OSIRIS ISIS ORION
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LIGHT AND LIFE
Lars Olof Bjorn 1976
Page197
BY
WRITING
THE
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KEEPER OF GENESIS
A QUEST FOR THE HIDDEN LEGACY OF MANKIND
Robert Bauval Graham Hancock 1996
Page 254
"...Is there in any sense an interstellar
Rosetta Stone? We believe there is a common language that all technical
civilizations, no matter how different, must have.
That common language is science and
mathematics.
The laws of Nature are the same everywhere:..."
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
G Hancock
1995
Page 287
"What one would look for, therefore,
would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible
to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand
or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far
between, but mathematics is one of them - and the city of Teotihuacan
may be the calling-card of a lost civilization written in the eternal
language of mathematics."
"Of all the other stupendous inventions,'
Galileo once remarked,
what sublimity of mind must have been
his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other
person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those
who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall
be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty
than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let
this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3"
WHAT ONE WOULD LOOK FOR THEREFORE WOULD
BE A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE THE KIND OF LANGUAGE COMPREHENSIBLE TO ANY TECHNOLOGICALLY
ADVANCED SOCIETY IN ANY EPOCH
SUCH LANGUAGES ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN
BUT MATHEMATICS IS ONE OF THEM
"ALL IS NUMBER"
Pythagoras
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann
1875-1955
Page 417
"I preach mathematics."
"I tell them: that if they
will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in
it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh. Lawyer Paravant was
a bad case; he took my advice, he is nqw busy squaring the circle, and
gets great relief. But most of them are too witless and lazy, God help
them!"
Page 628
"Next they tired of ordinary photography,
the fashion veered to flash-lights and colour photography after Lumiere.
They were enthusiastic over groups of people with startled, staring eyes
in livid faces dazed by the magnesium flare, resembling the corpses of
the murdered set upright. Hans Castorp had a framed diaposi-tive, showing
him with a copper-:coloured visage, a brassy butter- cup in his buttonhole,
standing among buttercups in a poison- ously green meadow, with Frau Stohr
on one side of him in a sky-blue blouse, and Fraulein Levi on the other
in a blood-red sweater.
Then there was the collecting of postage stamps, a considerable interest
at all times, but rising periodically to an obsession. Every- body pasted,
haggled, exchanged, took in philatelic magazines, carrie on correspondence
with special vendors foreign and do- mestic, with societies and private
owners; astonishing sums were spent for rare specime?s, even by people
whose means were scarcely adequate to their expenses at the Berghof..
Postage stamps would have their day, and give way to the next folly on
the list, which might be the accumulation and endless munching of all
possible brands of chocolate. Everybody's mouth was stained brown, and
the Berghof kitchen offered its most elaborate delicacies to captious
and indifferent diners who had lost their appetites to Milka-nut, Chocolat
Ii la creme d' amandes, Marquis-napolitains, and gold-besprinkled cats' tongues.
Pig-drawing, a diversion introduced by high authority on a long-ago carnival
evening, had had its little day, and led up to geometrical teasers which
for a time consumed all the mental powers of the Berghof world, and eventhe
last thoughts and en- ergies of the dying. Weeks on end the house was
under the spell of a complicated figure consisting of not less than eight
circles, large and small, and several engaged triangles, the whole to
be drawn free-hand without lifting the pen - or, as a further refine-
ment, to be drawn blindfold. Lawyer Paravant, the virtuoso of this kind
of mental concentration, finally succeeded in performing the feat, perhaps
with some loss of symmetry; but he was the only one.
"We know on the authority of the Hofrat
that Lawyer Paravant studied mathematics, we know too the disciplinary
grounds of / Page 629 /
his devotion to that branch of learning, and its virtue in cooling and
dulling the edge of fleshly lusts. If the guests of the Berghof had more
generalIy applied themselves' to the same study, the necessity for certaIn
recent rulings would most likely have been obviated. The chief of these
dealt with the passage across the bal-conies, at the end of the white
glass partitions that did not quite ,reach to the balustrade. These were
now extended by means of little doors, which. the bathing-master had it
in charge to lock every night - and did so, to a general accompaniment
of smirks and sniggers. Since that time, the chambers in the first storey
had become popular, because they afforded a passage across the ve-randah
roof beyond the balustrade. But this disciplinary departure had not been
introduced on Lawyer Paravant's account. He had long since overcome the
severe attack caused by the presence of the Egyptian Fatme, and she had
been the last to cliallenge his natural man. Since her time he had flung
himself with redoubled conviction into the arms of the clear-eyed goddess,
of whose soothing powers Hofrat Behrens had so morally discoursed. There
was one problem to which day and night he devoted all his brains, all
the sporting pertinacity which once - before the beginning of this prolonged
and enforced holiday, that even threatened at times to end in total quiescence
- had gone to the convicting of crim-inals. It was - the squaring of the
circle.
In the course of his studies, this retired official had convinced himself
that the argtiments on which science based the impossi-bility of the proposition
were untenable; and that an overruling providence had removed him, Paravant,
from the world of the living, and brought him here, having selected him
to transfer the problem from the realms of the transcendental into the
realms of the earthly and exact. By day and night he measured and calcu-lated;
covered enormous quantities of paper with figures, letters, computations,
algebraic symbols; his face, which was the face of an apparently sound
and vigorous man, wore the morose and vision-ary stare of a monomaniac;
while his conversation, with consistent and fearful monotony, dealt with
the proportional number pi, that abandoned fraction which the debased
genius of a mathematif:ian named Zachariah Dase one day figured out to
the two-hundredth decimal place - purely for the joy of it and as a work
of superero-gation, for if he had figured it out to the two-thousandth,
the result, as compared with unattainable mathematical exactitude, would
have been practically unchanged. Everybody shunned the devoted Paravant
like the plague; for whomever he succeeded in button-holing, that unhappy
wretch had to listen to a torrent of red-hot / Page629 / oratory, as the
lawyer strove to rouse his humaner feelings to the shame that lay in the
defilement of the. mind of man by the hope-less irrationality of this
mystic relation. The fruitlessness of for ever multiplying the diameter
of the circle by pi to find its circum-ference, of multiplying the square
of the radius by pi to find its area,. caused Lawyer Paravant to be visited
by periodic doubt whether the problem had not been unnecessarily complicated,
since Archimedes day; whether the solution were not, in actual fact, a
child's affair for simpleness. Why could not one rectify the cir-cumference,
why could one not also convert every straight line into a circle? Lawyer
Paravant felt himself, at times, near a revela-tion. He was often seen,
late in the evening, sitting at his table in . the forsaken and dimly
lighted dining-room, with a piece of String laid out before him, which
he carefully arranged in circular shape, and then suddenly, with an abrupt
gesture, stretched out straight; only to fall thereafter, leaning on his
elbows, into bitter brooding. The Hofrat sometimes lent him a helping
hand at the sorry sport, and generally encouraged him in his freak: And
the sufferer turned to Hans Castorp too, again and yet again, with his
cherished grievance, finding in the young man much friendly understanding
and a sympathetic interest in the mystery of the circle. He illustrated
his pet despair to the young man by means of an exact drawing, executed
with vast pains, showing a circle be-tween two polygons, one inscribed,
the other circumscribed, each polygon being of an infinite number of tiny
sides, up to the last human possibility of approximation to the circle.
The remainder the surrounding curvature, which in some ethereous, immaterial
way refused to be rationalized by means of the calculable bound-ing lines,
that, Lawyer Paravant said, with quivering jaw, was pi. Hans Castorp,.for
all his receptivity, showed himself less sensitive to pi than his interlocutor.
He said it was all hocus-pocus; and advised Paravant not to over-heat
himself with his cat's-cradle; spoke of the series of dimensionless
points of which the circle consisted,. from Its beginnig - which did not
exist -to its end- which did not exist either; and of the overpowering
melancholy that lay in eternity, for ever turning on itself without permanence
of direction at any given moment - spoke with such tranquil resig-nation
as to exert on Lawyer Paravant a momentary beneficent effect."
I
THE
NINTH
HIEROGLYPHIC
THE
BOOK OF CREATION
THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE
THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY THE ACCOUNT
IS SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD
BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE AS THOUGH WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE ENTIRELY TRANSFORMED THE MESSAGE
OF CREATION IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET IS
GIVEN A NUMERICAL VALUE BY COMBINING THE
LETTERS WITH THE SACRED NUMBERS REARRANGING
THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS THE MYSTIC WEANED THE MIND AWAY FROM THE
NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS
A
HISTORY OF GOD
Karen Armstrong
The God of the Mystics
Page 250
"A quality of holiness, a quality of
power, a fearful quality, a dreaded quality, a quality of awe, a
quality of dismay, a quality of terror Such is the quality of the
garment of the Creator, Adonai, God of Israel, who, crowned, comes to
the thone of his glory; His garment is engraved inside and outside and
entirely covered with
YHWH, YHWH"
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"No eyes are able to behold
it, neither the eyes of flesh and blood, nor the eyes of his
servants.6
If we cannot imagine what Yahweh's cloak is like, how can we think to
behold God himself?
Perhaps the most famous of the early Jewish mystical texts is the fifth-century Sefer yezirah (The Book of Creation). There is no attempt to
describe the creative process realistically; the account is unashamedly
symbolic and shows God creating the world by means of language as though
he were writing a book. But language has been entirely transformed and
the message of creation is no longer clear. Each letter of the Hebrew
alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with the
sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the mystic
weaned his mind away from the normal connotations of words. The
purpose was to bypass the intellect and remind Jews that no words
or concepts could represent the reality to which the Name pointed. Again,
the experience of pushing language to its limits and making it yield a
non-linguistic signficance, created a sense of the otherness of God.
Mystics did not want a straightforward dialogue with a God whom they experienced
as an overwhelming holiness rather than a sympathetic friend and father.
Throne Mysticism was not unique. The Prophet Muhammad is said to have
had a very similar experience when he made his Night Journey from Arabia
to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He had been transported in sleep by
Gabriel on a celestial horse. On arrival, he was greeted by Abraham, Moses,
Jesus and a crowd of other prophets who confirmed Muhammad in his own
prophetic mission. Then Gabriel and Muhammad began their perilous ascent
up a ladder (mira}) through the seven heavens, each one of which
was presided over by a prophet. Finally he reached the divine sphere.
The early sources / Page 251 / reverently keep silent
about the final vision, to which these verses in the Koran are believed
to refer.
And indeed he saw him a second time by the lote-tree of the furthest limit,
near unto the garden of promise, with the lote-tree veiled in a veil
of nameless splendour . . .
[And withal] the eye did not waver, nor yet did it stray: truly did he
see some of the most profound of his Sustainer's symbols7
Muhammad did not see God himself but only symbols that pointed to the
divine reality: in Hinduism the lote-tree marks the limit of rational
thought. There is no way in which the vision of God can appeal to the
normal experiences of thought or language. The ascent to heaven is a symbol
of the furthest reach of the human spirit, which marks the threshold of
ultimate meaning.
The imagery of ascent is common. St Augustine had experienced an ascent
to God with his mother at Ostia, which he described in the language of
Plotinus:
Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection
towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporate
objects
and the heaven itself, where sun, moon and stars shed light on the earth.
We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue
and wonder at your works and entered into our own minds.8
Augustine's mind was filled with the Greek
imagery of the great chain of being instead of the Semitic images of the seven heavens. This was not a literal journey through outer
space to a God 'out there' but a mental ascent to a reality within.
This rapturous flight seems something given, from without, when he says
'our minds were lifted up' as though he and Monica were passive recipients
of grace, but there is a deliberation in this steady climb towards 'eternal
being'. Similar imagery of ascent has also been noted in the trance experiences
of Shamans 'from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego', asJoseph Campbell puts
it.9
The symbol of an ascent indicates that worldly perceptions have been
left far behind. The experience of God that is finally attained is utterly
indescribable, since normal language no longer applies. The Jewish
mystics describe anything but God! They tell us about his cloak,
/ Page 252 / his palace, his heavenly court and the veil that shields
him from human gaze, which represents the eternal archetypes. Muslims
who specu- lated about Muhammad's flight to heaven stress the paradoxical
nature of his final vision of God: he both saw and did not see
the divine presence. 10 Once the
mystic has worked through the realm of imagery in his mind, he reaches
the point where neither concepts nor imagination can take him any further. Augustine and Monica were equally reticent about the climax of their flight,
stressing its transcend-ence of space, time and ordinary knowledge. They
'talked and panted' for God, and 'touched it in some small degree by a
moment of total concentration of heart'. II Then they had to return to
normal speech, where a sentence has a beginning, a middle and an end:
Therefore we said: If to anyone the tumult
of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air
are quiescent, if the
heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making no
sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking about itself, if
all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language
and everything transitory is silent - for if anyone could hear then this
is what all of them would be saying, 'We did not make ourselves, we were
made by him who abides for eternity' (Psalm 79:3,5)
. . . That is how it was when at that moment we extended our reach
and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which
abides beyond all things.12
This was no naturalistic vision of a personal
God: they had not, so to speak, 'heard his voice' through any of the normal
methods of naturalistic communication: through ordinary speech, the voice
of an angel, through nature or the symbolism of a dream. It seemed that
they, had 'touched' the Reality which lay beyond all these things.
'.1
Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of 'ascent' seems
an incontrovertible fact of life. However we choose to interpret it, people
all over the world and in all phases of history have had this type of
contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the climactic insight
a 'vision of God'; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience of
the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation of nirvana. The point is
that this is something that human beings who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical /
Page 253 / experience of God has certain characteristics that are common
to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involves an interior
journey, not of a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it
is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind - often called
the imagination - rather than through the more cerebral logical faculty
Finally, it is something that the mystic
creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental
exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon dtem unawares.
Augustine seems to have imagined that privileleged human beings were sometimes
able to see God in this life:: he cited Moses and St Paul as examples.
Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 acknowledged master of the spiritual life
as well as being a powerful pontiff, disagreed. He was not an intellectual
and, a had a more pragmatic view of spirituality. He used the metaphors
of cloud, fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge
of the divine. His God remained hidden from human beings in an impenetrable
darkness that was far more painful than the cloud of unknowing experienced
by such Greek Christians as Nyssa and Denys. God was a distressing experience
for Gregory. He insisted that God was difficult of access. There was no
way we could talk about him familiarly, as though we had something in
common. We knew nothing at all about God.We could make no predictions
about his behaviour on the basis of our knowledge of people: 'Then only
is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible
that we cannot fully know anything about him."14 Frequently Gregory dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach
to God. The joy and peace of contemplation attained for a few moments
after a mighty struggle before tasting God's sweetness, the soul
has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element:
It cannot fix its
mind's eyes on that which it has with h the within itself, because it
is compelled by its own habits to sink downwards. It meanwhile pants and
struggles and endeeavours to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered
with weariness, into its own familiar darkness.15
Page 254
God could only be reached after 'a great effort of the mind', which
had to wrestle with him as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. The path
to God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him,
'the soul could do nothing but weep'. 'Tortured' by its desire for God,
it only 'found rest in tears, being wearied out'.16 Gregory remained
an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century; clearly the West
continued to find God a strain.
In the East, the Christian experience of God was characterised by light
rather than darkness. The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism,
which is also found world-wide. This did not depend on imagery and vision
but rested on the apophatic or silent experience described by Denys the
Areopagite. They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God.
As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on the Song of
Songs, 'every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in
the quest to those who search.' The aim of the contemplative was to go
beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these could
only be a distraction. Then he would acquire 'a certain sense of presence'
that was indefinable and certainly transcended all human experiences of
a relationship with another person.17 This attitude was called hesychia, 'tranquillity' or 'interior silence'. Since words, ideas
and images can only tie us down in the mundane world, in the here and
now, the mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques of concentration,
so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only then could it hope
to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive.
How was it possible to know an incomprehensible God? The Greeks loved
that kind of paradox and the hesychasts turned to the old distinction
between God's essence (ousia) and his 'energies' (energeia,)
or activities in the world, which enabled us to experience something of
the divine. Since we could never know God as he is in himself, it was
the 'energies' not the 'essence' that we experienced in prayer. They could
be described as the 'rays' of divinity, which illuminated the world and
were an outpouring of the divine, but as distinct from God himself as
sunbeams were distinct from the sun. They manifested a God who was utterly
silent and unknowable. As St Basil had said: 'It is by his energies that
we know our God; we do not assent that we come near to / Page 255 / the
essence itself, for his energies descend to us but his essence remains
unapproachable.'18 In the Old Testament,
this divine 'energy' had been called God's 'glory' (kavod).ln the New
Testament, it had shone forth in the person of Christ on Mount Tabor,
when his humanity had been transfigured by the divine rays. Now they penetrated
the whole created universe and deified those who had been saved. As the
word 'energeiai," implied, this was an active and dynamic
conception of God. Where the West would see God making himself known by
means of his eternal attributes - his goodness, justice, love and
omnipotence - the Greeks saw God making himself accessible in a ceaseless
activity in which he was somehow present.
When we experienced the 'energies' in prayer, therefore, we were in some
sense communing with God direcdy, even though the unknow-able reality
itself remained in obscurity. The leading hesychast Evagrius
Pontus (d.399) insisted that the 'knowledge' that we had of God
in prayer had nothing whatever to do with concepts or images but was an
immediate experience of the divine which transcended these. It was important,
therefore, for hesychasts to strip their souls naked: 'When you
are praying,' he told his monks, 'do not shape within yourself any image
of the deity and do not let your mind be shaped by the impress of any
form.' Instead, they should 'approach the Immaterial in an immaterial
manner'.19 Evagrius was proposing a sort
of Christian Yoga. This was not a process of reflection; indeed, 'prayer
means the shedding of thought'.20 It
was rather an intuitive apprehension of God. It will result in a sense
of the unity of all things, a freedom from distraction and multiplicity,
and the loss of ego - an experience that is clearly akin to that produced
by contemplatives in non-theistic religions like Buddhism. By systematically
weaning their minds away from their 'passions' - such as pride, greed,
sadness or anger which tied them to the ego - hesychasts would
transcend themselves and become deified like Jesus on Mount Tabor, transfigured
by the divine 'energies'.
Diodochus, the fifth-century bishop of Photice, insisted that this deification
was not delayed until the next world but could be experienced consciously
here below. He taught a method of concen-tration that involved breathing:
as they inhaled, hesychasts should pray: / Page 256 / Jesus Christ,
Son of God'; they should exhale to the words: 'have mercy upon us'. Later hesychasts refined this exercise: contemplates should sit with
head and shoulders bowed, looking towards their heart or navel. They should
breathe ever more slowly in order to direct their attention inwards, to
certain psychological foci like the heart. It was a rigorous discipline
that must be used carefully; it could only be safely practised under an
expert director. Gradually, like a Buddhist monk, the hesychast would
find that he or she could set rational thoughts gently to one side, the
imagery that thronged the mind would fade away and they would feel totally
one with their prayer. Greek Christians had discovered for themselves
techniques that had been practised for centuries in the oriental religions.
They saw prayer as a psychosomatic activity, whereas Westerners like Augustine
and Gregory thought that prayer should liberate the soul from the body.
Maximus the Confessor had insisted: 'The whole man should become God,
deified by the grace of the God-become-man, becoming whole man, soul and
body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace.'"
The hesychast would experience this as an influx of energy and
clarity that was so powerful and compelling that it could only be divine. As we have seen, the Greeks saw this 'deification' as an enlightenment
that was natural to man. They found inspiration in the transfigured Christ
on Mount Tabor, just as Buddhists were inspired by the image of the Buddha,
who had attained the fullest realisation of humanity. The Feast of the
Transfiguration is very important in the Eastern Orthodox Churches; it
is called an 'epiphany', a manifestation of God. Unlike their Western
brethren, the Greeks did not think that strain, dryness and desolation
were an inescapable prelude to the experience of God: these were simply
disorders that must be cured. Greeks had no cult of a dark night of the
soul. The dominant motif was Tabor rather than Gethsemane and Calvary.
Not everybody could achieve these higher states, however, but other Christians
could glimpse something of this mystical experience in the icons. In the
West, religious art was becoming predominantly representational: it depicted
historical events in the lives of Jesus or the saints. In Byzantium, however,
the icon was not meant to re-present anything in this world but
was an attempt to portray the ineffable / Page 257
/ mystical experience of the hesychasts in a visual fonn to inspire
the non-mystics. As the British historian Peter Brown explains, 'Throughout
the Eastern Christian world, icon and vision validated one another. Some
deep gathering into one focal point of the collective imagination. . .
ensured that by the sixth century, the supernatural had taken on the precise
lineaments, in dreams and in each person's imagination, in which it was
commonly portrayed in art. The icon had the validity of a realised dream.'22 Icons were not meant to instruct the faithful or to convey information,
ideas or doctrines. They were a focus of contemplation (theoria)
which provided the faithful with a sort of window on the divine world.
They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God, however, that
by the eighth century they had become the centre of a passionate doctrinal
dispute in the Greek Church. People were beginning to ask what exactly
the artist was painting when he painted Christ. It was impossible to depict
his divinity but if the artist claimed that he was only painting the humanity
of Jesus, was he guilty of Nestorianism, the heretical belief that Jesus's
human and divine natures were quite distinct? The iconoclasts wanted to
ban icons altogether but icons were defended by two leading monks: John
of Damascus (656-747) of the monastery of Mar Sabbas near Bethlehem, and
Theodore (759-826), of the monastery of Studios near Constantinople. They
argued that the iconoclasts were wrong to forbid the depiction of Christ.
Since the Incarnation. the material world and the human body had both been given a divine dimension and an artist could paint this new type of deified humanity. He was also painting an image of God, since Christ the Logos
was the icon of God par excellence. God could not be contained
in words or summed up in human concepts but he could be 'described'
by the pen of the artist or in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy.
The piety of the Greeks was so dependent upon icons that by 820 the iconoclasts
had been defeated by popular acclaim. This assertion that God was in some
sense describable did not amount to an abandonment of Denys's apophatic
theology, however. In his Greater Apology for the Holy Images,
the monk Nicephoras claimed that icons were 'expressive of
the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves the / Page 258
/ ineffability of a mystery that transcends being. Without ceasing
and without speech, they praise the goodness of God in that venerable
and thrice-illumined melody of theology,23 Instead of instructing the faithful in the dogmas of the Church and
helping them to form lucid ideas about their faith, the icons held them
in a sense of mystery. When describing the effect of these religious paintings,
Nicephoras could only compare it to the effect of music, the most ineffable
of the arts and possibly the most direct. Emotion and experience are conveyed
by music in a way that bypasses words and concepts. In the nineteenth
century, Walter Pater would assert that all art aspired to the condition
of music; in ninth -century Byzantium, Greek Christians saw theology as
aspiring to the condition of iconography. They found that God was better
expressed in a work of art than in rationalistic discourse. After
the intensely wordy Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries,
they were evolving a portrait of God that depended upon the imaginative
experience of Christians.
This was definitively expressed by Symeon (949-1022), Abbot of the small
monastery of St Macras in Constantinople, who became known as the 'New
Theologian'. This new type of theology made no attempt to define God.
This, Symeon insisted, would be presump-tuous; indeed, to speak about
God in any way at all implied that 'that which is incomprehensible is
comprehensible'.24 Instead of arguing
rationally about God's nature, the 'new' theology relied on direct, personal
religious experience. It was impossible to know God in conceptual terms,
as though he were just an-other being about which we could form ideas.
God was a mystery. A true Christian was one who had a conscious experience
of the God who had revealed himselfin the transfigured humanity of Christ.
Symeon had himself been converted from a worldly life to contemplation
by an experience that seemed to come to him out of the blue. At first
he had had no idea what was happening, but gradually he became aware that
he was being transformed and, as it were, absorbed into a light that was
of God himself. This was not light as we know it, of course;
it was beyond 'form, image or representation and could only be experienced
intuitively, through prayer'25 But this was not an experience for the elite or for monks only; the kingdom
announced by Christ in the Gospels was a / Page 259 / union with
God that everybody could experience here and now, without having to wait
until the next life.
For Symeon, therefore, God was known and unknown, near and far. Instead
of attempting the impossible task of describing 'ineffable matters by
words alone',z6 he urged his monks to concentrate on what could be experienced
as a transfiguring reality in their own souls. As God had said to Symeon
during one of his visions: 'Yes, I am God, the one who became man for
your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you see, and I shall make
you God'27 God was not an external,
objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal enlighten-ment.
Yet Symeon's refusal to speak about God did not lead him to break with
the theological insights of the past. The 'new' theology was based firmly
on the teachings of the Fathers of the Church. In his Hymns of Divine
Love, Symeon expressed the old Greek doctrine of the deification of
humanity, as described by Athanasius and Maximus:
O Light that none can name, for it is
altogether nameless.
O Light with many names, for it is at work in all things. . .
How do you mingle yourself with grass?
How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible,
do you preserve the nature of the grass unconsumed?28
It was useless to define the God who affected
this transformation, since he was beyond speech and description. Yet as
an experience that fulfilled and transfigured humanity without violating
its integrity, 'God' was an incontrovertible reality. The Greeks had developed
ideas about God - such as the Trinity and the Incarnation - that separated
them from other monotheists, yet the actual experience of their mystics
had much in common with those of Muslims and Jews.
Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily con-cerned with
the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest companions
had been mystically inclined and the Muslims had quickly developed their
own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth and ninth centuries,
an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside the other sects; the
ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and the Shiis about the wealth
of the court and the apparent abandonment of the austerity of the early ummah. They / Page 260 attempted to return to the simpler life
of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing in the coarse garments made of
wool (Arabic SWF) that were supposed to have been favoured by the Prophet.
Consequently, they were known as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial
to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained:
The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the
conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily
and particularly against one's own faults with a desire intensified by
inner purification to find God at any price.29
At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great
Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ala (d.748) had been a disciple of Hasan
al-Basri (d.728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered as one of
the fathers of Sufism.
The ulema were beginning to distinguish Islam sharply from other
religions, seeing it as the one, true faith but Sufis by and large remained
true to the Koranic vision of the unity of all rightly-guided religion.
Jesus, for example, was revered by many Sufis as the prophet of the interior
life. Some even amended the Shahadah, the profession of faith, to say:
'There is no god but aI-Lab and Jesus is his Messenger', which was technically
correct but intentionally provoca- tive. Where the Koran speaks of a God
of justice who inspires fear and awe, the early woman ascetic Rabiah (d.801)
spoke of love, in a way that Christians would have found familiar:
Two ways I love Thee: selfishly,
And next, as worthy is of Thee.
'Tis selfish love that I do naught
Save think on Thee with every thought.
'Tis purest love when Thou dost raise
The veil to my adoring gaze.
Not mine the praise in that or this:
Thine is the praise in both, I wis.30
This is close to her famous prayer: 'O God!
If I worship thee in fear of Hell, bum me in Hell; and if I worship Thee
in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for
Thine own sake, / Page 261/ withhold not Thine Everlasting Beauty!'31 The love of God became the hallmark of Sufism. Sufis may well have been
influenced by the Christian ascetics of the Near East but Muhammad remained
a crucial influence. They hoped to have an experience of God that was
similar to that of Muhammad when he had received his revelations. Naturally,
they were also inspired by his mystical ascent to heaven, which became
the paradigm of their own experience of God.
They also evolved the techniques and disciplines that have helped mystics
all over the world to achieve an alternative state of conscious-ness.
Sufis added the practices of fasting, night vigils and chanting the Divine
Names as a mantra to the basic requirements of Muslim law. The effect
of these practices sometimes resulted in behaviour which seemed bizarre
and unrestrained and such mystics were known as 'drunken' Sufis. The first
of these was Abu Yazid Bistami (d.87.) who, like Rabiah, approached
God as a lover. He believed that he should strive to please al-Lah as
he would a woman in a human love affair, sacrificing his own needs and
desires so as to become one with the Beloved. Yet the introspective disciplines
he adopted to achieve this led him beyond this personalised conception
of God. As he approached the core of his identity, he felt that nothing
stood between God and himself; indeed, everything that he understood as
'self' seemed to have melted away:
I gazed upon [al-Lah] with the eye of
truth and said to Him: 'Who is this?' He said, 'This is neither I nor
other than I. There is no God
but I.' Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood . . .
Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying:
'How fares it with me with Thee?' He said, 'I am through Thee;
there is no god but Thou.'32
Yet again, this was no external deity 'out there', alien to mankind: God was discovered to be mysteriously identified
with the inmost self. The systematic destruction of the ego led to a sense
of absorption in a larger, ineffable reality. This state of annihilation
(rana) became central to the Sufi ideal. Bistami had completely reinterpreted
the Shahadah in a way that could have been construed as blasphemous, / Page 262 / had it not been recognised by so many other
Muslims as an authentic experience of that islam commanded by the
Koran.
Other mystics, known as the 'sober' Sufis, preferred a less extravagant
spirituality. Al-Junayd of Baghdad (d.910), who mapped out the ground
plan of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al- Bistami's extremism
could be dangerous. He taught that 'fana (annihilation) must
be succeeded by baqa (revival), a return to an enhanced self.
Union with God should not destroy our natural capabilities but fulfil
them: a Sufi who had ripped away obscuring egotism to discover the divine
presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realisation
and self-control. He would become more fully human. When they experienced
'fana and baqa, therefore, Sufis had achieved a state that
a Greek Christian would call 'deification'. Al-Junayd saw the whole Sufi
quest as a return to man's primordial state on the day of creation: he
was returning to the ideal humanity that God had intended. He was also
returning to the Source of his being. The experience of separation and
alienation was as central to the Sufi as to the Platonic or Gnostic experience;
it is, perhaps not dissimilar to the 'separation' of which Freudians and
Kleinians speak today, although the psychoanalysts attribute this to a
non-theistic source. By means of disciplined, careful work under the expert
guidance of a Sufi master (pir) like himself, al-Junayd taught
that a Muslim could be reunited with his Creator and achieve that original
sense of God's immediate presence that he had experienced when, as the
Koran says, he had been drawn from Adam's loins. It would be the end of
separation and sadness, a reunion with a deeper self that was also the
self he or she was meant to be. God was not a separate, external reality
and judge but somehow one with the ground of each person's being:
Now I have known, 0 Lord, What lies within
my heart;
In secret, from the world apart,
My tongue hath talked with my Adored.
So in a manner we
United are, and One; / Page 263 /
Yet otherwise disunion
is our estate eternally.
Though from my gaze profound
Deep awe hath hid Thy Face,
In wondrous and ecstatic Grace
I feel Thee touch my inmost ground.33
The emphasis on unity harks back to the
Koranic ideal of tawhid: by drawing together his dissipated self,
the mystic would experience the divine presence in personal integration.
Al-Junayd was acutely aware of the dangers of mysticism. It would be easy
for untrained people, who did not have the benefit of the advice of a pir, and the rigorous Sufi training, to misunderstand the ecstasy
of a mystic and get a very simplistic idea of what he meant when he said
that he was one with God. Extravagant claims like those of al-Bistami
would certainly arouse the ire of the establishment. At this early stage,
Sufism was very much a minority movement and the ulema often regarded
it as an inauthentic innovation. Junayd's famous pupil Husain ibn Mansur
(usually known as al-Hallaj, the Wool-Carder) threw all caution to the
winds, however, and became a martyr for his mystical faith. Roaming the Iraq, preaching the overthrow of the caliphate and the establishment
of a new social order, he was imprisoned by the authorities and crucified
like his hero, Jesus. In his ecstasy, al-Hallaj had cried aloud: 'I am
the Truth!' According to the Gospels, Jesus had made the same claim, when
he had said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Koran repeatedly
condemned the Christian belief in God's incarnation in Christ as blasphemous,
so it was not surprising that Muslims were horrified by al- Hallaj's ecstatic
cry. Al-Haqq (the Truth) was one of the names of God and it was
idolatry for any mere mortal to claim this title for himself. Al-Hallaj
had been expressing his sense of a union with God that was so close that
it felt like identity. As he said in one of his poems:
I am He whom I love, and He whom I love
is I:
We are two spirits dwelling in one body.
If thou seest me, thou seest Him,
And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both.34
Page 264
It was a daring expression of that annihilation
of self and union with God that his master al-Junayd had called fana.
AI-Hallaj refused to recant when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly
death.
When he was brought to be crucified and saw
the cross and the nails, he turned to the people and uttered a prayer,
ending with the
words: 'And these Thy servants who are gathered to slay me, in zeal for
Thy religion and in desire to win Thy favours, forgive them, O Lord, and
have mercy upon them; for verily if Thou hadst revealed to them that which
Thou hast revealed to me, they would not have done what they have done;
and if Thou hadst hidden from me that which Thou hast hidden from them,
I should not have suffered this tribulation. Glory unto Thee in whatsoever
Thou doest, and glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou willest.35
Al-Hallaj's cry ana aL-Haqq: 'I
am the Truth!' shows that the
God of the mystics is not an objective reality but profoundly subjective.
Later al-Ghazzali argued that he had not been blasphemous but only unwise
in proclaiming an esoteric truth that could be misleading to the uninitiated.
Because there is no reality but al-Lah - as the Shahadah maintains - all men are essentially divine. The Koran taught that God
had created Adam in his own image so that he could contemplate himself
as in a mirror.36 That is why he ordered
the angels to bow down and worship the first man. The mistake of the Christians
had been to assume that one man had contained the whole incarnation of
the divine, Sufis would argue. A mystic who had regained his original
vision of God had rediscovered the divine image within himself, as it
had appeared on the day of creation. The Sacred Tradition (hadith qudsi)
beloved by the Sufis shows God drawing a Muslim towards him so closely
that he seems to have become incarnate in each une of his servants: 'When
I love him, I become his Ear through which he hears, his Eye with which
he sees, his Hand with which he grasps, and his Foot with which he walks.'
The story of al-Hallaj shows the deep antagonism that can exist between
the mystic and the religious establishment who have different notions
of God and revelation. For the mystic the revelation is an event that
happens within his own soul, while for more conventional people like some
of the ulema it is an event / Page 265 /
that is firmly fixed in the past. We have seen, however, that during the
eleventh century, Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina and al- Ghazzali
himself had found that objective accounts of God were unsatisfactory and
had turned towards mysticism. AI-Ghazzali had made Sufism acceptable to
the establishment and had shown that it was the most authentic form of
Muslim spirituality. During the twelfth century the Iranian philosopher
Yahya Suhrawardi and the Spanish-born Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi linked
Islamic Falsafah indissolubly with mysticism and made the God experienced
by the Sufis nonnative in many parts of the Islamic empire. Like al-Hallaj,
however, Suhrawardi was also put to death by the ulema in Aleppo
in 1191, for reasons that remain obscure. He had made it his life's
work to link what he called the original 'Oriental' religion with Islam,
thus completing the project that Ibn Sina had proposed. He claimed that
all the sages of the ancient world had preached a single doctrine.
Originally it had been revealed to Hermes (whom Suhrawardi identified
with the prophet known as Idris in the Koran or Enoch in the Bible); in
the Greek world it had been transmitted through Plato and Pythagoras and
in the Middle East through the Zoroastrian Magi. Since Aristotle,
however, it had been obscured by a more narrowly intellectual and cerebral
philosophy but it had been secretly passed from one sage to another
until it had finally reached Suhrawardi himself via al-Bistami and al-Hallaj.
This perennial philosophy was mystical and imaginative but did not involve
the abandonment of reason. Suhrawardi was as intellectually rigorous as
al-Farabi but he also insisted on the importance of intuition in the approach
to truth. As the Koran had taught, all truth came from God and should
be sought wherever it could be found. It could be found in paganism and
Zoroastrianism as well as in the monotheistic tradition. Unlike dogmatic
religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes, mysticism often claims
that there are as many roads to God as people. Sufism in particular would
evolve an outstanding appreciation of the faith of others.
Suhrawardi is often called the Sheikh al-Ishraq or the Master
of Illumination. Like the Greeks, he experienced God in terms of light.
In Arabic, ishraq refers to the first light of dawn that issues
from the / Page 266 / East as well as to enlightenment: the Orient, therefore,
is not the geographical location but the source of light and energy. In
Suhrawardi's Oriental faith, therefore, human beings dimly remem-ber
their Origin, feeling uneasy in this world of shadow, and long to return
to their first abode. Suhrawardi claimed that his philosophy would
help Muslims to find their true orientation, to purify the eternal . wisdom
within them by means of the imagination.
Suhrawardi's immensely complex system was an attempt to link all the
religious insights of the world into a spiritual religion. Truth must
be sought wherever it could be found. Consequendy his philosophy linked
the pre-Islamic Iranian cosmology with the Ptolemaic planetary system
and the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation. Yet no other Faylasuf had ever
quoted so extensively from the Koran. When he discussed cosmology, Suhrawardi
was not primarily interested in accounting for the physical origins of
the universe. In his masterwork The Wisdom of Illumination (Hiqmat
al-lshraq), Suhrawardi began by considering problems of physics and
natural science but this was only a prelude to the mystical part of his
work. Like Ibn Sina, he had grown dissatisfied with the wholly rational
and objective orientation of Falsafah, though he did believe that rational
and metaphysical speculation had their place in the perception of total
reality. The true sage, in his opinion, excelled in both philosophy and
mysticism. There was always such a sage in the world. In a theory that
was very close to Shii Imamology, Suhrawardi believed that this spiritual
leader was the true pole (qutb) without whose presence the world
could not continue to exist, even if he remained in obscurity. Suhrawardi's
Ishraqi mysticism is stilI practised in Iran. It is an esoteric system
not because it is exclusive but because it requires spiritual and imaginative
training of the sort undergone by Ismailis and Sufis.
The Greeks, perhaps, would have said that Suhrawardi's system was dogmatic rather than kerygmatic. He was attempting to discover
the imaginative core that lay at the heart of all religion and philosophy
and, though he insisted that reason was not enough, he never denied its
right to probe the deepest mysteries. Truth had to be sought in scientific
rationalism as well as esoteric mysticism; sensibility must be educated
and informed by the critical intelligence. / Page 266 / / Page 267 / As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was
the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God. It
was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial and indefinable yet
was also the most obvious fact of life in the world: totally self-evident,
it required no definition but was perceived by everybody as the element
that made life possible. It was all-pervasive: whatever luminosity belonged
to material bodies came directly from light, a source outside themselves.
In Suhrawardi's emanationist cosmology, the Light of Lights corres-ponded
to the Necessary Being of the Faylasufs, which was utterly simple. It
generated a succession of lesser lights in a descending hierarchy; each
light, recognising its dependency on the Light of Lights, developed a
shadow-self that was the source of a material realm, which corresponded
to one of the Ptolemaic spheres. This was a metaphor of the human predicament.
There was a similar combina-tion of light and darkness within each one
of us: the light or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit
(also known, as in Ibn Sina's scheme, as the Angel Gabriel, the light
of our world). The soul longs to be united with the higher world of Lights
and, if it is properly instructed by the qutb saint of the time
or by one of his disciples, can even catch a glimpse of this here below.
Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat. He had
been obsessed with the epistemological problem of knowledge but could
make no headway: his book-learning had nothing to say to him. Then he
had a vision of the Imam, the qutb, the healer of souls:
Suddenly I was wrapped in gendeness; there was a blinding flash, then
a diaphanous light in the likeness of a human being. I watched attentively
and there he was . , . He came towards me, greeting me so kindly that
my bewilderment faded and my alarm gave way to a feeling of familiarity,
And then I began to complain to him of the trouble I had with this problem
of knowledge.
'Awaken to yourself,' he said to me, 'and your problem will be
solved,'37
The process of awakening or illumination was clearly very
different from the wrenching, violent inspiration of prophecy. It had
more in common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha: / Page
268 / "mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality into the
religions of God. Instead of a collision with a Reality without, illumination
would come from within the mystic himself. There was no imparting of facts.
Instead, the exercise of the human imagination would enable people to
return to God by introducing them to the alam al-mithal, the world
of pure images.
Suhrawardi drew upon the ancient Iranian belief in an archetypal world
by which every person and object in the getik (the mundane, physical
world) had its exact counterpart in the menok (the heavenly realm).
Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the God-religions had ostensibly
abandoned. The menok, which in Suhra-wardi's scheme became the
alam al-mithal, was now an intermediate realm that existed between
our world and God's. This could not be perceived by means of reason nor
by the senses. It was the faculty of the creative imagination which enabled
us to dis-cover the realm of hidden archetypes, just as the symbolic
interpretation of the Koran revealed its true spiritual meaning. The alam
al-mithal was close to the Ismaili perception of the spiritual history
of Islam which was the real meaning of the earthly events or Ibn Sina's
angelology, which we discussed in the last chapter. It would be crucial
to all future mystics of Islam as a way of interpreting their experiences
and visions. Suhrawardi was examining the visions that are so strikingly
similar, whether they are seen by shamans, mystics or ecstatics, in many
different cultures. There has recendy been much interest in this phenomenon.
lung's conception of the collective unconscious is a more scientific attempt
to examine this common imaginative experience of humanity. Other scholars,
such as the Rumanian- American philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade,
have attempted to show how the epics of ancient poets and certain kinds
of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights.38
Suhrawardi insisted that the visions of mystics and the symbols of Scripture
- such as Heaven, Hell, or the Last Judgement-were as real as the phenomena
we experience in this world but not in the same way. They could not be
empirically proven but could only be discerned by the trained imaginative
faculty, which enabled visionaries to see the spiritual dimension of earthly
phenomena. This experience was / Page269 / nonsensical to anybody who
had not had the requisite training, just as the Buddhist enlightenment
could only be experienced when the necessary moral and mental exercises
had been undertaken. All our thoughts, ideas, desires, dreams and visions
corresponded to realities in the alam al-mithal. The Prophet Muhammad,
for example, had awakened to this intermediate world during the Night
Vision, which had taken him to the threshold of the divine world. Suhrawardi
would also have claimed that the visions of the Jewish Throne Mystics
took place when they had learned to enter the alam al-mithal during
their spiritual exercises of concentration. The path to God, therefore,
did not lie solely through reason, as the Faylasufs had thought, but through
the creative imagination, the realm of the mystic.
Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian
suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination.
Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what
is not.39 Human beings are the only animals
who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something
that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination
has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology
as well as in art and religion. The idea of God, however it is defined,
is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt
problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years.
The only way we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the
senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbols, which it is the chief
function of the imaginative mind to interpret. Suhrawardi was attempting
an imaginative explanation of those symbols that have had a crucial influence
on human life, even though the realities to which they refer remain elusive.
A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive
with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something
other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special,
the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is
the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists,
attribute their insights. As in art, the most effective religious symbols
are those informed by an intelligent knowledge and understanding of the
human / Page 270 / condition. Suhrawardi, who wrote in extraordinarily
beautiful Arabic and was a highly skilled metaphysician, was a creative
artist as well as a mystic. Yoking apparently unrelated things together
- science with mysticism, pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion
- he was able to help Muslims create their own symbols and find new meaning
and significance in life."
7 |
ISHRAQI |
81 |
45 |
9 |
6 |
ISHRAQ |
72 |
36 |
9 |
5 |
IRAQI |
54 |
36 |
9 |
4 |
IRAQ |
45 |
27 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
8 |
DAMASCUS |
81 |
18 |
9 |
THE KINDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU
THAT THAT THAT
HOLYWHOLLYHOLY
ISISISIS
WITHIN YOU WITHIN
YOUR OWN MINDS
I
DAILY MIRROR
Jonathan Cainer
Thursday May 27, 2004
SPIRITUAL HEALING
Rupert Sheldrake
Page 54
"Last month I wrote about after death contacts,
when people feel the presence of someone who has passed on, it turns
out that many readers have had these expe-riences, mostly with dearly
loved spouses, parents or children..."
"Very few of these visits were frightening. most
were comforting or reassuring. However we try to explain them, they
certainly help the bereaved to come to terms with their loss.
Suprisingly some dead pets seem to pay visits too. Janine said: "Early one early morning, after my cat died, she was standing
on my chest as she used to do..."
DAILY MIRROR
Thursday May 27, 2004
Geoffrey Lakeman
Page 35
SLABBY CAT
Pet's tombstone is 900-yr old carving
"A huge stone used to mark a beloved pet cats
grave has been identified as a rare 11th-century carving. Amateur
historian and potter Chris Brewchorne stumbled on the eight stone slab
in the garden of a house near his gallery.
Expert Prof Rosemary Cramp says the carving of St Peter
is one of the most important medieval pieces found in Britain.
Mr. Brewchorne, 44, of Dowlish Wake, Somerset, said: "You
do not find top-quality 11th century stonework like this on top of a
dead cat. It is remarkable. I would think it is worth many
thousands. You can't buy this sort of thing at a car boot sale."
The owner's late husband was a stonemason who bought the
carving, now thought to come from a frieze in a Saxon church, among
a job lot.
He realised it was too good to use so for nine years it has marked Winkle's grave."
JUST CATS
Fernand Mery 1957
Page 24
"In the year 999, in the tenth day of the
Fifth Moon,
at the Imperial Palace of Kyoto, a cat gave birth for
the first time recorded here, and to five little kittens."
IN THE YEAR
999
GREAT CAT TALES
Anthology
1992
THE CHESHIRE CAT
Lewis Carroll
Page 349 (number omitted)
"...The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice.
It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and
a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
"Cheshire -Puss,' she began rather timidly,
as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however it
only grinned a little wider.'Come, it's pleased so far, 'thought Alice,
and she went on. 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go
from here?'
That depends a good deal on where you want to get
to, said the cat,' said the Cat.
I dont care where-'said Alice.
Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the
Cat..."
THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE
Sir Arthur Eddington 1932
Page
99
To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an
incidental characteristic-like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the
physicist it is an indispensible character-istic, It would be going
too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to
the grin.
Physics is concerned with interrelatedness of cats
and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin
without a cat"
are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies"
GREAT CAT TALES
Anthology
1992
THE CHESHIRE CAT
Lewis Carroll
Page 351
"All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished
quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with
the grin, which waited some time after the rest of it had gone.
'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought
Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever
saw in all my life!..."
GREAT CAT TALES
Anthology
1992
Mike
Ernest A.Wallace Budge
Page 383 / 4
"(The cat who assisted in keeping the main gate
of the British Museum from February, 1909, to January 1929)"
"...Early in the spring of 1908 the Keeper of
the mum-/ mies in the British Museum was going down the steps of his
official residence, when he saw Black Jack coming towards the steps..."
"...The Keeper of the Mummied Cats took care
to feed him during the lean years of the war..."
SUPERNATURE
Lyall Watson
Page 96
RESONANCE
If a tuning fork designed to produce a frequency of 256 cycles a second
(that is, middle C), is sounded anywhere near another fork with the
same natural frequency, the second one will begin to vibrate gendy in
sympathy with the first, even without being touched. Energy has been
transferred from one to the other. An insect without ears would not
be able to hear the sound of the first fork, but if it were sitting
on the second one, it would very soon become aware of the vibration
- and thus of events taking place beyond its normal sphere. This is
what Supernature is all about.
An event in the cosmos sets up the vibration of electromag- netic waves,
which travel across space and create an equiva-lent vibration by resonance
with some part of earth that has the same natural frequency. Life may
respond to these stimuli direcdy, but more often it reacts by resonating
in sympathy with part of its immediate environment. A flashing light
on the same frequency as a brain rhythu} produces resonance and alarming
effects, even though the flicker may be too fast for us to see. A very
weak electrical or magnetic field becomes noticeable because it resonates
on the same frequency as the life field of the organism reacting to
it. In this :way, very subtle stimuli, too small to make any impression
on the normal senses, are magnified and brought to our notice. The super-natural
becomes part of natural history.
In most musical instruments, sound is produced by strings, stretched
membranes, rods, or reeds, and an important part of all of them is a
structure that increases the area of contact these vibrators have with
the air. A guitar string has a sound- ing box and a clarinet reed has
a pipe. The shape of the / Page 97 / structure detennines the way in
which the air will resonate and the quality of the sound. Shape and
function are very closely related, not only for the sender of the signal
but also for the receiver. If the listener is to hear the soufid properly,
he cannot sit in a room of the wrong shape or wear a football
helmet.
Ultimately, sensitivity to sound depends on vibrations being set up
in the fluid of the inner ear, but the sound first has to be collected
by the external ear. In man, the passage between the eardrum and the
outside world is funnel-shaped, with the walls making an angle of about
30 degrees to the drum. This is exactly the angle best suited to magnification
of sounds in the critical range. The most popular, and therefore presumably
the most effective, old-fashioned ear trumpet is one that also has this
angle of 30 degrees. This could be just coincidence, but I doubt it.
Sound, of course, is a vibration that can be conducted only through
an elastic medium; it cannot travel through a vacuum. Electromagnetic
waves do travel through free space, and we know far less about the factors
governing their resonance. There is, however, one quite extraordinary
piece of evidence which suggests that shape could be important in receiving
even cosmic stimuli. It comes from those favorites of mystics throughout
the ages-the pyramids of Egypt.
The pyramids on the west bank of the Nile were built by the pharaohs
as royal tombs and date from about 3000 B.c. The most celebrated are
those at Giza, built during the fourth dynasty, of which the largest
is the one that housed the pharaoh Khufu, better known as Cheops; This
is now called the Great Pyramid. Some years ago it was visited by a
Frenchman named Bovis, who took refuge from the midday sun in the pharoah's
chamber, which is situated in the center rof the pyramid, exactly one"
third of the way up from the base. He found it unusually humid there,
but what really surprised / Page 98 / him were
the garbage cans that contained, among the usual tourist litter, the
bodies of a cat and some small desert ani-mals that had wandered
into the pyramid and died there. .
Despite the humidity, none of them had decayed but just dried out like
mummies. He began to wonder whether the pharaohs had really been so
carefully embalmed by their sub-jects after all, or whether there was
something about the pyramids themselves that preserved bodies .in a
mummified condition.
Bovis made an accurate scale model of the Cheops pyramid and placed
it, like the original, with the base lines facing precisely north-south
and east-west. Inside the model, one third of the way up, he put a dead
cat. It became mummified, and he concluded that the pyramid promoted
rapid dehy-dration. Reports of this discovery attracted the attention
of Karel Drbal, a radio engineer in Prague, who repeated the
experiment with several dead animals and concluded, "There is a
relation between the shape of the space inside the pyramid and the physical,
chemical, and biological processes going on inside that space. By using
suitable forms and shapes, we should be able to make processes occur
faster or delay them." (233) Drbal remembered an old superstition
which claimed that a razor left in the light of the moon became blunted.
He tried putting one under his model pyramid, but nothing happened,
so he went on shaving with it until it was blunt, and then put it back
in the pyramid. It became sharp again. Getting a good razor blade is
still difficult in many Eastern European countries, so Drbal tried to
patent and market his discovery. The patent office in Prague refused
to consider it until their chief scientist had tried building a model
himself and found that it worked. So the Cheops Pyramid Razor Blade
Sharpener was registered in 1959 under the Czechoslovakian Republic
Patent No. 913°4, and a factory soon began to turn out / Page 99 miniature
cardboard pyramids. Today they make them in styrofoam.
The edge of a razor blade has a crystal structure. Crystals are almost
alive, in that they grow by reproducing themselves. When a blade becomes
blunted, some of the crystals on the edge, where they are only one layer
thick, are rubbed off. Theoretically, there is no reason why they should
not replace themselves in time. We know that sunlight has a field that
points in all directions, but sunlight reflected from an object such
as the moon is partly polarized, vibrating mostly in one direction.
This could conceivably destroy the edge of a blade left under the moon,
but it does not explain the reverse action of the pyramid. We can only
guess that the Great Pyramid and its little imitations act as lenses
that focus energy or as resonators that collect enetgy, which encourages
crystal growth. The pyramid shape itself is very much like that of a
crystal of magnetite, so perhaps it builds up a magnetic field. I do
not know the answer, but I do know that it works.
JUST CATS
Fernand Mery
FROM LEGEND TO HISTORY
"By studying Egyptian mummified cats
Cuvier thought it possible to prove that the species is immutable. On
the other hand, Darwin, by taking a cat to Paraguay, proved how'little
change is needed to alter an animal to the point of giving it a new
form.
Can this be the answer, then? An abrupt mutation? The sudden appearance
of an arbitrary form of dwarfish- ness in a species of African panther
affected by some little-known phenomena? A mutation which, becoming
hereditary, gave rise to the cat, to be gradually tamed and domesticated
by the Nubians and the Egyptians?
This theory would be tempting indeed but for one detail: the difference
in the pupillary opening, round in all other felines and oval in the
cat. However, we may note, that famous "pupillary crack ,"
is not altogether special to the one genus: it is also found in the
civet-cat, a pleasant creature which is readily domesticated-like a
cat!
EGYPT, PARADISE OF CATS
What do we know of ancient Egypt, a shadowy
country beginning at Karnak in the midst of the temples of Thebes and
reaching its apotheosis in the sombre tombs of the Valley of Kings?
The gods, with human bowes and / Page 18 / animal heads, expressed by
their strange form the limita-tions of a world to which the minds of
mere men had no access.
Egypt is the logical background in which to search for a trace, a detail,
that may help the researcher in his delv- ings into the history of the
civilized cat.
I have visited the remains of Ancient Egypt. The most vivid reproduction
of cats are on the tomb of the sculptors Apuki and Nebamun at Thebes
and date from the reign of Amenophis III; also in the temple of Medineth-Abou,
on the bas-reliefs dedicated to hunting. In these the cats are represented
as taller, larger and with longer lines than our most highly-bred Siameses
of today, and more often than not are on leads for hunting the aquatic
marsh-birds for their masters.
Were they brown or black? Uniformly coloured or spotted? Ringed or striped,
these cats, so highly prized that their masters went into mourning when
one of them died? Indeed, the killing of these cats was punishable by
death. They were so much admired that from Mem-phis to Thebes the most
sought-after women, the most successful courtesans, were those whose
eyes had the colour and shape of a cat's, and whose figure and bearing
had a cat's suppleness.
We cannot, of course, be certain about the simple facts of the appearance
of these cats.
There exists at the British Museum a painting from Thebes, in which
the cat is represented as a somewhat irregularly striped tiger; but
there have also come down to us pictures of cats on papyrus, where the
animal, coloured evenly, is just slightly marked with streaks half-
way up the paws and a third of the way along the tail. The cats of Bubastis,
of Hahbe Antar, of Arthemidos, have shed no further light on this problem.
Scarcely sixty years ago, a discovery was made in Central Egypt, at
Beni Hassan, of an actual cemetery where 300,000 embalmed and mummified
cats had been sleeping for thousands of years.
Page 19
No archaeologist was on the spot to prevent
the inevit-able vandalism; stupidly the graveyard was destroyed- an
irreparable loss. It would have been enough to have kept just a random
hundred of these cats for us to know now what the colouring and texture
of the hair of these first cats were. By taking an average, we should
have gained an approximate idea of their size.
By a wild combination of circumstances, this mass of cats was thrown
into the hold of a ship departing for England-later to be sold as manure!
Professor W. M. Conway, in the English Illustrated Magazine of
the time, wrote down all the details of this unpardonable crime. Twenty
tons of Egyptian cats in an admirable state of preservation were transported
to Liverpool, and almost all sold to farmers at £4 per ton, to be mixed
into the English soil as though they were mere dung.
Undoubtedly there are in existence some damaged or half-destroyed mummies,
the scientific value of which is not realized. It can only be hoped
that one day some interested specialist may be able to buy and study
them, so throwing some light on the question. Before the 1914 war, Dr.
Ehrenburg and an anatomist, de Blainville, tried in vain. After performing
autopsies on several mummified cats and analysing the kind of cloths
in which they were bound, etc., they concluded that these were Abyssinian
cats. At Cairo we found only one tomb, an empty sarco- phagus of stone:
that of a cat commemorated by its master, the chief of the Order of
Architects, who had his own name engraved in his companion's epitaph.
When one considers that an entire city, situated between the branches
of the Nile off the present-'day Benha-el-Asl on the railway line from
Ismailia to Cairo, was once dedi-cated to cats, one is surprised to
learn that today cats are rare in Egypt. Certainly one sees memorials
of them everywhere, but often confused with the various effigies of
other, indeterminate felines.
Is it a cat or a lion, that overwhelming statue of Sekmet with the splendid
body of a woman, which leaps out from / Page 20 / its obscure background?
For counterpart it has Bastet, a milder but equally disturbing figure.
The one is terrify-ing, the other on the surface reassuring; but the
dividing line is not quite clear between the savage beast and the charming
little cat.
Elsewhere we find the same confusion between goats and rams, jackals
and wolves, wolves and dogs even. And as Ancient Egypt has left no document
comparable to the Bible or the Koran, there is nowhere to trace exact
infor-mation or references.
Only those statues which are completely, in both head and body, of cats
can help to give a picture of the Ancient Egyptian domestic cat. All
proportions being similar, this type of the statues resembles that most
friendly and tameable feline: the cheetah. Aesthetically only the cheetah-if
it had retractile claws, that is-is the counter- part of these statues.
The lion or the tiger, with their larger, flatter muzzles, never ha~
that loose frame, those paws with long and solid toes, that comparatively
narrow chest between very straight shoulders, and that serpentine head.
But Ancient Egypt was only yesterday, comparatively speaking. What after
all are two or three thousand years in the evolution of a species? The
domestic cat seems a comparative newcomer, when one considers that the
dog has been man's companion since our first ancestors so many hundreds
of thousands of years ago.
All we know is that from his first appearance in Ancient Egypt the cat
became a veritable godhead, the sacred host in all his glory. A male
cat was held to be the ally of the sun and the scourge of Apopi, serpent
of night. A female was beloved of the common people and regarded as
a Lady of Heaven.
This astonishing ascendancy lasted for nearly a thousand years, up to
the period of decadence, the collapse of the dynasty of the Pharaohs,
and the birth of the Christian religion. The new Faith cast a dazzling
enlightenment, but Page 21 / consigned the cat to perpetual darkness
and the most tragic of destinies.
IN SEARCH OF SCHRODINGER'S CAT
John Gribbin
1984
PROLOGUE
NOTHING IS REAL
Page 1
"The cat of our title is a mythical
beast, but Schrodinger was a real person. Erwin Schrodinger was an Austrian
scientist instrumental in the development, in the mid-1920s, of the
equations of a branch of science now known as quantum mechanics. Branch
of science is hardly the correct expres-sion, however, because quantum
mechanics provides the fundamental underpinning of all of modem science.
The equations describe the behavior of very small objects-gen-erally
speaking, the size of atoms or smaller-and they provide the only understanding
of the world of the very small. Without these equations, physicists
would be unable to design working nuclear power stations (or bombs),
build lasers, or explain how the sun stays hot. Without quantum mechanics,
chemistry would still be in the Dark Ages, and there would be no science
of molecular biology-no under- standing of DNA, no genetic engineering-at
all.
Quantum theory represents the greatest achievement of science, far more
significant and of far more direct, prac- / Page 2 / tical use than
relativity theory. And yet, it makes some very strange predictions.
The world of quantum mechanics is so strange, indeed, that even Albert
Einstein found it in-comprehensible, and refused to accept all of the
implica-tions of the theory developed by Schrodinger and his colleagues.
Einstein, and many other scientists, found it more comfortable to believe
that the equations of quantum mechanics simply represent some sort of
mathematical trick, which just happens to give a reasonable working
guide to the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles but that conceals
some deeper truth that corresponds more closely to our everyday sense
of reality. For what quantum mechanics says is that nothing is real
and that we cannot say anything about what things are doing when we
are not looking at them. Schrodinger's mythical cat was invoked to make
the differences between the quantum world and the everyday world clear.
In the world of quantum mechanics, the laws of phys ics that are
familiar from the everyday world no longer work. Instead, events are
governed by probabilities. A radio-active atom, for example, might
decay, emitting an electron, say; or it might not. It is possible to
set up an experiment in such a way that there is a precise fifty-fifty
chance that one of the atoms in a lump of radioactive material will
decay in a certain time and that a detector will register the decay
if it does happen. Schrodinger, as upset as Einstein about the implications
of quantum theory, tried to show the absurdity of those implications
by imagining such an experiment set up in a closed room, or box, which
also contains a live cat and a phial of poison, so arranged that if
the radioactive decay does occur then the poison container is broken
and the cat dies. In the everyday world, there is a fifty-fifty chance
that the cat will be killed, and without looking in- side the box we
can say, quite happily, that the cat inside is either dead or alive.
But now we encounter the strangeness of the quantum world. According
to the theory, neither of the two possibilities open to the radioactive
material, and therefore to the cat, has any reality unless it is observed. The atomic decay has neither happened nor not happened, the cat has
neither been killed nor not killed, until we look / Page 3 / inside
the box to see what has happened. Theorists who accept the pure version
of quantum mechanics say that the cat exists in some indeterminate state,
neither dead nor alive, until an observer looks into the box to see
how things are getting on. Nothing is real unless it is observed.
The idea was anathema to Einstein, among others. "God does not
play dice," he said, referring to the theory that the world
is governed by the accumulation of outcomes of essentially random "choices"
of possibilities at the quan- tum level. As for the unreality of the
state of Schrodinger's cat, he dismissed it, assuming that there must
be some un-derlying "clockwork" that makes for a genuine fundamen-
tal reality of things. He spent many years attempting to devise tests
that might reveal this underlying reality at work but died before it
became possible actually to carry out such a test. Perhaps it is as
well that he did not live to see the outcome of one line of reasoning
that he initiated.
In the summer of 1982, at the University of Paris- South, in France,
a team headed by Alain Aspect completed a series of experiments designed
to detect the underlying reality below the unreal world of the quantum.
The under-lying reality-the fundamental clockwork-had been given the
name "hidden variables," and the experiment con-cerned the
behavior of two photons or particles of light fly- ing off in opposite
directions from a source. It is described fully in Chapter Ten, but
in essence it can be thought of as a test of reality. The two photons
from the same source can be observed by two detectors, which measure
a property called polarization. According to quantum theory, this prop-erty
does not exist until it is measured. According to the hidden-variable
idea, each photon has a "real" polarization from the
moment it is created. Because the two photons are emitted together,
their polarizations are correlated with one another. But the nature
of the correlation that is actually measured is different according
to the two views of reality.
The results of this crucial experiment are unam- biguous. The kind of
correlation predicted by hidden-variable theory is not found; the kind
of correlation pre- dicted by quantum mechanics is found, and what is
more, again as predicted by quantum theory, the measurement / Page 4
/ that is made on one photon has an instantaneous effect on the nature
of the other photon. Some interaction links the two inextricably, even
though they are flying apart at the speed of light, and relativity theory
tells us that no signal can travel faster than light. The experiments
prove that there is no underlying reality to the world. "Reality," in the everyday sense, is not a good way to think about the be- havior
of the fundamental particles that make up the uni-verse; yet at the
same time those particles seem to be inseparably connected into some
indivisible whole, each aware of what happens to the others.
The search for Schrodinger's cat was the search
for quantum reality.. From this brief outline, it may seem that the
search has proved fruitless, since there is no reality in the everyday
sense of the word. But this is not quite the end of the story, and the
search for Schrodinger's cat may lead us to a new understanding of reality
that transcends, and yet includes, the conventional interpretation of
quantum mechanics. The trail is a long one, however, and it begins with
a scientist who would probably have been even more horrified than Einstein if he could have seen the answers we now have to the questions he puzzled
over. Isaac New-ton, studying the nature of light three centuries ago,
could have had no conception that he was already on the trail leading
to Schrodinger's cat.
4 |
REAL |
36 |
18 |
9 |
7 |
REALITY |
90 |
36 |
9 |
7 |
PHYSICS |
99 |
36 |
9 |
14 |
ALBERT + EINSTEIN |
153 |
63 |
9 |
13 |
ATOMIC + NUMBERS |
153 |
54 |
9 |
14 |
PHARAOH + PYRAMID |
153 |
81 |
9 |
THE COSMIC CODE
Heinz Pagels
1982
The Road to Quantum Reality
Page165
"That we may not always know reality is not because it is so far
from us but because we are so close to it."
We feel excited by his remarks, though the old uneasi-ness has not left
us. Yet listening to him is certainly better than that marketplace.
After a long silence our old friend gives us his final words. "What
quantum reality is, is the reality marketplace. The house of a God that
plays dice has many rooms. We can live in only one room at a time, but
it is the whole house that is reality."He gets up and leaves us.
Only the smoke from his pipe remains, and then,
like the smile of
the Cheshire cat, that too disappears."
I
ME
ENTANGLEMENTS
Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
Quantum entanglement
Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. This leads to correlations between observable physical properties of the systems. For example, it is possible to prepare two particles in a single quantum state such that when one is observed to be spin-up, the other one will always be observed to be spin-down and vice versa, this despite the fact that it is impossible to predict, according to quantum mechanics, which set of measurements will be observed. As a result, measurements performed on one system seem to be instantaneously influencing other systems entangled with it. But quantum entanglement does not enable the transmission of classical information faster than the speed of light (see discussion in next section below).
Quantum entanglement applications in the emerging technologies of quantum computing and quantum cryptography, and has been used to realize quantum teleportation experimentally. At the same time, it prompts some of the more philosophically oriented discussions concerning quantum theory. The correlations predicted by quantum mechanics, and observed in experiment, reject the principle of local realism , which is that information about the state of a system should only be mediated by interactions in its immediate surroundings. Different views of what is actually occurring in the process of quantum entanglement can be related to different interpretations of quantum mechanics.
DOES GOD PLAY DICE
THE NEW MATHEMATICS OF CHAOS
Ian Stewart 1989
Page 1
PROLOGUE
CLOCKWORK OR CHAOS?
"YOU BELIEVE IN A GOD WHO PLAYS DICE, AND I IN COMPLETE LAW AND ORDER."
Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born