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 "The conclusion to the last chapter brings us close to the end of our quest. Close but not quite. I have chosen to introduce the concept that an evolving consciousness accesses reality directly by using those aspects which work best for me, namely music and a sense of the beautiful. Many people will feel that this interpretation of conscious- ness is unsatisfying and incomplete. They are quite right.

The whole focus of this book has been on time and death. What the last chapter failed to do was to interpret consciousness in terms of time. It did not seek to explain unresolved problems raised in earlier parts of the book like the startling statement 'death is not a feature of consciousness'. Moreover, it did not address the wider issue of the death of the cosmos. These omissions were deliberate. The interknotted issues of time and death, the linking threads of this book, are central to the deepest of all deep questions, the nature of reality itself. Only when we have looked at this, the secret 'face of God', can we truly see the dual role that consciousness plays, both in our lives and in the world. It is to this, the final paradox, that we now turn. / Page 205 / Let us quickly review what we have learned about time. In Chapter 2, we saw that, from the standpoint of physics, time has no verifiable status: it is a fictional map we draw on the seamless spacetime fabric so that we can find our way around. Chapter 4 showed how our peculiar sense of moving time arises. In order to cohere the concep- tual flux of symbolic images that exploded into being when the ego-self was born, the mind needed an ordering principle and a nexus of reference. That ordering principle was time and that nexus was self.

In 'gaining' self, man took upon himself the responsibility for his own actions. That burden is with him still. In 'gaining' self, man stepped out of the Dreaming and into time. That sadness is with him still. This is why the emergence of the egoic-conceptual mind-an upward step in evolution-is given the paradoxical title of the Fall.

The first half of this book, then, stated the problem that time poses to the human psyche. The thrust of my argument in Chapters 1 to 7 was to show that time is the greatest barrier that nature has erected between the average structure of the human mind and reality. To paraphrase a favourite saying of the late Joseph Campbell, 'History [time] is a nightmare from which I hope some day to awaken'. The German mystic, Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), echoed the same thought when he said 'there is no greater obstacle to God than time',

In Chapters 8 and 9, we began to feel our way towards the beginnings of a resolution of this time problem. In Chapter 8, we saw that the differentiating processes that build ego can be diminished, effectively (as we now understand) by filtering out the ego-based existential 'noise' that jams the input and output channels of consciousness, Chapter 9 focused on the unifying quality of con- sciousness, showing how it integrates information, seeking always 'the one in the many', the hidden oneness of things.

The unanswered question in all this is 'What happens to our fallacious sense of tick -tock time when the ego-self collapses?' How does deep consciousness 'see' time? This question can only be meaningfully answered if some human beings have evolved suffi- ciently to 'see' the reality behind time. I think one can confidently assert that such individuals exist, According to the idea of the 'mutant minority' there are always, in each generation, a few individuals who are 'ahead of their time', whose consciousness has evolved far beyond the species norm. Who are they? And what do they tell us? / Page 206 / Who they are is easy to answer; they are the great religious teachers, the mystics. And what they say is a matter of record:

These poetic sayings must be read in the spirit of a koan-a paradoxical epigram used by students of Zen to focus the mind on hidden depths of meaning that are not obvious from mere surface inspection, i.e. they are not logical statements born of reason but insights of the-inner eye. The meaning they carry is below the level of the words themselves. And that meaning is, I believe, that pure consciousness is freed of time. To the highly evolved mind, which has filtered out ego noise, reality appears as a timeless continuum.

In the light of what I have said in this book, this should not be taken as a cop-out, a retreat into spiritualism or religion. Let me remind the reader that this 'in-sight' corresponds remarkably with the portrait of spacetime depicted by contemporary science. Since I have used the words of others to convey this sense of being 'out-of- time', I will use the words of a scientist to paint the relativistic / Page 207 / picture of spacetime that science sees. The quote is from mathematician Clement Durrell's book Readable Relativity:

the universe is to be regarded as a collection of events anywhere and anywhen, an entity which mathematicians call a continuum, and the difference between A (one observer) and 0 (another) is simply that they slice it up differently. The universe as an entity is timeless (and space less). What each individual perceives is merely his own time-section. History records some of the time sections of our ancestors and H.G. Wells forecasts time-sections of our descendants. With neither group have we the power to make direct acquaintance, merely because we cannot put our- selves in the position in which the desired time-cleavage would be the natural one. But all events, past, present and future as we call them, are present in our four-dimensional space-time continuum, a universe without past or present, as static as a pile of films which can be formed into a reel for the cinemato-graph.

Quantum mechanics approaches the issue from a different perspective but its conclusions can be remarkably similar. As Fred Allen Wolf says in Parallel Universes:

The past, present, and future exist side by side. If we were totally able to 'marry' corresponding times each and every moment of our time-bound existences, there would indeed be no sense of time and we would all realise the timeless state, which is taken to be our true or base state of reality by many spiritual practices.

The point of this book is that true consciousness, free of the ego- cage, 'sees' this timelessness without travail or trammel. To be free of time is to be free of death. This is the same message as that insighted by the the poet William Blake when he said 'If the doors of perception [the existential noise of the ego-self] were cleansed [by ego-death], everything would appear to man as it is, infinite [timeless]'..."

Page 208 "...Through mathematics and experiment, we have deduced the existence of a fourth spacetime dimension but we do not experience it as it. We see it in glimpses, strangely fractured into ever-dissolving, non dimensional planes called 'now'

We know this is a less-than-perfect condition because our reality is locked into a fiction- this Dali-esque 'now you see it, now its gone' trick-state called the present.

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To understand something of the nature of our trap, imagine a line segment of say 25 centimeters. Move it an equal length at right angles to itself. This gives us a square (two dimensions). Move the square an equal length at right angles to itself and we have a cube (three dimensions). It is mathematically possible to repeat the process another time, moving the cube simultaneously at right angles to all three dimensions of familiar space into an imaginary fourth space dimension. This gives us a four-dimensional structure called a hypercube or tesseract. We cannot see or experience a hypercube because our brains cannot see or experience a fourth dimension of space. But we can see the three-dimensional shadow cast by the four-dimensional object, just as we can see the two- dimensional shadow cast by a three-dimensional cube on a sheet of paper (it looks like a nested pair with a small cube contained in a bigger one).

At this stage in the evolution of our minds, our experience of reality is like that of the shadow, a limited, impoverished ghost- image projected into the three-dimensions of our present (average) mode of consciousness by the invisible (to us) four-dimensional 'truth structure' that lies beyond and behind it, extended in time as we are extended in space. I cannot stress too strongly that it is this four-dimensional truth structure which is the universe's reality. What we call objective reality, our everyday commonsense world, is but a dim phantom construct of the timeless hyperstructure that exists, in or perhaps as, the 'mind of God', to use religious imagery. Yet, just as our present three-dimensional state of consciousness evolved from the one dimensional mode of our remote ancestors, so there is abundant evidence that the four-dimensional mode is struggling to be born in the homo sapiens species at this human moment in the cosmic story. We are almost there.

Whether a four-dimensional state of consciousness is the ulti-mate truth of the universe or whether beyond this lie higher states of being that extend into an infinitely rich, multi-dimensional hyperspace and hypertime we do not know. One day our descendants may.

This seems to bring us to the end of our quest. Yet, one problem remains and, like all final problems, it is the greatest one of all, sticking like a thorn in the vision of hope which the inner eye holds out to us. The cosmos is a spacetime continuum and in this regard, the poet's intuition of a timeless state of consciousness merely / Page 210 / reflects the facts of the physical universe as science depicts them. However, timelessness implies forevemess and the same science that reveals spacetime to us also tells us that the universe will one day end, in fire or ice.

The death of forever. The fact that the very cosmos in which we live is 'mortal'. This was where this journey started and it is from this existentialist crisis of truly universal proportions that this book gets its name. At the finish of the race, we seem to run head-on into one last, unresolvable paradox, just as light was dawning. Something that seems to make our intuition of timelessness as insubstantial as a lovely vision, dreamed by a dreamer in a quiet time but dissolving like a snowflake at first contact with brute fact.

Is this really the case? In Chapter 7, I discussed a recent model of spacetime put forward by Stephen Hawking (Figure 7.3 omitted). I had to seem to be dismissive of the model at that time because I had not yet focused the reader's attention on the way our flawed, ego-conscious window to the world distorts the structure of the world we see. Now, however, we can return to Hawking's idea from a new and different and, I believe, truer perspective.

Hawking built a model of the cosmos which he called the 'no boundary' model because in his theory, time does not begin at a 'point' nor does it end in one (Figure 7.3 omitted). From the earlier perspec-tive of Chapter 7, this model seemed, from many points of view, unsatisfactory, because it used imaginary time, not real time. Chapter 9 gives the model a new source of credibility for it is characteristic of the inner eye that it can disregard the 'commonsense' aspects of experience and penetrate to the inner logic of nature.

Thus when the inner eye 'sees' a circle, a mandala, and recog-nises therein some impression of flawlessness, it is, at a different level, seeing the endless number 3.1415926 It may be significant that we call such numbers transcendental. Indeed, science builds its deepest truths using numbers that are, in an important sense, 'illogical'. The square root of minus one is imaginary (it is, in fact, part of the number system Hawking uses to build his model). The square root of 2 is irrational. And so it goes on.

Moreover, the word 'imaginary', like all symbols invented by the conceptual mind, confuses the issue by implying that such numbers are in some way 'unreal'. This is fundamentally false. As Hawking's colleague, mathematician, Roger Penrose, says cryptically:

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it is important to stress the fact that these 'imaginary' numbers are no less real than the 'real' numbers that we have become accustomed to...the relationship between such 'real' numbers and physical reality is not as direct or compelling as it may at first seem to be...

We find a similar situation in particle physics where the so-called ultimate building blocks of matter (quarks) are given such mythic names as 'strange', 'charmed', etc. At this deep level of reality, the false distinction between scientist and poet breaks down and scien- tists use the language of song and parable in their intuitive attempts to seek out the basic structure of the world.

To return to my point, I find it fascinating that Hawking himself recognises that his use of imaginary time, far from being a ruse or trick, may in fact be a door to a higher order of insight. Listen to his own words:

This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time and that what we call real time isjustafigment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real isjust an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.

This goes to the heart of the matter for the defining quality of the inner eye in its most highly evolved forms is that it can 'see' the deepest hidden structures of reality without impediment. If timeless- ness is an authentic feature of consciousness-and the evidence I have summarised in this book very strongly suggests that it is-then consciousness may just as well 'exist' in what the mathematicians call 'imaginary' time as in 'real' time. Indeed, it may be precisely because the ego-self lives in real time that it 'knows' death, while it may be precisely because consciousness lives in imaginary time that it 'knows' eternity.

I now want to build on Hawking's model, but I want to do so in a particular way. I want to use it in the poetic sense of a metaphor, not in the rigid sense of a mathematical model. There are three reasons for this: first, Hawking's model presupposes that the uni- / Page 212  / verse is closed (that spacetime is positively curved) and this is as yet, unproven. Second, I do not believe Hawking's model (despite the credentials of its creator) is science's last word on this subject. Third, we are, by any definition, crossing into uncharted psychological territory by thinking about human hopes for the future in terms of imaginary time or any other mathematical representation of time that science may discover.

The key feature of the Hawking metaphor is that time closes back upon itself to form a loop. This is why in this metaphor we cannot talk of a beginning or an end to time, for a circle has neither except for the arbitrary points we choose to mark on it. It may be no accident that the inner eye has for long sensed that reality is eternal, for in this higher-order understanding, foreverness is restored to its ancient position as the foundation stone of consciousness.

The most fascinating consequence of the 'loop of time' meta- phor is summed up in Figure 7.3. (Figure 7.3. omitted) Here, we see evolution starting with the 'north pole' (the Big Bang) and progressing around the circle to 'now', represented by the 18th line of latitude (say). From this 'now' perspective, we can look 'back' at our past, hidden behind the 'southward' spacetime rim, or 'forward' into our future, hidden behind the 'northward' spacetime rim. Yet this is illusionary, a hangover of the flawed way we look at time through the ego-self window. The loop of time metaphor shows that when we look forward into the future we are also looking back into the past because the arrow of time traces out the full circumference of the circle, eventually coming back to itself.

In this 'song of reality', the distinction between past and future vanishes. The process of 'seeing' is then symmetrical in both directions. In T.S. Eliot's apt words:

If this is what consciousness 'sees', it is 'timeless' in a deeper and different sense than we ever dreamed possible. In real time, such a closing of the loop would play havoc with our notions of causality, cause becoming effect and effect cause. However, this may be a superficial view as I will try to show in a moment.

The unexpected feature of the loop of time metaphor is that a signal from the future becomes a signal from the past. Nothing is / Page 213 / wholly new, for information is always travelling where it has been before. This is why I find the loop of time parable so satisfying. It resonates deeply with a poem cited earlier-T.S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding':

The famous line 'know the place for the first time' is critically significant in the context of this book. Relate this message to your own 'moments of growth' - those times you look back on as marking some kind of quantum jump in your understanding - a leap forward. One key characteristic of these moments is that we suddenly understand something we feel we have, in a dim way, understood all along. Hence such sayings as 'I've known that all my life but I've only just realised it's true' or 'Now I see-I understand it'. This shows up a deeper layer of meaning in the way we use the words discussed in Chapter 5: recognise (know again) and remem-ber (to recall to mind).

It is said of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo that he ap-proached a block of marble believing that the perfect sculpture he sought to create already existed in the unhewn stone. The artistic act was thus an act of discovery not creation, and the long hours of painstaking work were devoted to revealing what was already there.

A scientific colleague once (in a moment of not entirely compli-mentary frankness) described me as a 'prophet, not a scientist'. One of my most 'successful' papers was a short article published in the science journal Nature in 1979. In this paper I made a specific prediction about the way cells process genetic data. This prediction was confirmed shortly after. The interesting thing is that I knew the moment I had the idea on which the prediction were based that the idea was right. There was in some hard-to-define way a 'certainty' about the insight that put it beyond doubt. This is I believe, the stamp of an authentically creative act: one discovers what is already true. When a human being 'sees' a pre-existing truth, already known to / Page 214 / the cosmos, in a very deep sense, the universe recognises part of itself, comprehending it at a higher level of understanding. This kind of incremental knowing is the self-realisation of the cosmos.

In other words, there is a deep knowing about consciousness that is utterly distinct from mere intellectual comprehension. This deep knowing is a remembering of what is already there. One becomes, in the full sense, conscious of what one has always subconsciously been aware of. In terms of Eliot's poem, the 'gate' is remembered even though itis unknown. We arrive where we started and know the place for the first time!

We do not create the future, we discover it.

Roger Penrose captures something of the flavour of the mode of knowing in The Emperor's New Mind, when he says:

Recall my proposal that consciousness, in essence, is the 'seeing' of a necessary truth: and that it may represent some kind of actual contact with Plato's world of ideal mathemati- cal concepts. Recall that Plato's world is itself timeless. The perception of Platonic truth carries no actual information and there would be no actual contradiction involved if such a conscious perception were even to be propagated backwards in time!

The loop of time metaphor goes a long way towards explaining a puzzle that many readers will have picked up as they worked their way through the pages of this book. The argument I put forward in Chapters 8 and 9, that ego cages consciousness, is not a novel one- it is an ancient tenet of many religions. In particular, much of what I said in those chapters could be described as a scientific interpreta- tion of a set of beliefs mapped out in the Hindu Upanishads thousands of years ago. Hindu belief, for example, sees the ego as a deception (maya) which separates the I from the Ultimate. When the mirage of ego is dissolved, the underlying union is made plain- Thou art That (tat tvam asi) is the illuminating recognition of this oneness. This is essentially the message of Chapter 8.

Even the metaphor of the ego-smudged mirror of consciousness that I have used repeatedly (Chapters 8 to 10) has a Hindu parallel. Yoga teaching uses the simile of wind blowing across the surface of water to describe the relationship between self and reality. While the wind blows, the water's surface-the mirror-is fragmented, shift- ing, the 'reality' it reflects continuously disrupted into half-truths / Page 215 / and confusing images. However, when the wind stops, the surface of the water, like that of the mirror, becomes still and perfect, reflecting the wholesome majesty of God, beheld in motionless serenity. Hence, the origin of the much misunderstood word 'nirvana', (nir= beyond; vana = wind).

Moreover, Eastern religions seem to have arrived by mystical contemplation and insight at an understanding of the deep structure of physical reality that Western science has only recently been able to formulate in empirical mathematical terms. Consider these two descriptions of the nature of time, as quoted by Fritjof Capra in his well-known text, The Tao of Physics:

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This passage captures the essence of the relativisitic picture of time.

A further insight into time comes from a Buddhist text:

This passage not only encapsulates the modem scientific view of our subjective sense of time, with its false tense structure (past- present-future); it also aptly summarises the formative role of language in the creation of the ego-self.

Is all I have done in this book retell, in the imagery of science, a story of reality that has been known to mystics for centuries? In one sense the answer is no. I have tried to derive my argument entirely from known scientific premises, attempting at all times to keep my logic internally consistent. However, in another sense the answer is yes. I have already said that the linear logic of the left brain has, from one point of view, been compelled to create science so that it could 'see', in its own conceptual way, the image of unity that the right brain had, through intuition, glimpsed aeons ago.

This leads me to an adventurous speculation. The time when many of the 'deep myths' of our species crystallised out-about 5000 to 3000 years ago in the West-corresponds remarkably with the period of the Fall, the emergence of the ego-self. At this / Page 216 / transition stage of human evolution, consciousness was, by the definition of my argument, stronger in highly evolved individuals because the confounding distractions of the still-evolving ego had not yet hardened into their final form. It is not surprising that the visionaries or prophets of that period possessed a more powerful insight than we do today, submerged as we are in the fallacy of our tick-tock time.

What I am suggesting is that the prophets who formulated the deep unitive insights common to the major religions of humanity were in some sense tuned in to the future, 'seeing' the dim and far-off image of knowledge still unborn, listening perhaps to the holistic message of a science thousands of years away, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of the modem era. I propose that this is not a rare or a strange thing, I submit that this is precisely what conscious- ness recognises, not just a premonition of the past but a memory of the future.

A memory of the future. Is this scientifically possible? The answer is quite emphatically 'yes'. Many scientists, including Paul Davies and Fred Hoyle, have noted that electromagnetic waves, for example, can propagate in both time directions. Radio waves spreading outwards from a point source define an arrow of time because they get further and further from their origin, moving from past into future. The field equations which govern electromagnetic radiation work just as well the other way round; they describe mathematically valid waves which converge back to a point, reversing the direction of time from future to past. Past to future waves are called 'retarded' since they arrive after they have been sent, whereas future to past waves are called 'advanced' since they arrive before they are sent.

While physicists acknowledge that advanced waves exist as a theoretical possibility, most would deny them any existential real-ity. This majority view is being increasingly challenged by scientists such as John Wheeler, John Cramer, Yahir Aharonov and others. Among the scientists who take the idea of 'signals from the future' seriously Fred Hoyle stands out. In his book The Intelligent Universe, he poses this question about electromagnetic waves that are reversed in time:

is it conceivable...that the possibility of a reversed time-sense, future-to-past, is an exception, pretty well the only exception to this general rule of natural parsimony?

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He then gives his own answer: ~

I have for long considered that the answer to this question must surely be no, and I have for long puzzled about what the consequences of such an answer would be.

Acknowledging that communication from future to past appears to lead to 'logical inconsistency', Hoyle, significantly, also invokes the idea of a loop in time. To solve the old paradox of what would happen to a person who goes back in time and prevents his own parents from marrying, i.e. stops himself from being born, Hoyle proposes what seems at first sight to be merely an ingenious strategem:

So the reader [time-traveller] hesitates, trying to make up his mind [about his parents], which he eventually does through an individual quantum event in the brain, an event which takes the form that preserves logical consistency. In short, the reader proceeds to arrange the marriage believing himself to be acting voluntarily, whereas he is really acting through a control from the future which always preserves consistency.

Here, I believe, Hoyle has hit upon a fundamental insight. In Chapter 5 (on self-consciousness) and in Chapter 8 (on the ego-self), I hammered the point that we create our ego-selves largely through the verbal structures in which we encase our thoughts. Each act of speech definition, however, is preceded by a 'readiness potential' or something analogous to it. During this brief interval, something happens in the mind which translates the unrealised option into the realised choice.

We come back to choice, to the Y node that has been a pivot-point of this book. The readiness potential phase corresponds with the Y node ambivalence, the 'moment before choice'. Before a decision is made, both possibilities are open. After it has been made, one is shut (decided), the other still open (not used). As I have noted before, a system like this corresponds closely to the binary system on which computers operate. I find this significant because I have been impressed by analogies which link the brain with computers; from many points of view, the two mechanisms of information storage and processing seem to have much in common.

The point is that we imagine that our conscious choices are our own-that they reflect some essential us-ness. Yet, the fact is that we / Page 218 / do not know what happens during that 'silent second' that precedes choice. Do we decide or is the decision something we automatically own 'after the event'; in the latter case, the actual deciding factor could have little (if anything) to do with us; it could be partly or wholly a result of quantum uncertainties in the brain.

Can we link this speculation with brain research? Perhaps we can. Nerve cells typically end in a bunch of minute, tree-like 'feelers'. As was mentioned briefly in Chapter 7, the gap between the 'feeler' of one nerve and that of another is called a synapse. A nervous impulse is transmitted across a synapse by special chemi- cals called neurotransmitters.

Synaptic gaps are extremely short, about 200 to 300 Angstroms across (an Angstrom is one hundred millionth of a centimetre) which means they are approaching the atomic scale of dimensions at which quantum effects become important. It does not unduly strain imagi-nation to believe that a synapse which was teetering on the brink of its 'firing threshold' could be triggered into activity by an event from the quantum realm. The instrument used to measure radioactivity, a Geiger counter, may provide an analogy. The Geiger counter can detect the disintegration of a single atom, something which is firmly in the quantum domain, by amplifying the initial signal into an 'avalanche' of further disintegrations (in this case among gas molecules), which results in a detectable electrical pulse. In this example, a single quantum micro-event can set off a chain reaction which results in a measurable, large-scale result.

The father of the so-called 'Copenhagen interpretation' of quan-tum mechanics, Niels Bohr, speculated as far back as 1958 that key points in the regulatory mechanisms of the brain might be so delicately balanced that they could be affected by quantum me- chanical events. Significantly, eminent brain biologist John. C. Eccles seems to agree. As Eccles has observed:

if one uses the expressive terminology... the 'ghost' (the quantum mechanical event) operates a 'machine' (the brain), not of ropes and pulleys, valves and pipes, but of microscopic spatio-tempo- ral patterns of activity in the neuronal net woven by synaptic connexions often thousand million neurones, and even then only by operating on neurones that are momentarily poised close to ajust-threshold level of excitability.

This means that the Y node choices that are almost evenly / Page 219 / balanced between two outcomes are most likely to be susceptible to quantum influences because it is only in these near-equipoise situations that the quantum fluctuations are the 'feather on the scale' that tips the balance one way or the other. In psychological terms, such equipoise choices may correspond to those decisions we find hardest to make because we are almost equally 'pulled in both directions'. It would be interesting if this were to prove to be the case because it is these extremely 'difficult' choices and the decisions which arise from their resolution that often have the greatest influence on our lives.

Quantum fluctuations could also explain those thoughts that come to us 'in a flash' or 'out of nowhere'. I wonder what role, if any, they play in intuition. It is possible that the neural centre that 'sees' unity, no matter how much it is 'perfected' by unselfishness, is incapable of determining when it will have its deeper insights. That may well still be a matter of complete chance, or, on the above hypothesis, of quasi-chance and non-causal cross-linkaging.

If some Y node choices were quantum in nature, a profound and enduring link would be established between the dynamics of con- sciousness and the structure of the cosmos itself. It is not in the sense of a presently available scientific theory that I intuitively sense a 'rightness' in Hoyle's idea but in the sense of a song of truth, an insight. It may take science years to formulate such a concept in a mathematically consistent way that will win it acceptance.

However, one prediction does seem possible now. The con-straints placed on quantum events by the need to maintain consistency in the loop must constitute one of the great ordering principles of nature. Such an ordering principle could require a profound modi- fication of the laws of quantum mechanics which are rooted in and dependent on the statistical principles of probability and randomness. (It was this indeterminate character of quantum mechanics that caused Einstein to complain that God 'did not play dice with the world'.) To maintain consistency in the loop, many quantum events could not be random: they would have to be linked, in the non-local way so characteristic of quantum mechanics. Could this linkage correspond to (and explain) the principle of synchronicity formulated by psychologist Carl Jung and quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and others?

Synchronicity refers to the apparently inexplicable coincidences that crop up from time to time. We all have experiences of this type. / Page 220 / For no apparent reason, you may suddenly think of a friend you have not seen for years at the very moment when the phone rings and you discover that he/she has just landed in town and wants to visit. The quantum event that caused you to think of the person at the very instant he/she was thinking of you may result from the need to preserve the internal consistency of a quantum world closed back upon itself to form a loop of time.

The self-consistency concept may also help to explain what scientists call the anthropic principle. This refers not to the coinci- dences of human life, but to cosmic coincidences. When Hoyle describes the universe as a 'put-up job', he is referring to the almost unbelievable way in which the cosmos seems to have been tailor- made to permit the evolution of creatures like ourselves. If the fundamental constants of physics were readjusted by just a tiny fraction, the universe would become inhospitable to life. For exam- ple if the gravitational constant was just a fraction bigger, the instabilities which cause stars to explode as supernovae could never have developed. This means that there would have been no way to seed space with the 'ash' of heavy elements essential to life. The gravitational constant, in other words, is very finely tuned to create just the right kind of universe in which life can evolve.

Physicists from Paul Dirac to Paul Davies have also pointed out that the cosmos seems to be sensitively built on a number of quite amazing coincidences. In particular, the large number 1040 crops up in some of the most basic relationships in physics.

^x G^-1 ~ 1040

N ~ 10⁸⁰ = 10(⁴⁰)²

N_* ~ 10⁶⁰ = 10(⁴⁰)^3/2

t _H/ t _N ~ 10 ⁴⁰

t_N/tp ~ 10 ⁴⁰

S ~ (10⁴⁰)^1/4

The letters and numbers on the left refer to qualities or relation-ships that have fundamental importance in physics; their meaning need not concern us-it is the fact that the number 10⁴⁰ crops up so regularly in the context of the parameters which determine the structure of the universe that is so remarkable.

The anthropic principle says that all these 'coincidences' create the special kind of cosmic conditions needed to produce us. The puzzle that this presents however, if consciousness inter- / Page 221 / acts with matter by means of quantum events in the brain because the spacetime loop can then only maintain its self-consistency by creating and preserving just those conditions which permit con- sciousness to flourish. Consciousness, in this context, does not mean the average mode of human consciousness at this moment in evolution, it means whatever completed limit consciousness may reach in future time. The cosmos then emerges as the ultimate feedback loop and consciousness is a created product of its own antecedent activity.

This idea has many similarities to the 'bootstrap' principle formu- lated by physicist Geoffrey Chew (which defines all basic constituents of the real world in terms of their mutually self-consistent relation- ships). It is also a cousin of John Wheeler's concept of the universe as a 'self-excited circuit' in which the cosmos is called into being by retroactive causation, that is by events in the future propagating backwards in time to cause events in the past.

This is a very bold, almost rash ,speculation and it invites the obvious criticism from a scientific cynic, 'if these synchronicities which underpin consistency are real, if they exist, they must show up somewhere as mathematical regularities. OK, where are they?'.

To explore this issue, we must look at the mathematics of randomness. And, up-front, we encounter a surprising fact. It is difficult, if not impossible, to say with confidence that a given number sequence that appears random in anyone context is in fact random in an absolute sense. Most seemingly random numbers when compared, for example by adding or subtracting, would give further numbers which themselves would seem to be random. However, consider the sequence:

31415926535897(1)

This passes all currently-available tests for randomness. Now com-pare it with the sequence

20304815424786(2)

which also qualifies as a wholly-random number. On the face of it, we simply have two random numbers. However, if we subtract the lower sequence (2) from the higher, (1), with the 'wrinkle' that if we get a negative number we add 10 to the result, we obtain the sequence

111111111111111

This is strikingly non-random. These two 'random' numbers thus have a special property. Heinz Pagels, who gives this example in his book The Cosmic Code, draws from this illustration a conclu- / Page 222 / sion that goes to the heart of my argument about synchronistic cross- linkaging. He says:

This illustrates that two random sequences can be correlated- each is individually chaotic but, ifproperly compared by using some rule, then a non-random pattern appears.

If I am right, analogous non-random cross-linkages at the quan-tum level may be the fine gossamer threads, fragile in themselves, but indestructible in their collective strength, that hold the cosmos in a self-consistent loop of becoming.

Y nodes, choices, thus emerge as the determinants of the pattern of our psychological development. Because of them, we create our own heaven, our own hell, we create ourselves, we create the very fabric of the world.

We are getting into very deep waters where ordinary experience cannot guide us. So again, as has become my habit in this penulti- mate Chapter, I will let a more eloquent voice speak for me. Not the voice of a scientist but of a poet-writer. In her remarkable retelling of the legend of Arthur, The Mists of Avalon, Marian Zimmer- Bradley makes her heroine, Morgan Ie Fay, say:

With this discussion of synchronicity and self-consistency, we have arrived at the point where we cal! begin to see the strange relation- ship between consciousness and the universe, between the 'thought' within and the 'thing' without.

We have established that consciousness cannot be treated sepa-rately from the 'reality' it observes. We can assert this confidently. Itis now a (virtually) unchallengeable axiom of quantum mechanics that each act of observation causes the ripple of possibility of the quantum wave to 'concretise' into entities with an observable and measurable existence.

In Chapter 9, I postulated that consciousness is that unifying activity in the brain that 'sees' one in many. However, conscious-ness is not just a passive receiver. By its choices, it creates unities. Indeed, its very essence is that it acts as a nodal integrator between the quantum ripples of possibility that emanate from both past and future. It is, if you like, the 'reality slit' into which multiple ripples / Page 223 / of possibility enter, leaving the temporally symmetric quantum world and 'falling' into the one-way world of matter which decays with time.

Wolf has summarised this viewpoint admirably:

Our minds [i.e. consciousness] are thus tuned... to multiple dimensions, multiple realities. The freely associating mind is able to pass across time barriers, sensing the future and reap- praising the past. Our minds are time machines, able to sense the flow of possibility waves from both the past and the future. In my view, there cannot be anything like existence without this higher form of quantum reality.

All this sounds highly abstract, remote from the kind of con-

sciousness you and I experience now. So let me bring the message close to home. Think back again to a moment when you suddenly felt you really understood something you had not understood before. It may have been a mathematical problem you had been wrestling with for days. Suddenly, after hours of frustration, the answer was there - complete and perfect.

This is the essence of insight. Things hitherto separate and unconnected suddenly 'click together'. The pieces of the jigsaw slide into place. As I have stressed, this integrative faculty is the hallmark of consciousness. The understanding that follows a 'Eu- reka' moment is not a surface comprehension; it is a 'deep knowing' that will stay with you for life precisely because it is part of a wider multiform consciousness, of which your mind is but a single unit. In deep knowing you become part of the self-unfolding of the cosmos.

Think about this in terms of time. The answer you sought existed prior to your discovery of it. What happened in your flash of understanding was that your individual consciousness suddently 'caught up' with a truth already 'known'. It tapped into the com- pleted, unitive consciousness that underpins the closed feedback loop of becoming. What you experienced was a faint fore-taste of the final act in the evolution of consciousness, a memory of that magic future moment of total togetherness, when the distinction between observer and observed vanishes completely.

One of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, said of his subject 'The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer, body and soul, is no longer adequate '. In saying this he, a scientist, found himself using / Page 224 / the language of mysticism. Cqmpare Heisenberg's words with those of the Dominican monk Meister Eckhart, 'the knowe r and the known are one', or the words of the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, 'consciousness is its content' and 'there is neither the outer nor the inner but only the whole. The experiencer is the experienced...the thinker is the thought'.

Here then is the longed-for end of the age-old road. Here science and religion speak with a single voice, each subtending and validat- ing the other. Here confusion ends and contradictions cease. All things are one. Even the distinction between inner and outer, singer and song fades in the full light of completed consciousness.

Even now, today, here, still trapped in time, if we strain our ears to their limit, we can just hear the strains of that distant music 'from some far shore the final chorus sounding' as Whitman said. A whisper of tomorrow, reaching into today. More than a beacon of hope, more than a promise of better things, a commitment from our higher selves to their lowlier foundations, a conviction that the creative evolution which fashioned man from microbe will fashion God from man, no, has fashioned God from man. From round the closed arc of time, the time-free God speaks to his time-trapped children, who are both his parents and his heirs.

What then of the' arrow of time' ,forever pointing towards decay and death? Hoyle gives us an interesting clue. Speaking of the ability of electromagnetic waves to propagate in both time directions, Hoyle notes that the propagation of radiation in the familiar past-to- future time sense leads inevitably to loss of information. However, over evolutionary time, organisms have gained in complexity (such a gain in complexity being powered by the energy of the sun's radiation).

He then goes on to suggest, as I have outlined above, that life uses informationfrom thefuture. In 'real time' science, such a suggestion would run foul of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. However, if time is closed into a loop, a relentless decay of order into noise is impossible because at some point in the 'circle', the situation must reverse itself so that noise becomes order. Again, in a metaphorical sense, the idea of a loop in time seems to resolve a paradox. In this metaphor, life and intelligence can draw, not only on information in their past, as 'remembered' in their DNA, but on information in their future, which is their past 'once removed'.

Where does consciousness fit into this global picture? My problem here is a perfect example of the thing I have emphasised / Page 226 / over the past few chapters-of the way the words we choose, by trapping (defining) our thoughts in words, confuse the reality we are trying to reach. I have now implanted two 'models' in the readers' mind, Hawking's spacetime loop and Hoyle's idea of choice as a resultant of quantum uncertainties translated into conscious action (even if that 'action' is only the fixing of a thought in words). These two models do not mesh readily together. As always happens with language, I have brought clarity in one case only by muddying the .waters in another.

From this perspective, we can now map out an evolution of consciousness, in terms of the spacetime globe. In Figure 10.1, ( page 225 Figure omitted)I sketch out a mandala, a mythic symbol in the form of a Hawking spacetime globe, a loop in time. Each pole is dark, symbolising undifferentiated 'simplicity' in a physical sense and total 'ignorance' (zero conscious- ness) in a pyschological sense. From this darkness, gradually through evolution, light is bom and increases in strength. That light is informa- tion, the data stored in DNA code and in us expressed as consciousness. At this stage, we are low on the scale of consciousness. Beyond the 'now' point occupied by man at his present stage of evolution, the light of consciousness continues to brighten, reaching a maximum for reasons of pure symmetry at the 'equator' of the spacetime globe after which it fades away again to reach another pole of darkness.

The 'pure symmetry' of the 'equator' is not just a turn of phrase. The point at which the cosmos reaches its maximum size has a special property because it is unique, marking the exact moment at which growth transmutes into decay. As such, it has something of the quality of a 'phase transition' or a 'symmetry breaking'. If consciousness reaches its full flowering at its point of maximum strength, its very perfection may, for reasons beyond our present comprehension, require a dissolution into darkness in order that it may realise itself again on the other side of the spacetime rim.

This idea has its own poetic logic, for the definition of something perfect is that it has reached finality-it has fulfilled its 'dream', it has realised the most sublime expression of beauty that the cosmos is capable of. In a real sense, therefore, it can evolve no further because it has nowhere to go. If the structure of the cosmos is such that nothing can 'stand still' , the only thing a perfected structure can do is undergo a symmetry-breaking effect that reverses the process that brought it into being. At that climactic point of flawless and absolute perfection, the laws of physics may require that evolution / Page 227 / Page 227 / 'inverts itself' , unbuilding what has been built, unlearning what has been learned, forgetting what has been remembered, destroying created order to regenerate creative chaos.

If this idea still feels vaguely unsatisfying, remember that we are using a metaphor to try to convey some feeling for a concept which is beyond our power to conceive or formulate at this stage of our evolution. As usual, poetry gives us a sharper insight. Listen to what T.S. Eliot says in 'Burnt Norton':

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless neither from nor towards: at the still point, there the dance is but neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it firity where pastandfuture are gathered. Neither movementfrom nor towards

neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point there would be no dance, and there is only the dance

And later

words move, music moves

only in time; but that which is only living

can only die. Words, after speech, reach

into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern

can words or music reach

the stillness, as a Chinese jar still

moves perpetually in its stillness

not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts

not that only, but the co-existence

or say that the end precedes the beginning

and the end and the beginning were always there

before the beginning and after the end

and all is always now

In a symbolic way, this new mandala solves 'in song' many of the paradoxes which have bedevilled our quest for meaning through the course of this book. In Chapter 2, I painted a grim picture of the future in a cosmos destined to move to a state of maximum entropy, i.e. of death. In the mandala, the chain of cause-and-effect is continuous-maximum entropy is linked to and continuous with maximum order for the arrow of time points not only to the dark node but inevitably to the brightness beyond. This may be the final 'darkness before dawn' image.

Page 228

The mandala also shows-clearly-how consciousness can be universal while at the same time being fractured into different reflecting crystals by ego-boundaries. In this representation, the 'lines of latitude' on the spacetime globe represent levels of con- sciousness, progressing from the preconscious minds of animals to the various levels of human consciousness and beyond. A thousand different human minds may reach a given 'line' on the scale by any one of a million different, meandering 'worldline' routes (resulting from billions of different Y node choices) but, once there, the quality of the consciousness they experience will be identical. There are a million roads to the same place, a million roads to Avalon.

What is true of man is also true of extraterrestrial intelligences, if they exi~t. Whatever the physical basis of its mentality, an alien lifeform would experience exactly the same quality of understand- ing at any given line of latitude as a human, for universal conscious- ness admits of no exceptions.

In this mandala, there is no need for God to create (cause) the cosmos since the act of creation is itself a 'result' of its own prior 'effects'.

Perhaps (only perhaps) the mandala metaphor allows us to see why ego-death can free consciousness from time even at our present, far-from-perfect stage of evolution. Consider the 'line of latitude' which the average human consciousness has almost but not quite reached on the spacetime globe as a 'breakthough point' at which ego-death occurs for most humans. Today, we are somewhere short of that threshold and all we can do is strive for the small ego-deaths that lead to those rare 'moments of insight' so treasured by those who have experienced them. These may be enough to allow us to escape our bondage to 'real time'. One only has to break the time threshold fleetingly to make a permanent contribution to the evolu- tionary process for that breakthough, once it has happened, is indelibly imprinted into the fabric of spacetime. We must never lose sight of the fact that our past thoughts are as 'real' as our past bodies. They do not cease to exist just because our awareness is locked in the present. This is true not just of those things we remember but of the millions of forgotten Y node choices through which we fixed the pattern of our minds. The universe remembers them even if we do not. In this sense, the poet's intuition may be right: one moment may 'hold eternity'.

So, finally, the pattern emerges. Through the haze of ego, / Page 229 / through the limitations of ignorance, we of this generation, begin to see something no other generation has ever seen. At least, not with such precise, mathematical detail, and not in such depth.

What we see, for the first time, is truth; the truth of what we are and whence we came. We know the scale of Deep Time: fifteen billion years. We know the evolutionary sequence: Big Bang -+ formless clouds of hydrogen (and helium) gas -+ galaxies -+ first generation stars -+ supernovae -+ second generation stars and planets -+ life -+ mind. We are beginning to feel in our bones just what this means. We see that from hydrogen, the simplest atom in the periodic table, has come symphony orchestras, diamonds, the sound of starlings at sunset, Voyager spacecraft, the glitter of dew on spiderwebs at dawn, fractal images on computers, the laser light of cognitive awareness. This is a creative act of staggering propor- tions. We are the products of this evolutionary process. We are also its heirs and its trustees.

So here we stand at this human moment in evolution, sentient stardust looking back at its origins with eyes that see for the first time, a universe made conscious of itself. Poised on the present, we look forward to the future - in both senses of the term. For here is the most intimately awesome realisation our science has bequeathed us - the creative process that fashioned the human mind will not stop with us. We know that consciousness will continue to grow in strength until it is as far removed from the present human mentality as our minds are from the rudimentary nervous systems of the slipper animalcules that swarm in a drop of pondwater; until its creative power is so great that it can realise itself, making its own unbegun splendour explode into being in a supreme 'instant' of consciously retroactive causation. In ten billion years, or ten mil-lion, or ? What is the climax of consciousness towards which the whole evolutionary process draws, the point of paradox where beginning and end meld? Is it God? I have already used the word God but I must caution that 'God' is only a word, a label. The reality is beyond our comprehension. If we could foresee the fulfilled cognition our minds will evolve into, we would perish in an instant. It is a law of life that understanding only comes to a mind which is ready to receive it. If cosmic consciousness were to flood into the present structure of the average human mind, iftoday's thought pattern were to unpreparedly 'know' tomorrow's consciousness, simultaneously aware of being at / Page 230 / the fine scale of atoms and the colossal scale of stars, mind would self-destruct. Such premature insight would 'fry our brains'.

In his wonderful prose poem 'Deep Time', physicist David Darling maps out the future path of consciousness in words I cannot improve upon.

Even now, at the close of the twentieth century, we sense it.

You and I are the infant cosmos, still only dimly aware, still only conscious of things immediately around the reality generators that are our minds. We perceive only dully, over a small range of wavelengths of light and sound, and we comprehend structure over only a narrow range in space and time. But, eventually, we will see X rays and gamma rays,

radio waves and gravitational waves. And subatomic parti- cles. And whole galaxies in their most intimate detail. We

shall see and understand all there is to know. What we are today will evolve to become a single universe-wide mind, so that every particle in space will be within this cosmic con- sciousness -free, but aware. Every particle of which you

and I are made will ultimately be reconstituted in this univer- sal mind, along with everything else. Given such a prospect,

we need hardly fear our own personal deaths. For nothing ever dies. And in Deep Time we shall be as one.

This 'map' of future evolution allows us to remove the last fracture in our understanding, that final fissure that stops us from seeing things whole. In order to carry my argument through chapters 8 to 10 in logical order, I allowed the impression to develop that consciousness was largely a right brain function and ego largely a left brain function. In so doing, I preserved the very dualism I was trying to demolish. Let me therefore repeat a point I raised briefly in

chapters 8 and 9 - that completed consciousness melds together right-brain holism and left-brain logic. It is not a sufficient function of consciousness that it simply 'sees' the oneness of things. The cosmos is a creative process, a stupendously generative act. This act demands work, the work that comes not from contemplation but from action. In the final analysis, the 'Western' tradition of science has been as necessary for the evolution of consciousness as the 'Eastern' tradition of mysticism. Far from being set against each other, these differing approaches support and enrich the comple- mentary yin/yang oneness they create. / Page 231 /The insights of science - 'monuments of un aging intellect'- are part of the 'deep knowing' of consciousness. We must not confuse ego with intellect. While pre-scientific societies could intuitively sense the oneness of things, the cosmos could never realise itself without the detailed mathematical definition which science brings about. In a more profound sense, the self-realisation of the cosmos required - and requires - the ongoing' collapse' of temporally symmetric quantum waves into matter, the transfigura- tion of possibility into actuality, the Fall from Eternity into Time. It is this endlessly repeating metamorphosis that produces in the 'static' spacetime world of being the dynamic adventure of becom- ing, that generates in us the sense of motion that so confuses us when we apply it to 'time'. For this 'Fall' is the 'heartbeat' of the cosmos -that which keeps it 'real' by making it 'whole'. Without this 'Fall' we and the world we inhabit would be but virtual quantum possibili- ties, shapeless dreams in the Mind of God.

This mandala sings to us that consciousness will continue to evolve into a truly supreme state in which it will be fully timeless and creatively free of all limitations. In this state of divinity, it will have the capacity to build a world from what Paul Davies has called 'structured nothingness'. In this continuum the individual human brain is not simply a passive receiver, tuning in to information from both past and future. Rather, it receives data from the past and then by reworking it in consciousness creates the data that will go forward into the future. Consciousness is not just a mirror (another confusing image) which receives the light of truth with clearer definition as its ego-barriers go down. Consciousness is also an amplifier, a generator of the light that brightens beyond itself to reach the transcendent radience of the 'centre', the still point.

Giver and receiver, consciousness is both, its ability to take and to give being handicapped by the level of growth it has reached and by the confusing noise of the ego-cage. A highly evolved mind free of self receives fully and gives fully. In both senses, it 'sees', it 'knows'.

The message of this chapter, and this book, is, to me, flawlessly captured in my favourite poem, by English poet Siegfried Sassoon:

I am that fantasy which race has wrought

of mundane chance mate rial. I am time

paeaned by the senses five like bells that chime. / page 232

 I am that cramped and ctumbling house of clay

where mansoul weaves the secret webs of thought.

venturer-automaton-I cannot tell

what power.s pnd instincts animate and betray

and do their dreamwork in me. Seed and star,

sown by the wind, in spirit I am far

from self; the dull control with whom I dwell

also I am ancestral. Aeons ahead

and ages back, both son and sire I live

mote-like between the unquickened and the dead- from whom I take, and unto whom I give

Page number 233 (number omitted)

Fool! All that is, at all

lasts ever, past recall;

earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:

what entered into thee

that was, is, and shall be:

time's wheel runs back or stops; Potter and clay endure

Robert Browning

The pages of this book have taken us on a journey to far-off places. We have looked around the rim of space and time to the ultimate beginning and end of things and we have looked at our dread of death and the misty genesis of faith. We have shared a journey of exploration. However, exploration is a poignant metaphor of the human state, for what explorers seek in the outside world is often that which is missing in themselves. The brave pioneer is sometimes the lost child, looking for home.

So, at the end of our story, inevitably, we come back to our point of origin, to the frail perishable constructions of blood and flesh and bone that are you and I. In the light of where we have been, we ask a final question, a simple, almost plaintive question: What is happiness?

Happiness. What do we mean by this strange, paradoxical, sad word? To make sense of the question, we must phrase the answer in terms of evolution. We have seen how the human brain preserves, in its present structure, the history of its past development. The newer layers are built on top of the older layers, just as younger strata in a geological formation lie on top of-and conceal-the more / Page 234 / ancient strata which preceded-them. In particular, we focused on the ancient reptilian core and the next-oldest rind wrapped around it, the limbic brain, because these are the seats of the so-called instincts.

Let us quickly review these, ordering them into a hierarchy based on the character of the emotions they generate in our ego-awareness.

1. The instinct which drives us to eat and drink. This is hard- wired into our brains because it is the means by which the body/self preserves its own structure. As parts wear out, they must be reconstructed, as water is lost through sweat and urine, it must be replaced so that the concentration of key chemicals like salt in the blood remains at the constant level needed to sustain life. Associated with this instinct are the most primitive emotions, hunger and thirst, barely capable of being called emotions and hardly distinguishable from physiological states. These emotions tend to be prolonged, and their gratification may be delayed without endangering life; thus we can 'feel hungry' for hours before we are driven to eat.

2. The instinct which drives us to defend the integrity of our body/self in the face of danger. This is the fight or flight reaction we discussed in Chapter I and elsewhere. When life is threatened, the mind-computer has to make a rapid choice between two options-to avoid the danger by trying to escape from it or to confront the danger by engaging in real or mock combat. Associated with this instinct are the emo- tions of rage (fighting) and fear (fleeing). These emotions correspond to a sense of crisis which means that they are rapidly aroused and demand an immediate response. Whereas we can ignore or suppress feelings of hunger and thirst, rage and terror dominate the psyche until the threat that engen- dered them has been dealt with.

3. The instinct which drives us to reproduce. Reproduction is unique among the instincts because it involves not one individual but two. Associated with this instinct of sex is the emotion of lust, by which I mean simply the direct expression of sexual urge without taking into account any of the compli- cating value judgements which arise when the biological drive is viewed through the distorting prism of the symbolate mind. These value judgements colour the underlying instinct / Page 235 / so deeply that the sensation of love, which we normally associate with sex, is seen as the 'highest' of all human emotions.

These instincts conform to a common pattern. In cases studied in animals, the instinct is often triggered by a specific signal which behavioural scientists call an innate releasing mechanism or IRM. In the case of the male stickleback fish, for example (which has been the subject of many studies), the colour red on the belly of another male during the mating season acts as an IRM, setting off an attack reaction aimed at driving the intruder from his territory.

The role of hormones in instinctive behaviour is often misun- derstood. Hormones are responsible for the 'state of arousal', the 'turn-on' that accompanies the instinct but they do not trigger it. This is the role of the IRM. What hormones do is determine the threshold of response. Thus, during winter, a male stickleback can see a red- bellied male and remain indifferent-because he is not hormonally primed to respond. It is a different matter in spring, when the concentration of reproductive hormones reaches its maximum; now the mere sight of the colour red, even on a bit of wood, will provoke the male to attack; hormones have so lowered his excitatory threshold that the prime feature of the signal, not the signal itself, is enough to set the aggressive/defensive response in motion.

There has been an enormous controversy over the question of whether IRMs exist in humans and, if so, whether these are learned or inherited. The controversy need not concern us. There is no doubt that we share the instincts of the four Fs with our vertebrate relatives (for example, the chemical changes in the blood of a terrified man are identical to those in the blood of a terrified cat), and it seems hard to dispute that these instincts are activated by powerful stimuli or signals. When a man is hungry the succulent smell of roast lamb makes him want to eat; when he feels 'sexy' the provocative sight of well- formed female breasts or buttocks makes him want to 'make love'.

Once an IRM has set the scene in an appropriately primed individual, the final step is the carrying out of a specific action pattern which leads the animal to physically engage in the particular behaviour which the specific hormone has prepared and the specific IRM triggered. Behaviourial scientists call these selective action patterns 'consummatory' acts because they remove the source of their own motivation. / Page 236 / The pattern common to all instincts is thus encoded in the following paradigm. Hormones raise the level of arousal and thereby diminish the barriers that inhibit the action pattern; the IRM triggers the action and ili.e, consummatory act completes the sequence. Instinctive behaviour is fundamentally goal-driven and goal-oriented. This is why it conveys such a strong impression of purpose.

To bring out the inner nature of instinct, we can recap it thus:

eating and drinking = self-maintainance

fighting or fleeing = self-preservation

reproduction = self-continuation

Readers will recognise at once that what I am describing here is a mechanism of negative feedback or homeostatic control (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2 Figures omitted). In all cases, a stimulus (the IRM) provokes a response (the consummatory act) which restores a stressed system (the body/self) to its original non-stressed condition.

What has all this got to do with human happiness? On one level, almost everything. We possess all these instincts; they are, as we have seen, our 'original sin'-the genetic memory of our animal ancestry. However, the selective action pattern of each instinct does not, in the human case, take place in a mindless mechanical automaton like a thermostat. The chemical states associated with each instinct register in our conscious awareness as feelings. Thus we experience any move away from the equilibrium condition of the bodily status quo as a need or urge and we experience the re-establishment of

equilibrium following the consummatory act as contentment or happiness.

'Happiness is a full stomach' is an old adage which captures this point neatly. Consummation of any instinct takes us back into the state of 'body-bliss' where our physical machinery is running smoothly, all components 'oiled' and functioning in perfect har- mony. This is the 'warm inner glow' of satisfied appetite.

The gratification that follows consummation of an instinct means that the demands of the body/self no longer intrude into the realm of mentality: the psyche can sink back into the easeful slumber of semi-consciousness.

Thus we reach the first key conclusion of this chapter: consum-matory pleasure is the basic archetype of human happiness. How-ever, the instinctual paradigm is heavily overlaid by the complexi-ties of the ego self. So much so that we may fail to see the ancient / Page 237 / groundwork beneath its modem superstructure.

This is important, so let us work it through. Think back to the ego-self. The world of the ego-self is a symbolic world, generating a subjective life which has a reality all its own. In this world, we create new constructions through imagination. Most material in novels deals with situations that, from the point of view of the 'real' world, do not exist. This is the domain of the symbolate mind, where 'action' consists of constructing constellations of symbols (thoughts), not carrying out physical movements involving the body. This is the domain of predicative awareness-'if I do this, then that will happen', a continuous testing of options in the light of the likelihood of a preferred outcome.

The likelihood of a preferred outcome; here is the clue. Whereas an aroused animal will simply carry out a consummatory act in the eternal present of its now-centred focus, the symbolate mind often interposes sets of intermediate actions between the archetypal urge and its archetypal fulfilment. Most humans work. Why? To earn money. Why? To enjoy the 'good life'. It is in the definition of the 'good life' that the ancient consummatory patterns fe-emerge. To come at this from a different angle, most people in the West would be ecstatic if they won a lottery worth a million dollars. Why? What are the typical ego-constructed fantasies associated with such a dream-corne-true? While the variations are enormous, they tend to cluster around a limited set of common themes-good food, a holiday in the sun, indulgent sex with all its embroidery, absence of stress and so on. In other words, they would use the new-found money to gratify the old compulsions that lead to the state of body-bliss.

The ego-self may disguise the old paradigm in a coat of many different colours but it remains, for the most part, the motivational foundation of psychology. Remember that consummatory behaviour is, by definition, goal-driven. The goal-oriented archetype of instinc- tive behaviour has become the model for almost all purposeful mental activity. Indeed, the fundamental quantum of human behav- iour could be described as 'the creation of a goal, which is triggered by signals, empowered by motivation and consummated by action'. Note the use of the word' creation'. Here is where the human indi- vidual rises above his animal past. The consummatory instincts of the four Fs were 'created' by natural selection and the predisposition to act them out is hard-wired into our brains by our genes. Concep- / Page 238 / tual human goals are created by the symbolate mind and they can be as many and varied as the rich tapestry of human experience itself. However, the 'drive' which motivates the individual to realise these mind-generated goals remains, long-term, pegged to the legacy of instinct. To Ii surprising degree.

This comes about because the symbolate mind, with its enor- mous capacity for flexible cross-linkaging and association, fixes onto the mind-generated intermediate goals, most of the end-ori- ented tension that stems from the biological urge to final consum- mation. In many circumstances, these intermediate goals, intended as means to an end, can become ends in themselves. Jobs are a prime example. How many men get 'hooked' on their job? In these cases, the half-way post becomes a motivational substitute for the finishing line. However, the 'force' that draws behaviour through compli- cated sequences of conscious actions all too often comes from the ever-powerful magnet in the subconscious realm of the limbic brain where the pleasure/pain nuclei lie. No one should underestimate the influence of this magnet; one only has to think of the laboratory rat which self-stimulates its own pleasure centre until it drops from exhaustion to recognise that consummatory 'happiness' has an open-ended capacity to entrance the psyche.

The goal towards which this open-ended drive is directed, however, must never be forgotten: it is to eliminate the destabilising influences that upset the body/selfs equilibrium. To advance mat- ters we must examine what this equilibrium means.

In Chapter 2, we saw that one of science's most basic theorems, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, encodes a universal tendency for order to decay into disorder, for information to degenerate into noise, for complex systems to move back towards a state of inertia or equilibrium. Analogous processes operate in human psychology and there is in all of us a tendency to psychic laziness, a desire to say 'it's all too hard' and opt out of the struggle. The English poet Lord Tennyson once wrote a poem about the victors of the Trojan war. On their journey back to Greece after their ten-year battle, these wanderers chance upon a charmed Isle inhabited by mythic beings called Lotus Eaters. The Lotus Eaters offer the war-weary warriors the opium poppy of forgetfulness, whereupon they sink into a state of drowsy 'happiness', turning their backs on the pain-racked, strife-bedevil- led life of the outside world:

Page 239

hateful is the dark-blue sky

vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea death is the end of life; ah why

should life all labour be? ..,

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast

And in a little while our lips are dumb

Let us alone. What is it that will last?

All things are taken from us and become

portions and parcels of the dreadful past

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have

to war with evil? Is there any peace

in ever climbing up the climbing wave

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave

in silence; ripen, fall and cease

give us long rest, or death, dark death or dreamful ease

I quote this poem because this Siren call is present in all of us. Religion has symbolised it as the Great Tempter (the Devil or Satan) whose voice forever whispers to us to prefer the short-cut to the long journey, the easy answer to the hard question, to choose the safety of the inn and forsake the challenge of the road. 'Rest', the voice whispers, 'sleep'.

In the context of the quest for happiness, one has to ask the obvious question, 'Is not this return to Eden, to the lost Paradise of the instinctual psyche the end of the search?' Why should we not eat the opium poppy and, forsaking pain, slumber in dreamful ease? To answer this, we need to go back to the exchange between Mephistopheles and Faust, for this epitomises the very nub of the evolutionary process:

'Who art thou?' asks Faust

to which Mephistopheles replies

'I am part of that spirit, which always wills evil but always creates good'

I can now give a deeper explanation of what this interchange means. In the metaphorical imagery of religion, the Devil is not merely the Tempter who whispers to us to lie down in easeful slumber, he is also the mythic embodiment of the very hardships which make us suffer and, in suffering, transcend our present limitation. The things we see about us that seem so cruel, so unfair, / Page 240 / so tragic are the very things which prevent the human psyche from falling back into the state of equilibrium, the inertia of indolence, towards which it always tends. It is precisely because Beethoven was going deaf that he was driven to write some of his greatest music; precisely because Demosthenes had a speech impediment that he went on to become one of the greatest orators in ancient Athens; precisely because Helen Keller was born blind that she was able to 'see'the inner workings of human sorrow in such clear outline.

I can put this point into a scientific perspective by using a biological analogy. What I have been trying to say in the last few pages is that an animal can only enjoy instinctual happiness if its body/selfis in perfect equilibrium with its surroundings, no demands being made on it by hunger, fear or illness. There is a profound similarity between this condition of psychic equilibrium and the process of adaptation that occurs during biological evolution.

If you dig in the sand of certain beaches, you may come across a variety of worm that has remained virtually unchanged since the pre-Cambrian period some 600 million years ago. As the physicist Lecomte Du Nouy has noted:

The pre-Cambrian sandworms were probably not very different from those of our own shores. Their adaptation was remarkable and very superior to that of Man. Having attained equilibrium, living under only slightly changed conditions, they have had no reason to transform themselves further... One of these worms however, continued to evolve because it was less well adapted than the others... This worm, less perfect as a worm, may have been our ancestor

The evolutionary line that led from microbe to man has thus been precisely defined by just those creatures which did not equilibrate to their environments. Throughout evolution, it has always been the misfit that has been the vehicle of creative change.

The misfit is the biological and psychological embodiment of Mephistopheles' principle; by creating maladjustment (in religious language, willing 'evil'), misfits continually cause the present to be transcended (in religious language, they create 'good'). The happi- ness that comes from an achieved equilibrium situation lives only in the 'now'; it is the unhappiness of an unstable, non-equilibrium state that thrusts awareness into time.

To follow this we need to go back again to Chapter 2. The arrow / Page 241 / of time is defined by the direction of increasing entropy, i.e. by the direction a system spontaneously adopts as it tends to equilibrium. At equilibrium, time literally loses all meaning. Without some asymmetry in the system to make one part different from another, the very concept of time evaporates.

Thus it is the non-equilibrium situation, the unstable state, the misfit condition, that creates time. This is why the birth of the ego- self, the Fall, was, in the longest perspective, an upward step in humanity's journey towards higher consciousness. By creating the time sense, the ego-self put mind in an unstable, misfit situation, where it cannot remain, where it has no choice but to go on. Only by transcending the fallacy of the time sense can mind climb into a state of true timelessness, not the non-time of equilibrium (where neither past nor future exist) but the universal time of consciousness (where both past and future co-exist together).

To summarise simply, when a creature fits its environment, it has no cause to change; it exists in a non-time state of being; when a creature misfits its environment, it has no option but to change; it exists in a time-trapped state of becoming. This is why Gerald Heard captured the essence of evolution when he said 'indeed life's development, the evolution of awareness, may best be rendered into three attitudes towards time; then, we see successively the time unaware animal, the time-haunted man and the time-understanding mind'.

The unpalatable aspect of this is the inevitable requirement for hardship as a precondition of human growth, of the evolution of consciousness. Most people, obedient to the psychic pull of entropy, want 'salvation in six easy lessons'. This is not possible.

The point of the Devil's message to Faust has been captured, for me at least, in a simple poem by Angela Morgan, which highlights the essential and utterly unavoidable role of ordeal in human transformation:

When nature wants to take a man

and shake a man

and wake a man

when nature wants to make a man

to do thefuture's will

when she tries with all her skill and she yearns with all her soul to create him large and whole / P 242 /

with what cunning she prepares him

how she goads and never spares him and in poverty begets him... how she often disappoints

whom she sacredly annoints

with what wisdom she will hide him

never minding what betide him...

bids him struggle harder yet

makes him lonely

so that only

God's high messages shall reach him

so that she may surely teach him

what the hierachy planned

though he may not understand

gives him passions to command

how remorselessly she spurs him

with terrific ardour stirs him

when she poignantly prefers him

Is this then the meaning of life? To struggle, to bleed in silence, to grow through suffering? Is comfort the necessary adversary of growth? Others may think differently, but my answer has to be 'yes'. We live in a society that has elevated the cop-out to the level of an art form. We live in air-conditioned buildings, drive heated cars, and above all, we hide and deny death. This hiding of death-the final and absolute agent of change-is the epitome of our contemporary Western civilisation, just as I believe it will be its epitaph.

The problem of death should be familiar by now-it has been a key theme of this book. We fear nothing so much as change. Why? Because change, deep change, is a form of death. A system of any kind, mechanical, biological or psychic, which operates on the principle of negative feedback has, by the definition of its being, to adjust to change in such a way as to restore itself to its original state. In its perspective, change is a disturbance to be eliminated. If a self- preserving feedback system absorbs rather than resists change, it loses its self-sense, its identity-it dies.

This is why the 'little deaths' of life, the losses that result from divorce or the death of people with whom we have shared much of our lives, create in us a terrifying sense that 'everything is breaking down', a sense of being adrift without familiar anchors, in extreme cases, a sense almost of 'going mad'. We invest so much of / Page 243 / ourselves in those we love that their departure takes with it a large chunk of us. There is a simple reason why the familiar saying 'to part is to die a little' has become a cliche. It is true.

People in grief often express their feelings in two familiar phrases: 'nothing matters any more because my life is over' and 'I can't go on'. These are giveaway indications of what is going on in the psyche. And they are accurate: the old 'I' cannot 'go on' because it is in the process of restructuring itself; the former (stable) homeostatic controls are too altered to simply return to their prior state.

Professionals in grief counselling are often confronted with people who are visibly struggling to 'keep control'. When they present for therapy, the old, familiar self is still in position but it is perilously poised on the edge of breakdown, in a metastable equilib- rium from which it can be dislodged by the slightest push. That push is usually no more than the presence of a 'safe place' and the chance to externalise their hurt by talking it out. As Shakespeare said in Macbeth, 'give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whis- pers the 0' erfraught heart, and bids it break'. The rush of release that follows is cathartic. With this release, the knotted tension that held the old self together is unwound. The old self dies.

The result of that ego-death is almost invariably a lessening of the self-sense, at least in the short term. The psychic vacuum left when people 'let go' the focus of so many of their own projected hopes and longings is not refilled, at least not in the same way. The psyche has perforce unlearned many of the differences that separated itself from its fellows. The lowered ego-sense that remains is more open to, and tolerant of, grief in others because it recognises them as its own. The barrier between 'self and 'other' weakens. This is a hinge point and I return to it later.

It is impossible to describe the changes that occur during grieving scientifically because we have no neurophysiological or psychological models to guide us. Perhaps chaos theory will one day open up the issue, showing as it does how ordered patterns can arise spontaneously from disordered turbulence. However, the point remains. The death of the old is the birth of the new and the new self, the new stable state into which the lessened ego-sense settles, is more 'simple', one is tempted to say more 'beautiful.' Out of death comes more perfect life.

Page 244

This sentiment, that a higher state of being emerges from death, takes us into a crucial area of human activity, that of creativity. In one of the very few (to me) authentic analyses of creativity, the American p~ychologist Rollo May notes:

anxiety is understandably a concomitant of the shaking of the self-world relationship that occurs in the encounter (between the creative mind and the new insight). Our sense of identity is threatened,' the world is not as we experienced it before, and since self and world are always correlated, we no longer are what we were before.

This deep insight puts death into an entirely different perspec- tive. It is the hallmark of any truly creative thought or act that it generates novelty; something that was not present before emerges from the chaos of creation is caught by the memory of the universe. This new insight, this unexpected music, inevitably has to destroy the old thought forms which it replaces because new symmetries are almost invariably moulded from the broken-down modules of old assumptions. Death is forever present at the cutting edge of consciousness for death is the midwife of creative change, of transcendence. Always.

We seem to have moved a long way from the notion of happiness. We are now talking about evolution and this, by definition, means change, death and rebirth, genetic or psychic. In this context, the question of happiness remains pegged to an issue that has bedevilled students of evolution since Darwin, i.e. does evolution move to- wards a 'goal'?

English statesman Benjamin Disraeli once said of the present condition of humanity, 'this is no place to stop, halfway between ape

and angel' . In the terms of reference of this book, we can see that the

bulk of the human species at this point in time is trapped in a half- way, no man's land, an existential nightmare in which it is divided against itself by ego and ensnared in tick-tock time. This condition is, from the perspective of physics, unreal at its root. It is a function not of the world but of the present state of the human mind, of human limitation, a projection onto the world of fictions and fallacies evolved by the processes of mental 'natural selection' that occured as the conceptual mind struggled to make sense of the symbol-rich domain it was creating.

Page 245

In this focused sense, evolution does have a goal. Biologist Julian Huxley went part way to defining the goal when he said 'man is evolution made conscious of itself. In this book I have tried to show the logical end-point of this process of progressi ve enrichment of consciousness. The goal of evolution is to realise itself through consciousness, to close the feedback loop between mind and matter. Indeed, this has already happened, otherwise spacetime would not be folded back upon itself to form a circle in which past and future are seamlessly interconnected. The unhappiness of the current stage of human development stems from the fact that, for the most part, we do not yet 'see' the reality towards which both science and intuition point. We are caught in a hollow where the fog still enshrouds us; we still have far to go on our journey towards the high place.

However, the future already exists. The visionaries who have lived the timeless state of consciousness foreknew what will one day be the common experience of mankind. The way has been mapped for the many by the few. The road to transcendence then passes through ego-death towards that unified sense of reality that is a defining criterion of unfettered consciousness. This is why mystics spoke of God (pure consciousness) as holy, the word 'holy' coming from 'whole' whence also comes 'heal' (make whole).

Can we flag out signposts along this road to guide the traveller on his journey? I believe we can. I have ranked these according to the criterion of the mutant minority. Chapter 4 suggested that change appears first in a tiny subsection of the population, a mutant minority (sometimes a single individual) and only slowly speads through the population until it becomes the norm. This principle may not apply so constrainingly to psychological change because the power of one individual to transmit his enhanced awareness to others is greatly amplified by teaching and by the written word.

In seeking signposts for change, I will start with indicators that are first, common to all humans at this stage of evolution; second, found only in a minority of advanced members; third, so rare that they are, in an important sense, 'waiting to be born'.

Sex has a special role in human interaction; in order to escape the doomed bodies they inhabit, male genes (in sperm) and female genes (in eggs) unite to form a child, a new generation. Sex is clearly linked to the future as well as the past; this is one source of its uniqueness.

Page 246

As we have seen, the true axis of human growth lies along the road that leads to the lowering of ego-boundaries. This is just what sex achieves-for a while. When two individuals 'fall in love', they surrender, to a qu.it~ remarkable degree, the me-first individualism that is evolution's legacy. In their physical union, two meld into one. In the first flush of romantic love, they quite literally 'lose themselves in each other', often addressing the needs and problems of the other above their own.

The problem is that in modem society, the two-into-one union achieved by sex seldom outlasts the biological impulse that gave rise to it. Moreover, sex often locks both consenting parties into the backward-looking focus that is the hallmark of regressive behaviour; it is often corrupted into ego-mode by emphasising the ego-gratifying release from sexual tension achieved by each, not the communion shared by both.

Often but not always. Our history is filled with and illuminated by examples of human love where self is not separate from other. In the late Middle Ages, when physical love fell under the shadow of the Christian aberration about sex, Heloise could write to her lover Abelard:

I can expect no reward from God, as I have done nothing from love of Him...God knows, at your command I would have followed or preceded you to fiery places. For my heart is not with me, but with thee.

This pledge of love is made all the more poignant because Heloise could no longer expect its physical fulfilment-Abelard had been castrated because of her.

This ideal of romantic love, the ever-changing, ever-new story of 'boy meets girl', is a central theme of the human condition. Not merely because sex is the route to the future, the thread of genetic continuity, but also because sex is, for the vast majority of the population, the only significant form of ego-death we knowingly seek out. It is this communion that lifts love above lust and makes of the sexual act the most ambiguously 'noble' of all human functions, a strange chimera of past and future, beauty and blas- phemy. Sex is therefore a perfect metaphor of the processes of wholesome unselfishness that deepen consciousness. This is why the word 'love' has become the preferred symbol for man's longing for communion, at any level.

Page 247

Sexual love, then, is a first step towards deep happiness. How- ever, it can never be more than that, a first step. The reason for this limitation arises from the very premise on which sex is founded- it is restricted to two persons. Two only. The next step towards deep happiness requires us to widen the circle of communion beyond the limits of gene kinship (parents and children) and biological partners.

In looking at this statement, I have to discuss religion directly. I would like to do so without prejudicing the scientific basis on which this book is predicated. Let me make it clear that in the section that follows, I am not judging the material at issue from the standpoint of faith. Rather, I am looking at religion as a source of psychological insight, to be examined and interpreted like any other body of valid human experience.

The thing that strikes one about the psychology of religion is not the differences of dogma (over which so much blood has been pointlessly spilled) but the commonality of insight. What insight? At its root, simply that all men are brothers and that we should treat others as we treat ourselves.

Christianity: 'All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them' (Matthew 7:12)

Judaism: 'What is hurtful to yourself do not to your fellow man' (Talmud)

Taoism: 'Regard your neighbour's gain as your own gain: and regard your neighbour's loss as your own loss' (T'ai Shang Kan Ying P'ien)

Hinduism: 'Do nought to others which if done to thee would cause thee pain' (Mahabaharata 5.15.17)

Buddhism: 'hurt not others with that which pains yourself (Udanavarga 5.18)

The unity of insight encoded in these sayings is all the more remarkable because they seem, for the most part, to have evolved independently, in different parts of the world under the influence of different cultural traditions at different times during history. The feeling that each of us is capable of 'loving the world' is a common human intuition. Most of us, when supremely happy, are able to affirm 'I'm in love with all mankind'. However, to let it rest there is to miss the deeper message. What these sayings tell us is not merely that we should use a common code of conduct in our dealings with

Page 222

Page 238

"On their journey back to Greece after their ten-year battle, these wanderers chance upon a charmed Isle inhabited by mythic beings called Lotus Eaters. The Lotus Eaters offer the war-weary warriors the opium poppy of forgetfulness, whereupon they sink into a state of drowsy 'happiness', turning their backs on the pain-racked, strife-bedevil- led life of the outside world:"

Page 240

"The misfit is the biological and psychological embodiment of Mephistopheles' principle; by creating maladjustment (in religious language, willing 'evil'), misfits continually cause the present to be transcended (in religious language, they create 'good'). The happi- ness that comes from an achieved equilibrium situation lives only in the 'now'; it is the unhappiness of an unstable, non-equilibrium state that thrusts awareness into time."

Page 235 

"Thus far we have established an extremely strong case for the existence of Nibiru. We have identified its influence in the formation of the Solar System, in subsequent evolu-tion on Earth and in the Flood 13,000 years ago. We have traced it even more recently to the era of the Sumerians, and reviewed the present day search for it in the depths of space. However, despite the strong association of Nibiru with the chief god Anu in the Sumerian texts, 1O3 can we state with certainty that it is, or was, the home of the gods?

An important clue may lie in the number '12', which has been sacred to mankind since time immemorial. It appears within Judaism in the twelve tribes of Israel, within Chris-tianity in the twelve apostles and within Hinduism as a generally auspicious number.

In the complete absence of any other explanation for the sacred number twelve, it has been suggested that its roots lie in the realm of the gods, and specifically in astronomy. 104 As we discussed earlier, the planet Nibiru brings the total number of celestial bodies in our Solar System to twelve (counting the Sun and the Moon) and according to the Sumerians, the decision-making council of the gods also consisted of twelve 'olden' gods. The symbolic importance of this number has remained to this day in the division of the skies into twelve constellations, a division which split the Earth's precessional cycle into twelve periods of 2,160 years. It would seem that the gods' obsession with twelve, with astronomy generally, and with Nibiru in particular, had an almost religious significance, and it is possible to / Page 236 / conclude from this that the gods were not strangers to the Solar System but residents from within.

A possible corroboration that Nibiru was the origin of the gods who came to Earth is found in the significance of the number '7'. The number seven, like twelve, was an important number to the gods, and has remained sacred to mankind ever since. The number is particularly evident in the Biblical seven days of creation, whilst in the New Testament we have the Book of Revelations with its seven seals, seven golden lamp stands, seven angels with seven plagues, and the seven bowls of God's wrath. The number seven also appears in other religions and in the apocrypha. The Koran and the Book of Enoch both describe a journey through seven heavens, by Muhammad and Enoch respec-tively, whilst to this day, Muslim pilgrims must walk seven times around the Ka 'bah in Mecca. Our modern cultures have also absorbed expressions such as the 'Seven Wonders of the Ancient World' (even though we could name a lot more) and the 'Seven Deadly Sins' (even though we could probably name a few more of those too!).

The divine legacy of '7' is also found in the otherwise unexplained origin of the seven days of the week. Most of us take the 7-day week for granted and assume it is a natural cycle. In actual fact, it is not a fixed cycle at all, and scientists have struggled for years to explain why this tradition should have originated. Theologians would claim that the answer lies in the Biblical seven days of creation, but the origin of the Biblical 'days' is almost certainly the seven tablets on which the Enuma Elish was written. This is evident from the contrast between the first six Babylonian tablets describing Marduk's acts of creation and the seventh tablet which is dedicated to a general exaltation of the god (and thus a parallel to the Biblical seventh day when God rested).

The 7-day week splits the solar year into 52 weeks and thereby unlocks the door to another mystical number from / Page 237 / both Egyptian and Mayan tradition. According to an ancient papyrus found in a tomb in Thebes, Thoth the Egyptian god of magic, used to challenge mortals to a mysterious 'Game of 52', which they usually lost.lO5 The number also appears in the Maya's enigmatic Sacred Round of 52 cycles (18,980 days), when their sacred year of 260 days would coincide exactly with their solar year of 365 days.

But what is the ultimate origin of the sacred number '7'? Why did the Babylonians write their creation epic on seven tablets? Whilst the seven stars of the Pleiades may ulti-mately be significant, Zecharia Sitchin has put forward a very interesting alternative theory, based on a literal accep- tance of the ancient texts. Having already identified the association of twelve gods with twelve planets, he was intrigued by continual references to the god Enlil, known as the Chief God of the Earth, but also somewhat crypti- cally as 'Lord of 7'. This gave Sitchin the idea that Earth was somehow the seventh planet, and he quickly realised that Earth was indeed the seventh planet encountered by the gods as they travelled from Nibiru into the heart of the Solar System.lO6

 Among the evidence cited by Zecharia Sitchin is a partly- damaged clay planisphere, which was found in the ruins of the ancient Library of Nineveh. This curved disc, thought to be a copy of a Sumerian original, bears a puzzling and unique array of cuneiform signs and arrows (plate 41, colour section).lO7 Studies of the disc have concluded that it represents technical or astronomical information. One segment shows two triangular shapes, linked by a line alongside which there are seven dots. One of the triangles then contains another four dots. Recognising the seven / four split as an ancient division between the outer and inner planets of the Solar System, Sitchin studied the disc a little more closely.

Along the sides of each segment of the disc were repeated / Page 238 / signs, which were meaningless in Akkadian, but sprang to life when they were read as Sumerian word syllables. Zecharia Sitchin found references to 'Enlil', to geographi-cal features such as 'sky' and 'mountains', and to actions such as 'observing' and 'descending'. One reference was to 'deity NI.NI, supervisor of descent'. There were also numbers which would represent a mathematically perfect glide approach for a space shuttle landing. Sitchin was left in no doubt that the disc represented 'a route map, marking the way by which the god Enlil went by the planets, accompanied by some operating instructions,.IO8 This disc seems to confirm that Nibiru was the home of the gods and Earth the seventh planet counting inwards.

Such a journey, by the gods to Earth, was also comme-morated in the ancient Babylonian ritual of the 'procession of Marduk', the main event of the twelve day New Year Festival. Extensive excavations of Babylon, correlated with Babylonian ritual texts, have allowed scholars to recon- struct the holy precinct of the god Marduk, and bring to life the ancient ritual. The procession involves seven different 'stations' at which the god Marduk is praised with different names. Realising that the Babylonians had named the planet Nibiru as Marduk in honour of their national god, Zecharia Sitchin was able to decipher the names of the stations and the names of Marduk (which the text provides in both Akkadian and Sumerian). At this point it is worth quoting Sitchin in full:

It is our contention that the seven stations in the procession of Marduk represented the space trip of the Nefilim from their planet to Earth; that the first 'station', the 'House of Bright Waters', represented the passage by Pluto; the second ('Where the Field Separates') was Neptune; the third (mutilated), Uranus; the fourth - a place of celestial storms - Saturn. The fifth, where 'The Roadway' became clear, 'where the shepherd's word appears', was Jupiter. The sixth, where the journey switched to 'The Traveller's Ship' was Mars. And the / Page 239 seventh station was Earth- the end of the journey, where Marduk provided the 'House of Resting. 109

Page 1024

21 Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I for-give him? Till seven times?

22 Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.".

Page 10 Chapter 1

Page 664 "At length, as no one seemed able to settle, Hans Castorp, with his finger on the glass, supporting his cheek on his fist, said he would like to know what was to be / Page 665 / the actual length of his stay up here, instead of the three weeks originally fixed.

Very well since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded in fathoming, it made the word , or the syllable Go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp's room. That was to say, through number thirty-four. What was the sense of that"

Page 164 (1) "I think (writes Professor Dhorme) that the pseudo- hieroglyphic texts of Byblos date from the period of Amenopsis IV ( that is to say, ca. 1375 B.C. - D.D.).

Page 165 " (7) The engravers or scribes of Byblos gave to the hieroglyphic signs meanings proper to their tongue, without taking into consideration their origin. The texts are in pure Phoenician.

( 8) My starting- point was the last line of the tablet c (here, Fig. 82, 2), in which the last sign written seven times is a numeral . . . .(3 + 40 or 3 + 4 ), preceded by the word b sh n t,"in the years." Hence, nkh sh, "bronze," in the first line: mzbh, "altar," in the 6th line; btmz, "in Tammuz," in the 14th line, etc., etc.

The Complete Fortune Teller

Francis x King

Page 166

"Durer's engraving 'Melancholia' shows the angel of Saturn,symbolizing an individual suffering from acute melancholia. On the wall behind the angel is a 'magical square' made up of 16 separate numbers in four rows of four.

A 'magical square'is one in which the numbers in any particular row, whether across, perpendicular or diagonal, add up to the same figure. In the case of the square shown in Durer's engraving the signifi-cant number is 34. The reason for this is explained below."

"And the two diagonals are 16 + 11 + 6 + 1 ( = 34 ) and 13 + 10 + 7 + 4 ( = 34)

The fact that all the rows of figures in this 16-figured square add up to 34 /

Page 167 / is not the only interesting thing about it from the point of view of the numerologist. Thus, the 16 figures In the square add up to 136, and 1 + 3 + 6 = 10,which becomes one (1 + 0 )," "…Again the totals of the four perpendicular, four, four horizontal, and two diagonal rows add up to 340, which reduces to 7 ( 3 + 4 + 0), a number which has, for millenia, been thought to possess mystical properties.

The square which has been analysed above and which was incorpor-ated by Durer into his 'Melancholia engraving is, in fact, referred to by some numerologists as 'the magical square of Jupiter'…"

"Albrecht Durer included this square in his engraving as a reflection of the belief that its mere presence in the room occupied by a person suffer-ing from depression would help to lift that person's spirits.

Similarly - but conversely it was believed that the magical square of Saturn (signifi-cant number, 15) shown below:"

 would 'bring down to earth' someone suffering from maniacal exalta-tion.

In the present day the idea that figured squares may possess occult powers seem very odd indeed to most of us, but three or four centuries ago such beliefs were commonplace among those who concerned themselves with the mystic power of numbers."

There are three letters in God said ZedAliz and four in Gods and four + three are seven

One again the Alizzed shows an emphasized hand 

The Complete Fortune Teller

Francis x King

Page 166

"A 'magical square'is one in which the numbers in any particular row, whether across, perpendicular or

diagonal, add up to the same figure. In the case of the square shown in Durer's engraving

the signifi-cant number is 34.."

The point of no return writ the scribe

Penguin Classics Rear page comment /

Page 10 Chapter 1

Page 653 Chapter VII

"…EDHIN KROKOWSKI'S lectures had in the swift passage of the years taken an unexpected turn His researches, which dealt with psycho-analysis and the dream-life of humanity, had always had a subterranean, not to say catacombish character;but now by a transition so gradual that one scarcely marked it, they had passed over to the frankly supernatural, and his fortnightly lectures in the dining-room - the prime attraction of the house, the pride of the prospectus, delivered in a drawling foreign voice, in frock coat and sandals from behind a little covered table, to the rapt and motionless Berghof audience- these lectures no longer treated of the disguised activities of love and the retransformation of the illness into the conscious emotion. They had gone on to the ex-traordinary phenomena of hypnotism and somnambulism, telep-athy, "dreaming true" and second sight; the marvels of hysteria, the expounding of which widened the philosophic horizon to such an extent that suddenly before the listener's eyes would glitter / Page 654 / darkly puzzles like that of the relation of matter to the psychical, yes even the puzzle of life itself, which it appeared, was easier to approach by uncanny, even morbid paths than by the way of health…"

"… The field of his study had always been those wide, dark tracts of the human soul, which one had been used to call the subconsciousness, though they might perhaps be better called the superconsciousness, since from them sometimes emanates a know-ingness beyond anything of which the conscious intelligence is capable, and giving rise to the hypothesis that there may subsist connexions and associations between the lowest and least illumined regions of the individual soul and a wholly knowing All-soul. The province of the subconscious,"occult" in the proper sense of the word, very soon shows itself to be occult in the narrower sense as well, and forms one of the sources whence flow the phenomena we have agreed to characterize But that is not all. Whoever recognizes a symptom of organic disease as an effect of the conscious soul-life of forbidden and hystericized emotions, recognizes the creative force of the psychical within the material - a force which one is inclined to claim as a second source of magic phenomena. Idealist of the pathological, not to say patho-logical idealist, he sees himself at the point of departure of certain trains of thought which will shortly issue in the problem of existence, that is to say in the problem of the relation between spirit and matter. The materialist, son of a philosophy of sheer animal vigour can never be dissuaded from explaining spirit as a mere phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, proceed-ing from the principle of creative hysteria, is inclined, and very readily resolved, to answer the question of primacy in the exactly opposite sense. Take it all in all, there is here nothing less than the old strife over which was first, the chicken or the egg - a strife which assumes its extraordinary complexity from the fact / Page 655 / that no egg is thinkable except one laid by a hen, and no hen that has not crept out of a previously postulated egg. Well then, it was such matters as these that Dr. Krokowski discussed in his lectures. He came upon organically, legitimately - that fact cannot be over-emphasized. We will even add that he had already begun to treat of them before the arrival of Ellen Brand upon the scene of action, and the progress of matters into the empirical and experimental stage.

Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our readers do not know her, so familiar to us is the name. Who was she? Hardly anybody,at first glance. A sweet young thing of nineteen years a flaxen haired Dane,…"

"…Now this little Fraulein Brand, this friendly-natured little Danish bicycle-rider and stoop shouldered young counter jumper, had things about her, of which no one could have dreamed,…"

"…and these it became Dr. Krokowski's affair to lay bare in all their extraordinariness.

The learned man received his first hint in the course of a general evening conversation. Various guessing games were being played; hidden objects found by the aid of strains from the piano, which swelled higher when one approached the right spot, and died away when the seeker strayed away on a false scent. Then one person went outside and waited while it was decided what task he should perform; as, exchanging the rings of two selected persons; inviting someone to dance by making three bows before her; taking a / Page 656 / designated book from the shelves and presenting it to this or that person - and more of the same kind. It is worthy of remark that such games had not been the practice among the Bergof guests. Who had introduced them was not afterwards easy to decide;certainly it had not been Elly Brand, yet they had begun since her arrival. The participants were nearly all old friends of ours, among them Hans Castorp. They showed themselves apt in greater or lesser degree - some of them were entirely incapable. But Elly Brand's talent was soon seen to be surpassing,striking unseemly. Her power of finding hidden articles was passed over with ap-plause and admiring laughter. But when it came to a concerted series of actions they were struck dumb. She did whatever they had covenanted she should do, did it directly she entered the room; with a gentle smile, without hesitation, without the help of music.She fetched a pinch of salt from the dining room, sprinkled it over Lawyer Paravant's head, took him by the hand, led him to the piano and played the beginning of a nursery ditty with his forefinger: then brought him back to his seat curtseyed, fetched a footstool and finally seated herself at his feet, all of that being precisely what they had cudgelled their brains to set her for a task.

She had been listening.

She reddened.With a sense of relief at her embarrassment they began in chorus to chide her; but she assured them she had not blushed in that sense. She had not listened, not outside, not at the door, truly, truly she had not!

Not outside not at the door?

"Oh, no" - she begged their pardon. She had listened after she came back in the room she could not help it.

How not help it?

Something whispered to her, she said it whispered and told her what to do, softly but quite clearly and distinctly.

Obviously that was an admission. In a certain sense she was aware, she had confessed, that she had cheated. She should have said beforehand that she was no good to play such a game, if she had the advantage of being whispered to . A competition loses all sense if one of the competitors has unnatural advantages over the others.In a sporting sense, she was straightway disqualified - but disqualified in a way that made chills run up and down their backs. With one voice they called on Dr.Krokowski, they ran to fetch him and he came. He was immediately at home in the situation, and stood there, sturdy, heartily smiling, in his very essence inviting confidence. breathless they told him they had / Page 657 / something quite abnormal for him an omniscient;, a girl with voices. Yes, yes? Only let them be calm, they should see. This was his native heath, quagrnirish and uncertain footing enough for the rest of them, yet he moved upon it with assured tread. He asked questions, and they told him. Ah there she was - come, my , child, is it true, what they are telling me? And he laid his hand on her head, as scarcely anyone could resist doing. Here was much ground for interest, none at all for consternation. He plunged the gaze of his brown, exotic eyes deep into Ellen Brand's blue ones, and ran his hand down over her shoulder and arm, stroking her gently. She returned his gaze with increasing subInission, her head inclined slowly toward her shoulder and breast. Her eyes were actually beginning to glaze, when the master made a careless out-ward motion with his hand before her face. Immediately there- after he expressed his opinion that everything was in perfect order, and sent the overwrought company off to the evening cure, with the exception of Elly Brand, with whom he said he wished to have a little chat.

A little chat. Quite so. But nobody felt easy at the word, it was just the sort of word Krokowski the merry comrade used by preference, and it gave them cold shivers. Hans Castorp, as he sought his tardy reclining-chair, remembered the feeling with which he had seen Elly's illicit achievements and heard her shame- faced explanation,.as though the ground were shifting under his feet, and givmg him a slIghtly qualmish feeling, a mild seasick-ness. He had never been in an earthquake, but he said to himself that one must experience a like sensation of unequivocal alarm. But he had also felt great curiosity at these fateful gifts of Ellen Brand, combined, it is true, with the knowledge that their field was with difficulty accessible to the spirit, and the doubt as to whether it was not barren, or even sinful, so far as he was con-cerned - all which did not prevent his feeling from being what in fact it actually was, curiosity. Like everybody else, Hans Ca-storp had, at his time of life, heard this and that about the mys-teries of nature, or the supernatural. We have mentioned the clairvoyante great-aunt, of whom a melancholy tradition had come down. But the world of the supernatural, though theoretically and objectively he had recognized its existence, had never come close to him, he had never had any practical experience of it. And his aversion from it, a matter of taste, an resthetic revulsion, a re-action of human pride - if we may use such large words in con-nexion with our modest hero - was almost as great as his curi-osity. He felt beforehand, quite clearly, that such experiences, / Page 658 / whatever the course of them, could never be anything but in bad taste, unintelligible and humanly valueless. Arid yet he was on fire to go through them. He .was aware that his alternative of "barren" or else "sinful," bad enough in itself, was in reality not an alternative at all, since the two ideas fell together, and calling a thing spiritually unavailable was only an a-moral way of expressing its forbidden character. But the "placet experiri" planted in Hans Castorp's mind by one who would surely and re-soundingly have reprobated any experimentation at all in this field was planted firmly enough. By little and little his morality and his curiosity approached. and overlapped, or had probably always done so; the pure curiosity of inquiring youth on its travels, which had already brought him pretty close to the forbidden field, what time he tasted the mystery of personality, and for which he had even claimed the justification that it too was almost military in character, in that it did not weakly avoid the forbidden, when it presented itself. Hans Castorp came to the final resolve not to avoid; but to stand his ground if it came to more developments in the case of Ellen Brand.

Dr. Krokowski had issued a strict prohibition against any further experimentation on the part of the laity upon Fraulein Brand's mysterious gifts. He had pre-empted the child for his scientific use, held sittings with her in his analytical oubliette, hypnotized her, it was reported, in an effort to arouse and discipline her slum- bering potentialities, to make researches into her previous psychic life. Hermine Kleefeld, who mothered and patronized the child, tried to do the same; and under the seal of secrecy a certain number of facts were ascertained, which under the same seal she spread throughout the house, even unto the porter's lodge. She learned, for example, that he who - or that which - whispered the answers into the little one's ear at games was called Holger. This Holger was the departed and etherealized spirit of a young man, the familiar, something like the guardian angel, of little Elly. So it was he who had told all that about the pinch of salt and the tune played with Lawyer Paravant's forefinger? Yes, those spirit lips, so close to her ear that ther were like a caress, and ticklea a little, making her smile, had whispered her what to do. It must have been very nice when she was in school and had not prepared her lesson to have him tell her the answers. Upon this point Elly was silent. Later she said she thought he would not have been allowed. It would be forbidden to him to mix in such serious matters - and moreover, he would probably not have known the answers himself.

/ Page 659 / It was learned, further, that from her childhood up Ellen had had visions, though at widely separated intervals of time; visions, visible and invisible. What sort of thing were they, now - in- visible visions? Well, for example: when she was a girl of sixteen, she had been sitting one day alone in the living-room of her par-ents' house, sewing at a round table, with her father's dog Freia lying near her on the carpet. The table was covered with a Turk- ish shawl, of the kind old women wear three-cornered across their shoulders. It covered the table diagonally, with the corners some-what hanging over. Suddenly Ellen had seen the comer nearest her roll slowly up. Soundlessly, carefully, and evenly it turned itself up, a good distance toward the centre of the table, So that the resultant roll was rather long; and while this was happening, the dog Freia started up wildly, bracing her forefeet, the hair rising on her body. She had stood on her hind legs, then run howling into the next room and taken refuge under a sofa. For a whole year thereafter she could not be persuaded to set foot in the living-room.

Was it Holger, Fraulein KIeefeld asked, who had rolled up the cloth? Little Brand did not know. And what had she thought about. the affair? .But since it was absolutely impossible to think anything about it, little Elly had thought nothing at all. Had she told her parents? No. That was odd. Though so sure she had thought nothing about it, Elly had had a distinct impression, in this and similar cases, that she must keep it to herself, make a profound and shamefaced secret of it. Had she taken it. much to heart? No, not particularly. What was there about the rolling up of a cloth to cake to heart? But other things she. had - for ex- ample, the following:

A year before, in her parent's house at Odense, she had risen, as was her custom, in the cool of the early morning and left her room on the ground-floor, to go up to the breakfast-room, in order to brew the morning co.ffee before her parents rose. She had almost reached the landing, .where the stairs turned, when she saw standing there close by the steps her elder sister Sophie, who had married and gone to America to live. There she was, her physical presence, in a white gown, with, curiously enough, a garland of moist water-lilies on her head, her hands folded against one shoulder, and nodded to her sister. Ellen, rooted to the spot, half joyful, half terrified, cried out: ".Oh, Sophie, is that you? " Sophie had nodded once again, and dissolved. She became gradually transparent, soon she was only visible as an ascending current of warm air, then not visible at all, so that Ellen's / Page 660 / path was clear. Later it transpired that Sister Sophie had died of heart trouble in New Jersey, at that very hour.

 Hans Castorp, when Frauleinl Kleefeld related this to him, ex-pressed the view that there was some sort of sense in it: the apparition here, the death there - after all, they did hang together.And he consented to be present at a spiritualistic sitting, a table tipping, glass-moving game which they had determined to undertake with Ellen Brand, behind Dr Kronowski's back, and in defiance of his jealous prohibition.

A small and select group assembled for the purpose, their theatre being Fraulein Kleefeld's room. Besides the hostess, Fraulein Brand, and Hans Castorp, there was only Frau Stohr, Fraulein Levi, Herr Albin, the Czech Wenzel,and Dr.Ting-Fu. In the evening, on the stroke of ten, they gathered privily, and in whispers mustered the apparatus Hermine had provided, consisting of a medium-sized round table without a cloth, placed in the centre of the room, with a wine glass upside-down upon it, the foot in the air. Round the edge of the table, at regular intervals, were placed twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink.Fraulein Kleefeld served tea, which was gratefully received, as Frau Stohr and Fraulein Levi,despite the harmlessness of the undertaking, complained of cold feet and palpitations. Cheered by the tea, they took their places about the table, in the rosy twilight dispensed by the pink-shaded table-lamp, as Fraulein Kleefeld, in concession to the mood of the gath-ering, had put out the ceiling light; and each of them laid a finger of his right hand lightly on the foot of the wineglass. This was the prescribed technique.They waited for the glass to move.

That should happen with ease ,The top of the table was smooth, the rim of the glass well ground, the pressure of the tremulous fingers, however lightly laid on, certainly unequal, some of it being exerted vertically, some rather sidewise, and probably in sufficient strength to cause the glass finally to move from its posi-tion in the centre of the table. On the periphery of its field it would come in contact with the marked counters ; and if the letters on these, when put together, made words that conveyed any sort of sense, the resultant phenomena would be complex and contaminate, a mixed product of conscious, half-conscious, and unconscious elements; the actual desire and pressure of some, to whom the wish was father to the act, whether or not they were aware of what they did ; and the secret acquiescence of some dark stratum in the soul of the generality, a common if subterranean effort toward seemingly strange experiences, in which the sup- / Page 661 / pressed self of the individual was more or less involved, most strongly, of course, that of little Elly. This they all knew be- forehand - Hans Castorp even blurted out something of the sort ,after his fashion, as they sat and waited. The ladies palpitation and cold extremities the forced hilarity of the men, arose from their knowledge that they were come together in the night to embark on an unclean traffic with their own natures, a fearsome prying into unfamiliar regions of themselves, and that they were awaiting the appearance of those illusory or half-realities which we call magic. It was almost entirely for form's sake' and came about quite conventionally, that they asked the spirits of the departed to speak to them through the movement of the glass. Herr Albin offered to be spokesman and deal with such spirits as mani-fested themselves - he had already had a little experience at seances.

Twenty minutes or more went by. The whisperings had run dry, the first tension relaxed. They supported their right arms at the elbow with their left hands. The Czech Wenzel was almost dropping off. Ellen Brand rested her finger lightly on the glass and directed her pure, childlike gaze away into the rosy light from the table lamp.

Suddenly the glass tipped, knocked,and ran away from under their hands. They had difficulty in keeping their fingers on it. It pushed over to the very edge of the table, ran along it for a space, then slanted back nearly to the middle; tapped again and remained quiet

They were all startled ; favourably, yet with some alarm. Frau Stohr whimpered that she would like to stop, but they told her she should have thought of that before, she must just keep quiet now. Things seemed in train. They stipulated that, in order to answer yes or no the glass need not run to the letters, but might give one or two knocks instead.

Is there an Intelligence present? Herr Albin asked, severly directing his gaze over their heads into vacancy. After some hesitation, the glass tipped and said yes.

" What is your name?" Herr Albin asked, almost gruffly, and emphasized his energetic speech by shaking his head.

The glass pushed off. It ran with resolution from one point to another, executing a zig zag by returning each time a little distance towards the centre of the table. It visited H, O,and L, then seemed exhausted; but pulled itself together again and sought out the G, and E, and the R. .Just as they thought. It was Holger in person, the spirit Holger, who understood such matters as the / Page 662 pinch of salt and that, but knew better than to mix into lessons at school. He was there, floating in the air, above the heads of the little circle. What should they do with him? A certain diffidence possessed them, they took counsel behind their hands, what they were to ask him. Herr Albin decided to question him about his position and occupation in life, and did so, as before, severely, with frowning brows; as though he were a cross-examining counsel.

The glass was silent awhile. Then it staggered over to the P, zigzagged and returned to O. Great suspense. Dr. Ting-Fu gig-gled and said Holger must be a poet. Frau Stohr began to laugh hysterically; which the glass appeared to resent, for after indi-cating the E it stuck and went no further. However, it seemed fairly clear that Dr. Ting-Fu was right.

What the deuce, so Holger was a poet? The glass revived, and superfluously, inapparent pridefulness, rapped yes. A lyric poet, Fraulein Kleefeld asked? She said ly - ric, as Hans Castorp in-voluntarily noted. Holger was disinclined to. specify. He gave no new answer, merely spelled out again, this time quickly and un-hesitatingly; the word poet, adding the T he had left off before.

Good, then, a poet. The constraint increased. It was a con-straint that in reality had to do with manifestations on the part of uncharted regions of their own inner, their subjective selves, but which, because of the illusory, half-actual conditions of these manifestations, referred itself to the objective and external. Did Holger feel at home, and content, in his present state? Dreamily, the glass spelled out the word tranquil. Ah, tranquil. It was not a word one would have hit upon oneself, but after the glass spelled it out, they found it well chosen and probable. And how long had Holger been in this tranquil state? The answer to this was again something one would never have thought of, and dreamily answered; it was " A hastening while." Very good. As a piece of ventriloquistic poesy from the Beyond, Hans Castorp, in particular, found it capital. A " hastening while" was the time-element Hol- ger lived in: and of course he had to answer as it were in parables, having very likely forgorten how to use earthly terminology and standards of exact measurement. Fraulein Levi confessed her curi-osity to know how he looked, or had looked, more or less. Had he been a handsome youth? Herr Albin said she might ask him her-self, he found the request beneath his dignity. So she asked if the spirit had fair hair.

"Beautiful brown, brown curls," the glass responded, delib-erately spelfing out the word brown twice. There was much merri- / Page 663 / ment over this. The ladies said they were in love with him. They kissed their hands at the ceiling. Dr. Ting-Fu, giggling said Mister Holger must be rather vain.

Ah, what a fury the glass fell into! It ran like mad about the table, quite at random, rocked with rage, fell over and rolled into Frau Stohr's lap who stretched out her arms and looked down at it pallid with fear. They apologetically conveyed it back to its station, and rebuked the chinaman. How had he dared to say such a thing - did he see what his indiscretion had led to? Suppose Hol-ger was up and off in his wrath, and refused to say another word! They addressed themselves to the glass with the extreme of cour-tesy. Would Holger not make up some poetry for them? He had said he was a poet, before he went to hover in the hastening while.Ah, how they all yearned to hear him versify! They would love it so!

And lo, the good glass yielded and said yes! Truly there was something placable and good-humoured about the way it tapped. And then Holger the spirit began to poetize, and kept it up, circumstantially, without pausing for thought, for dear knows how long . It seemed impossible to stop him. And what a suprising poem it was, this ventriloquist effort, delivered to the admiration of the circle - stuff of magic, and shoreless as the sea of which it largely dealt. Sea-wrack in heaps and bands along the narrow strand of the far flung bay; an islanded coast, girt by steep, cliffy dunes. Ah see the dim green distance faint and die into eternity, while beneath broad veils of mist in dull carmine and milky radiancethe summer sun delays! to sink. No word can utter how and when the watery mirror turned from silver into untold changeful colour-play, to bright or pale, to spreading, opaline and moonstone gleams or how, mysteriously as it came, the voiceless magic died away. The sea slumbered yet the last traces of the sunset linger above and beyond. Until deep in the night it had not grown dark: a ghostly twilight reigns in the pine forrest on the downs, bleaching the sand until it looks like snow. A simulated winter forest all in silence, save where an owl wings rustling flight. Let us stray here at this hour - so soft the sand beneath our tread, so sublime, so mild the night! Far beneath us the sea respires slowly and murmers a long whisperings in its dream. Does it crave thee to see it again? Step forth to the sallow, glacierlike cliffs of the dunes, and climb quite up into the softness, that runs coolly into thy shoes.The land falls harsh and bushy steeply down to the pebbly shore, and still the parting remnants of the day haunt the edge of the vanishing sky. Lie down here in the sand! How cool as death it is, / Page 664 / how soft as silk, as flour! It flows in a colourless, thin stream from thy hand and makes a dainty little mound besides thee. Doest thou recognize it this tiny flowing ? It is the soundless, tiny stream through the hour-glass, that solemn, fragile toy that adorns the hermit's hut. An open book, a skull, and in its slender frame the double glass, holding a little sand, taken from eternity, to prolong here as time, its troubling, solemn, mysterious essence…

Thus Holger the spirit and his lyric improvisation, ranging with weird flights of thought from the familiar sea-shore to the cell of a hermit and the tools of his mystic contemplation. And there was more; more, human and divine, involved in daring and dreamlike terminology -over which the members of the little circle puzzled endlessly as they spelled it out;

Scarcely finding time for hurried though rapturous applause, so swiftly did the glass zigzag back and forth, so swiftly the words rollon and on. There was no dis-tant prospect of a period, even at the end of an hour. The glass improvised inexhaustably of the pangs of birth and the first kiss of lovers; the crown of sorrows, the fatherly goodness of God; plunged into the mysteries of creation, lost itself in other times and lands, in interstellar space; even mentioned the Chaldeans and the zodiac; and would most certainly have gone on all night, if the conspiritors had not taken their fingers from the glass, and expressing their gratitude to Holger, told him that must suffice them for the time, it had been wonderful beyond their wildest dreams, it was an everlasting pity there had been no one at hand to take it down, for now it must inevitably be forgotten, yes alas, they had already forgotten most of it, thanks to its quality which made it hard to retain, as dreams are. Next time they must ap-point an amanuesis to take it down, and see how it would look in black and white, and read connectedly. For the moment how-ever, and before Holger withdrew to the tranquillity of his hasten-ing while, it would be better, and certainly most amiable of him, if he would consent to answer a few practical questions. They scarcely as yet knew what, but would he at least be in principle inclined to do so, in his great amiability?

The answer was yes. But now they discovered a great perplex-ity what should they ask? It was as in the fairy-story, when the fairy or elf grants one question, and there is danger of letting the precious advantage slip through the fingers. There was much in the world much of the future, that seemed worth knowing, yet it was so difficult to choose. At length, as no one seemed able to settle, Hans Castorp, with his finger on the glass, supporting his cheek on his fist, said he would like to know what was to be / Page 665 / the actual length of his stay up here, instead of the three weeks originally fixed.

Very well since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded in fathoming, it made the word , or the syllable Go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp's room. That was to say, through number thirty-four. What was the sense of that ? As they sat puzzling and shaking their heads, suddenly there came the heavy thump of a fist on the door.

They all jumped. Was it a surprise? Was Dr. Krokowski stand- ing without, come to break up the forbidden session? They looked up guiltily, expecting thc betrayed one to enter. But then came a crashing knock on the middle of the table, as if to testify that the first knock too had come from the inside and not the outside of the room.

They accused Herr Albin of perpetrating this rather contempt-ible jest, but he denied it on his honour; and even without his word they all felt fairly certain no one of their circle was guilty. Was it Holger, then? They looked at Elly, suddenly struck by her silence. She was leaning back in her chair, with drooping wrists and finger-tips poised on the table-edge, her head bent on one shoulder, her eyebrows raised, her little mouth drawn down so that it looked even smaller, with a tiny smile that had something both silly and sly about it, and gazing into space with vacant, childlike blue eyes. They called to her, but she gave no sign of consciousness. And suddenly the night-table light went out.

Went out? Frau Stohr, beside herself, made great outcry, for she had heard the switch turned. The light, then, had not gone out, but been put out, by a hand - a hand which one characterized afar off in calling it a " strange " hand. Was it Holger's? Up to then he had been so mild, so tractable, so poetic - but now he seemed to degenerate into clownish practical jokes. Who knew that a hand which could so roundly thump doors and tables, and knav-ishly turn off lights, might not next catch hold of someone's throat? They called for 'matches, for pocket torches. Fraulein Levi shrieked out that someone had pulled her front hair. Frau Stohr made no bones of calling aloud on God in her distress: "0 Lord, forgive me this once! "she moaned, and whimpered for mercy in-stead of justice, well knowing she had tempted hell. .It was Dr. Ting-Fu who hit on the sound idea of turning on the ceiling light; / Page 666 /  the room was brilliantly illuminated straightway. They now es-tablished that the lamp on the night-table had not gone out by chance, but been turned off, and only needed to have the switch turned back in order to burn again. But while this was happening, Hans Castorp made on his own account a most singular discovery, which might be regarded as a personal attention on the part of the dark powers here manifesting themselves with such childish per-versity. A light object lay in his lap; he discovered it to be the "souvenir" which had once so surprised his uncle when he lifted it from his nephew's table: the glass diapositive of Clavdia Chau- chat's x-ray portrait. .Quite uncontestably he, Hans Castorp,had not carried it into the room.

He put it into his pocket, unobservably. The others were busied about Ellen Brand, who remained sitting in her place in the same state, staring vacantly, with that curious simpering expression. Herr Albin blew in her face and imitated the upward sweeping motion of Dr. Krokowski, upon which she roused, and inconti-nently wept a little. They caressed and comforted her, kissed her on the forehead and sent her to bed. Fraulein Levi said she was willing to sleep with Frau Stohr, for that abject creature confessed she was too frightened to go to bed alone. Hans Castorp, with his retrieved property in his breast pocket, had no objection to finish-ing off the evening with a cognac in Herr Albin's room. He had discovered, in fact, that this sort of thing affected neither the heart nor the spirits so much as the nerves of the stomach - a retroactive effect, like seasickness, which sometimes troubles the traveller with qualms hours after he has set foot on shore.

His curiosity was for the time quenched. Holger's poem had not been so bad; but the anticipated futility and vulgarity of the scene as a whole had been so unmistakable that he felt quite will-ing to let it go at these few vagrant sparks of hell-fire. Herr Set- tembrini, to whom he related his experiences, strengthened this conviction with all his force. "That,'"he cried out, "was all that was lacking. Oh, misery, misery! " And cursorily dismissed little EIly as a thorough-paced impostor.

His pupil said neither yea nor nay to that. He shrugged his shoulders, and expressed the view that we did not seem to be alto- gether sure what constituted actuality, nor yet, in consequence, what imposture. Perhaps the boundary line was not constant. Per- haps there were transitional stages between the two, grades of actuality within nature; nature being as she was, mute, not sus- ceptible of valuation, and thus defying distinctions which in any case, it seemeed to him, had a strongly moralizing flavour. What / Page 667 / did Herr Settembrini think about" delusions "; which were a mix-ture of actuality and dream, perhaps less strange in nature than to our crude, everyday processes of thought? The mystery of life was literally bottomless. What wonder, then, if sometimes illusions - arose - and so on and so forth, in our hero's genial, confiding, loose and flowing style.

Herr Settembrini duly gave him a dressing-down, and did pro-duce a temporary reaction of the conscience, even something like a promise to steer clear in the future of such abominations. " Have respect," he adjured him, " for your humanity, Engineer! Confide In your God-given power of clear thought, and hold In abhorrence these luxations of the brain, these miasmas of the spirit! Delusions?

The mystery of life? Caro mio! When the moral courage to make decisions and distinctions between reality and deception degen- erates to that point, then there is an end of life, of judgment, of the creative deed: the process of decay sets in, moral scepsis, and does its deadly work." Man, he went on to say, was the measure of things. His right to recognize and to distinguish between good and evil, reality and counterfeit, was indefeasible; woe to them who dared to lead him astray in his belief in this creative right. Better for them that a millstone be; hanged about their necks and that they be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Hans Castorp nodded assent - and in fact did for a while keep aloof from all such undertakings.. He heard that Dr. Krokowskj had begun holding seances with Ellen Brand in his subterranean cabinet, to which cettain chosen ones of the guests were invited. But he nonchalantly put aside the invitation to join them - natu-rally not without hearing from them and from Krokowski him-self something about the success they were having. It appeared that there had been wild and arbitrary exhibitions of power, like those in Friiulein Kleefeld's room: knockings on walls and table, the turning off of the lamp, and these as well as further manifesta-tions were being systematically produced and investigated, with every possible safeguarding of their genuineness, after Com-rade Krokowski had practised the approved technique and put little Elly into her hypnotic sleep. They had discovered that the process was facilitated by music; and on these evenings the gramo-phone was pre-empted by the circle and carried down into the basement. But the Czech Wenzel who operated it there was a not unmusical man, and would surely not injure or misuse the instru-ment; Hans Castorp might hand it over without misgiving. He even chose a suitable album of records, containing light music, dances, small overtures and suchlike tunable trifles. Little Elly / Page 668 /  made no demands on a higher art, and they served the purpose admirably.

To their accompaniment, Hans Castorp learned, a handkerchief had been lifted from the floor, of its own motion, or, rather, that of the "hidden hand" in its folds. The doctor's waste-paper- basket had risen to the ceiling; the pendulum of a clock been alter- nately.stopped and set going again "without anyone touching it," a table-bell "taken" and rung-these and a good many other turbid and meaningless phenomena. The learned master of cere-monies was in the happy position of being able to characterize them by a Greek word, very scientific and impressive. They were, so he explained in his lectures and in private conversatiqns, "tele-kinetic" phenomena, cases of movement from a distance; he asso-ciated them with a class of manifestations which were scientifically known as materializations, and toward which his plans and at-tempts with EIly Brand were directed. He talked to them about biopsychical projections of sub con-scious complexes into the objective; about transactions of which the medial constitution, the somnambulic state, was to be regarded as the source; and which one might speak of as objectivated dream- concepts, in so far as they confirmed an ideoplastic property of nature; a power, which under certain conditions appertained to thought, of drawing substance to itself, and clothing itself in tem-porary reality. This substance streamed out from the body of the medium, and developed extraneously into biological, living end-organs, these being the agencies which had performed the extraor-dinary though meaningless feats they witnessed in Dr. Krokowski's laboratory. Under some conditions these agencies might be seen or touched, the limbs left their impression in wax or plaster. But some-times the matter did not rest with such corporealization. Under certain conditions, human heads, faces, full-length phantoms mani- fested themselves before the eyes of the experimenters, even within certain limits entered into contact with them. And here Dr. Kra-kowski's doctrine began, as it were, to squint; to look two ways .at once. It took on a shifting and fluctuating character, like the method of treatment he had adopted in his exposition of the nature of love. It was no longer plain-sailing, scientific treatment of the objectively mirrored subjective content of the medium and her passive auxiliaries. It was a mixing in the game, at least sometimes, at least half and half, of entities from without and beyond. It dealt - at least possibly, if not quite adinittedly-with the non-vital, with existences that took advantage of a ticklish, mysteriously and momentarily favouring chance to return to substantiality and show / Page 669 /  themselves to their summoners - in brief, with the spiritualistic invocation of the departed.

Such manifestations it Was that Comrade Krokowski, with the assistance of his followers, was latterly striving to produce; stur~ dily, with his ingratiating smile, challenging their cordial confi-dence, thoroughly at home; for his own person, in this questionable morass of the subhuman, and a born leaaer for the tImId and compunctious in the regions where they now moved. He had laid him~ self out to develop and discipline the extraordinary powers of Ellen Brand and, from what Hans Castorp could hear fortune smiled upon his efforts. Some of the party had felt the touch of materialized hands. Lawyer Paravant had received out of trans- cendency a sounding slap on the cheek, arid had countered with scientific alacrity, yes, had even eagerly turned the other cheek, heedless of his quality as gentleman, jurist, and one-time member of a duelling corps, all of which would have constrained him to quite a different line of conduct had the blow been of terrestrial origin. A. K. Ferge, that good-natured martyr, to whom all" high- brow" thought was foreign, had one evening held such a spirit hand in his own, and established by sense of touch that it was whole and well shaped. His clasp had been heart-felt to the limits of respect; but it had in some indescribable fashion escaped him. A considerable period elapsed, some two months and a half of bi-weekly sittings, before a hand of other-worldly origin, a young man's hand, it seemed, came fingering over the table, in the red glow of the paper-shaded lamp, and, plain to the eyes of all the circle, left its imprint in an earthenware basin full of flour. And eight days later a troop of Krokowski's workers, Herr Albin, Frau Stohr, the Magnuses, burst in upon Hans Castorp where he sat dozing toward midnight in the biting cold of his balcony, and with every mark of distracted and feverish delight, their words tum-bling over one another, announced that they had seen Elly's Hol-ger he had showed his head over the shoulder of the little me-dium, and had in truth " beautiful brown, brown curls." He had smiled with such unforgettable, gentle melancholy as he vanished!

Hans Castorp found this lofty melancholy scarcely consonant with Holger's other pranks, his impish and simple-mmded tricks, the anything but gently melancholy slap he had given Lawyer Paravant and the latter had pocketed up. It was apparent that one must not demand consistency of conduct. Perhaps they were deal- ing with a temperament like that of the little hunch-backed man in the nursery song, with his pathetic wickedness and his craving for intercession. Holger's admirers had no thought for all this. / Page 670 / What they were detennined to do was to persuade Hans Castorp to rescind his decree; positively, now that everything was so bril- liantly in train, he must be present at the next seance. Elly, it seemed, in her trance had promised to materialize the spirit of any departed person the circle chose.

Any departed person they chose? Hans Castorp still showed reluctance. But tliat it might be any person they chose occupied his mind to such an extent that in the next three days he came to a different conclusion. Strictly speaking it was not three days, but as many minutes, which brought about the change. One evening, in a solitary hour in the music-room, he played again the record that bore the imprint of Valentine's personality, to him so pro-foundly moving. He sat there listening to the soldierly prayer ot the hero departing for the field of honour:

and, as ever, Hans Castorp was tilled by emotion at the sound, an emotion which this time circumstances magnified and as it were condensed into a longing; he thought: "Barren and sinful or no, it would be a marvellous thing, a darling adventure! And he, as I know him, if he had anything to do with it, would not mind." He recalled that composed and liberal "Certainly, of course," he had heard in the darkness of the x-ray laboratory, when he asked Joa-chim if he might commit certain optical indiscretions.

The next morning he announced his willingness to take part in the evening seance; and half an hour after dinner joined the group of familiars of the uncanny, who, unconcernedly chatting, took their way down to the basement. They were all old inhabitants, the oldest of the old, or at least of long standing in the group, like the Czech Wenzel and Dr. Ting-Fu; Ferge and Wehsal, Lawyer Paravant, the ladies Kleefeld and Levi, and, in addition, those per-sons who had come to his balcony to announce to him the appari-tion of Holger's head, and of course the medium, Elly Brand;

That child of the north was already in the doctor's charge when Hans Castorp passed through the door with the visiting-card: the doctor, in his black tunic, his arm laid fatherly across her shoulder, stood at the foot of the stair leading from the basement floor and welcomed the guests, and she with him. Everybody greeted every-body else, with surprising hilarity and expansiveness - it seemed to be the common aim to keep the meeting pitched in a key free from all solemnity or constraint. They taIked in loud, cheery voices; / Page 671 / poked each other in the ribs, showed everyway how perfectly at ease they felt. Dr. Krokowski's yellow teeth kept gleaming in his beard with every hearty, confidence-inviting smile; he repeated his "Wel-come " to each arrival, with special fervour in Hans Castorp's case - who, for his part, said nothing at all, and whose manner was hesitating. "Courage, comrade," Krokowski's ener-getic and hospitable nod seemed to be saying, as he gave the young man's hand an almost violent squeeze. No need here to hang the head, here is no cant nor sanctimoniousness, nothing but the blithe and manly spirit of disinterested research. But Hans Castorp felt none the better for all this pantomime. He summed up the resolve formed by the memories of the x-'ray cabinet; but the train of thought hardly fitted with his present frame; rather he was re- minded of the peculiar and unforgettable mixture of feelings- nervousness, pridefulness, curiosity, disgust, and awe - with which, years ago, he had gone with some fellow students, a little tipsy, to a brothel in Sankt-Pauli.

As everyone was now present, Dr. Krokowski selected two controls - they were, for the evening, Frau Magnus and the ivory Levi - to preside over the physical examination of the medium, and they withdrew to the next room. Hans Castorp and the re- maining nine persons awaited in the consulting-room the issue of the austerely scientific procedure - which was invariably without any result whatever. The room was familiar to him from the hours he had spent here, behind Joachim's back, in conversation with the psycho-analyst. It had a writing-desk, an arm-chair and an easy-chair for patients on the left, the window side; a library of refer- .ence-books on shelves to right and left of the side door, and in the further right-hand comer a chaise-longue, covered with oilcloth, separated by a folding screen from the desk and chairs. The doc-tor's glass instrument-case also stood in that comer, in another was a bust of Hippocrates, while an engraving of Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson" hung above the gas fire-place on the right side wall. It was an ordinary consulting-room, like thousands more; but with certain temporary special arrangements. The round ma- hogany table whose place was in the centre of the room, beneath the electric chandelier, upon the red carpet that covered most of the floor, had been pushed forward against the left-hand wall, be-neath the plaster bust; while a smaller table, covered with a cloth and bearing a red-shaped lamp, had been set obliquely near the gas fire, which was lighted and giving out a dry heat. Another electric bulb, covered with red and further with a black gauze veil, hung above the table. On this table stood certain notorious objects: two / Page 672 / table-bells, of different patterns, one to shake and one to press, the plate with flour, and die paper-basket. Some dozen chairs of dif-ferent shapes and sizes surrounded the table in a half-circle, one end of which was formed by the foot of the chaise-longue, the other ending near the centre of the room, beneath the ceiling light. Here, in the neighbourhood of the last chair, and about half-way to the door, stood the gramophone; the album of light trifles lay on a chair next it. Such were the arrangements. The red lamps were not yet lighted, the ceiling light was shedding an effulgence as of common day, for the window, above the narrow end of the writ-ing-desk, was shrouded in a dark covering, with its open-work cream-coloured blind hanging down in front of it.

After ten minutes the doctor returned with the three ladies. Elly's outer appearance had changed: she was not wearing her ordinary clothes, but a night-gownlike garment of white crepe, girdled about the waist by. a cord, leaving her slender arms bare. Her maidenly breasts showed themselves soft and unconfined be-neath this garment, it appeared she wore little else.

They all hailed her gaily. "Hullo, Elly!,How lovely she looks again! A perfect fairy! Very pretty, my angel! " She smiled at their compliinents to her attire, probably well knowing it became her. "Preliminary control negative," Krokowski announced. " Let's get to work, then, comrades," he said. Hans Castorp, con-scious of being disagreeably affected by the doctor's manner of address, was about to follow the example of the others, who, shout-ing, chattering, slapping each other on the shoulders, were settling themselves in the circle of chairs, when the doctor addressed him personally.

" My friend," said he, "you are a guest, perhaps a novice, in our midst, and therefore I should like, this evening, to pay you special honour. I confide to you the control of the medium. Our practice is as follows." He ushered the young man toward the end of the circle next the chaise-longue and the screen, where EIIy was seated on an ordinary cane chair, witb her .face turned rather toward the entrance door than to the centre of the room. He himself sat down close in front of her in another such chair, and clasped her hand, at the same time holding both her knees firmIy between his own. "Like' that," he .said, and gave his place to Hans Castorp, who assumed the same position. " You'll grant that the arrest is complete. But we shall give you assistance too. Fraulein KIeefeld,

may I implore you to lend us your aid?" And the lady thus courteousfy and. exotically entreated came and sat down, clasping Elly's fragile wrists, one in each hand. /

 Page 673 / Unavoidable that Hans Castorp should look into the face of the young prodigy, fixed as it was so immediately before his own. Their eyes met - but Elly's slipped aside and gazed with natural self-consciousness in her lap. She was smiling a little affectedly, with her lips slightly pursed, and her head on one side, as she had at the wineglass seance. And Hans Castorp was reminded, as he- saw her, of something else: the look on Karen Karstedt's face, a smile just like that, when she stood with.Joachim and himself and regarded the unmade grave in the Dorf graveyard.

The circle had sat down. They were thirteen persons; not count-ing the Czech Wenzel, whose function it Was to serve Polyhymnia, and who accordingly, after putting his instrument in readiness, squatted with his guitar at the back of the circle. Dr. Krokowski sat beneath the chandelier, at the other end of the row, after he had turned on both red lamps with a single switch, and turned off the centre light. A darkness, gently aglow, layover the room, the corners and distances were obscured. Only the surface of the little table arid its inimediate vicinity were illumined by a pale rosy light. During the next few minutes one scarcely saw one's neighbours; then their eyes slowly accustomed themselves to the darkness and made the best use of the light they had - which was slightly reinforced by the small dancing flames from the chimney-piece.

The doctor devoted a few words to this matter of the lighting, and excused its lacks from the scientific point of view. They must take care not to interpret it in the sense of deliberate mystifica-tion and scene-setting. With the best will in the world they could not, unfortunately, have more light for the present. The nature of the powers they were to study would not permit of their being . developed with white light, it was not possible thus to produce the desired conditions. This was a fixed postulate, with which they must for the present reckon. Hans Castorp, for his part, was quite satisfied. He liked the darkness, it mitigated the queerness of the situation. And in its justification he recalled the darkness of the x.ray room, and"how they had collected themselves, and " washed their-eyes " in it, before they "saw."

The medium, Dr. Krokowski went on, obviously addressing his words to Hans Castorp in particular, no longer needed to be put in the trance by the physician. She fell into it herself, as the con-trol would see, and once she had done so, it would be her guardian spirit Holger, who spoke with her voice, to, whom, and not to Her, they should address themselves. Further, It was an error, which might result in failure, to suppose that one must bend mind or will / Page 674 / upon the'expected phenomena. On the contrary, a slighrly dif. fused attention, with conversation, was recommended. And Hans Castorp was cautioned, whatever else he did, not to lose control of the medium's extremities.

"We will now form the chain," finished Dr. Krokowski; and they did so, laughing when they could not find each other's hands in the dark. Dr. Ting-Fu, sitting next Hermine Kleefeld, laid his right hand on her shoulder and reached his left to Herr Wehsal, who came next. Beyond him were Herr and Frau Magnus, then A. K. Ferge; who, if Hans Castorp mistook not, held the hand of the ivory Levi on his right - and so on. "Music! "the doctor com-manded, and behind him his neighbour the Czech set the instru-ment in motion and placed the needle on the disk. "Talk!", Krokowski bade them, and as the first bars of an overture by Mil-locker were heard, they obedienrly bestirred themselves to make conversation, about nothing at all: the winter snow-fall, the last course at dinner, a newly arrived patient, a: departure, "wild" or otherwise - artificially sustained, half drowned by the music, and lapsing now and again. So some minutes passed.

The record had not run out before ElIy shuddered violently. A trembling ran through her, she sighed, the upper pari: of her body sank forward so that her forehead rested against Hans Ca-storp's, and her arms, together with those of her guardians, began to make extraordinary pumping motions to and fro.

" Trance," announced the Kleefeld. The music stopped, so also the conversation. In the abrupt silence they heard the baritone drawl of the doctor. "Is Holger present?' "

ElIy shivered again. She swayed in her chair. Then Hans Ca-storp felt her press his two hands with a quick, firm pressure.

" She pressed my hands," he informed them.

"He,' the doctor corrected him. "He pressed your hands. He is present. W el-come, Holger," he went on with unction." W el - come friend and fellow comrade, heartily, heartily wel-come. And remember, when you were last with us," he went on, and Hans Castorp remarked that he did not use the form of address common to the civilized West-" you promised to make visible to our mortal eyes some dear departed, whether brother soul or sister soul, whose name should be given to you by our circle. Are you willing? Do you feel yourself able to perform what you promised? "

Again ElIy shivered. She sighed and shivered as the answer came. Slowly she carried her hands and those of her guardians to her fore- / Page 675 / head, where she let them rest. Then close to Hans Castorp's ear she whispered: "Yes."

The warm breath irnmediatelr at his ear caused.in our friend that phenomenon of the epidernus popularly called goose-flesh, the nature of which the Hofrat had once explained to him. We men-tion this in order to make a distinction between the psychical and .the purely physical. There could scarcely be talk of fear, for our hero was in fact thinking: "Well, she is certainly biting off more than she can chew! " But then he was straightway seized with a mingling of sympathy and consternation springing from the con-fusing and illusory circumstance that a blood-young creature, whose hands he held in his, had just breathed a yes into his ear.

"He said yes," he reported, and felt embarrassed.

"Very well, then, Holger," spoke Dr. Krokowski. "We shall take you at your word. We are confident you will do your part. The name of the dear departed shall shortly be communicated to you. Comrades," he turned to the gathering, " out with it, now! Who has a wish? Whom shall our friend Holger show us? "

A silence followed; Each waited for the other to speak. Indi-vidually they had probably all questioned themselves, in these last few days; they knew whither their thoughts tended. But the call-ing back of the dead, or the desirability of calling them back, was a ticklish matter, after all. At bottom, and boldly confessed, the de-sire does not exist; it is a misapprehension precisely as impossible as the thing itself, as we should soon see if nature once let it happen. What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is gnef at not being able to want to do so.

This was what they were all obscurely feeling; and since it was here simply a question not of an actual return, but merely a theatri- cal staging of one, in which they should only see the departed, no more, the thing seemed humanly unthinkable; they were afraid to look into the face of him or her of whom they thought, and each one would willingly have resigned his right of choice to the next. Hans Castorp too, though there was echoing in his ears that large-hearted " Of course, of course " out of the past, held back, and at the last moment was rather inclined to pass the choice on. But the pause was too long; he turned his head toward their leader, and said; in a husky voice: "I should like to see my departed cousin, Joachim Ziemssen."

That was a relief to them all. Of those present, all excepting Dr. Ting-Fu, Wenzel, and the medium had known the person asked / Page 676 / for. The others, Ferge, Wehsal, Herr Albin, Paravant, Herr and Frau Magnus, Frau Stohr Frau!ein Levi, and the Kleefeld, loudly announced their satisfaction WIth the choice. Krokowski hImself nodded well pleased, though his relations with Joachim had always been rather cool, owing to the latter's reluctance in the matter of psycho-analysis.

" Very good indeed," said the doctor. "Holger, did you hear? The person named was a stranger to you in life. Do you know him in the Beyond, and are you prepared to lead him hither? "

Immense suspense. The sleeper swayed, sighed, and shuddered., She seemed to be seeking, to be struggling; falIing this way and that, whispering now to Hans Castorp, now to the Kleefeld, some-thing they could not catch. At last he received from her hands the pressure that meant yes. He announced himself to have done so, and-

" Very well;~then," cried Dr. Krokowski. "To work, Holgerl Music, " he cried. " Conversation! "and he repeated the injunction that no fixing of the attention, no strained anticipation was in place, but only an unforced and hovering expectancy.

And now followed the most extraordinary hours of our hero's young life. Yes, though his later fate is unclear, though at a certain moment in his destiny he will vanish from our eyes, we may as-sume them to have been the most extraordinary he ever spent.

They were hours - more than two of them, to be explicit, count-ing in a brief intermission in the efforts on Holger's part which now began, or rather, on "the girl EIly's - of work so hard and so prolonged that they were all toward the end inclined to be faint- hearted and despair of any result; out of pure pity, too, tempted to resign an attempt which seemed pitilessly hard, and beyond the delicate strength of her upon whom it was laid. We men, if we do not shirk oui humanity, are familiar with an hour of life when we know this almost intolerable pity, which, absurdly enough no one else can feel, this rebellious "Enough, no more! ' which is wrung' from us, though it is not enough, and cannot or will not be enough, until it comes somehow or other to its appointed end. The reader knows we speak of our husband- and fatherhood, of the act of birth, which Elly's wrestling did so unmistakably resemble that even he must recognize it who had never passed through this ex perience, even our young Hans Castorp; who, not having shirked life, now came to know,'in such a guise, this act, so full of orgamc mysticism. In what a guise! To what an end! Under what circum- stances! One could not regard as anything. less than scandalous the sights and sounds in this red-lighted lying-in chamber, the / Page 677 / maidenly form of the pregnant one, bare-armed, in flowing night-robe; and then by contrast the ceaseless and senseless gramophone music, the forced conversation which the circle kept up at com-mand, the cries of encouragement they ever and anon directed at the struggling one: "Hullo, Holger! Courage, man! It's coming, just keep it up, let it come, that's the way! " Nor do we except the person and situation of the " husband " - if we may regard in that "light our young friend, who had indeed formed such a wish-sitting there, with the knees of the little " mother " between his own, holding in his her hands, which were as wet as once little Leila's, so that he had constantly to be renewing his hold, not to let them slip.

For the gas fire in the rear of the circle radiated great heat.

Mystical, consecrate? Ah, no, it was all rather noisy and vulgar, there in the red glow, to which they had now so accustomed their eyes that they could see the whole room fairly well. The music and shouting were so like the revivalistic methods of the Salva- tion Army, they even made Hans Castorp think of the comparison, albeit he had never attended at a celebration by these cheerful zealots. It was in no eerie or ghostly sense that the scene affected the sympathetic one as mystic or mysterious, as conducing to solemmty; It was rather natural, organic - by VIrtue of the inti-mate association we have already referred to. Elly's exertions came in waves, after periods of rest, during which she hung sidewise from her chair in a totally relaxed and inaccessible condition, described by Dr. Krokowski as "deep trance." From this she would start up with a moan, throw herself about, strain and wrestle with her captors, whisper feverish, disconnected words, seem to be trying, with sidewise, jerking movements, to expel something; she would gnash her teeth, once even fastened them in Hans Castorp's sleeve.

This had gone on for more than an hour when the leader found it to the interest of all concerned to grant a brief intermission. The Czech Wenzel, who had introduced an enlivening variation by closing the gramophone and striking up very expertly on his guitar, laid that instrument aside. They alI drew a long breath and broke the circle. Dr. Krokowski strode over to the wall and switched on the ceiling lamp; the light flashed up glaringly, mak-ing them all blink. Elly, bent forward, her face almost in her lap, slumbered. She was busy too, absorbed in the oddest activity, with which the others appeared familiar, but which Hans Castorp watched with attentive wonder. For some minutes together she moved the hollow of her hand to and fro in the region of her hips: / Page 678 / carried the hand away from her body and then with scooping, raking motion drew it towards her, as though gathering some-thing and pulling it in. Then, with a series of starts, she camne to herself, blinked in her turn at the light with sleep-stiffened eyes and smiled.

She smiled affectedly, rather remotely. In truth, their solicitude. seemed wasted; she did not appear exhausted by her efforts. Per-haps she retained no memory of them. She sat down in the chair reserved for patients, by the writing-desk near the window, be-tween the desk and the screen about the chaise-longue; gave the chair a turn so that she could support her elbow on the desk and look into the room; and remained thus, receiving their sympa-thetic glances and encouraging nods, silent during the whole inter- mission, which lasted fifteen minutes.

It was a beneficent pause, relaxed, and filled with peaceful satis-faction in respect of work already accomplished. The lids of cigarette-cases snapped, the men smoked comfortably, and stand-ing in groups discussed the prospects of the seance. They were far from despairing or anticipating a negative result to their efforts. Signs enougn were present to prove such doubting uncalled for. Those sitting near the doctor, at the far end of the row, agreed that they had several times felt, quite unmistakably, that current of cool air which regularly whenever manifestations were under way streamed in a definite direction from the person of the medium. Others had seen light-phenomena, white spots, moving congloba- tions of forces showing themselves at intervals against the screen. In short, no faint-heartedness! No looking backward now they had put their hands to the plough. Holger had given his word they had no call to doubt that he would keep it.

Dr. Krokowski signed for the resumption of the sitting. He led Elly back to her martyrdom and seated her, stroking her hair. The others closed the circle. All went as before. Hans Castorp sug-gested that he be released from his post of first control, but Dr. Krokowski refused. He said he laid great stress on excluding, by immediate contact, every possibility of misleading .manipulation on the part of the medium. So Hans Castorp took up again his strange position vis-a-vis to ElIy; the white light gave place to rosy twilight, the music began again, the pumping motions; this time it was Hans Castorp who announced trance." The scandal-ous lying-in proceeded.

With what distressful difficulty! It seemed unwilling to take its course - how could it? Madness! What maternity was this, what delivery, of what should she be delivered? "Help, help," the child / Page 679 / moaned, arid her spasms seemed about to pass over into that dan-gerous and unavailing stage obstetricians call eclampsia. She called at intervals on the doctor, that he should put his hands on her. He did so, speaking to her encouragingly. The magnetic effect, if such it was, strengthened her to further efforts.

Thus passed the second hour, while the guitar was strummed or the gramophone gave out the contents of the album of light music into the twilight to which they had again accustomed their vision. Then came an episode, introduced by Hans Castorp. He supplied a stimulus by expressing an idea, a wish; a wish he had cherished from the beginning, and might perhaps have profitably expressed before now. Elly was lying with her face on their joined hands, in "deep trance." Herr Wenzel was just changing or re-versing the record when our friend summoned his resolution and said he had a suggestion to make, of no great importance, yet per-haps - possibly - of some avail. He had - that is, the house possessed among its volumes of records - a certain song, from Gounod's Faust, Valentine's Prayer, baritone with orchestral ac-companiment, very appealing. He, the speaker, thought they might try the record.

" Why that particular one? " the doctor asked out of the dark-ness.

" A question of mood. Matter of feeling," the young man re-sponded. The mood of the piece in question was peculiar to itself,

quite special - he suggested they should try it. Just possible, not out of the question, that its mood and atmosphere mIght shorten their labours.

." Is the record here? " the doctor inquired.

No, but Hans Castorp could fetch it at once.

"What are you thinking of? " Krokowski promptly repelled the idea. What? Hans Castor;p thought he mIght go and come again and take up his business where he had left it off? There spoke the voice of utter inexperience. Oh, no, it was impossible.. It would upset everything, they would have to begin all over. Scientific exactitude forbade them to think of any such arbitrary going in and out. The door was locked. He, the doctor, had the key in his pocket. In short, if. the record was not now in the room -

He was still talking when the Czech threw in, from the gramo- phone: "The record is here."

" Here? " Hans Castor;p asked.

"Yes, here it is, Faust, Valentine's Prayer." It had been stuck by mistake in the album of light music, not in the green album of arias, where it belonged; quite by chance - or mismanagement / Page 680 / or carelessness, in any case luckily - it had partaken of the general topsyturyyness, and here it was, needing omy to be put on.

What had Hans Castorpto say to that? Nothing. It was the doc-tor who remarked: "So much the better,"and some of the others chimed in. The needle scraped, the lid was put down. The male voice began to choral accompaniment: "Now the parting hour has come."

No one spoke. They listened, Elly, as the music resumed, re-newed her efforts. She started up convulsively, pumped, carried the slippery hands to her brow. The record went on, came to the. middle part, with skipping rhythm, the part about war and dan- ger, gallant, god-fearing, French. After that the finale, in full volume, the orchestrally supported refrain of the beginning..

" 0 Lord of heaven, hear me pray. . . ."

Hans Castorp had work with Elly. She raised herself, drew in a straggling breath, sighed a long, long, outward sigh, sank down and was still. He bent over her in concern, and as he did so, he heard Frau Stohr say, in a high, whining pipe: "Ziems - sen! "

He did not look up. A bitter taste came in his mouth. He heard another voice, a deep, cold voice, saying: "I've seen him a long time."

The record had run off, with a. last accord of horns. But no one stopped the machine. The needle went on scratching in the silence, as the disk whirred round. Then Hans Castorp raised his head, and his eyes went, without searching, the right way.

There was one more person in the room than before. There in the background, where the red rays lost themselves in gloom, so that the eye scarcely reached thither, between writing-desk and screen, in the doctor's consulting-chair, where in the intermission Elly had been sitting, Joachim sat. It was the Joachim of the last days, with hollow, shadowy cheeks, warrior's. beard and full curling lips. He sat leaning back, one leg crossed over the other, On his wasted face, shaded though it was by his bead-covering, Was plainIy seen the stamp of suffering, the expression of gravity and austerity which had beautified it. Two folds stood on his brow, between the eyes, that lay deep in their bony cavities; but there was no change in the mildness of the great dark orbs, whose quiet, friendly gaze sought out Hans Castorp, and him alone. That ancient grievance of the outstanding ears was still to be seen under the head-covering, his extraordinary head-covering, which they could not make out. Cousin Joachiin was not in mufti. His sabre seemed to be leaning against his leg, he held the handle, one thought to distinguish something like a pistol-case in his belt But that was / Page 681 / no proper uniforn1 he wore. No colour, no decorations; it had a collar like a litewka jacket, and side pockets. Somewhere low down on the breast was across. His feetlooked large, his legs very thin, they seemed to be bound or wound as for the business of sport more than war. And what was it, this headgear? It seemed as though Joachim had turned an arlmy cook-pot upside - down on his head, and fastened It under his chin wIth a band. Yet it looked quite properly warlike, like an old-fashioned foot-soldier, perhaps.

Hans Castorp felt Ellen Brand's breath on his hands. And near him the Kleefeld's rapid breathing. Other sound there was none, save the continued scraping of the needle on the run-down, ro-tating record, which nobody stopped. He looked at none of his company, would hear or see nothing of them; but across the hands and head on his knee leaned far forward and stared through the red darkness at the guest in the chair. It seemed one moment as though his stomach would turn over within him. His throat con- tracted and a four-or fivefold sob went through and through him. " Forgive me! " he whispered; then his eyes overflowed, he saw no more.

He heard breathless voices: "Speak to him! "he heard Dr. Kro-kowski's baritone voice summon him, formalIy, cheerily, and re- peat the request. Instead of complying, he drew his hands away from beneath EIly's face, and stood up.

Again Dr. Krokowski called upon his name, this time in moni-tory tones. But in two strides Hans Castorp was at the step by the entrance door and with one quick movement turned on the white light.

Fraulein Brand had collapsed. She was twitching convulsively in the Kleefeld's arms. The chair over there was empty.

Hans Castorp went up to the protesting Krokowski, close up to him. He tried to speak, but no words came. He put out his hand, with a brusque, imperative gesture. Receiving the key, he nodded several times, threateningly, close into the other's face; turned, and went out of-the room.

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 "The conclusion to the last chapter brings us close to the end of our quest. Close but not quite. I have chosen to introduce the concept that an evolving consciousness accesses reality directly by using those aspects which work best for me, namely music and a sense of the beautiful. Many people will feel that this interpretation of conscious- ness is unsatisfying and incomplete. They are quite right.

The whole focus of this book has been on time and death. What the last chapter failed to do was to interpret consciousness in terms of time. It did not seek to explain unresolved problems raised in earlier parts of the book like the startling statement 'death is not a feature of consciousness'. Moreover, it did not address the wider issue of the death of the cosmos. These omissions were deliberate. The interknotted issues of time and death, the linking threads of this book, are central to the deepest of all deep questions, the nature of reality itself. Only when we have looked at this, the secret 'face of God', can we truly see the dual role that consciousness plays, both in our lives and in the world. It is to this, the final paradox, that we now turn. / Page 205 / Let us quickly review what we have learned about time. In Chapter 2, we saw that, from the standpoint of physics, time has no verifiable status: it is a fictional map we draw on the seamless spacetime fabric so that we can find our way around. Chapter 4 showed how our peculiar sense of moving time arises. In order to cohere the concep- tual flux of symbolic images that exploded into being when the ego-self was born, the mind needed an ordering principle and a nexus of reference. That ordering principle was time and that nexus was self.

In 'gaining' self, man took upon himself the responsibility for his own actions. That burden is with him still. In 'gaining' self, man stepped out of the Dreaming and into time. That sadness is with him still. This is why the emergence of the egoic-conceptual mind-an upward step in evolution-is given the paradoxical title of the Fall.

The first half of this book, then, stated the problem that time poses to the human psyche. The thrust of my argument in Chapters 1 to 7 was to show that time is the greatest barrier that nature has erected between the average structure of the human mind and reality. To paraphrase a favourite saying of the late Joseph Campbell, 'History [time] is a nightmare from which I hope some day to awaken'. The German mystic, Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), echoed the same thought when he said 'there is no greater obstacle to God than time',

In Chapters 8 and 9, we began to feel our way towards the beginnings of a resolution of this time problem. In Chapter 8, we saw that the differentiating processes that build ego can be diminished, effectively (as we now understand) by filtering out the ego-based existential 'noise' that jams the input and output channels of consciousness, Chapter 9 focused on the unifying quality of con- sciousness, showing how it integrates information, seeking always 'the one in the many', the hidden oneness of things.

The unanswered question in all this is 'What happens to our fallacious sense of tick -tock time when the ego-self collapses?' How does deep consciousness 'see' time? This question can only be meaningfully answered if some human beings have evolved suffi- ciently to 'see' the reality behind time. I think one can confidently assert that such individuals exist, According to the idea of the 'mutant minority' there are always, in each generation, a few individuals who are 'ahead of their time', whose consciousness has evolved far beyond the species norm. Who are they? And what do they tell us? / Page 206 / Who they are is easy to answer; they are the great religious teachers, the mystics. And what they say is a matter of record:

These poetic sayings must be read in the spirit of a koan-a paradoxical epigram used by students of Zen to focus the mind on hidden depths of meaning that are not obvious from mere surface inspection, i.e. they are not logical statements born of reason but insights of the-inner eye. The meaning they carry is below the level of the words themselves. And that meaning is, I believe, that pure consciousness is freed of time. To the highly evolved mind, which has filtered out ego noise, reality appears as a timeless continuum.

In the light of what I have said in this book, this should not be taken as a cop-out, a retreat into spiritualism or religion. Let me remind the reader that this 'in-sight' corresponds remarkably with the portrait of spacetime depicted by contemporary science. Since I have used the words of others to convey this sense of being 'out-of- time', I will use the words of a scientist to paint the relativistic / Page 207 / picture of spacetime that science sees. The quote is from mathematician Clement Durrell's book Readable Relativity:

the universe is to be regarded as a collection of events anywhere and anywhen, an entity which mathematicians call a continuum, and the difference between A (one observer) and 0 (another) is simply that they slice it up differently. The universe as an entity is timeless (and space less). What each individual perceives is merely his own time-section. History records some of the time sections of our ancestors and H.G. Wells forecasts time-sections of our descendants. With neither group have we the power to make direct acquaintance, merely because we cannot put our- selves in the position in which the desired time-cleavage would be the natural one. But all events, past, present and future as we call them, are present in our four-dimensional space-time continuum, a universe without past or present, as static as a pile of films which can be formed into a reel for the cinemato-graph.

Quantum mechanics approaches the issue from a different perspective but its conclusions can be remarkably similar. As Fred Allen Wolf says in Parallel Universes:

The past, present, and future exist side by side. If we were totally able to 'marry' corresponding times each and every moment of our time-bound existences, there would indeed be no sense of time and we would all realise the timeless state, which is taken to be our true or base state of reality by many spiritual practices.

The point of this book is that true consciousness, free of the ego- cage, 'sees' this timelessness without travail or trammel. To be free of time is to be free of death. This is the same message as that insighted by the the poet William Blake when he said 'If the doors of perception [the existential noise of the ego-self] were cleansed [by ego-death], everything would appear to man as it is, infinite [timeless]'..."

Page 208 "...Through mathematics and experiment, we have deduced the existence of a fourth spacetime dimension but we do not experience it as it. We see it in glimpses, strangely fractured into ever-dissolving, non dimensional planes called 'now'

We know this is a less-than-perfect condition because our reality is locked into a fiction- this Dali-esque 'now you see it, now its gone' trick-state called the present.

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To understand something of the nature of our trap, imagine a line segment of say 25 centimeters. Move it an equal length at right angles to itself. This gives us a square (two dimensions). Move the square an equal length at right angles to itself and we have a cube (three dimensions). It is mathematically possible to repeat the process another time, moving the cube simultaneously at right angles to all three dimensions of familiar space into an imaginary fourth space dimension. This gives us a four-dimensional structure called a hypercube or tesseract. We cannot see or experience a hypercube because our brains cannot see or experience a fourth dimension of space. But we can see the three-dimensional shadow cast by the four-dimensional object, just as we can see the two- dimensional shadow cast by a three-dimensional cube on a sheet of paper (it looks like a nested pair with a small cube contained in a bigger one).

At this stage in the evolution of our minds, our experience of reality is like that of the shadow, a limited, impoverished ghost- image projected into the three-dimensions of our present (average) mode of consciousness by the invisible (to us) four-dimensional 'truth structure' that lies beyond and behind it, extended in time as we are extended in space. I cannot stress too strongly that it is this four-dimensional truth structure which is the universe's reality. What we call objective reality, our everyday commonsense world, is but a dim phantom construct of the timeless hyperstructure that exists, in or perhaps as, the 'mind of God', to use religious imagery. Yet, just as our present three-dimensional state of consciousness evolved from the one dimensional mode of our remote ancestors, so there is abundant evidence that the four-dimensional mode is struggling to be born in the homo sapiens species at this human moment in the cosmic story. We are almost there.

Whether a four-dimensional state of consciousness is the ulti-mate truth of the universe or whether beyond this lie higher states of being that extend into an infinitely rich, multi-dimensional hyperspace and hypertime we do not know. One day our descendants may.

This seems to bring us to the end of our quest. Yet, one problem remains and, like all final problems, it is the greatest one of all, sticking like a thorn in the vision of hope which the inner eye holds out to us. The cosmos is a spacetime continuum and in this regard, the poet's intuition of a timeless state of consciousness merely / Page 210 / reflects the facts of the physical universe as science depicts them. However, timelessness implies forevemess and the same science that reveals spacetime to us also tells us that the universe will one day end, in fire or ice.

The death of forever. The fact that the very cosmos in which we live is 'mortal'. This was where this journey started and it is from this existentialist crisis of truly universal proportions that this book gets its name. At the finish of the race, we seem to run head-on into one last, unresolvable paradox, just as light was dawning. Something that seems to make our intuition of timelessness as insubstantial as a lovely vision, dreamed by a dreamer in a quiet time but dissolving like a snowflake at first contact with brute fact.

Is this really the case? In Chapter 7, I discussed a recent model of spacetime put forward by Stephen Hawking (Figure 7.3). I had to seem to be dismissive of the model at that time because I had not yet focused the reader's attention on the way our flawed, ego-conscious window to the world distorts the structure of the world we see. Now, however, we can return to Hawking's idea from a new and different and, I believe, truer perspective.

Hawking built a model of the cosmos which he called the 'no boundary' model because in his theory, time does not begin at a 'point' nor does it end in one (Figure 7.3). From the earlier perspec- tive of Chapter 7, this model seemed, from many points of view, unsatisfactory, because it used imaginary time, not real time. Chapter 9 gives the model a new source of credibility for it is characteristic of the inner eye that it can disregard the 'commonsense' aspects of experience and penetrate to the inner logic of nature.

Thus when the inner eye 'sees' a circle, a mandala, and recog-nises therein some impression of flawlessness, it is, at a different level, seeing the endless number 3.1415926 It may be significant that we call such numbers transcendental. Indeed, science builds its deepest truths using numbers that are, in an important sense, 'illogical'. The square root of minus one is imaginary (it is, in fact, part of the number system Hawking uses to build his model). The square root of 2 is irrational. And so it goes on.

Moreover, the word 'imaginary', like all symbols invented by the conceptual mind, confuses the issue by implying that such numbers are in some way 'unreal'. This is fundamentally false. As Hawking's colleague, mathematician, Roger Penrose, says cryptically:

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it is important to stress the fact that these 'imaginary' numbers are no less real than the 'real' numbers that we have become accustomed to...the relationship between such 'real' numbers and physical reality is not as direct or compelling as it may at first seem to be...

We find a similar situation in particle physics where the so-called ultimate building blocks of matter (quarks) are given such mythic names as 'strange', 'charmed', etc. At this deep level of reality, the false distinction between scientist and poet breaks down and scien- tists use the language of song and parable in their intuitive attempts to seek out the basic structure of the world.

To return to my point, I find it fascinating that Hawking himself recognises that his use of imaginary time, far from being a ruse or trick, may in fact be a door to a higher order of insight. Listen to his own words:

This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time and that what we call real time isjustafigment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real isjust an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.

This goes to the heart of the matter for the defining quality of the inner eye in its most highly evolved forms is that it can 'see' the deepest hidden structures of reality without impediment. If timeless- ness is an authentic feature of consciousness-and the evidence I have summarised in this book very strongly suggests that it is-then consciousness may just as well 'exist' in what the mathematicians call 'imaginary' time as in 'real' time. Indeed, it may be precisely because the ego-self lives in real time that it 'knows' death, while it may be precisely because consciousness lives in imaginary time that it 'knows' eternity.

I now want to build on Hawking's model, but I want to do so in a particular way. I want to use it in the poetic sense of a metaphor, not in the rigid sense of a mathematical model. There are three reasons for this: first, Hawking's model presupposes that the uni- / Page 212  / verse is closed (that spacetime is positively curved) and this is as yet, unproven. Second, I do not believe Hawking's model (despite the credentials of its creator) is science's last word on this subject. Third, we are, by any definition, crossing into uncharted psychological territory by thinking about human hopes for the future in terms of imaginary time or any other mathematical representation of time that science may discover.

The key feature of the Hawking metaphor is that time closes back upon itself to form a loop. This is why in this metaphor we cannot talk of a beginning or an end to time, for a circle has neither except for the arbitrary points we choose to mark on it. It may be no accident that the inner eye has for long sensed that reality is eternal, for in this higher-order understanding, foreverness is restored to its ancient position as the foundation stone of consciousness.

The most fascinating consequence of the 'loop of time' meta- phor is summed up in Figure 7.3. (Figure 7.3. omitted) Here, we see evolution starting with the 'north pole' (the Big Bang) and progressing around the circle to 'now', represented by the 18th line of latitude (say). From this 'now' perspective, we can look 'back' at our past, hidden behind the 'southward' spacetime rim, or 'forward' into our future, hidden behind the 'northward' spacetime rim. Yet this is illusionary, a hangover of the flawed way we look at time through the ego-self window. The loop of time metaphor shows that when we look forward into the future we are also looking back into the past because the arrow of time traces out the full circumference of the circle, eventually coming back to itself.

In this 'song of reality', the distinction between past and future vanishes. The process of 'seeing' is then symmetrical in both directions. In T.S. Eliot's apt words:

If this is what consciousness 'sees', it is 'timeless' in a deeper and different sense than we ever dreamed possible. In real time, such a closing of the loop would play havoc with our notions of causality, cause becoming effect and effect cause. However, this may be a superficial view as I will try to show in a moment.

The unexpected feature of the loop of time metaphor is that a signal from the future becomes a signal from the past. Nothing is / Page 213 / wholly new, for information is always travelling where it has been before. This is why I find the loop of time parable so satisfying. It resonates deeply with a poem cited earlier-T.S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding':

The famous line 'know the place for the first time' is critically significant in the context of this book. Relate this message to your own 'moments of growth' - those times you look back on as marking some kind of quantum jump in your understanding - a leap forward. One key characteristic of these moments is that we suddenly understand something we feel we have, in a dim way, understood all along. Hence such sayings as 'I've known that all my life but I've only just realised it's true' or 'Now I see-I understand it'. This shows up a deeper layer of meaning in the way we use the words discussed in Chapter 5: recognise (know again) and remem-ber (to recall to mind).

It is said of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo that he ap-proached a block of marble believing that the perfect sculpture he sought to create already existed in the unhewn stone. The artistic act was thus an act of discovery not creation, and the long hours of painstaking work were devoted to revealing what was already there.

A scientific colleague once (in a moment of not entirely compli-mentary frankness) described me as a 'prophet, not a scientist'. One of my most 'successful' papers was a short article published in the science journal Nature in 1979. In this paper I made a specific prediction about the way cells process genetic data. This prediction was confirmed shortly after. The interesting thing is that I knew the moment I had the idea on which the prediction were based that the idea was right. There was in some hard-to-define way a 'certainty' about the insight that put it beyond doubt. This is I believe, the stamp of an authentically creative act: one discovers what is already true. When a human being 'sees' a pre-existing truth, already known to / Page 214 / the cosmos, in a very deep sense, the universe recognises part of itself, comprehending it at a higher level of understanding. This kind of incremental knowing is the self-realisation of the cosmos.

In other words, there is a deep knowing about consciousness that is utterly distinct from mere intellectual comprehension. This deep knowing is a remembering of what is already there. One becomes, in the full sense, conscious of what one has always subconsciously been aware of. In terms of Eliot's poem, the 'gate' is remembered even though itis unknown. We arrive where we started and know the place for the first time!

We do not create the future, we discover it.

Roger Penrose captures something of the flavour of the mode of knowing in The Emperor's New Mind, when he says:

Recall my proposal that consciousness, in essence, is the 'seeing' of a necessary truth: and that it may represent some kind of actual contact with Plato's world of ideal mathemati- cal concepts. Recall that Plato's world is itself timeless. The perception of Platonic truth carries no actual information and there would be no actual contradiction involved if such a conscious perception were even to be propagated backwards in time!

The loop of time metaphor goes a long way towards explaining a puzzle that many readers will have picked up as they worked their way through the pages of this book. The argument I put forward in Chapters 8 and 9, that ego cages consciousness, is not a novel one- it is an ancient tenet of many religions. In particular, much of what I said in those chapters could be described as a scientific interpreta- tion of a set of beliefs mapped out in the Hindu Upanishads thousands of years ago. Hindu belief, for example, sees the ego as a deception (maya) which separates the I from the Ultimate. When the mirage of ego is dissolved, the underlying union is made plain- Thou art That (tat tvam asi) is the illuminating recognition of this oneness. This is essentially the message of Chapter 8.

Even the metaphor of the ego-smudged mirror of consciousness that I have used repeatedly (Chapters 8 to 10) has a Hindu parallel. Yoga teaching uses the simile of wind blowing across the surface of water to describe the relationship between self and reality. While the wind blows, the water's surface-the mirror-is fragmented, shift- ing, the 'reality' it reflects continuously disrupted into half-truths / Page 215 /