and all the rest of the prehistoric stone monuments as astronomical calendars, but that is our modern scientific prejudice.

Undoubtedly they were sometimes used as directional (equinox) pointers to the Sun, but we have to remember that those planting and harvesting directions were also highly spiritual. God = Sun, remember?

As for dolmens, the long rows and arrangements of stones, it’s obvious they had a spiritual, perhaps a healing purpose. We don’t really know why they saw stones in such a way, or why they arranged them in the way they did, or exactly how they were used, but it’s obvious these stones had to have served a special purpose. It was very hard work moving and lifting them, right? It wasn’t a whim.

And please, let’s forget all this nonsense about them being pointers that interstellar UFOs relied on for getting from A to B on the earth. If they could find there way here and back from Alpha Centauri they could surely find their way around prehistoric France. They didn’t need rows of stone dolmens to guide them.

For prehistoric cultures, everything was spiritual.

It’s the key to understanding them.

I think this little side trip into the preliterate view of stones helps partially explain why Stonehenge doesn’t look as “finished” as the polished Parthenon.

What is critical is that both cultures had the same native intelligence when it came to solving the intricacies of quarrying, transporting, carving, lifting and moving very large stones. Period.

What we really want to focus on, however, is the construction advantage the Greeks had. The Greeks of 400 B.C. had iron tools to shape the hard granite and marble of the Parthenon. They also had simple pulleys and the wheel, both of which seem to have been not available to the Stonehenge Britons. See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/stonehenge-questions.html,)

The 1800 B.C. Stonehenge Britons, however, had only stone tools with which to carve out and shape the hard granite blocks of Stonehenge (it seems no bronze tools were used at Stonehenge, despite the introduction of bronze in Britain circa 2100 B.C.). See http://books.google.com/books?id=5khnAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA471&lpg=PA471&dq=stonehenge++bronze+tools&source=bl&ots=CCwGji3GT3&sig=0MnPQCsoi7f9x9_P5dEwavyzFrc&hl=en&ei=bxqsTpyGKab0sQLWqKCeDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=stonehenge%20%20bronze%20tools&f=false

All this gave the Parthenon builders a tremendous advantage in speed of construction and stone finishing. But that’s it: a speed advantage. Not construction savvy.

It just takes a lot of guys if you don’t have iron tools and pulleys and wheels and the like, but it can be done with earth moving and levers and endless pounding..

(See: http://jonathanturley.org/2009/12/05/the-man-who-moves-blocks-stonehenge-mystery-unraveled-by-guy-named-wally-in-flint/ )

You don’t need beam-lifting spaceships for Stonehenge anymore than you need them for the Parthenon. And that goes for all the preliterate monumental stone structures both in the old and new world.

But if we just had these rough Stone Age structures and carvings as evidence of a Stone Age native intelligence equal to that of the Parthenon Greeks, we’d be in a bit of trouble.

This where the mind-bending art of some Stone Age cultures comes in. There isn't any doubt in anybody's mind today that high aesthetic capability is a certain indicator of high native intelligence.

Fortunately, despite the ravages of time, certain non-stone art forms have been miraculously preserved (such as the cave drawings in Altamira and other European caves which date to some 18,000 to 35,000 years ago—Stone Age Europe.)

We have the cave drawings at Altamira today only because the caves were sealed by a rock slide around 13,000 B.C., thereby preserving them.

Any other visual art forms, however, that would have been created by Stone Age humans: paintings on wood or fabric, wood carvings, clay sculptures, etc., would have long ago been dissolved by time.

However, a few very early fired-clay sculptures have miraculously survived, such as the Venus of Willendorf, an 11 cm (4.3 in) female figure estimated to have been made between 24,000 and 22,000 B.C.

If you don’t think this statue is as sophisticated and mysterious as anything made by Brancusi or Picasso, you just have to read the squabbling interpretations of anthropologists and archeologists to show you how mysterious it really is. They don’t have a clue.

It’s only when you look at the statue as a metaphor for the Mother Goddess aka The First Mother (which is how the prehistoric humans would have looked at it) that the statue explains itself.

The statue is not a representation of female fertility per se either, because a woman that fat ( if at all possible in an always-hungry, hunter-gatherer world) would not only be undesirable but would also be pretty much incapable of copulation.

And if she ever did manage get it on, she’d probably have died in childbirth. Ask any obstetrician.

It had to have been a metaphor for something else, namely a metaphor for the Mother Goddess/ Mother of all Humans.

The large fat breasts and belly and arms and thighs can only be human versions of the incredibly enlarged, gorged size of the queen bee, something that preliterate humans knew well and must have wondered at.

And honored: One out of Many: which is exactly how the Mother Goddess/ Mother of all Humans /First Mother was seen.

The fact that you can’t see her face is also spiritual. Ask the ancient Hebrews about that.

For early Hebrews, God's name couldn't be spoken, meaning God is beyond comprehension, which is another way of saying: God's face shouldn’t/couldn’t be seen.

Look away, Moses! Remember how Moses was warned about not trying to look at God’s face? The same thing is being represented by this faceless female.

If we only had the caves at Altamira and this so called Venus as evidence of the high artistic vision of these prehistoric cultures, it’s enough to suggest that Stone Age man was artistically as sophisticated as the Greeks of 400 B.C., maybe even ahead of the Greeks in terms of their impressionistic qualities. It’s far more modern than what the Greeks were doing, as beautiful as that was. Think about it.

I rest my case.

Summary of responses to assumptions 1 and 3

Assumptions 1 and 3 are really different faces of the same coin. Let me repeat them:

Assumption 1. Many of the preliterate stone carvings, cave drawings and oral myths that came into existence hundreds if not thousands of years before we learned to read and write (3300-1000 B.C., depending on the culture) have been seriously misinterpreted by our literate western scientific culture in that we failed to see that the many recorded appearances of various Gods in preliterate times were, in reality, recordings of physical visits by advanced beings from some other (or alternative ) part of the universe. Instead, we mistakenly saw them as spiritual (psychic) visitations.

Assumption 3: That there is no other universe (e.g., a spiritual or psychic universe) than the physical universe, a view it holds in common with our modern scientific view of the universe.

Response to Assumption 1.

Of the numerous of cave drawings, clay sculptures, and rock carvings that have come down to us, there are a handful that portray a kneeling/standing human receiving something or looking up at, or praying to, a larger standing figure (Alien/God?). There are also a few portraying a figure (Alien/God?) in some kind of vehicle, or fire, or clouds, descending from, or ascending to, the sky.

These are the only ones that could realistically be interpreted as portraying an Alien being, but then again they could just as easily be portrayed as they have been for millennia: as spiritual/psychic visions of the Gods.

The great oral myths (Book of Moses, Odyssey, Iliad, Gilgamesh) that eventually were transcribed into writing also contain verbal descriptions of similar events (God giving Ten Commandments to Moses, Athena advising Odysseus). Again, we can choose to see them as physical visitations by Aliens or in the manner they have been portrayed for millennia: as spiritual/psychic visions of the Gods.

Take your pick. Which one you choose (Aliens or Gods) should be on the basis of which presents the stronger evidence. I’ll say more about this in my detailed responses.

The thousands of remaining rock carvings, cave paintings, clay sculptures, and oral myths are clearly portrayals of animals or hunting or important events (wars, floods) or dream/psychic images, something our scientific mindset has a hard time handling, but I can assure you that preliterate peoples didn’t, as their mindset was somewhere between the consciousness we enjoy today and an intuitive consciousness that was highly psychic and very at home with the dream state. See SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul, Chapter pg 222.

The oral myths, taken as a whole, are stories about cultural truths/themes, and not about God/Alien visitations per se. The correct way to look at them is to see the “visitations’, whatever they represent, as narrative elements that drive the much larger cultural truths and themes of the stories.

Response to Assumption 3.

Assumption 3: That there is no other universe (e.g., a spiritual or psychic universe) than the physical universe, a view it holds in common with our modern scientific view of the universe.

Unfortunately, most alternative theorists are as tightly wound into the western scientific view of reality as is the scientific establishment. Thus the only way they can explain the alien phenomena is to immediately assume that aliens are a physical reality.

Despite Harvard psychiatrist John Mack’s substantial findings to the contrary, namely that these visitations are psychic phenomena not physical phenomena, most alternative theorists continue to cling to the belief that the aliens are physical beings.

This does not mean that alien visitations are hallucinations, or the imaginings of idle minds. They are not unreal, but very real. But they are not physical.

Mack makes the point that psychic events have no place in western thought, so they are immediately considered unreal (hallucinations), whereas in eastern thought, such visitations are seen as real as the clothes you are wearing.

What puzzles me is how ignorant most alternative thinkers are about the reality of psychic events. I include in this, by the way, all those who have reported being visited and/or abducted by aliens.

It is one indication how dominant western scientific thought has become, i.e., it has sifted down to the everyday level of thinking about the world.

Yet for someone who is familiar with psychic events and their characteristics, as well as how real they can seem, it is obvious that those who have experienced such visitations are so oblivious to the clues imbedded in that reality that they never even consider that the visitation, as real as it seems, might not be the same kind of “real” as the clothes they are wearing.

What exactly are those clues that signal it is a psychic reality?

There are several:

The appearance of the aliens (large eyes, no mouth, telepathic speech and understanding) is not a Hollywood fabrication unconsciously imitated by those who have been visited. It is a primal unconscious projection of “those who know, who see all” with roots back into prehistory.

Julian Jaynes points out that in many middle eastern preliterate communities, small figurines with very large eyes were in every home and were obviously used to trigger the internal voices that preliterate humans relied on for guidance.

If someone were to object to Jaynes’ insight by saying that the figurines were representations of physical beings, i.e., physical Aliens, they would also have to explain the reason for their existence in so many homes and why they were generally placed above the buried bones of the ancestors of the person whose home it was.

Clearly preliterate man saw the source of his voices as being that of his ancestors and the Gods who created those ancestors. It was one long chain. Jung would call it the collective unconscious, but it was an unconscious much more available to the mind of preliterate man than it is to ours, where it surfaces primarily in dreams.

The other clue is that the aliens are never able to completely explain a final ultimate view of the universe and the role they play in it. There are numerous situations where those who have been abducted have been led to a “book of knowledge” that explains everything only to find it unreadable. This is a common occurrence in psychic visitations.

Another clue is that despite the “reality” of the aliens (and the space ships that abductees are brought to) there is always an intense emotional sense of something “special” about the scene that is not present in ordinary reality. This intensity is always present in psychic visions.

Another clue is that the visitations don’t generally occur as they do in the Hollywood version of such encounters where it is usually envisioned as an encounter between groups, e.g., the army and aliens, scientist and aliens, government officials and aliens. Rather they almost always occur as an individual encountering an alien or a group of aliens, which is how psychic visitations generally occur and indeed as they have been recorded in the spiritual man/God encounters that have come down to us from preliterate times.

Another clue is the telepathic communications used by the aliens. This non-verbal communication is a standard component of psychic visions and goes back millennia. Let me put it to you this way: the Gods have always spoken in the language of the person being visited. There is never any confusion as to what they were saying. And vice versa.

If aliens were physical beings, technologically advanced physical beings, you might just as well expect them to speak and hear through an electronic translator, such as we have today on our PCs.

Other clues are the time and shape changes that are always reported. This is normal in a psychic visitation.

And then there is this: after 50 years of intense scrutiny, no hard proof in the way of physical remains of Aliens or their craft have ever been obtained for scientific scrutiny. None. Oh, there are plenty of frauds, but frauds don’t count.

I could name more clues but let me say something about the reality of such visitations. They can be blindingly real. Abductees have reported that their alien visitations were as real as everyday life right down to the last nail in the floor (let’s put aside for a minute the “clues” I’ve mentioned that indicate that it was a psychic reality).

I have no doubt that a spellbinding reality can be fabricated by the unconscious and projected into consciousness. The human mind can create a reality so real as to completely fool us.

I have had several experiences where I woke up at night and walked about my room opening and closing doors, hearing intruders, etc., only to find that I was not really awake because I suddenly woke up ( this time for real) and found myself still in bed, or in another completely different room of the house, stunned at how I had been completely fooled by the reality of the fabricated “waking” experience.

I think I’ve said enough about the psychic nature of Alien visitations and abductions as well as their overwhelming “reality”. The fact of the matter is we are being visited, but it is not by physical beings.

The real question is: what or who is visiting us and why? This is especially relevant because modern western people have become, as a rule, strangers to their unconscious as compared to preliterate man, who seemed to have slipped between the conscious and unconscious realm quite easily.

To me this implies a tremendous force from the collective unconscious that is breaking into our consciousness, although there is some indication that many of the people who are visited by aliens are not as “ thick” as we might think, i.e., they seem, on closer inspection, to have the ability to surrender somewhat easily to their unconscious.

If we push aside the question of UFOs for a moment, as they are really a separate issue despite their frequent association with Alien visitations, and just concentrate on the Aliens being psychic visitations, we still have to answer the following:

1. How have these psychic visitations managed to break into a modern consciousness which is so locked into the physical world.

2. Why now, at this point in time?

3. To what purpose?

I have no definitive answer to these questions, but can suggest what may be happening.

First let me tell you a story. I have an acquaintance who may be the most literal, unintuitive person I have ever met. We meet annually when he comes to Florida and he always looks me up. He is quite bright and capable of expressing himself lucidly, but he tells me the physical world is the only world he has ever experienced. He has never had a vision or heard voices and never dreams, but we know that to be scientifically impossible. The truth is that he never recalls his dreams, i.e., his consciousness must block out the memories of his dreams.

Yet he is not closed minded. He frequently asks me questions about my intuitive/psychic experiences, and I often have the impression I am a New Guinea native being gently questioned by an anthropologist who doesn’t have a clue.

Yet as extreme as his case may be, I would say it’s quite representative of at least half of the American population.

Here’s where I’m going. One year, I would say 6 or 7 years after we first met, he said he wanted to tell me something because he thought I’d understand.

He went on to tell me about a trip he took to Paris many years before with several friends. One afternoon he decided to go to a location where a beautiful small medieval church once stood that he had a hunger to see. He knew it had been replaced long ago by an apartment house, but he just wanted to visit the locale. His companions weren’t interested, so he decided to go alone.

When he got to the area and turned the corner, right in front of him was the medieval church. He opened the door and the church was ablaze with candles. He raced back to his companions and dragged them to the church.

But the church wasn’t there, only the apartment house. He looked at me for some kind of explanation as to what had happened and I told him he had a vision. But it wasn’t a vision, he said, it was real. I told him visions were real, but they were a psychic reality constructed by his unconscious that for all intents and purposes can seem as real as his shoes.

He asked me why it had happened, why then? I told him my best guess is that his unconscious wanted to wake him up to the mystery of human existence and must have taken advantage of the slight chink in his conscious armor caused by his hunger to visit the site and managed to break through.

Now here’s the real point. When I brought this up several years later he had no recollection of this ever happening.

His conscious armor had repaired itself by forgetting an experience that threatened to topple his entire world view if he had fully admitted it into his conscious mind.

That is the situation with most of us today.

I think what is happening is that a new form of consciousness is evolving, one that is more intuitive, not more logical. It is a re-balancing, because our older consciousness has become unbalanced in its internal insistence of logic over intuition, self over soul, reason over feeling.

Every 2300 years or so, a new form of consciousness seems to arrive. You should read Jung on this. We are in the first stages of The Age of Aquarius, which is the name of the current 2300 year cycle.

There is no way to scientifically explain what is happening, but I believe the energy that is allowing these extraordinary psychic “Alien” appearances to burst into our consciousness is coming from that transition

And I also believe that despite the thick, modern consciousness of most of those who have been visited or abducted, there also exists somewhere within them the kind of hunger my friend was feeling. Maybe it’s not a hunger for the beautiful church, but a hunger for a richer, more meaningful world. After all, I can’t imagine a more sterile world than current American culture.

There has to exist a chink in the armor for the psychic projection to break through, but once the opening occurs, it comes through like a thunderbolt.

That is what I think is happening and why at this time. It’s going to grow like a snowball racing down a hill. There will be even more and more Alien visitations over hundreds of years and simultaneously, bit by bit, children will appear who are not smarter ( which is what is happening today as we are about to crash and burn) but more intuitive, wiser.

The so-called Indigo Children may be a harbinger of this, but they are only the beginning.

Anyway, what remains to be answered is: what are the Aliens trying to tell us? Or to put it more succinctly, what is our collective unconscious trying to tell us?

MORE TO COME.

THIS PAGE IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION

ATLANTIS: WHAT WAS PLATO REALLY UP TO?

2011-06-03T05:03:00.000-07:00

Atlantis: Fact or Fiction

Summary:

Atlantis

All the evidence points towards Atlantis being a work of fiction created to make a moral point. The fact that some aspects of the story roughly reflect events or historical facts that we can be reasonably sure existed 10,000 years ago is only evidence that Plato, like any good story teller, incorporated raisins of preliterate lore into his confection.

To a storyteller like myself, Plato’s Atlantis reeks of fiction, and very good fiction at that.

Added to this is the fact that most of Plato’s philosophical works were cast as stories e.g., the Socratic Dialogues, as opposed to the more modern recitation of facts used by Aristotle, his contemporary.

Plato was essentially a philosopher who expressed his ideas through stories, and was very skilled at it. If we don’t understand this, we miss the boat.

OK here's the detail.

The first thing you have to understand in determining if Atlantis is fact or fiction is this—Plato was not only a great philosopher, he was also a great storyteller.

Storytellers do more than recite facts: they are intent on creating small worlds that will entertain us, instruct us, mystify us, even deceive us in order to get at the root of a complex truth.

Alice Hickey, has a great deal to say about this storytelling aspect of Plato, whose Socratic Dialogues were stories designed not so much to reveal the character of Socrates—but the nature of truth, something much more illusive than the gadfly character of the real Socrates.

Although many consider Plato’s Republic to be a philosophical treatise on how to best organize a polis, some others—including myself—believe it to be a satire about the idiocy of trying to make the real world conform to philosophical theories.

Plato was much too intelligent to have actually believed someone (the so-called Philosopher King) could actually determine which roles people should play in a society, and then take those selected people and construct a perfect society from the ground up.

Of course, Plato could have been an artistic fool who had no idea how the real world operated, but all we know about him argues against that.

What makes the satire even more complete is that Plato was actually given a chance to do that by one of the Greek kings and failed miserably. Perhaps he had a bit of street theater in him as well.

Plato’s artistic bent made him radically different from his pupil Aristotle, who could be said to represent our current logical, observational approach to knowledge. Plato was much more complex.

This is not to say that Plato didn’t observe nature, and wasn’t logical, but he was also skilled in using storytelling to arrive at a truth in a much different way.

We also have to keep in mind that Plato was never concerned with historical oddities (like Atlantis) for their own sake. We see none of that type of curiosity in his other writings.

He was, however, intensely concerned with the the nature of reality, and on the political side, the declining moral fiber of Athens. I don’t know of any scholar who would dispute that Plato’s Atlantis story (of a once powerful country destroyed by the Gods because of corruption) wasn’t aimed directly at the declining character of the Athenians.

So we know what Plato was up to. He was constructing a story to illustrate a point: Athens couldn’t continue behaving in such an immoral way.

The only question that remains to be answered is this: is the story he wrote one of fact, or did Plato make it up out of the bits and pieces of catastrophe stories that had been undoubtedly passed down orally from preliterate times.

(The destruction and flooding of Mycenaean Crete by the monstrous 1500 B.C. Santorini explosion would be a good example of such an oral tale).

My take is that it was the latter. After all, as Alice Hickey points out, that is exactly what any good storyteller would do. I highly suggest you read Alice Hickey on this aspect of Plato. It will open your eyes and perhaps help you look at his story of Atlantis in a much more complex way.

It is clear from the various modern books on Atlantis that continue to come on the market 2400 years after Plato’s death that—unless mainstream science has completely missed the boat—Atlantis is not going to be found in the size and location indicated by the translations that have come down to us.

Sorry, but science is very good on matters like this. There is no evidence at all that a great landmass (equal in size to the United States) was once located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Andrew Collins has great deal to say about this in his book Gateway to Atlantis.

His research and arguments are convincing enough to make me believe that source of the catastrophe recounted by Plato is in actuality a very distant (9500 B.C.) meteoric event in the with worldwide impact, but most especially in the Caribbean.

It is the oral memory of that immense catastrophe that was heard by early trans-Atlantic sailors who then brought it back to the Mediterranean, where it began to grow its own tale so to speak— because there is absolutely no evidence that an advanced civilization like Atlantis existed in the Caribbean around 9500 B C., at best only Stone Age tribal cultures with a natural interest in the stars.

Exactly when that catastrophe story first landed in the Mediterranean is hard to say, but we know from the recent testing of the mummies of Pharaohs for traces of cocaine that cocaine trading between the Americas and Egypt was occurring at least by 2500B.C.—so that is a good date to start with.

It may have been occurring prior to that, but we have no mummies to test. That leaves 7000 years between the Caribbean event and its being recorded in hieroglyphics by the Egyptians around 2500 B.C. in the supposed detail Plato gives us.

That is an excruciatingly long time for an oral catastrophe story to be passed on unchanged by members of various Caribbean oral cultures to various merchant sailing cultures (Myceanean, Egyptian, Phoenician) before it finally achieves written form in Egypt around 2500 B.C.—which is about the time hieroglyphics were well established in Pre-Dynastic Egypt. (The Phoenician alphabet didn’t come into being until around 1000B.C.)

I suggest you read Part V of my book SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul on the nature and accuracy of oral transmission in preliterate cultures to see the ways in which stories were distorted and enlarged before you assume they could be handed down verbatim over a 7000 year period.

It just doesn’t happen. The Caribbean catastrophe story undoubtedly grew its own tale long before Plato got hold of it and added his own little literary fillips. Believe me, it never stops. So here is the situation: a highly modified 7000 year old oral tale lands in the Mediterranean where it began growing more tales and then, 2200 years later it winds up in the hands of Plato, the storyteller (300 B.C.).

As there are no existing Egyptian records of Atlantis and no other accounts of Atlantis that we know of by any other person in any other culture, the jury is out as to whether all the feathers on the bare bird called Atlantis came from Plato's supposed Egyptian source, or if most of the feathers came from remnants of oral catastrophe/flood stories that drifted around the Mediterranean as sailor's lore, with the remaining bright plumes being products of Plato's imagination.

My best guess is the latter case. I believe the Egyptian “connection” was to a large degree made up, not only for the insightful artistic reasons that Alice Hickey gives but also because keeping records of faraway oddities was not an Egyptian (2500 B.C.) concern..

After all, why would the Egyptians, who were a highly spiritual, soul-obsessed culture, have bothered to collect and maintain such a detailed story?

They weren’t really interested in anything outside of the spiritual realm called Egypt. (The exception being the recording of attacks by Hittites and the like; but those stories didn’t start until around 2200B.C.)

It is far more likely that such a detailed description of Atlantis would have been maintained in some form by those Mediterranean cultures (Egyptian,Mycenaean, Phoenecian) who were engaged in transatlantic/Mediterranean trading and whose sailors were, by nature, curious about everything.

(The exception to this curiosity may have been be the Phoenicians, who, it seems, had no interest in other cultures, only trading. They would leave their goods on the shore and then come back in several days to pick up what was offered in return.

But this may not have been the case in the Caribbean, where it is clear that the trading was long term and highly sophisticated (cocaine and cotton being the desired raw materials). Relationships with the Mexican/Peruvian sources were surely developed to insure delivery and quality.

As all sailors are by nature tale spinners, all Plato would have had to do was to go down to the docks of Piraeus and keep his ears open. So there was surely a rich source of raw catastrophe material.

A second, related question that begs to be answered is this: if Plato's Atlantis was created out of bits and pieces of existing catastrophe stories, is it geologically possible that such an island (as described by Plato) could have ever existed anywhere or is its basic geological description merely one of the bright plumes added by Plato.

Outside of the size and impossible mid-Atlantic location—which Andrew Collins shows may have been due to a translation error that may have gone unnoticed for centuries, Plato's Atlantis has many geological oddities.

One of the surface geological features that makes us suspect Plato made up the basic geological description of Atlantis is his report that there were very large preexisting circular canals embedded in natural rock formations prior to the founding of Atlantis. Plato says these were the work of the Gods.

Digging canals is one thing, finding pre-existing canals is another. For the resolution of this conundrum and several others (such as the extraordinary canal depths and widths) I suggest you read the amazing research of Ulf Richter.

Richter took Plato’s description apart piece by piece, compared it to known rock and island formations, as well as what we know about existing ancient docks/canals, and comes up with the conclusion that Plato’s description makes sense if we also conclude that Plato got the unit of measurement wrong.

It is the best piece of research I have ever seen. I suggest you study it.

It may be that Plato was aware of such ringed rock formations as those in North African Mauretania that Richter cites. Perhaps Plato used those stories to construct his preexisting Atlantis canal rings.

It seems equally likely that such mysterious stone formations were known to others besides Plato, and that Plato stitched a similar formation into his tale to show how the Gods favored the early Atlanteans.

Plato implies that this gift from the Gods of three very large stone canals encouraged the residents to rather easily dig (out of dirt) a secondary canal scheme that would lead to the ocean and other locations in Atlantis.

There is nothing that can turn a suspicious reader completely around as to the accuracy and truth of a "tall tale" than a generous and expert sprinkling of known, accepted lore throughout the tale, and I believe this stone canal gambit is an excellent example of Plato's skill with such devices.

Although you may be thinking that Richter was able to identify a geologic site somewhere in the world similar to his final description of Atlantis, he wasn’t able to suggest any known place, sunken or otherwise, that fits.

So all we can again conclude is that Plato was indeed extremely skilled in stitching his geological description of Atlantis together from many sources, evidence of that being Richter's conclusion that Plato's geological description of Atlantis echoes that of other island/seaside/harbor/canal descriptions of preliterate seaports.

So that leaves us with one final question: is it possible that Plato's catastrophic tale (no matter how stitched up it became with bits and pieces of catastrophe lore) is actually based on a huge meteoric catastrophe that occurred in 9500 B.C. and that some of the stitched-in bits describing the destruction of an actual island empire are bits of that catastrophic lore?

The answer is unequivocally NO.

Oh, a huge catastrophe undoubtedly did occur in the Caribbean in 9500 B.C., that's not being questioned.

What is being questioned is this: for such a memory of a meteoric event in 9500 B.C. to have accurately maintained itself orally from 9500 B.C. until the first Mediterranean sailors hit the Caribbean in 2500 B.C. goes against everything we know about the accuracy of oral transmission in preliterate cultures.

This inaccuracy inherent in oral transmission over great lengths of time (especially of dates) illustrates the Achilles heel of all Atlantis theories, namely the huge length of time between the event and Plato.

The date Plato gives of the destruction of Atlantis is approximately 9500 B.C.

That date is so distant from the time in which the earliest writing emerged (2500 B.C./hieroglyphics), that just entertaining the thought that information about the catastrophe could have been accurately maintained for 7000 years boggles the mind of anyone with any knowledge of how preliterate cultures actually maintain and preserve knowledge.

I have no doubt that oral tales would have abounded throughout the Caribbean from 9500 B.C. on, but those tales would have been so mangled by their transmission over that length of time that God knows what would have come through intact except some very basic facts and names (Atlaxxx, fire, destruction, sinking, flood).

Everything else is up for grabs. I say that as someone very familiar with preliterate oral transmission and traditions.

But that is still not the primary problem, which is this: how did any of these preliterate cultures record and keep track of the date of destruction so that they could hand it to the seafaring traders 7000 years later?

Sorry,it doesn't work that way. Preliterate people have a very simple way of describing the distant past. It's called "long, long ago."

Any hard date, like 9500 B C., is a very big stinky herring.

Collins has no real answer for this, because there is none.

As fantastic as it seems, all we can really say is that Plato somehow made the date up (or we have misinterpreted the date that Plato gives) and that it happens to coincide with the date of the Caribbean meteoric catastrophe.

There is no other answer when it comes to the date except to suppose that somehow a literate shadow civilization existed over that 7000 year period and that it maintained the date of the catastrophe ( and details) until it was finally recorded by one of our known the literate civilizations.

I don't think so.

As for the rest of it, the bits and pieces, suffice it to say that Plato made up some of it them (like any good story teller) and the rest he got made up for him over thousands of years by some equally good storytellers

And we should never forget this fact: Plato made two lunges at the Atlantis myth (Timaeus and Critias) and then broke off in the last elaboration and went on to something else.

Anyone who is a novelist or short story writer understands what happened to Plato. He must have simply felt that the elaborate tale, despite his best efforts, wasn't going to be that convincing, especially with the cynical Athenians.

In other words, it wasn't worth finishing. He sent it to the circular file where it was, fortunately or unfortunately, retrieved by his students after his death and given a new life.

We should all be so lucky.

1. WHY I CREATED THIS INVESTIGATIVE BLOG

2011-03-10T21:12:00.001-08:00

Justin Spring with his daughter Margaret, an archeology student. With Margaret is Hamid, our guide in Egypt.

This blog is an investigative commentary on the various alternative world views currently in circulation. While many of these views haven't established a solid foothold in mainstream thinking, I see many of them as corrections to traditional positions that will eventually take root.

Although I appreciate the efforts of others in these areas, I find a great deal of the current thinking shoddy. This is due in part to what I see as a severe lack of knowledge about the nature of preliterate cultures and the various art forms (oral epic poems, rock glyphs, statues, cave paintings etc) upon which many alternative theories are based.

Preliterate cultures were essentially artistic cultures and have to be looked at with an artist's intuitive eye if we are to pry loose the real meaning of the vision-messages left by preliterate man. A logical eye is almost useless, and that, unfortunately, is what is being used by most of our investigators.

This is because their investigations mistakenly assumed that the consciousness of early man was the same as our modern, logical, explaining consciousness.

But the consciousness of early man was not like ours.

We know this now because of the pioneering work of Julian Jaynes.

Preliterate man was just as smart as us, but he was also was a highly psychic creature constantly slipping between the physical world and the psychic world, the world he called the Other World.

He experienced things in that world that he comprehended intuitively, not logically. He communicated those intuitions through his art, a much different art than our modern, consciously contrived art, because his art was completely driven by the unconscious, much as our dreams are driven by the unconscious.

That unique capability shaped his vision-messages.

It makes them almost impossible for modern traditional thinkers to understand, as they automatically assume the only world is the observable, physical world and that it can only be understood through the scientific method that has evolved over the past 400 years. Unfortunately, that same prejudiced assumption also guides much of our alternative thinking.

Unless our alternative thinkers understand this, a begin to see those vision-messages as psychic, unconsciously fashioned entities, our interpretations are going to wind up as flawed as those of our traditional thinkers.

I intend to go into many alternative areas as I can to illustrate the errors that have come about because of our failure to correctly interpret those vision-messages. Hopefully these illustrations will lead to a another way of examining our distant past.

scylla@c

2. MY UNIQUE BACKGROUND

2011-03-10T21:11:00.001-08:00

Much of my thinking is original, but much of it is also built upon the findings of Julian Jaynes and Carl Jung, as well as the thinking of Alice Hickey, an extr-aordinary psychic. She is the subject of a recent book of mine "ALICE HICKEY: Between Worlds."

Here is an interesting exposition of Alice's views as well as short but intimate biography of her life by her son Christopher Hickey.

My background and strength is that of an artist, writer and poet familiar with the psychic, artistic and mental capabilities of preliterate man.

I am also familiar with psychic events. Modern observers are often completely unaware of the existence and power of the
unconscious mind and its ability to create extraordinarily life-like visions we can mistakenly take to be physical events.

This lack of awareness often prevents investigators from understanding what they (or others) have experienced.

My videos and blog entries will try to correct this situation.

One of the rules I will always use is this: What we should be looking for are the most probable conclusions, not just the possible, because almost anything is possible.

To make the most probable conclusions we have to intelligently consider all the possibilities and then conclude which one(s) are the most probable.

Sorry, but that's the way it works.

scylla@c

3. NOAH'S ARK: FACT OR FICTION

2011-03-10T21:09:00.000-08:00

Summary:

If you take the story of Noah as the revealed truth of God, and therefore true in every detail, this is not for you.

If you view it, however, as an oral myth that was eventually incorporated into the Book of Moses, here are the only things you can be sure of: there was a man named Noah* who experienced a psychic vision around 8000 B.C.** telling him that a great flood was about to occur because of God’s wrath. He built a craft to save himself and his family and a few farm animals and survived.

This skinny story about his vision, boat and flood survival became the seed of the enlarged story that made its way over the milennia into the Bible.

The changes in the Bible's version of Noah are due to two factors (1) exaggeration, which is the nature of preliterate oral tales, and ( 2) as a reflection of the Hebrews' religious vision that redemption would follow God’s destruction of them because of their sins. In many senses, the Biblical story of Noah is a new Genesis.

*(The name Noah comes from the verb (nuah 1323) meaning rest, settle down. This was either the man’s name or a name adopted or given to him by others to honor his survival.)

** The entire world experienced massive flooding around 8000 B.C. as a result of a sudden retreat of the Ice Age. This is why there are hundreds of flood stories.

OK, here's the detail :

The Biblical story about Noah's Ark is is an area alternative thinkers are constantly investigating in efforts to find remains of the ark.

Among the questions we have to answer are these: Did Noah exist, did the ark exist as described , and did the Flood take place as depicted?

If we want to understand the sources of the Biblical Noah, and how accurate that story is, we have to first understand that a number of flood/ark stories existed in other cultures. The scholarship is pretty tight on this.

There is also some dating that has been done by scholars which shows some of these flood stories predate that of Noah.

Or to be more specific, the creation dates of the written versions of these stories indicates that creation of one preceded the other, but this is meaningless and has nothing to do with how old each of these myths actually was.
This is because we also know that these stories existed as oral story poems for hundreds if not thousands of years before they were eventually transcribed into writing somewhere around 1200BC, which is the approximate point in time that humans discovered alphabetic writing, although some like the Sumerians and Egyptians had a written language as early as 2500 B.C.

Thus, the oral story poem about Noah was eventually transcribed into writing around 1200 BC, where it existed in "manuscript" form for about 400 years until it was entered into the Bible around 800 B.C., the period when the Book of Moses was formalized out of hundreds of transcribed oral poems.

What few scholars (and alternative thinkers) really understand is the extent to which a preliterate oral story poem can be trusted.

The answer is this: they can be highly accurate on some matters and highly untrustworthy on others.

700 years (by the way) is the time gap between the Trojan war and the time of Homer, who was an oral epic poet.

The Noah gap is even larger, with some biblical scholars giving the date of the Flood as 2300 B.C., about the time when the pyramids were being built in Egypt.

This date is disputed by others, some scientists placing the Flood at 4500 B.C. or 8000 B.C. Nevertheless, even using the 2300 BC .date, this is a huge amount of time ( 2300 B.C. minus 1200 B.C. = 1100 years) for any culture to maintain a detailed, accurate story .

As an example of this, look how little we really know abut the 1200 AD Knights Templar), but it is mind boggling when we think about it being accomplished by a culture in which no written records exist.

Without going into the thinking backing up my statements (which can be investigated in my books listed below) the answer is as follows for the Biblical Noah:

1) Here's the main rule that is never violated: all oral story poems are based on real physical or psychic events.

They were never imaginary fables, which are modern, literate inventions.

An actual massive flood event did take place somewhere in the middle eastern preliterate world. That can be taken as a fact.

Exactly, when and where is problematic, but there are several well-documented scientific theories about the occurrence of great floods in the middle east and I believe more will appear in time as we uncover instances of meteor collisions in the seas in the middle eastern area.

2) A man named Noah (or a name with a similar linguistic root) did exist and he did fashion some kind of craft to save his family, his belongings and some animals. Here is some scholarship on the meaning of Noah.

(The name Noah () comes from the verb (nuah 1323) meaning rest, settle down. HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament reports that this root 'signifies not only absence of movement but being settled in a particular place [] with overtones of finality.)

Here an interesting situation arises. We can assume the Hebrew root "nuah" preceded the date of the flood and

a) the man Noah was given this name at birth in prophetic recognition of the fact he would bring the human race to a "place of final rest".

or

b) the man who built the craft accepted or adopted the name in honor of the fact that he had brought humanity to a "place of final rest".

In other words, he allowed himself to be "reborn and renamed", because "naming" in preliterate cultures was not a casual event. It was considered a sacred, prophetic activity.

You had to be symbolically "reborn" to acquire a new name, which may have been the case with Noah.

In either case, the name Noah would have been rigidly honored after the Flood.

The names of heroes are one of the few things in oral story poems that are always correct, because in oral cultures, honoring a hero meant repeating his name in song correctly and endlessly. Honor, which to us is expendable, was the highest virtue in an oral culture. It would be unthinkable to change the hero's name.

3. The general theme of an oral story poem always reflects the world-vision of that culture.

Like the hero's name, it never changes, nor is it arbitrary because it emerges from the collective unconscious of that culture via the creative act of poetry.

The general theme of the Noah story is not unique. It occurs over and over in many preliterate cultures. In its simplest form it is this: God's destruction of disobedient humans.

But the Noah story is a variation on that general theme. This variation also occurs in many cultures. It is one of divine punishment by Water, which is of immense psychic importance because death by drowning for the Hebrews implies a return to the "darkness of the waters" and thus sets the stage for a new Creation.

It is water's implied ability to create life as well as destroy it that gives the Noah story much of its unconscious power.

Let me put it this way: fire or comets or raging monsters would not have done the trick.

Such powerful story poems emerge when something like a powerful flood occurs at a point in time when the collective unconscious of a culture has been searching for a way to express a yet to be born cultural truth .

It is an automatic, unconscious cultural response, which is the nature of these great preliterate story poems.

This is why the name Noah and the central theme of the Flood are not arbitrary. It is out of the question because both are dictated by the power of the cultural, collective unconscious, which again, is always rooted in an actual psychic or physical event.

4) Here is something else that is never arbitrary : the nature or character of the hero.

Achilles is always courageous, Odysseus is always wily. It is no accident that Noah is depicted as obedient, a drunk , and not a deep thinker, i.e., he is a man driven by his unconscious.

In this, he is a stand-in for God, the ultimate "unconscious" power, in the re-seeding of the earth. There is also an echo of Homer's mysterious , brooding, psychically-rooted "wine-dark sea" in the drunken Noah.

BUT:

5) Everything else in the story is subject to change. Everything.

Oral story poems were never consciously fashioned, as our TV dramas are. They emerged from the unconscious of individual poets in hundreds of songs that ebbed and flowed over hundreds of years. Like dreams they needed no prompting from the conscious mind, because they reflected unconscious cultural truths that needed to be sung of over and over.

So here's the run down on the Biblical Flood:

1) Noah existed and his nature and name as well as the theme of the Flood were orally preserved over hundreds if not thousands of years until they were transcribed into writing.

2) A flood event existed and triggered the initial story poem.

3.)The theme of Noah's Flood was a cultural vision of destruction and redemption that remained intact over hundreds of years until it was transcribed into writing.

4) Here's the kicker: everything else was subject to change, usually through exaggeration. Colors, dimensions, times, minor characters, costume, habits, etc.

Tall tales weren't invented by Paul Bunyan. Thus the dimensions of the craft, the number and type of animals, the family members, the duration of the flood, where it finally grounded, etc., were all subject to exaggeration and change.

It happened organically out of the poet's unconscious. and the collective unconscious of the culture. It's the nature of oral story poems to grow in this manner over hundreds of years.

Don't forget, there are no written records, none. A change that took place in a retelling may not even have been noticed. Or if it was, it was easily accepted because the culture was ready to hear it.

For instance, the 40 day period of the flood before it receded most probably does not reflect any actual duration. If it was a flash flood it may have lasted for a few days or if by glacial melting, a very long time.

Forty days is a highly spiritual number: it signifies the time period most preliterate cultures held as the time between death and the body's decomposition and the soul's departure from the physical world. Most probably the 40 days fit a cultural/spiritual need.

One last note. Whether the Hebrews adopted the Flood story from earlier cultures so as to flesh out their own "punishment /redemption" story poems , or if it originated with the Hebrews out of their own flood experience is anyone's guess.

We have to remember that the Hebrews in their early preliterate stage were wanderers. They were herders and craftsmen. Here is some scholarship on that:

The term Hebrew means "to cross over a boundary". (ISBE, revised, Hebrew) Included in this thought is that a "Hebrew" would be one "who crossed over" or one who went from place to place, a nomad, a wanderer, an alien.

Thus, while the final transcribed versions of the various Flood stories have originating dates as to their written publication, the question as to where the stories originated orally, and when, is essentially unanswerable. Even members of those ancient cultures would have no idea.

An oral world has few artistic boundaries, because oral story poems existed on the wind as poets and listeners came and went across vast areas.

It could be that one of the great flood stories originated with the Hebrews, or it could be they adopted one to fit their own flood story and cultural vision.

The fact of that adoption, however, would soon be forgotten. It would become theirs, because it expressed an unconscious cultural truth that needed expressing.

Outside of the art work and stone structures that have survived, there are no permanent records of what those preliterate cultures were like.

We must never forget that in oral cultures, there is only the foggy past (many moons), the immediate present, and the great oral story poems that came and went on the wind.

Some of those great story poems, however, didn't fade away, but were retold over hundreds and even thousands of years until they were thrown upon the shores of literacy and transcribed into writing.

We must always remember, however, that they were subject to the kind of changes I have been indicating.

Let the buyer beware.

So anyone who is looking for a 500 foot, 3-story boat capable of carrying every animal known to the Hebrews should think twice before setting out on an expedition.

This is why it pays to understand that the so called "document" you're relying on for facts is not a physical description like you'd find in Popular Science, but a (hopefully) somewhat accurately transcribed (and translated) Hebrew metaphor for the Divine destruction and re-creation / redemption of the Hebrews.

In short, it is a work of art. It is as much about the interior world as the exterior world.

An interesting note: this is a replica of the biblical Ark, built by Dutchman Johan Huibers as a testament to his faith in the literal truth of the Bible. Johan got the idea to build the ark after having a dream about the Netherlands being flooded. He plans to set sail and travel to other parts of the country and eventually to major cities in Belgium and Germany.

Don't confuse this remarkable feat, however, with the preliterate myth of Noah. They are two different things, created by different eruptions of the imagination. No one will be reading or thinking about Johan 3000 years from now, in the same way as we have been reading and thinking about Noah for the past 3000 years. Think about it

I welcome your comments on anything in this blog or in my videos .

scylla@c

4. MY VIDEO SERIES ON ALTERNATIVE THINKING

2011-03-10T21:08:00.000-08:00

For those who prefer video to prose, I have created 39 videos on alternative subjects. They will be added to a special YOUTUBE Section as time permits. You can view those already uploaded at:
http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists?p=F8B441C3329F189B

Here are some sample videos:

scylla@c

5.THE SPHINX & GIZA PYRAMIDS: WHEN WERE THEY REALLY CONSTRUCTED AND WHY?

2011-03-10T21:06:00.000-08:00

Summary:

There are two current theories about the Sphinx and The Pyramids at Giza.

1. The establishment view is that they were all created around 2500B.C.

2. There are several alternate views, some of which argue that the pyramids predate 2500 B.C. and/or were not meant as tombs. There is some evidence that both parts of this argument may be true. But that is not the alternative view I want to talk about.

The major alternate view of the pyramids accepts the 2500 B.C. date of pyramid construction. But many of them argue, most especially Bauval and Hancock, that the Giza pyramids have a special function.

They suggest that the pyramids represent the belt stars in the constellation of Orion, and as such, are an attempt to mirror it. The argument also holds that the Sphinx is a much earlier sculpture (by thousands of years) and that it is a lion representing the constellation Leo that points to Orion at a specific time in the past ( 10, 500 B.C.).

My artistic view:

The sphinx’s face: The crude carving of the face of the sphinx is evidence the sphinx was created much earlier than 2500 B.C. or even 3000 B.C. because by that time, Egyptian art had been formalized and codified to insure the exquisite symmetry, beauty and proportions we see in all Egyptian art. It is impossible to believe that the Sphinx was carved at the same time as the beautiful temples and figures created after 3000 B.C. It would not have been permitted.

The length of the Sphinx’s body. The extreme length of the body is due to the fact that its length is that of a cheetah, not a lion. Even the proportion of the head to the body is that of a cheetah. The cheetah, the most beautiful of the Egyptians’ beloved cats, is a more fitting symbol of the intense soul-driven, psychic nature of early Egyptian culture prior to 3000B.C., while a lion is a more fitting symbol of Egypt in its later empire-building, martial stage of development (2500-1500 B.C.).

This cheetah-like length is further evidence that the Sphinx was created very early in the development of Egyptian culture, something echoed by the geological dating by Robert Schock, ageologist who holds that the rain weathering indicates the Sphinx was built around 7000-10,000 B.C.

Galactic Timing. If the sphinx is a cheetah, then it could not represent the constellation Leo ( a la Bauvelt and Hancock) .

Also, the Zodiac (and Leo,one of its 12 constellations) were not created by the Babylonians until around 1000 B.C. Thus the view that the Sphinx is a very early (prior to 2500 B.C.) galactic pointer utilizing Leo and Orion to point precisely to 10, 500 B.C.) fails to hold up because Leo and the Zodiac didn't exist until 1000 B.C.

My own view is that the positioning of the Sphinx ( which points east to the direction of the rising Sun, RA) is not accidental. It may be simply that it points to the rising sun, a sacred direction for all preliterate peoples. Or it may be more complex, perhaps pointing to a galactic event we are unaware of, or it may be to a a different time ( a la Bauvelt and Hancock) since without the Leo connection their timing could vary up or down by multiples of 1600 years.

OK here's the the rough detail first.

There is much alternative thinking devoted to correcting the traditional mainstream position that the age of the the Egyptian Sphinx is approximately 4500 years old, i.e, it was built around 2500BC.

I agree with much of the alternative thinking.

Solid geological evidence of rain water wear indicates it must have been constructed sometime around or before 7,000 BC, when rains were plentiful. This is the kind of scientific evidence that is hard to dispute.

In addition, a theory has been put forth by alternative thinkers Bauval and Hancock that claims the positions of the Nile, the 3 Giza pyramids, and the "lion-maned" Sphinx "mirror" the Spring equinox sunrise position of Orion, the Constellation Leo (the Lion), and the Milky Way as they would have been in 10, 500 B.C.

Here is the Wikipedia summary of that theory:

An argument put forward by Bauval and Hancock to support the Orion Correlation Theory is that the construction of the Great Sphinx was begun in 10,500 BC; that the Sphinx's lion-shape is a definitive reference to the constellation of Leo; and that the layout and orientation of the Sphinx, the Giza pyramid complex and the Nile River is an accurate reflection or “map” of the constellations of Leo, Orion (specifically, Orion’s Belt) and the Milky Way, respectively.^[11]

A date of 10,500 BC is chosen because they maintain this is the only time in the precession of the equinoxes when the astrological age was Leo and when that constellation rose directly east of the Sphinx at the vernal equinox. They also suggest that in this epoch the angles between the three stars of Orion’s Belt and the horizon was an “exact match” to the angles between the three main Giza pyramids. This time period also coincides with the American psychic Edgar Cayce’s “dating” of Atlantis. These and other theories are used to support the overall belief in an advanced and ancient, but now vanished, global progenitor civilization.

As the sun and Orion were key heavenly bodies in Egyptian theology, it is reasonable to argue that the position of the pyramids and a purposefully redirected Nile were used to reflect the heavenly positioning of Orion and the Milky way at a vernal equinox (Sunrise) date, in 10,500 B.C., that date being the traditional date to begin Spring planting.

( I say this even though the Egyptians, in practice, used the height of the Nile for that purpose. The height was a clear indicator that it would soon flood, and that planting should begin. The Equinox time, however, was still an important solar event.)

As for the Sphinx, it's positioning is no accident. It is pointing east, a critical (sun/ RA is born) spiritual position. The eastward-pointing Sphinx may be additionally pointing at some heavenly body or galactic event that was in that position at a specific time in the past, such as the one Bauval and Hancock propose: that the Sphinx gazes toward a critical heavenly event in the year 10,500.

If that is true, then the positioning of the pyramids next to the Sphinx further validates their theory that the Sphinx was a very ancient alignment anchor already in place.

Some scholars, however, have used Bauval and Hancock's critical assumption of a Sphinx/Leo connection to shoot the whole theory down by pointing out that the Leo Constellation would not have been known to the Egyptians, either in 2500 B.C. or 10,500 B.C., because the Zodiac wasn't formulated by the Babylonians until 1000 B.C.

Other scholars further point out that such an alignment in 10, 500 BC would have pointed to to what we know as Virgo, not Leo.

Thus, the association of the constellation Leo with the "lion-like" Sphinx goes up in smoke. But is it the weak link that will bring the entire house down?

Not necessarily. We also have to consider this: despite the 1000 B.C. date given for the Babylonians invention of the Zodiac, it is hard to believe that the Egyptians, who were sophisticated stargazers, did not have some kind of astronomical scheme similar to the Babylonian zodiac much earlier, as even Bronze age (3000 BC) cultures had Zodiac-like versions of the rotating heavens.

I believe this may also be true about the Egyptian Pre-dynastic cultures dating back to 5000 B.C., for the simple reason that it is becoming clear that all preliterate cultures were sophisticated stargazers and sun/moon/star-plotters.

And it is also possible that some proto-Egyptian culture existing around 10,500 B.C. also had possession of that "zodiac" knowledge as well.

Thus, to my mind, these Leo/Virgo/Zodiac objections simply show us that we don't know very much about Egyptian astronomy in any period.

While the association of the Lion-like Sphinx with the Babylonian sign Leo most probably has to be thrown out the window, it is entirely possible that it's positioning reflects the positioning of an "Egyptian zodiac" sign at a specific point in time. I wouldn't be surprised, by the way, if an "Egyptian zodiac" scheme ever is discovered, to find that one of its signs represented the cheetah.

At any rate, it seems very clear that the pyramid/Nile positioning mirrors the Orion/Milky way heavenly positioning and also, quite possibly, that the Sphinx may be pointing not only east, but additionally at Orion in conjunction with some other significant "Egyptian zodiac" sign or heavenly event representing a specific time in the past.

If that latter proposition is true, then the entire Orion, sun, Milky Way positioning of the pyramids is also related to the galactic/time positioning of the Sphinx.

After all, the Giza pyramids could have been constructed elsewhere, and they would have been (as others had been) if the Egyptians hadn't felt that the anciently-aligned Sphinx was an integral part of the positioning equation.

The only question that remains to be answered then is WHAT heavenly event they are pointing and at WHAT point in time?

That is not an easy question to answer, and I won't pretend I have any answers.

I can say however that there is significant Spaniard in the woodpile when it comes to proposing that the Egyptians of 2500 B.C. were in possession of any date/heavenly position data that had been created by the our proposed preliterate Sphinx builders.

If that time/event were in the very distant preliterate past (say 5000B.C. or 10, 500 B.), those cultures would have had no way of transmitting that date/time to the literate Egyptians of 2500 B.C. who were building the pyramids and ( it seems) positioning them in some relationship to the Sphinx.

Preliterate cultures had a sense of time that went one moon, two moons, many moons. Sorry, that's the way it worked. Transmittable time/dates only exist in literate cultures.

Nor would the Egyptians in 2500 B.C. have anyway of computing backwards over vast amounts of time to deduce the heavenly positions of Orion and some conjunction of Orion and some other astral event or body.

Thus the best that could be hoped to have been transmitted by those distant cultures to the literate Egyptians of 2500 B. C. was an oral poem/myth, or perhaps a stone carving, indicating that the Sphinx gazed toward the east, but also at the vernal equinox as well as at a specific astral body/event, say a recognizable star collection/constellation such as Scorpio. But as to what specific historical time this conjunction had occurred would be missing, so our Spaniard is still in the woodpile.

Still such a carving or myth would have been of some help to the Egyptians in 2500 B.C., but they would have been left to their own devices as to what the historical times was. After all, astral bodies all go thru cycles, and picking the cycle depicted is the impossible trick. It is even more difficult for a galactic event ( a nova) since they don't repeat themselves.

Yet we know of no such myth or carving, but that is not to say that one didn't exist. Still for that stone or myth to have survived intact over thousand and thousands of years is highly unlikely. If it had happened, that myth/stone would have been honored in the same way Moses tablets were or the Islamic stone at Mecca, i.e., a serious mention of it should exist somewhere in the hieroglyphs that have survived.

Hancock suggests that a literate shadow culture existed over a 10,000 year period parallel to these distant preliterate cultures and that these distant dates were in its possession, but he deserves a good spanking for that confection.

Thus the best we can propose is that the Sphinx points toward something more specific than merely east, but when that distant event occurred in historical time is up for grabs. Sorry, but that's the way it works.

All I can do is give you my detailed artistic thinking on the Sphinx/Leo/10,500 B.C./ Pyramid / Nile alignment controversy and why I believe it shows that the construction of the Sphinx was earlier than 2500B.C., in fact much earlier.

It is based on two things:

1. THE SHAPE OF THE SPHINX
2. THE ASTRAL POSITIONING ASSUMPTIONS

Let's take THE SHAPE OF THE SPHINX first.

It is clear to any artist that the Sphinx is a mess. The sculptural quality and proportions of the Sphinx ( for a lion) are horrible.

If we concede for a moment that it was a very early sculpture, that would account for it not being on a par with sculptures done after 3300B.C and for sure after 2700 B.C.

But I am going to suggest something else: not only that it is indeed early, and indeed of poor sculptural quality (especially in the face), but that the body proportions are not a mess, as they are not those of a lion but a cheetah, as the proportions of the Sphinx (long body, small head, long tail) are identical to that of a cheetah.

Even the re-building of the outside skin from time to time to check the rain wear damage doesn't negate this obvious shape. It is a cheetah.

We can see other , smaller sphinx sculptures made by the Egyptians that do accurately resemble lions in their muscularity and shape. But the ancient Sphinx is clearly not a lion.

So we now have a clear artistic objection to the Leo Constellation /"lion-like" Sphinx connection in addition to the astronomical objections.

It is clear that the proponents of that connection, like most archeologists, thought the Sphinx was a lion so they naturally assumed it should be pointing at Leo, but they weren't quite on the money for the reasons cited.

The common assumption that the various Egyptian sphinxes are "lions" is understandable because most of them do have the proportions of a lion, but the Sphinx doesn't. It is a cheetah.

So let's get back to the cheetah. look at its face. It is the face of a cat. Your cat. A lion's face doesn't look like your cat.

What everyone seems to be missing about the Sphinx (as a cheetah) is that it's a very beautiful big cat, and the Egyptians were drawn to cats. They even mummified them.

My guess is they loved cats for their exquisite beauty and mysterious, non-logical ways, which is not a bad description of the nature of the mystical, soul-driven Egyptian culture itself.

The mystical nature of Egyptian culture is something often glossed over by our scientific thinkers, who don't really know how to handle it.

My sense of is that both the shaman Black Elk and Castenada's nagual, Don Juan, would have felt right at home with the psychically-driven Egyptian priests.

Someone once said that the Egyptian culture didn't have a religion, that Egypt was the religion. And it is evident that cats walked through it like they owned it.

But again, the cheetah. And the lion.

Both the lion and the cheetah ranged throughout Egypt in preliterate times.

But the cheetah is more cat-like, and cats are a symbol of the psychic world and always have been.

The lion embodies power, domination, it is a warrior symbol.

The cheetah is more of a match for the essence of the Egyptian culture, which was obsessed with the soul, not war, especially in its formative years in the early Pre-dynastic period (5000 B.C. to 3300 B.C.) because that is the nature of these early preliterate Mother Goddess dominated cultures. This would have been even truer for a Proto-Egyptian culture.

While the lion played a symbolic role in Egyptian culture, it was only in its later war-like, empire-building moments, which came and went.

What endured was the mystical, spiritual nature of Egyptian culture, which anchored it from the very beginning.

The beautiful, cat-like cheetah is a more fitting symbol of that bedrock aspect of Egyptian culture, and the further we go back in time, away from Empires and wars , the more dominant it becomes.

It is no secret that the cheetah was highly regarded by the Egyptians. We see this by the fact they were often kept as pets by royalty.

They were soul companions.

Realizing the shape is that of a cheetah fits with an early 3300 B.C. to 10, 500 B.C. creation date for the Sphinx.

So much for the significance of the cheetah.

2. THE ASTRAL POSITIONING ASSUMPTIONS

First of all, if we suspect (as Bauval and Hancock do) that the origin of the Sphinx (and its positioning) is connected to a major event in the very distant past, then the Sphinx/pyramid positioning most probably does point to some important heavenly body or galactic event position in the past. And the vernal equinox sunrise timing is just as good as any to focus on.

If the Sphinx is not pointing at the Zodiac Leo, as it seems not to be, who cares? We can be assured it's pointing at something important in the night skies. We simply don't know what.

If we don't necessarily believe in the 10,500 B.C. date, but believe in the positioning theory, then we have to begin to search for some heavenly event and time where the Sphinx/pyramid/Nile alignment occurs with as much correlation to the Orion/Milky way positioning as the 10,500 B.C. date does, and that (SURPRISE!) will happen every 1600 years or so, which is the time it takes for Orion to begin rising in a new precession (Zodiac sign) window at vernal equinox time.

So you can begin to take your pick of the possibilities by walking forward or backwards from 10,500 B.C. in 1600 year increments. Do the math. All will yield the same Sphinx/pyramid/Nile mirroring of the Orion/Nile positioning as Bauval and Hancock's 10,500 B.C. date.

Any further mental gymnastics I leave to others.

However, what I am qualified to speak on as an artist is the following:

THE SHAPE OF THE SPHINX AND HOW IT POINTS TOWARD CERTAIN POSSIBLE DATES OF CONSTRUCTION.

Based on the crudeness of the face carving, (which is so devoid of the high artistic standards of Dynastic Egypt) and the unrealistic body proportions (for a lion) it is clear that the Sphinx was created sometime before the first of the Dynastic periods began around 3100 B.C, or at least before 2700 B.C., when the rules and codification of proportion and symmetry of Egyptian sculpture came into full force.

Can anyone seriously believe that such a crude sculpture would have been allowed carved side by side with the exquisite Giza pyramids? Wake up!

What this means is that there is the distinct possibility that an early version of the Sphinx was first roughly carved out of a rock formation during the early Pre-Dynastic Egyptian period.

Or, and this is also likely, that it was carved by a Proto-Egyptian people unknown to the Egyptians and that the Egyptians simply maintained and honored it (and its astral positioning), as the Aztecs did Teotihuacan.

Thus, it is clear from the artistic evidence that the Sphinx is older than 2500 B.C.

How much older is the question. It is most likely as old as 7000B.C. simply because of the rain damage evidence, which is hard scientific evidence, and maybe as old as 10,500B.C. or even older.

The crudeness of the face carving suggests somewhere at least before 3300 B.C., as that is the point in time when Egyptian art began to conform to a exquisite aesthetic.

Again, it is impossible for me to believe that we can date other exquisitely proportioned sculptures to around 3300 B.C. and still believe that something as important as the Sphinx would be allowed to be so crudely sculpted.

The Egyptians loved symmetry and proportion, it was key to their artistic aesthetic, so you can't disregard my artistic dating of the Sphinx. It is a distinctly unlikely possibility that a crudely sculpted Sphinx would have been allowed after 3300 B. C. and an absolute impossibility of it being allowed after 2700 B.C.

SOME MORE ARTISTIC/ASTRAL POSITIONING CONSIDERATIONS

That same aesthetic love of proportion and symmetry destined the Egyptians of 2500 B.C. to position the 3 majestic pyramids (and move the Nile River to more closely mirror the Milky Way) so the entire configuration (Sphinx, pyramids, Nile) would mirror not only the astral positioning of Orion and the Milky Way, but also, as some propose, that the Sphinx's ancient positioning would time-position that mirroring at some spiritually-critical heavenly event and time.

Let me make one small step backward here, and state again that it is entirely possible that the Sphinx/Giza complex does not point to some spiritually-critical heavenly event and time. The Sphinx may simply point toward the East, because that is the direction of the birthplace of the Gods. It is a spiritual direction, and for preliterate peoples the most important direction.

Our modern archeologists and scientific investigators are often blind to the reason why all early human migrations were to the east. It wasn't for more food or room. It was to find the Gods. And the Egyptians, a highly spiritual culture, were no exception to this obsession.

But if we suspect there is something more to the Sphinx's positioning than merely pointing to the east, that its ancient positioning already mirrored some spiritually-critical heavenly event, then there is good reason to believe that the Giza pyramid/Nile positioning mirroring the Orion/sun/Milky way positioning is intimately related to the meaning of the earlier alignment of the Sphinx.

So much for positioning. It's clear that the entire Giza complex may be mirroring a spiritually-critical Egyptian astral position and time. It may be in 10, 500 B.C., and it may not be. So far, 10,500 B.C. has a tenuous lead.

MORE DETAIL ABOUT THE SHAPE OF THE SPHINX AND WHAT IT CAN TELL US

Equally important, and I again say this as an artist, the Sphinx is the only Egyptian sculpture that completely lacks the sublime beauty, proportion and harmony of all Egyptian art.

In fact, it is downright ugly, especially the face. I'm not talking about the broken parts, but the proportions and delicacy of the non-broken parts: the eyes, mouth, eyebrows, ears.

It surprises me that no one has ever mentioned this, but it is immediately evident to any artist. The uniformly codified, symmetric beauty of all Egyptian art is one of its unique hallmarks, as the examples below show.

The majestic, codified beauty of all Egyptian art is self evident.

This strongly indicates that the Sphinx was not created at the time of the pyramids (2500 B.C.), but much much earlier, as Egyptian art began to be codified during the period 3100-2700 BC, which is why, from 2700 B.C. on, it is so uniformly beautiful in symmetry and proportion. My own guess is the sphinx was carved sometime before 3300 B.C.

Yet despite this artistic evidence, archeologists assure us that the Sphinx was built around 2500 B.C.

Two of the major historical facts used in dating the construction of the Sphinx to 2500 B.C., or perhaps slightly earlier (2700-31000 B.C.) are two elements seen in the headdress. The nemes, or draped royal head dress and the uraeus, or serpent’s head in the middle of the forehead of the nemes.

The nemes argument is as follows: the first appearance of the nemes, or draped royal head dress, is in 2700 B.C. Therefore, the Sphinx could not have been carved before 2700 B.C.

A similar argument concerns the uraeus, or serpent’s head in the middle of the forehead of the nemes. Since the first appearance of the uraeus is in 3100 B.C., the Sphinx could not have been constructed until after 3100 B.C.

The alternative counter argument to both of these positions is that the carving of the Sphinx was very early and that the current face (along with the nemes and the uraeus) is a re-carving done sometime after 3100 B.C. or 2700 B.C.

From the serious geological evidence of rainwear on the Sphinx (suggesting it was built sometime around 7000 B.C., when the rains were plentiful) the alternative counter argument of a re-carving has to be taken seriously.

But first, let's get rid of one clever idea, and that is that the current face is a 2500 B.C. re-carving of a much earlier lion's head. I dismiss the idea of a lion out of hand because it shows a dismal ignorance of the fact that a carving of the size and position of the Sphinx would never have been of an animal alone.

Egyptians, like all early preliterate cultures, created small sculptures of rams, cats, hippos etc. as a part of their artistic menagerie. But a sculpture as large as the Sphinx placed in such an important position speaks of an important spiritual statement.

And the spiritual statement that occupied all preliterate cultures, including the Egyptians, was their recognition of the special, godlike place that the human animal held among all other animals.

This was always represented by showing a man/animal hybrid figure. Here are preliterate man/animal hybrid sculptures.

It doesn't matter which part was animal and which part was human. It varied depending on the emphasis the sculptor wished to make: an animal head emphasized the instinctive intelligence of man. A animal body emphasized the basic animal nature of humans.

The standing lion man is dated to 32,000 B.C.

The earliest representations of the centaur and Zobek, the Egyptian alligator God, are dated to respectively, 3300B.C and 2700 B.C., although there may be earlier versions yet to be discovered.

So I think the lion's head argument can be dispensed with.

But we do have to consider whether the Sphinx's current face is a re-carving of an even cruder face, and that the nemes and uraeus were also sculpted as a part of that re-carving.

Let's take a look at some problems associated with this proposition:

One thing that is problematic about a possible face re-carving is determining a date for that re-carving.

If it was after 2700 B. C., then the re-carving completely ignored the aesthetic standards for quality and proportion that were rigidly enforced after 2700 B.C.

So we can dismiss that date (2700 B.C.) because it is impossible to believe that its obviously low aesthetic quality would have been allowed on such an important sculpture.

Making it even more impossible is believing that the nemes was created as a part of that 2700 B.C. re-carving..

If so , then the new head (and nemes) would have had to be carved out of an extremely large "older" head, one twice as big if not three times as big, as the new face.

This would mean that the "older " Sphinx's proportions (head to body) would have been very strange: a body whose length to width proportions are those of a cheetah with an absolutely huge human head.

Yet, it's possible and can't be dismissed.

The question is, however, when was that re-carving done?

If after 2700B.C., we still can't overcome the Egyptian codification of proportion and symmetry that would have prevented such a crude re-carving.

Therefore it had to be earlier.

Here is my suggestion as to whether the accepted 2700 B.C. dating of the nemes is irrefutable and therefore dates the Sphinx's construction to after 2700 B.C.

First of all, the dating of the menes as a Dynastic royal head dress is based on the first sculptural appearance we have of it in 2700 B.C. . Yet it is far from conclusive. There may be much earlier appearances of it still buried in the sands.

After all, the Dynastic royal nemes is really a spiffed-up, sun-protection head dress that has been used for millennia by desert dwellers everywhere in the desert world and thus it may simply be an adopted symbol of what it means to be a human desert dweller.

If the Sphinx is indeed an early spiritual man/animal hybrid statement, then the face could well represent a human, not a king or leader.

Of course, over time, the head shade, may have been adopted as a symbol of rank, but that adoption could have occurred at any time.

As such, it must have been used for thousands of years in Pre-Dynastic Egypt (and possibly in a Proto-Egyptian culture) before it was codified in 2700 B.C. as a royal head dress.

Thus despite the accepted proposition that such head dresses were codified as "royal"and given the name nemes around 2700 B.C., a much earlier version of the the "nemes" could have easily ( and most likely) existed.

Which leads me to believe that the carved face and draped headdress are original, and very old,

or

the first face was very old and indeed huge and that re-carving of the head and nemes was done at a very early date.

One last thing, as the uraeus (serpent's head) on the forehead center of the nemes is not seen in sculpture until 3100 B.C.

So how could it be possibly on a very early (7000B.C.) sphinx. The answer is as follows:

Like the nemes, it may have existed at an earlier time, and be on a sculpture still to be discovered.

Yet if we take the 3100 B.C. date as accurate, it is entirely possible that if the original face and head dress were carved before that 3100 B.C. date, the uraeus could have been added to the draped head dress sometime after 3100 B.C., as it would have been easily accomplished by carving out the front of the menes, which could help explain why the forehead of the face protrudes only slightly.

These artistic considerations lead me to the conclusion that the Sphinx we see was carved at a date prior to the codification of Egyptian art. That codification was in full force by 2700 B.C., and is evident as early as 3100 B.C.

So the artistic evidence points toward an initial carving prior to at least 3100 B.C. but that is a minimum date. It could go way back.

The rain wear evidence points to 7000 B.C., or even earlier.

So the artistic and geological evidence clearly indicate that the Sphinx may indeed date back to a very early date.

And we can be assured that its positioning was no accident.

Whatever culture it was that carved the initial Sphinx could have carved it out of the bedrock in any position, but they chose one. The Sphinx was carved to gaze at something highly significant to that culture.

"Accidents" didn't exist in preliterate cultures, nor did "chance", as they do in our culture.

We can be assured that the significant event was highly spiritual as well, because that is what early preliterate cultures were consumed by: the spiritual, just as we are consumed by the logical.

Indeed it is the key to understanding preliterate Egypt because that psychically-driven age is most probably where the Sphinx originated.

It is also the key to truly understanding the Sphinx: why it was built, what its astral orientation meant, why it was made so large, what its "cheetah likeness" meant, and why the literate, more logical Dynastic Egyptians held it in such high esteem.

scylla @comcast.net ss1

scylla@c

6. CRITICAL BOOKS IN UNDERSTANDING PRELITERATE MYTHS AND CULTURES

2011-03-10T21:04:00.000-08:00

Knowing the nature of the preliterate mind is the key to correctly understanding the ancient sources (Old Testament, Egyptian art and spirituality, the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, Meso-American glyphs and art, European prehistoric cave art etc.) that many of our alternative world views are based on.

HERE ARE SOME BOOKS THAT WILL HELP YOU UNDERSTAND THAT MIND

Alice Hickey is a must read for anyone interested in the psychic world and the very early Mother Goddess cultures.

To download and read a free copy of Alice Hickey- http://justinspringbooks.blogspot.com/

Anyone seeking to understand the nature of the preliterate oral poetry that gave birth to all of the world's great myths (and that now feed much of our alternative thinking) should read this book. No ancient legend or myth can be correctly understood without understanding how and why these great story poems were created.

To download and read a free copy of this book:
http://outwardjourneytext.blogspot.com/

The Witnesses Log Myth is a contemporary creation myth spoken spontaneously from the unconscious, which is how all preliterate (oral) poems were made. It is an excellent example of the nature of those great oral myth/poems.

A free video version of The Witnesses Log can be seen at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/soulspeakspring#grid/user/17B15AE75AE11984

MORE THINKING THAT IS CRITICAL:
CARL JUNG AND JULIAN JAYNES

Carl Jung's work revealed the nature of the psychic world and the unconscious mind. These short videos illustrate various aspects of his powerful, unorthodox thinking about the unconscious mind.

Jung was a scientific psychologist who championed the importance of the unconscious mind in living a complete life. Jung saw the terms unconscious mind, psyche, and soul as essentially interchangeable. In the course of his monumental investigations, he shed new light on ancient ways of thinking, but most importantly on the psychic world, a major component of preliterate culture, consciousness and art.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Carl Gustav Jung 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology. Jung is often considered the first modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is "by nature religious" and to explore it in depth.^[1] Though not the first to analyze dreams, he has become perhaps one of the most well known pioneers in the field of dream analysis. Much of his life's work was spent exploring Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts.

Many pioneering psychological concepts were originally proposed by Jung, including the Archetype, the Collective Unconscious, the Complex, and synchronicity.

The groundbreaking work of Julian Jaynes revealed the true nature of the consciousness of preliterate man.

The following is a brief outline of Jaynes' thought and influence.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), in which he argued that ancient peoples acted by means of automatic, non-conscious habit. When habit did not suffice and stress rose at the moment of a decision, behavior was directed by auditory verbal hallucinations, which were heard as the voice of a chieftain or god and immediately obeyed.

Jaynes argued that the change from this mode of thinking (which he called the bicameral mind) to {modern}consciousness occurred over a period of centuries about three thousand years ago and was based on the development of special types of linguistic cognition and the emergence of writing as an alternative means of social control.

Jaynes's theory has been influential to philosophers, psychologists, and psychiatrists and has been cited in hundreds of scientific and popular books. It was a nominee for the National Book Award in 1978. In the late 1990s, Jaynes's ideas received renewed attention as brain imaging technology confirmed many of his early predictions.

Here are some links to good, reliable web pages and YOUTUBE videos on various alternative subjects that I have found to be both useful and informative.

Whitley Strieber doesn't mind going far out with his guests, who can really be on the fringe at times, and he can be a bit of a showman, but I love listening to him because he's one of the few investigators who has actually had an alien experience and is still trying to honestly figure it out.

A YOUTUBE playlist of Whitley Streiber Broadcasts and Videos.

Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country/Dreamland web page where audio and video broadcasts back to 2002 can be accessed.

Joseph Campbell plays it a bit close to the vest, as you might expect from an academic, but Campbell knew more about myths than anyone and knew how to explain them to a general public. His books are excellent. His YOUTUBE channel is well worth viewing if you want an introduction to the true nature of preliterate myths and their continuing effect upon us.

Joseph Campbell's Youtube Page.

EVEN MORE THINGS TO CONSIDER

Above are two depictions of preliterate humans. I have chosen the figure on the left to represent humans at the beginning of the preliterate period (150,000 BC -50,000BC) and the figure on the right other to represent them immediately before the advent of literacy ( 4000BC).

Both of these preliterate humans were just as bright as we are. But there were a few critical differences.

Early humans had a much different consciousness. They did not have the reflective mind space that we have that allows us to imagine future paths.

In its place, they heard guiding psychic voices they took to be the Gods. In addition, they had easy access to their unconscious minds and the psychic realm.

They were not so much concerned with logically examining the world but intuitively imitating it through art. Oral story poetry, cave paintings, and sculpture were the primary forms.

We have only transcribed remnants of the great flood of oral poetry that once filled those cultures.

Some of the sculptures and paintings have survived intact. A few are shown below and are critical to understanding preliterate cultures.

The large number of female figures are from the very early (60,000-10,000BC) Mother Goddess period that preceded the rise of the male Gods.

But first let us consider the 17,000 year old drawing at Lascaux.

The 17,000 year old cave drawings at Lascaux in France.

The art of preliterate man is hard to categorize. It ranges from the extremely simplistic to the sublime, as in these cave drawings.

My own take on the incredible art produced by the people who painted Lascaux is two fold. One: not all preliterate peoples advanced uniformly. Some seem to have developed highly sophisticated cultures while others didn't. Two: preliterate man was a naturally artistic creature who experienced sudden bursts in creative insight because he always worked from the unconscious, which is unpredictable in its projected visions.

HERE ARE SOME DAZZLING EXAMPLES OF THAT ART THAT HAVE SURVIVED THE RAVAGES OF OVER 30,000 YEARS OF TIME.

scylla@c