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Category: New Science/Consciousness

  • The Incredibly Strange Story of Intelligent Design

    The Incredibly Strange Story of Intelligent Design

    From New Dawn 97 (Jul-Aug 2006)

    Children in Ohio may be taught life was created by aliens under an education package designed to ditch Darwin’s Theory of evolution. The US state is considering adopting the “intelligent design” theory that life is too complex to have simply evolved – as the Darwin Theory suggests. Therefore says the package, life must have been designed by some supernatural being, maybe God, maybe aliens.
    – Herald Sun, Columbus, Ohio, March 2002

    Intelligent Design (ID) theory is a highly speculative philosophical argument, popular in recent years, which holds that rich diversity of species on the planet Earth is best understood as evidence of divine (or alien) intervention in terrestrial life.

    In a nutshell, ID argues that the Earth is too young, and life too complex for fish, animals and birds to have evolved through natural selection; instead, we must look for a supernatural cause.

    Professional scientists object to ID theory on the grounds that it can’t be proven, and so falls outside the domain of science; ID proponents have responded by taking their case directly to the public with a political campaign called “teach the controversy.”

    The “teach the controversy” campaign makes scientists (especially those who depend on public funding) nervous, and with good reason – the ultimate goal of the ID movement, as leading spokesmen frankly admit, is to discard the scientific method altogether and “win back” Western culture for the Biblical creator god.

    What makes this situation so especially interesting is the fact that leading ID theorists have positioned themselves as intellectual “heretics” struggling against the gatekeepers of scientific “orthodoxy.”

    Of course, the idea that ID could actually be taught alongside evolution in public schools has provoked an unprecedented tsunami of scorn from these same, self-appointed gatekeepers. “ID isn’t science!” they object. “If we teach ID, then why not teach students that the Moon is made out of green cheese, or that storks deliver babies?”

    I would like to respectfully suggest that children’s stories like the ones I’ve just mentioned aren’t the best analogies for ID theory. A better example might be the Anthropic Principle (AP), a closely related line of speculative reasoning which holds that the Universe itself is so complex and so improbable that it, too, requires special explanation. (We might also note that evangelical Christians are especially fond of AP in its “strong” form, which suggests that our Universe was “fine-tuned” for life by a god-like being.)

    Unfortunately for Christian culture warriors, neither of these remarkable notions ultimately supports the old-fashioned idea that life, the Universe and everything represent the singular creations of a perfect, rational Supreme being. (In its totalising singularity, the Genesis metanarrative differs little from the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution scenarios which comprise the “origins story” of the industrialised West).

    Rather, ID theory and the Anthropic Principle – and especially their corollary mechanisms panspermia and simulation – seem to reveal the handiwork of multiple, incompetent creators who were themselves created by yet more incompetent creators in another Universe, and so on, extending backwards in time and space to a point of infinite regress.

    To put it bluntly: AP and ID do not somehow “prove” the case for the Bible; instead, they unavoidably and inevitably lead us back to a time and place even earlier and more primal than Genesis itself, back to the myths and theological speculations of the ancient Gnostic Christians.

    GNOSTICISM: A QUICK INTRODUCTION

    What historians today call “Gnosticism” was once a broad and diverse movement within pre-Catholic Christianity – an anarchic assemblage of hundreds of different schools of mystical theology whose adherents proudly produced reams of elaborate, florid, and highly speculative re-interpretations of Biblical scripture.

    While no one doctrine united all Gnostic Christians, they did hold certain beliefs in common; perhaps the most shocking of these was the idea that the Old Testament creator God Yahweh was actually the Demiurge, a monstrous deity born from the shadow of infinity who fled the divine world to build our Universe in a misbegotten experiment.

    This Demiurge, the story goes, created for himself assistants – bumbling fallen angels called “archons” – and these in turn created the Earth, humanity, and seven heavens which encase and enclose our planet like so many cosmic prison walls.

    In a version of the myth popularised by 2nd century Gnostic theologian Basilides, the archons generated not just seven, but 365 heavenly realms in sequence, nested one inside the other like the rings of an electron – each successive layer just slightly more defective than the one which produced and preceded it, and all populated by arrogant creator gods completely unaware of those who came before them.

    French heresy-hunter St. Irenaeus invokes these strange stories in an attempt to refute the idea there is another heaven above heaven, and another god above “God”; for if gods produce gods who create heavens filled with yet more world-creating gods, then where does it all stop?

    …by that very process of reasoning on which they [Gnostic Christians] depend for teaching that there is a… God above the Creator of heaven and earth, any one who chooses to employ it may maintain that there is another [heaven] above [heaven and] above that again another… flowing out into… worlds without limits, and gods that cannot be numbered… so that the formation of heavens of this kind can never cease… the operation must go on ad infinitum…1

    The Gnostic version of the Adam and Eve myth also differs radically from the Biblical one, presenting the Garden of Eden as a shabby laboratory where the “archons” built Adam from blurry blueprints, botching his brain and body almost beyond repair:

    The (first) human being… was a creation of angels [but was] unable to stand erect because of the angels’ impotence, and rather writhed on the ground like a worm….2

    Even after the Eden fiasco, the archons continued to tamper with the human gene pool, raping Eve, drowning Adam’s descendants in a flood, and descending to the Earth to impregnate the survivors with half-human hybrids.

    As we shall see, the ID and AP theories so beloved of contemporary apologists have far more in common with the open, flawed and multiple processes described here than with anything even remotely resembling the Biblical creation account; or, as one Gnostic scribe observed waggishly:

    For Adam was a laughingstock, since he was made a counterfeit type of man by the Rulers.3

    ID THEORY MADE SIMPLE

    The basic idea behind ID is that life and its component parts display something called “irreducible complexity.” This means that living systems (plants, animals, people) are so complicated that they could not possibly have arrived at their present forms through evolution – instead, new species must have been deliberately planned and introduced to the planet by some sort of godlike being.

    Inanimate objects such as televisions, microwave ovens or wristwatches illustrate this principle. If we can admit that these devices show evidence of planning and design, and are unlikely to have emerged from chance alone, then shouldn’t we admit the same of the human eye?

    Like the watch, the eye seems so perfectly engineered that it’s difficult to imagine how it could have evolved in stages over time. Remove any one of its parts, ID theorists point out, and it would dim, blur, or even become completely useless.

    Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this line of reasoning, at least from the Biblical perspective. For one thing, if organs and species are so complex that they require an “intelligent designer,” then wouldn’t this “designer,” too, be at least as complex as its creations, and so require a designer of its own? And wouldn’t that intelligent designer also require a designer, and so too its designer, ad infinitum?

    UNINTELLIGENT DESIGN

    A second problem with the “eye” example is the fact that the human retina tends to detach from the optic nerve over time, leading to blindness; if this is evidence of “Intelligent Design,” then our “Intelligent Designer” is clumsy at best and malicious at worst.

    Other widely remarked-upon flaws4 in the design of the human body include:

    • high placement of the larynx, facilitating choking
    • thin spinal discs between the vertebrae which degenerate under pressure, causing crippling back pain
    • a small pelvis makes childbirth difficult and often fatal for women
    • a weak, vulnerable stomach unprotected by ribs

    Of course, evidence of sub-optimal design in itself does not prove that “Intelligent Design” did not occur; it may instead demonstrate the purposeful engineering of planned obsolescence.

    Or it may be that these seeming flaws are part of the Intelligent Designer’s secret plan to give humans the opportunity to improve themselves. Consider the German artist Gunther von Hagens’ plan to build a “super-human” using the donated body parts of terminally ill patients. Why and how?

    The programme aims to identify and correct the significant design flaws in human anatomy. The body will be modified by Professor von Hagens and leading biologists, surgeons and mechanical engineers into an “improved” human form. Ideas already put forward include:

    • increase the number of ribs to protect internal organs better
    • create backward-bending knees to lessen wear on joints
    • rearrange the trachea and oesophagus to stop food going down the windpipe by mistake
    • double heart or reconstruction of the coronary arteries
    • make a retractable penis

    Professor von Hagens claims that his Protean monster will “pave the way for a more healthy, capable and longer-living body. What we do with a real human body today will show what we can achieve in the future using genetic engineering.”5

    MULTIPLE DESIGNERS THEORY

    Von Hagens’ team of assistants illustrate another unstated premise of popular ID theory, to wit: why do ID proponents always seem to assume there was only one designer?

    If evolution fails as an explanation for the rich diversity of species on the planet Earth, then why not posit a rich diversity of designers?

    Science writer Richard Hoppe finds such a scenario not only possible but likely, noting that:

    …Some of the most impressive and elaborate designs in biology appear to have as their primary purpose the defeat or subversion of other designs. Designs engage in various kinds of biological arms races with one another. Some examples are:

    • Predator/prey arms races.

    • Parasite/host arms races.

    • Male/female arms races.

    • Disease-causing bacteria/drug companies arms races.

    Each of these is an example of design pitted against design, directly implicating multiple designers.6

    In fact, scientists have long known that the human body hosts a wide variety of foreign flora and fauna; as a recent Wired news story entitled “People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid” notes:

    We are best viewed as walking “superorganisms,” highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses… More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.7

    “Which came first, the intestine or the tapeworm?” W.S. Burroughs once asked.

    If Hoppe’s “Multiple Intelligent Designers” theory is correct, the tapeworm, the intestine, mitochondria, bacteria, fungi and perhaps even the human brain and body were produced by completely separate beings – limited and imperfect creators with varying levels of skill competing against one another for ecological dominance.

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    ALIENS AMONG US

    ID theory continues to excite evangelical Christians, but there are even more signs that their enthusiasm may be misplaced, and for reasons much more serious than built-in flaws or design by committee.

    In short, if they accept this “Intelligent Designer,” then what guarantee do they have that it (or they) will be gods at all?

    Leading ID theorist Bill Dembski (of Baylor University) isn’t exactly sure. According to a recent article in the American Spectator:

    The intelligent design that Dembski hopes to detect could belong either to a Biblical God or to an earlier race of Martians who planted us here (like in the movie Mission to Mars).

    The idea that the Earth was deliberately “seeded” with life by extraterrestrial scientists “may seem pretty far out,” the article concedes. “But Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of DNA’s structure, is one of a number of scientists who have seriously promoted the ‘panspermia’ hypothesis…”8

    The ancient Gnostics were vitalists, holding that all life springs from a single, unseen animating principle; the Gnostic teacher Basilides referred to this original life source as the “universal seed,” or “panspermia.”

    Today, scientists use the term “panspermia” to describe the theory that life is not native to the Earth, but was instead brought here by an alien spore or virus. Part of the appeal of this idea lies in the fact it doesn’t try to answer how life first emerged from non-living matter; given our vast – perhaps infinite – Universe, the most likely scenario is that life first emerged somewhere else and then “infected” our relatively youthful planet only recently.

    Numerous vehicles for this “infection” have been proposed, from meteorites and sunbeams to interstellar clouds; perhaps the most distasteful was suggested by Thomas Gold of Cornell University, who famously wondered if the Earth life began when our planet was contaminated with microbes from the discarded remnants of an extraterrestrial picnic!

    CRICK’S CLONES

    Francis Crick agreed with the basic premise of panspermia – the idea that the Earth was probably “infected” with life – but wondered at the mechanism; wasn’t the passive spread of life from planet to planet by natural, accidental causes almost as unlikely as abiogenesis (the spontaneous production of life from non-living matter – the conventional scientific explanation)?

    Isn’t it much more likely that an extraterrestrial civilisation seeded our planet with life deliberately?

    Terming his model Directed Panspermia, Crick suggested that a “spaceship” carrying “large samples of… microorganisms” was sent to the Earth billions of years ago by an extraterrestrial civilisation – either as an experiment, preparation for colonisation or a genetic Noah’s Ark of some sort.9

    Or, as Fortean researchers Alan and Sally Landsburg put it:

    The DNA molecule is a marvel of microminiaturisation. All of the DNA in every cell of every living creature on Earth could be packed into one container no bigger than a pea. Thus it could be possible to ship to distant planets the distilled essence of entire colonies, stored in tiny packets. The DNA molecules need be activated only at the appropriate moment, thereby providing enormous savings both in shipping weight and in cost.10

    Sir Frederick Hoyle (the British astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang”) and his student Chandra Wickramasinghe have proposed an even stranger version of the Directed Panspermia model; in the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe view, life originated with (and continues to evolve from) showers of viruses from outer space:

    …life on Earth is derived from what appears to be an all pervasive galaxy-wide living system. Terrestrial life had its origins in the gas and dust clouds of space, which later became incorporated in and amplified within comets. Life was derived from and continues to be driven by sources outside the Earth…11

    What makes the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe model so remarkable is that it seeks to replace random genetic variation as a primary evolutionary mechanism; according to Wickramasinghe, “every crucial new inheritable property” that occurs in the animal kingdom “must have an external cosmic origin.”

    Viruses, although often bad for the individual, are in the view of Sir Fred Hoyle and myself of paramount importance to the evolution for species on our planet. They carry with them the store of cosmic genetic information needed for the generation of new species, classes and orders, and for the progressive forward march of life…12

    “If the Earth were sealed off from all sources of external genes: bugs could replicate till doomsday,” Wickramasinghe writes, “but they would still only be bugs: and monkey colonies would also reproduce but only to produce more monkeys. The Earth would be a dull place indeed…”13

    In other words, not only did aliens first infect the Earth with life, but they also make evolution possible by supplying terrestrial species with new genetic material for natural selection to act upon!

    Sir Hoyle didn’t believe that these viruses fell by chance; instead life itself was the result of an alien experiment:

    The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 naughts after it… It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.14

    Sir Hoyle seems to have betrayed at least some misgivings about the implications of these ideas, warning in a 1971 press conference that:

    Human beings are simply pawns in the game of alien minds that control our every move. They are everywhere, in the sky, on the sea, and in the Earth… It is not an alien intelligence from another planet. It is actually from another Universe which entered ours at the very beginning and has been controlling all that has happened since…15

    CAVEATS & PARADOXES

    For all its strengths, the panspermia hypothesis still does not actually tell us how or where life first arose, instead shuffling this question off to a distant realm of mystery and paradox into which we cannot hope to peer. As one Christian critic wonders:

    ..If for the sake of argument we grant that life on Earth was seeded by ancient extraterrestrials, then the obvious question is, Who or what created our extraterrestrial creators? Some would argue that they were, in turn sprinkled (created) by an even more ancient race of ET’s. Well, where did they come from? An infinite regression back in time of “alien sprinklings”…[?]16

    Since ID doesn’t distinguish between gods and extraterrestrials, and the activities of gods are by definition something that can’t be tested or measured, we have only a few, very limited avenues of inquiry left.

    Perhaps human beings were designed by multiple, incompetent creator gods (or one expert mischievously posing as a family of blunderers) – but if so, human beings will never be able to verify this supernatural creator(s) existence.

    Sadly, the metaphysical status of ghosts, spirits, gods and other supernatural beings means that these will always be compelled to hover just beyond the explanatory grasp of human science.

    On the other hand, researchers still can’t produce any evidence for the existence of (presumably physical and biological) extraterrestrial entities despite over 50 years of investigation – so until they do, the only way we can even hope to learn whether panspermia (and thus ID) might explain our own existence is by attempting to replicate the experiment ourselves.

    To wit: if human scientists ever succeed (either deliberately or accidentally) in “infecting” another planet with terrestrial bacteria or viruses, or in genetically engineering an entirely new species and introducing it to the wild, then ID will stand validated and our own role and history on this planet will suddenly come into sharp focus.

    Or, as Israeli researcher Zecharia Sitchin once put it:

    I feel that just as they (extraterrestrials) came to Earth and created us through genetic engineering, and mixed their genes with those of Ape-woman, that one day we will go out in space and land on another planet somewhere and do the same thing. In this sense, I believe things are ordained in a grand pattern…17

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    Footnotes:

    1. Irenaeus, Against all Heresies, http://ccel.wheaton.edu/fathers/ANF-01/iren/iren2.html
    2. Satorninos, according to St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, from Bentley Layton’s The Gnostic Scriptures, pp. 161-62, 1987
    3. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, from James M. Robinson’s The Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 363-71, 1978
    4. Massimo Pigliucci, “Design Yes, Intelligent No: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory and Neo-Creationism”, www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/pigliucci1.html
    5. Professor Gunther Von Hagens’ Body Worlds, London Press Release, March 2, 2003, www.bodyworlds.com/en/pages/Pressemeldungen%20London.asp
    6. “Introduction to Multiple Designers Theory”, Posted by Richard B. Hoppe on September 23, 2004, www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000509.html
    7. Rowan Hooper, “People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid”, Wired News, Oct. 11, 2004, www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,65252,00.html
    8. Fred Heeren, “The Lynching of Bill Dembski”, The American Spectator, November 2000, www.infovi.vu.lt/mps/Being Methodologically Correct.htm
    9. Crick, F. H. C., and Orgel, L. E. “Directed Panspermia,” Icarus, 19, 341 (1973), quoted in David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight, www.angelfire.com/on2/daviddarling/dirpans.htm
    10. Alan and Sally Landsburg, The Outer Space Connection, p.17, 1975
    11. Chandra Wickramasinghe, testimony in McLean v Arkansas Board of Education, 1981, www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm
    12. Ibid.
    13. Ibid. Latter-day beatniks might also note that an extremely similar theory is advanced in the seminal William S. Burroughs science fiction tale, The Soft Machine – see www.spress.de/author/burroughs/onwsb/skerl/softm.htm
    14. Lee Elliot Majors, The Guardian, “Big enough to bury Darwin: Lee Elliot Major looks at the theories that secured Sir Fred Hoyle’s reputation as one of the 20th century’s leading scientists”, August 23, 2001, http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/physicalscience/story/0,9836,541468,00.html
    15. Sir Frederick Hoyle, 1971 news conference.
    16. Missler & Eastman, Alien Encounters, p.141.
    17. Interview with Zecharia Sitchin, Connecting Link, Issue 17, www.metatron.se/asitch.html

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • The Hermetic Universe

    The Hermetic Universe

    Ever since my formative years, when I first began to think in concepts, I have always been confounded by the mystery of human existence. By and large we all tend to take this consciousness of ours for granted, but for me it has always been a source of wonder. Equally perplexing is that ultimate question in life: death – that future happening looming over the horizon of all of our lives like some conceptual black hole. What, one wonders, is the purpose in the unending cycle of the genesis and inevitable destruction of all of us? Why are millions of sentient beings all over our planet created, only to starve or be slaughtered wholesale, many without ever having been given the opportunity to fulfil themselves?

    On the wider scale of evolution, we see evidence in palaeontological and fossil records, of the emergence and subsequent violent extinction of whole races of people and species of animal. These entities come and go with alarming regularity. But to what avail?

    In the greater universe also, existence is no less capricious, with the continuous formation and devastating destruction of planets, stars – even entire galaxies. And who knows what countless other life-forms out there are being indiscriminately annihilated in this way? Just normal, everyday occurrences – but these inviolable and often disturbingly violent events have persistently gnawed at my reason. Why, I ask myself, would the theologians all-wise and all-knowing Benefactor – if he exists – create such a myriad of wonderful forms and then turn round and simply destroy them? These endless cycles of life and death, creation and destruction – what kind of devilment is this?

    The ongoing debate over the possible existence and modus operendi of a conscious, all-knowing creator proceeds unabated, with contributors from all disciplines lining up to have their say. However, owing to a specific sequence of events which led me on a solitary quest which was to last nearly fifteen years, I believe I have found a way of understanding what might really be going on in and around us. And ultimately, if I am right, the future looks not all bad. What is more, in this particular scheme of things, God is tangible, very much alive, and undeniably omnipresent.

    Strange as this may seem, this whole scenario can all be explained with numbers.

    Introducing the Hermetic Code

    The theory in question centres on a familiar numerical symbol: 22/7. This is pi of course, a unique mathematical convention whose discovery is generally attributed to the Greeks, but which in fact expresses a symmetry that was recognised as far back as the time of the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom.

    It is now generally accepted by all but the most hardened sceptic that the classical pi ratio – 22/7, or 3.142857 etc. – is incorporated in the dimensions and proportions of the Great Pyramid. That the Egyptians knew of this value is further substantiated by a key piece of non-pyramidal evidence. This appears in the form of a royal decree, one of the most important administrative documents of the Old Kingdom, which appoints the high priest and Grand Vizier Shemaj Director of Upper Egypt. This document officially places all twenty-two nomes (districts) under his authority, enumerating them from first to last. Some time later the pharaoh appoints to the post of deputy the overseer vizier j, who seems to be the son of the same Shemaj. But then comes the most interesting part of this ancient decree, which states that the son’s jurisdiction, as deputy, extends to only seven nomes. The symbolism is obvious: father over son, twenty-two over seven: pi.

    Most people are aware that pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. However this ratio exists separate from circles as well. It resonates in and around us and is the answer to innumerable maths puzzles. It is intrinsic to the solutions of probability and statistical questions; and it is part of how we interpret phenomena as varied as the structure of atoms to the motion of stars. Is it not remarkable, therefore, given its uniqueness and sophistication, that the ancient Egyptians incorporated this symmetry, not only in the proportions and dimensions of what is undoubtedly one of the most impressive pieces of architecture of the ancient world, but also as a basic model for the conduct and interactions of their high priests?

    Now, apart from geometry and the solving of probability and statistical questions, there is another, much more important aspect of the pi convention. This is its musical conformity. 22/7 is in fact an expression of three consecutive octaves of resonance. An octave, as everyone knows, comprises seven fundamental notes: Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti. The eighth note, Do, a repeat of the first but with double the pitch frequency, is the first note of the second octave. Accordingly the eighth note of the second octave – again, Do – is the first note of the third. Taken together these three octaves contain twenty-two notes.

    What we have here, in fact, is a symbolic embodiment of the two most fundamental laws of nature, namely, the ubiquitous law of three forces (active-passive-neutral), and the lesser-known but equally all-embracing law of octaves. The law of three forces, as we shall see, is the absolute mainstay of all creative processes, whose influence manifests practically everywhere. The second law, the law of octaves, tells us that all phenomena generated by these three primordial forces are essentially musically structured. To sensibly visualise this concept, we need to look at the formula pi when expressed musically, like so:

    Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-Do.

    This configuration expresses in exact scientific terms everything you need to know to understand the General Theory of just about Everything. All one need do to appreciate this is to remember the key musical numbers incorporated within it. These are: 3, 4, 7, 8, 22, and 64. Three, the number of the Trinity, is the number of octaves encoded in pi. Four is the number of base-notes (Dos) in three consecutive octaves. Seven is the number of intervals between the notes of the major scale. Eight is the number of individual notes in the major scale. Twenty-two is the number of notes in three consecutive scales or octaves. And, according to the law of three forces, the three octaves incorporated in pi are each sub-divisible into three octaves apiece, giving an inner formula of nine octaves, or sixty-four notes. So eight is the constant, and sixty-four, is the square of it.

    So much for the maths. You don’t need to be an Einstein to venture further, although it is worth noting the most famous scientific equation of all time – e=mc2 – was formulated to verify this great scientist’s Special Theory of Relativity, which states that e, the latent nuclear energy contained in any given element, is equal to m, the mass of the thing, multiplied by c2, the square of the constant speed of light. As we shall see, the square of the constant occurs time and again throughout the whole of nature.

    I have called this musical pattern of symmetry the Hermetic Code, after the Greek god of wisdom and patron of alchemy Hermes Trismegistus, known as the god Thoth, in Old Kingdom Egypt. As noted previously, it was in ancient Egypt where the pi symmetry first came to light, both in its most famous piece of architecture the Great Pyramid – and also in extant administrative documents of the Old Kingdom.

    The law of three expressed in the Hermetic Code can be recognised by anyone. Nothing in this universe can be created without the combined action of the three forces described by it: active, passive and neutral. The three main constituents of atoms – protons, electrons and neutrons – the triplet-codon templates of the genetic code, the three pin plug, two opposing teams and a neutral referee, the three primary colours of the spectrum of light, the tripart social and political arenas, two chemical compounds and an intermediary catalyst – all of these trinities exist and interact as a direct result of the three fundamental forces described by the first law of nature. Whenever and wherever something is created, these three forces will inevitably be there.

    The second law – the law of octaves – also operates throughout the entire universe. For example, the atomic scale of matter described by the periodic table of elements in chemistry conforms to this law precisely. Based on the atomic weight of a given substance, the table begins at its apex with hydrogen, the lightest of all elements, which has just one electron tracing a specific orbit, or period, around the nucleus. The heavier the element, the more electrons it hosts, and the more periods are needed to accommodate them. The table culminates with substances like curium, one of the densest of radioactive elements. The curium atom consists of ninety-six electrons, which between them trace a total of seven periods around the nucleus precisely the number of periods, or intervals, between the fundamental notes of the major musical scale. The eighth, transcendental note of this atomic scale is the whole phenomenon, all atoms combined.

    There is also a current method of classification in nuclear physics called the theory of quantum chromodynamics, which indicates that, beneath the atomic scale, in the world of subatomic quanta, there are also distinct musical symmetries. The American physicist Murray Gell-Man noted that the categories of particle-molecules known as baryons, mesons and pions always combine together in families of eight, which he called octets – hence his name for the system: the eightfold way. Further, each of the eight particles in an octet is a triplet made up of three smaller particles, which Gell-Man called quarks. Three quarks to each particle, eight particles to each octet – an altogether familiar pattern. And then we have the hermetic structure of light, with its three primary colours, the seven fundamental colours of the spectrum and the final eighth note, the product of all seven colours when spun together – the white ray.

    Whilst still on the subject of theoretical physics, significantly the number sixty-four, the square of the musical constant, has surfaced in superstring theory, which describes all particles in the universe as infinitesimally small strings made of a kind of vibrational energy. You really cannot get more conceptually obscure than superstring theory, with its eleven different dimensions (three spacial, one temporal, and seven others of increasingly acute curvature), and a system of higher mathematics guaranteed to give the layman a form of intellectual vertigo. But no matter, all we need to know here is that this incredibly complicated system holds that there are eight degrees of manifestation or modes of movement inherent within the string itself. Moreover, in order to account for the four-dimensional structure of classical space-time geometry, the superstring theory is further developed through calculating the formulation of the string in four dimensions, the mathematics of which apparently produces precisely sixty-four specific degrees of movement associated with it. The detailed mechanics of this theory involves a language all of its own, inaccessible to the general reader, myself included. The point is – and any lay observer can see this – even the most complex and advanced mathematical formulae of present-day scientific thought, taken as symbols, reflect virtually every aspect, every nuance, of the original Hermetic Code.

    As well as the microcosmic music of the underworld, there is also a cosmic aspect of the Hermetic Code. This is dramatically reflected, not only in the musical symmetry of light itself, but also in the movements of major planets in relation to the Sun, many of which, as I explain in my book High Priests, Quantum Genes, beat out endlessly repeating intervals developing in time, which exactly conform to the relative values of the fundamental notes of the major scale. Ergo, the music of the spheres is not simply legend, but fact.

    Perhaps most crucial of all aspects of the Hermetic Code is that it actually resonates throughout the entire organic world. Probably most of you will have heard of the genetic code, a chemical arrangement used by the DNA in the cells of your body to manufacture amino acids, the building blocks of all organic life. In the genetic code there are four kinds of fundamental chemical bases: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. In this respect it is significant there are exactly four base-notes, four Dos, in the triple-octave of resonance described by pi. It takes three of these bases to make what is known as a triplet-codon, an amino acid template, of which there are precisely sixty-four variations. Each of these codons correspond to one or another of twenty-two more complex components, namely, the twenty amino acids and two further coded instructions for starting and stopping the process of protein synthesis.

    All this, therefore, is crystallised music, composed by nature from units and sub-units of the constant number eight and its natural multiple, the square of the constant, sixty four. This same universal harmony is also reflected in the ever present number seven of course, which again, as we see from the periodic table, is prevalent throughout the whole of nature. This is simply because it, too, is an expression of the law of octaves, which describes eight fundamental notes, but with seven intervals between.

    So the General Theory of just about Everything is described in its entirety by the Hermetic Code, an exact blueprint, not only of the underlying structure of the physical universe, but also of the genetic code, of the DNA molecule, of life itself. This unique evolutionary concept has been in existence at least since the time of Old Kingdom Egypt. And, remarkably, the symmetry it describes is currently resonating through the entire spectrum of modern scientific enquiry. How strange is that? Well, not quite so strange, for the seeds of science were sown long ago, as we shall see when we go back in time. Consider this:

    In the symbolism of every major religion and belief system in history, the key numbers of the Hermetic Code are paramount. Without exception, these immensely powerful religious doctrines are all exact copies of the original blueprint. To briefly illustrate this, we need only to focus on the two key numbers of the octave: eight (the notes) and seven (the intervals between).

    In ancient Egypt, where the Hermetic Code first came to light, the people revered a pantheon of eight principal gods. There were three main theologies in the Old Kingdom: Hermopolitan, Memphite and Heliopolitan, and in all of them the octave format formed the basic blueprint.

    In China, in the third millennium BCE, the legendary sage Fu Hsi introduced a belief-system which was subsequently condensed into a book we today know as the I-Ching, whose chapters were numbered using a combination of eight three line symbols called trigrams. Confucius, who later added commentaries to this enigmatic book, subsequently introduced a system of instruction known as the Eight Steps of Learning.

    The body of writings known as the Vedas of Indian tradition described the nature of reality as being supported by a system of proofs, of which there were considered to be eight fundamental types. Reminiscent of this also are the systems of the Buddha, with his Eightfold Path, and the Persian Zoroaster, with his pantheon of eight Bounteous Immortals. Pythagoras, as we know, reinvented his own take on this oldest of sciences by working out the precise mathematics of the octave. In the Book of Genesis of Mosaic tradition, we read that God worked for six days, rested on the seventh, presumably starting over again on the eighth. Later still, Jesus Christ acted out possibly the greatest musical performance of all time through the Passion, which began on Palm Sunday and ended, seven days later, on the Sunday of the Resurrection. Finally we have Mohammad, last of the great revelationists, whose famous night journey began at the sacred site of the furthest mosque (The Dome of the Rock Temple in Jerusalem – the first note), and continued up through the seven heavens.

    The number seven, or the septenary principle, is equally ubiquitous in the annals of human tradition.

    It first appears in the customs of the Neanderthal race as far back as 75,000 BCE. In a cave at Drachenloch in the Swiss Alps, a known bear-hunter site, there was discovered an altar in which were enshrined seven bear skulls, each with their muzzles pointing toward the entrance.

    The Hindus regarded the constellation of the Great Bear (our Plough), as the heavenly home of the Septarishi, an embodiment of the seven Rishis (properties) applicable to the whole of nature. Their land had seven peninsulas, seven islands, seven rivers, seven seas and seven mountains.

    Another key number of the Hermetic Code, as noted earlier, is the number sixty-four, the square of the constant. This, too, is a vital component of many major religious and esoteric traditions. We have already noted this number is intrinsic to the pi convention, whose encoded triple-octave is further subdivisible into nine inner octaves – sixty-four notes. The Greeks recognised an Egyptian number system known as the Magic Square of Mercury, defined by the number 2080, which is the sum of all the numbers from one to sixty-four. Mercury, of course, is a Romanised version of Hermes/Thoth, the Egyptian messenger of the gods.

    In the time of the Buddha it was customary for the nobility to consult a council of sixty-four Brahmins on matters of supreme importance. The ancient game of chess, whose true origins are the subject of endless debate and whose strategic possibilities are seemingly endless, is played on a board comprising sixty-four squares. The Tarot pack, with its fifty-six minor arcana cards also includes a major arcana of twenty-two cards. This major arcana, a triple-octave on one scale, must also, according to the law of three forces, be a single octave on another scale. If we add this greater single octave onto the minor arcana figure, we end up with a total of sixty-four notes. And again, in the Koran, there is a crucial chapter on the sacred light of Allah – chapter sixty-four.

    So, what does all this mean? It means many things, whose separate conceptual strands all lead us back to the same hermetic blueprint. It means that the Hermetic Code, the design plan for everything existing – particles, cosmic concentrations, living cells – is applicable literally everywhere, not only in the wider universe, but also, as we see from esoteric traditions going back over centuries and millennia, in the ephemeral realms of the collective human psyche. It tells us that, if everything is music, then everything is hermetic, genetic, alive. There is an ancient dictum attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth which sums up this idea perfectly: As above, so below. The message is clear: man below and the universe above, as stated so emphatically in Genesis, are made in the same image. Everyone, quite literally, is a miniature universe. And expansion is the natural course of things.

    And so, if hermetic is genetic, this means the whole universe itself is alive, it is a living organism of infinite size. So if you are looking for a god, we have here a candidate that outshines all of the ill-defined, abstract deities alluded to by clueless clerics – an all-powerful, omnipresent deity that actually does exist.

    If we assume, therefore, that the universe is itself an organism, a living entity, and that we are all copies of it, then this would imply that the more advanced products of an organic brain – ideas, theories, concepts – are also in their own way alive, they are metaphysical genes, as organic as the brain from which they originate. The ancients of the remote past, in my view, seem somehow to have understood this, which is why they devised a musical mode of existence in the form of prescribed disciplines and rituals which enabled them to psychologically conform to the laws and forces controlling evolution. This is precisely why religion was first invented – to instil into the collective consciousness of humanity the necessity of harmonising one’s inner faculties according to the principles of the Hermetic Code.

    The aim was quite straightforward, it was an attempt to complete the natural course of one’s evolutionary and psychological development by living-out a harmonious existence and ultimately transcending on to a higher plane, a greater musical scale above. This greater scale, a wholly scientific concept describing a higher dimension of existence accessible to the trained mind, is the heaven expressed in all religions.
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