We have two adjacent events here in America: the elections on Tuesday, and Halloween last night.
In their own way, whatever else they are, those two events are a celebration of distortion. We have a lot of distortion enacted on Halloween, with all kinds of ghoulish masks and makeup and so on. And then on parade in the election is corruption, with finger-pointing, of course.
I would like to explore elements of the corruption and distortion that show up in world culture, in part using as a reference a book by Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization. It is a remarkable piece of research, largely ignored and denied by conventional science, and yet an exhaustive, definitive exploration of ancient culture, especially in the Americas but also around the world.
Hancock’s conclusion is that before recorded history, there were teachers who went around the world and influenced ancient cultures. He detailed the archaeology of the Americas — the mounds in North America and the buildings in South America. He did an in-depth exploration of the pyramids, and then of ancient texts: those from the Americas, which are less available, but also the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and other similar texts.
What he found was that there was an understanding of science, geometry, and astronomy held in common by these ancient civilizations around the world. How could that be? And there was a spiritual story that they carried in common.
After studying it, his conclusion was not that they conveyed this knowledge to each other. There was not the kind of travel across oceans that would have put the Egyptians in touch with the indigenous cultures of the Americas, for instance. He deduced that there were teachers who did have seafaring capacity, and who brought their knowledge to ancient cultures, sowing the seeds of civilization.
These ancient teachers apparently told a story that was picked up by the ancient indigenous people of the Americas, by the Egyptians, and by other cultures around the world. And that story was embodied in the archaeological remains.
The mounds in the Mississippi Valley look very different from the pyramids. And the pyramids in the Americas look very different from the pyramids in Egypt. But if you study the geometry, the underlying patterns are astonishingly similar. And then, some of these structures are oriented to Orion, such as the pyramids in Egypt and the ruins of Utatlan in Guatemala.
Along with the archaeological remains, there is a common story that tells of the path of the soul upon death to a hereafter associated with Orion, and of how the soul travels along the Milky Way to get there. It is a perilous journey, and speaking of Halloween, there are all kinds of horrific things that happen along the way that separate the virtuous from the unvirtuous.
Given that it is the morning after Halloween, I will take the liberty of telling one of these horrific stories, told both in the Americas and in Egypt. There is a brain smasher, usually female, who appears on the journey to the hereafter. If you do not qualify, bam!
We can see that the story of a perilous path to a hereafter found its way into Christian theology. Does this sound familiar from stories of Purgatory and all the rest? If you have been a good boy or girl on Earth, you get to go up there. And if you have not, you get sorted out and sent down there. And if you think of some of the Renaissance paintings of Purgatory or Hell, they are every bit as ghastly. So the fear and superstition of the ancient world crept into Christian teachings and Western culture.
I have great admiration for the work that Graham Hancock did. And yet, there is more to the history. Here is what I want to pose to you. In ancient, ancient times, there was both a purity of experience and a purity of culture, and then a deviation and a corruption of that culture began to occur. There is very little record of it, although there is some.
What I am saying is that the issues we see around the world today — the issues that those protesting in the streets of France and other places in Europe are trying to deal with, and the issues we are facing in America — are a corruption that did not start yesterday. It did not start with some modern populist movement or the modern rise of autocracy. The corruption that people are rebelling against is ancient. They are rebelling against an ancient deviation from what is real and true and beautiful.
Very early on, that corruption spread to the cultures of the world. Egyptian culture got into Greek and Roman culture. It got into Christianity. That view of the world, which corrupts Reality and leaves human beings dealing with the compromise of the human soul, is endemic.
And what happens then? What happens when we fall asleep to the Reality of the beautiful world in which we live, when we fall asleep to the beautiful Reality of other people and cannot see it, and do not know our own nobility and feel that we are at odds with the world? We have gone to sleep, unconscious of what is real and what is true. And the surprising, almost shocking thing is that what is real and true is unbelievably beautiful — so beautiful that we dare not imagine it. We dare not imagine how beautiful the people around us are. We dare not imagine how virtuous and noble we ourselves are — how endowed we are, as human beings, with the powers of Creation, which are the powers of wisdom, love, insight, and creative imagination.
There are ancient stories that illustrate the origin of human ignorance. They come down to us through what we think of as myth or story. How else would they come to us? From the Greeks, most of us know the story of Pandora’s box, and how her curiosity let out all of the afflictions of the world in which we live.
The Bible tries to tell how the human experience was corrupted. There is the story of the first murder, Cain and Abel. That story is more than an isolated incident. It depicts something introduced into the human experience. There is the story of the Tower of Babel, and there is a story of giants in Genesis. Did you know the Bible talks about giants walking the earth? And not only the Bible: the Greeks, the Norse, and other ancient cultures told of a race of giants. These are stories attempting to explain what went wrong.
And of course, there is the seminal story in the Bible: Adam and Eve. There was no apple. But there is a symbolic portrayal of what happened in consciousness, which is explicit in the story: human beings lost contact with their divine source.
The story of Job is relevant to what we are speaking of here. It is perhaps the oldest book of the Bible, and it takes place in ancient, ancient times. Job lived in the land of Uz, a reference to an ancient civilization in the Pacific, Mu. It is said of Job that he was the greatest of all the men of the east. Job gathered together his sons and daughters, and he blessed them. And then it says this:
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.
Job 1:6
The name Satan evokes the image of a little red guy with a forked tail and horns. Actually, the name Satan simply means adversary. It is that which is in human consciousness that is adversarial to the Reality we are supposed to know. This is something happening through human consciousness, not a creature separate from human experience. It is a portrayal of ignorance arising in the human experience that is detrimental to our wellbeing.
And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
Job 1:7
What a way of saying it: to and fro, and up and down. In other words, a consciousness that is all involved in the results of whatever the person has created in their life. Because that is what happens, is it not? When we go to sleep to the beautiful Reality in which we live and stop living it, we start living a nightmare — a nightmare composed of what is happening in the world and in our lives. And we become immersed in the external factors of the dimensional world, going to and fro and up and down in it.
The rest of the story is of Job’s path to victory. I bring up the story because it is a pure teaching introduced to the world. And it is an explicit record of an ancient corruption. It is a report of an ancient deviation. What I am saying here this morning is that the corruption you see in the world around you is ancient.
What is the remedy? So much of the view of our state as human beings — however you want to look at it, religiously, philosophically, scientifically, or psychologically — comes down to being victims of something that happened to us. Maybe an ancient cataclysm. Maybe a bad government today. Maybe somebody in our life who is apparently demonizing us.
We might be living in some kind of nightmare and wanting to cure the nightmare. If we are living a nightmare it is because we are asleep, to whatever degree, and unaware of the magnificence of the life we are leading. And in that state of not being awake, we might be trying to fix the nightmare. With a literal nightmare, is that how you fix it? Do you go in there and remedy what is happening in the nightmare? As far as I know, the remedy for a nightmare is to wake up.
There are plenty of teachings in the world that characterize human beings as victims and then attempt to bring them a remedy for the nightmare they are experiencing. And yet those teachings lack the element of awakening from the nightmare, which is the only answer to it. In many cases, that solution would put the person selling the nightmare remedies out of business, because you do not need a remedy for the nightmare if you are awake.
I am not interested in any of those remedies. I am not interested in the nightmare. I am interested in being awake and bringing wakefulness to the world, and in being with awake people, knowing that awake people have something to do together. Awake people are now gathering in one accord in one place.
You are not in that one place, in that one accord, if you are asleep. If you are in your nightmare, you cannot be. You are in the nightmare that is obsessing you. That is the nature of a nightmare.
The Bhagavad Gita speaks to this. This is from Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation:
When thy firm soul hath shaken off those tangled oracles which ignorantly guide, then shall it soar to high neglect of what’s denied or said, which has been taught or which is yet to teach. When thy soul, cleared of doubt, stayeth safe, fixed in contemplation, firm and immovable, then hast thou surely given thyself to yoga.
Bhagavad Gita 2:52–53
The corrupt teachings of the hereafter, with brain smashers and all the rest, spread around the world at the dawn of civilization. But there were also pure teachings, such as can be found within the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Job, that brought an awareness of Reality. Those teachings have received some measure of attention. And yet there is a tendency for us as human beings, if we are asleep and in some kind of nightmare, to see an enlightened teaching as relevant to our nightmare — as something that is going to help us and support us in the nightmare. That is actually not the ultimate point. The ultimate point is to awaken to the beauty of the Reality in which we live, and then to bring an awakening to that beauty to a world that is, in so many ways, lost in a nightmare.
I can tell you how that came home to me over the last number of years, as I began to take it upon myself to teach. I wanted to get down to the nub of what I know. And I realized that it comes down to this: all things begin and end with love. A human life begins and ends that way. Every project, every cycle, every day begins and ends with love. It is all about that. Can you think of a more beautiful way to create? Can you conceive of a more beautiful Reality?