DRAGONTREE NETWORK #2
Dragon, Mountain, Sun, Tree
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Cover Art, Walter Bruneel
Issue 2 - Vol. 1; No. 2, June 2011
"The Dragon Vortex & Relic Populations"
CONTENTS
1. The Dragon, the Vampire & the Vortex
2. Siberian Shamanism of the Vortex
3. Are the Dragons Crypto-Boskops?
4. Meet X-Woman: Proto-Human of Siberia
5. The Almas of Altai
6. Editorial - Living Your Enlightenment
7. NOW AGE PHYSICS: Holographic Sub-quantum Mind theory
Circumpolar Star Trails Vortex with central Abyss
1. DRAGON VORTEX: The Dragon, The Vampire & the Vortex
That which is Above is like that which is Below.
Dragon Vortex, by Iona Miller
The image of the serpent has been corrupted by the will of man, yet beyond the scope of his vision, it readies itself at his root, preparing to return him to the Godhead upon his death. --C.G. Jung
Apophenia is the method of understanding Uroboros. Uroboros is the Coil Power of Torsion Fields, so in the area of Torsion Fields the Chaos and Synchronicity can be importand tools to create events, realities and life forms. Alchemy is the Art of Psychonauts -- the "Nautonniers" of Apophenia. Apophenia derives from Apophis, the Egyptian Uroboros, Ophis! --Georg De Vere-Limburg
Primordial Vortex
The vortex is the primary icon of the Dragon peoples from time immemorial. It is the first icon in the universal language of symbols. Originally creator god-kings/queens, Dragons became the model of sovereignty for later human rulers. They were called "rulers" because they knew the mystery of ancient metrology. Only those who claimed Mandate of Heaven were considered emperors in Asia.
A Ruler with royal ancestry is typically called a deified King or Queen, dependent on gender. A Ruler without royal ancestry may also be called an Overlord. The Sumerian word for ruler, "excellence" is lugal, which etymologically means "big person." Vampire or oupere is European and uber is Turkish and thus from Upari, we discover that originally Uber - Vampire - meant Overlord. The term for a witch was Uber meaning Overlord. A guardian - a "Watcher" - is an overseer, and from this meaning we obtain the Scythian word uber, meaning a vampire or Overlord (by association, we also obtain from "watcher" the word Nefilim, which relates to the Anunnagi or Anunnaki).
In Sumerian ME means Lord or Master (an Overseer or Overlord) and in Gaelic Mor means ’high’ (also related to mountain and thus ’dweller on the mountain’, one who soars to the heights - a druid or Merlin) and is used as a suffix to the names of Scotic chieftains or kings as in - ’The Conor Mor’ - the High King (or Overlord) of the Clan Conor, for example. If Sumer means guardian and thus overlord, then so does sumaire and the SU component thus means ’the Power’ - the Sidhe or Siddhi. ME is also, it seems, specifically related to wisdom and knowledge (the Aryas) and in both senses therefore the ’sumer’ or ’sumaire’, being one and the same thing - is a derkesthai, a dragon. Sumer and Sumaire mean therefore - Lord of the Powers - SU.ME.
Thus, the ruler (divine sovereign and measuring rod with rolled string) became a symbol of power and divine order. The oldest preserved measuring rod is a copper-alloy bar was found by the German Assyriologist Eckhard Unger while excavating at Nippur. Two statues of the priest-king Gudea of Lagash in the Louvre depict him sitting with a tablet on his lap, upon which are placed surveyors tools including a measuring rod. The "ruler" is thus symonymous with the universal standard of measurement.
Sacred geometry is the language of shape, developed from our Ancestors' original measurements of Earth and Sky over pre-historic millennia. All cultures speak of a time before the fixed form and order of today’s world, and of powers dwelling in the world that predate humanity in both sentience and insight. The Dreamers are the architects of greatness. Their vision lies within their souls. They never see the mirages of Fact, but peer beyond the veils and mists of doubt and pierce the walls of unborn Time.
Many of these archetypes still exist in the human species memory, and are reflected in our own consciousness even if the original presence seems to be gone. Our genetic memory can be viewed as "Mem-Ori" -- literally, a golden braid of liquid light -- metaphysical fiber optic cable. "Mem" = "Water" and "Ori" = "Light" in ancient Hebrew, ie: Memory is Liquid Light and our brain is 90% Water. We need to assert sovereignty over our own consciousness. Dragons were one of the most influential creatures of the terran "dreamtime". Seeing with Dragon Eyes is a non-stop fugue of symbolism and meaning that plunges you into the Vortex of glowing consciousness.
The vortex is the meta-pattern of the universe and an elemental image. It is an archetypal symbol embodying above and below, in the Cosmos, Earth and our own microcosmic nature. Galaxies, Earth, the quantum realm, and the human energy body share an essence -- vortex energy. Earth's magnetic field protects all life on the planet. Our DNA has a helix/vortex configuration. The nonlocal vortex field generates and regenerates matter.
Dragon Vortex, by Iona Miller
The image of the serpent has been corrupted by the will of man, yet beyond the scope of his vision, it readies itself at his root, preparing to return him to the Godhead upon his death. --C.G. Jung
Apophenia is the method of understanding Uroboros. Uroboros is the Coil Power of Torsion Fields, so in the area of Torsion Fields the Chaos and Synchronicity can be importand tools to create events, realities and life forms. Alchemy is the Art of Psychonauts -- the "Nautonniers" of Apophenia. Apophenia derives from Apophis, the Egyptian Uroboros, Ophis! --Georg De Vere-Limburg
Primordial Vortex
The vortex is the primary icon of the Dragon peoples from time immemorial. It is the first icon in the universal language of symbols. Originally creator god-kings/queens, Dragons became the model of sovereignty for later human rulers. They were called "rulers" because they knew the mystery of ancient metrology. Only those who claimed Mandate of Heaven were considered emperors in Asia.
A Ruler with royal ancestry is typically called a deified King or Queen, dependent on gender. A Ruler without royal ancestry may also be called an Overlord. The Sumerian word for ruler, "excellence" is lugal, which etymologically means "big person." Vampire or oupere is European and uber is Turkish and thus from Upari, we discover that originally Uber - Vampire - meant Overlord. The term for a witch was Uber meaning Overlord. A guardian - a "Watcher" - is an overseer, and from this meaning we obtain the Scythian word uber, meaning a vampire or Overlord (by association, we also obtain from "watcher" the word Nefilim, which relates to the Anunnagi or Anunnaki).
In Sumerian ME means Lord or Master (an Overseer or Overlord) and in Gaelic Mor means ’high’ (also related to mountain and thus ’dweller on the mountain’, one who soars to the heights - a druid or Merlin) and is used as a suffix to the names of Scotic chieftains or kings as in - ’The Conor Mor’ - the High King (or Overlord) of the Clan Conor, for example. If Sumer means guardian and thus overlord, then so does sumaire and the SU component thus means ’the Power’ - the Sidhe or Siddhi. ME is also, it seems, specifically related to wisdom and knowledge (the Aryas) and in both senses therefore the ’sumer’ or ’sumaire’, being one and the same thing - is a derkesthai, a dragon. Sumer and Sumaire mean therefore - Lord of the Powers - SU.ME.
Thus, the ruler (divine sovereign and measuring rod with rolled string) became a symbol of power and divine order. The oldest preserved measuring rod is a copper-alloy bar was found by the German Assyriologist Eckhard Unger while excavating at Nippur. Two statues of the priest-king Gudea of Lagash in the Louvre depict him sitting with a tablet on his lap, upon which are placed surveyors tools including a measuring rod. The "ruler" is thus symonymous with the universal standard of measurement.
Sacred geometry is the language of shape, developed from our Ancestors' original measurements of Earth and Sky over pre-historic millennia. All cultures speak of a time before the fixed form and order of today’s world, and of powers dwelling in the world that predate humanity in both sentience and insight. The Dreamers are the architects of greatness. Their vision lies within their souls. They never see the mirages of Fact, but peer beyond the veils and mists of doubt and pierce the walls of unborn Time.
Many of these archetypes still exist in the human species memory, and are reflected in our own consciousness even if the original presence seems to be gone. Our genetic memory can be viewed as "Mem-Ori" -- literally, a golden braid of liquid light -- metaphysical fiber optic cable. "Mem" = "Water" and "Ori" = "Light" in ancient Hebrew, ie: Memory is Liquid Light and our brain is 90% Water. We need to assert sovereignty over our own consciousness. Dragons were one of the most influential creatures of the terran "dreamtime". Seeing with Dragon Eyes is a non-stop fugue of symbolism and meaning that plunges you into the Vortex of glowing consciousness.
The vortex is the meta-pattern of the universe and an elemental image. It is an archetypal symbol embodying above and below, in the Cosmos, Earth and our own microcosmic nature. Galaxies, Earth, the quantum realm, and the human energy body share an essence -- vortex energy. Earth's magnetic field protects all life on the planet. Our DNA has a helix/vortex configuration. The nonlocal vortex field generates and regenerates matter.
Now Age Physics
The spiral or vortex appears at all levels of the organization of matter -- from the spin of quantum physics to the singularity of black holes in the center of each galaxy. Spin is the angular momentum of elementary particles. All elementary particles of a given kind have the same spin quantum number, an important part of a particle's quantum state. When combined with the spin-statistics theorem, the spin of electrons results in the Pauli exclusion principle, which in turn underlies the periodic table of chemical elements.
An accretion disc is a vortex structure (often a circumstellar disk) formed by diffuse material in orbital motion around a central body. The central body is typically a star. Gravity causes material in the disc to spiral inward towards the central body. Gravitational forces compress the material causing the emission of electromagnetic radiation. The frequency range of that radiation depends on the central object.
Accretion discs are a ubiquitous phenomenon in astrophysics; active galactic nuclei, protoplanetary discs, and gamma ray bursts all involve accretion discs. These discs very often give rise to jets coming from the vicinity of the central object. Jets are an efficient way for the star-disc system to shed angular momentum without losing too much mass. The most spectacular accretion discs found in nature are those of active galactic nuclei and of quasars, which are believed to be massive black holes at the center of galaxies. As matter spirals into a black hole, the intense gravitational gradient gives rise to intense frictional heating. The accretion disc of a black hole is hot enough to emit X-rays just outside of the event horizon.
The spiral or vortex appears at all levels of the organization of matter -- from the spin of quantum physics to the singularity of black holes in the center of each galaxy. Spin is the angular momentum of elementary particles. All elementary particles of a given kind have the same spin quantum number, an important part of a particle's quantum state. When combined with the spin-statistics theorem, the spin of electrons results in the Pauli exclusion principle, which in turn underlies the periodic table of chemical elements.
An accretion disc is a vortex structure (often a circumstellar disk) formed by diffuse material in orbital motion around a central body. The central body is typically a star. Gravity causes material in the disc to spiral inward towards the central body. Gravitational forces compress the material causing the emission of electromagnetic radiation. The frequency range of that radiation depends on the central object.
Accretion discs are a ubiquitous phenomenon in astrophysics; active galactic nuclei, protoplanetary discs, and gamma ray bursts all involve accretion discs. These discs very often give rise to jets coming from the vicinity of the central object. Jets are an efficient way for the star-disc system to shed angular momentum without losing too much mass. The most spectacular accretion discs found in nature are those of active galactic nuclei and of quasars, which are believed to be massive black holes at the center of galaxies. As matter spirals into a black hole, the intense gravitational gradient gives rise to intense frictional heating. The accretion disc of a black hole is hot enough to emit X-rays just outside of the event horizon.
Accretion Disc
Creative Vortex
The vortex informs the organization of information, which is even more fundamental than matter. "Information" patterns energy and matter. Consciousness is information -- consciousness-in-forming -- the process of unfolding. Consciousness, ab origine, is intuitive. The uninterrupted narrative of self is embodied as short and longterm memory and genetic memory. The Mystery level of consciousness or abyss of consciousness (Cocchi et al. 2009) includes prophetic intuition. An abyss of consciousness opens the way for intellectual freedom as liberation from the outer limits and internal biological determinism.
Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) can be achieved through trauma, sleep disturbance, sensory deprivation or sensory overload, neurochemical imbalance, epileptic seizure, or fever. They may also be induced by social behavior, such as frenzied dancing ("Spiral Dance of the Vortex" to honor the dead), drumming, or chanting and may be induced by electrically stimulating parts of the brain or by ingesting psychotropic drugs, such as the hoama used by the Saka or Scythians.
Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random nature in general, as with gambling, paranormal phenomena, arcane correspondences, synchronicities, religion, and even attempts at scientific observation. Or, perhaps, it is a relic of authentic holistic Vision.
The secret of the universe is -- "Its alive!" "Killing the dragon" can refer to a cosmic happening. In alchemy, it is the penetration of the ‘prima materia’ as primal ocean, or primal chaos by the secret fire or the divine spirit. The fiery serpent emanated fire and light into the primal waters.When the dragon (or serpent, as the cat of Ra the sun god cut off the head of the serpent Apophis), is killed, the original chaos ceased and the process of cosmic evolution started.
DNA Vortex
Numerous ancient cultures picture the "Tree of Life" with serpents entwined around its trunk or at its roots. While the leaves reach out to receive the energy of the sun, the roots absorb the nutrition of the soil and water. One cannot exist without the other. In life we often acknowledge the leaves, but ignore the jumbled roots of our existence. The DNA molecule, itself the primary molecule, shapes our being from the electro-chemical soup of the womb. DNA excels at bioacoustic and bioelectric signaling -- electromagnetic energy reception and transmission.
The vortex guides the process of embryonic holography. DNA at the center of each cell creates the multi-cellular creature biohologram. First, the zygote is spherical, then it flattens into the embryonic disk. The disk differentiates into three layers: 1) the inner layer (the endoderm; viscera - digestion, blood, etc.); 2) the middle layer (the mesoderm; the musculature); and 3) the outer layer (the ectoderm, furthest from the wall of the uterus), becomes the nervous system and the skin. From a point in the center of the embryonic disk, a radial line defines itself out to the edge of the disk. On both sides of this neural groove, the flesh puckers up and curves over, entrapping electromagnetic lines of force.
The biohologram projected by the embryonic nervous system forms a three-dimensional pattern of resonant structures. These include points, lines, and planes that electromagnetically behave as cymatic acoustic waves, material standing waves. They form locations of no movement. Drawn from the blood of the mother, matter and electrolytic solutions are flowing. At vortex points, lines and planes motion stops; structures are laid down and built up. The zygote acts like a three-dimensional nozzle, through which electrolytes flow into the cymatic structure of standing wave patterns distributed through space inside the embryo, becoming fixed, solidified structures. (Miller & Webb, 1973)
Absolute Space Vortex
"Turning and turning within the widening gyre," the vortex structures turbulence. The internal structuring process is a vortex. The stillness at its center is the groundstate. A vortex field pulls objects in a circular or spiraling direction. These powerful eddies structure a mass of energy into a rotary or whirling motion, causing a depression or vacuum at the center. The simplest form of a vortex is the cross in the circle, but its dynamic form is serpentine. A vortex carries angular momentum; oscillating motion results in an elongated spiral or vortex of energy..
One of its forms is called Zero Point Energy (virtual vacuum fluctuation). The vortex is a depiction of the dynamic form of pure energy ordering chaos through toroidal forms. Quantum particles are quantum vortices. Interaction between these vortexlike objects is mediated by a subquantum level with superfluid properties. A vortex behaves as a massive particle. In physics, a quantum vortex is a topological defect exhibited in superfluids and superconductors (Feynman). The subquantal domain has superfluid properties. The Black Hole is a cosmic variant. In the quantum world, it means spin, flux and field -- the Singularity.
The Mystic Vortex
The gateway between the physical and spirit realms is known as a vortex. Geomagnetic vortex sites are often called Dragon’s Lairs and link the Dragon ley lines in a vast Earth grid. The Serpent life-force is the spiraling life-force energy that moves through the portals. Shaman consider these Serpent vortices inter-dimensional doorways. These vortex sites facilitate spontaneous synchronization of the anomalous geomagnetic event, EEG brainwaves, and Schumann Resonance which amplifies the vortex effect (Miller & Lonetree, 2010). This resonance produces a sense of high well-being and paranormal effects.
Within the energy body, vortexes manifest as chakras. The vortex in our DNA (Starfire) enables vision, illumination, lucid dreaming, and memory through death. Genetic memory is invoked to explain feelings and ideas inherited from our ancestors as part of a "collective unconscious". Entering the primal transformative spiral means entering the vortex of the internal structuring process, the natural kaleidoscope of shapes.
In a vortex of consciousness, questions and answers form in the scintillating swirling ether that also symbolizes the Collective Unconscious. Ezra Pound defined the vortex as, "a radiant node or cluster" "from which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." An image is a compositional vortex. Soulful images weave a vortex of longing. In the flow, the forces impel us. As we spin deeper into the creative vortex we are flooded with knowledge -- gnosis.
The interaction of fields, and the formation of a vortex of energy, the attractor, represents the beginning of our consciousness structure. This process culminates in the formation of separate identity, the ego. In therapy or shamanic Dreamhealing, the vortex can also heal. For example, an image of a deep red stab wound with a black center might become a swirling vortex pulling the dreamer and guide into a blackness. It is cold and empty, and the spinning of the vortex dismembers the dreamer. In fact, he experiences a sense of being disintegrated. The old self dies, so the transformed self image can be reborn, completing the transformational cycle.
The unconscious lends itself to the language of chaos. The whirling, twisting motion of a molecule of water in the chaotic world of non-laminar flow through a pipe is analogous to chaos consciousness. The disorienting, dizzying surrender to the vortex, tornado, or whirlpool is a surrender to chaos, an experience of no form and total confusion and disorientation. We penetrate deeper into the psyche -- into the vortex of the internal structuring process -- through progressively de-structuring patterns of organization.
It is like the experience of committing oneself to the fire and becoming it, then as the random flickering of the flames and torrid heat, disintegrating into pure energy. It means becoming the boiling, flowing, every-changing molten magma at the core of the earth, or the root of a volcano. A spiral or a vortex exerts a magnetic draw and the journeyers are drawn into it. Sensations of spinning and being drawn deeper often cause the journeyer to report intense dizziness and disorientation. Often there are feelings of flying apart, limbs and eventually all parts of the self flying off in the centrifugal forces experienced in the vortex.
These are all descriptions of the personal, subjective experience of total chaos. Always, after passing through this state, the new order which emerges of self-image, thought, emotion, and sensory perception reflectes the new and less dis-eased state of being. The deeper self-image undercut or superseded the old belief system, and began to create a new order of being, a new way of perceiving self and world. The new image provides a magnetic nucleus around which to order the personality, and often the physiology.
Carl Jung likened complexes to impersonal psychological vortex points, into which we are drawn. We mediate it through myths, ritual, art and dreams. The vortex is a focal point or eddy in the vast ocean of consciousness, in the individual stream of consciousness. It is an icon of the Flow State, from which creativity emerges. For active, trancendent consciousness, the center of the vortex is primordial emptiness, the gap between breaths, the stillpoint of illumination which is a royal marriage with the eternal. Our future is a vortex of emergent fateful change. Mythemes of the Vortex form their own widening gyre.
Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution. This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices. The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion.
The Archaic Vortex
The Dragon Vortex is probably the oldest iconic symbol on Earth. It was by mystical Cosmic Fire that the earth was destroyed and renewed with the passing of each age and from which is born a new heaven and a new earth. The Cosmic Fire was seen as the mythical Vortex of change emanating from Spiritual Fluid which gives rise to the Vortex of Fate, which is that situation into which persons or things are steadily drawn, and from which they, like ships pulled into the Maelstrom, cannot escape; and the Vortex of Emotions with its increasing round of excitement or pleasure.
The Egyptians saw the cosmic Vortex as Nu, the primordial waters of creation from which the galaxies and solar systems of the universe were created. But it was the earthly Vortices which controlled their lives. The ancient Egyptians professed a knowledge of the workings of the vortic fields through which they could see the future, control the elements and not only control the spirits, but commune with the Gods. The Egyptians believed that during their mortal lives they could gain knowledge that would allow their spirits to make the perilous journey from the world of the dead to the heavens where the immortal Gods lived. It was the Vortices which gave the Priestesses of Isis their magic and power over life and death.
The vortex informs the organization of information, which is even more fundamental than matter. "Information" patterns energy and matter. Consciousness is information -- consciousness-in-forming -- the process of unfolding. Consciousness, ab origine, is intuitive. The uninterrupted narrative of self is embodied as short and longterm memory and genetic memory. The Mystery level of consciousness or abyss of consciousness (Cocchi et al. 2009) includes prophetic intuition. An abyss of consciousness opens the way for intellectual freedom as liberation from the outer limits and internal biological determinism.
Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) can be achieved through trauma, sleep disturbance, sensory deprivation or sensory overload, neurochemical imbalance, epileptic seizure, or fever. They may also be induced by social behavior, such as frenzied dancing ("Spiral Dance of the Vortex" to honor the dead), drumming, or chanting and may be induced by electrically stimulating parts of the brain or by ingesting psychotropic drugs, such as the hoama used by the Saka or Scythians.
Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random nature in general, as with gambling, paranormal phenomena, arcane correspondences, synchronicities, religion, and even attempts at scientific observation. Or, perhaps, it is a relic of authentic holistic Vision.
The secret of the universe is -- "Its alive!" "Killing the dragon" can refer to a cosmic happening. In alchemy, it is the penetration of the ‘prima materia’ as primal ocean, or primal chaos by the secret fire or the divine spirit. The fiery serpent emanated fire and light into the primal waters.When the dragon (or serpent, as the cat of Ra the sun god cut off the head of the serpent Apophis), is killed, the original chaos ceased and the process of cosmic evolution started.
DNA Vortex
Numerous ancient cultures picture the "Tree of Life" with serpents entwined around its trunk or at its roots. While the leaves reach out to receive the energy of the sun, the roots absorb the nutrition of the soil and water. One cannot exist without the other. In life we often acknowledge the leaves, but ignore the jumbled roots of our existence. The DNA molecule, itself the primary molecule, shapes our being from the electro-chemical soup of the womb. DNA excels at bioacoustic and bioelectric signaling -- electromagnetic energy reception and transmission.
The vortex guides the process of embryonic holography. DNA at the center of each cell creates the multi-cellular creature biohologram. First, the zygote is spherical, then it flattens into the embryonic disk. The disk differentiates into three layers: 1) the inner layer (the endoderm; viscera - digestion, blood, etc.); 2) the middle layer (the mesoderm; the musculature); and 3) the outer layer (the ectoderm, furthest from the wall of the uterus), becomes the nervous system and the skin. From a point in the center of the embryonic disk, a radial line defines itself out to the edge of the disk. On both sides of this neural groove, the flesh puckers up and curves over, entrapping electromagnetic lines of force.
The biohologram projected by the embryonic nervous system forms a three-dimensional pattern of resonant structures. These include points, lines, and planes that electromagnetically behave as cymatic acoustic waves, material standing waves. They form locations of no movement. Drawn from the blood of the mother, matter and electrolytic solutions are flowing. At vortex points, lines and planes motion stops; structures are laid down and built up. The zygote acts like a three-dimensional nozzle, through which electrolytes flow into the cymatic structure of standing wave patterns distributed through space inside the embryo, becoming fixed, solidified structures. (Miller & Webb, 1973)
Absolute Space Vortex
"Turning and turning within the widening gyre," the vortex structures turbulence. The internal structuring process is a vortex. The stillness at its center is the groundstate. A vortex field pulls objects in a circular or spiraling direction. These powerful eddies structure a mass of energy into a rotary or whirling motion, causing a depression or vacuum at the center. The simplest form of a vortex is the cross in the circle, but its dynamic form is serpentine. A vortex carries angular momentum; oscillating motion results in an elongated spiral or vortex of energy..
One of its forms is called Zero Point Energy (virtual vacuum fluctuation). The vortex is a depiction of the dynamic form of pure energy ordering chaos through toroidal forms. Quantum particles are quantum vortices. Interaction between these vortexlike objects is mediated by a subquantum level with superfluid properties. A vortex behaves as a massive particle. In physics, a quantum vortex is a topological defect exhibited in superfluids and superconductors (Feynman). The subquantal domain has superfluid properties. The Black Hole is a cosmic variant. In the quantum world, it means spin, flux and field -- the Singularity.
The Mystic Vortex
The gateway between the physical and spirit realms is known as a vortex. Geomagnetic vortex sites are often called Dragon’s Lairs and link the Dragon ley lines in a vast Earth grid. The Serpent life-force is the spiraling life-force energy that moves through the portals. Shaman consider these Serpent vortices inter-dimensional doorways. These vortex sites facilitate spontaneous synchronization of the anomalous geomagnetic event, EEG brainwaves, and Schumann Resonance which amplifies the vortex effect (Miller & Lonetree, 2010). This resonance produces a sense of high well-being and paranormal effects.
Within the energy body, vortexes manifest as chakras. The vortex in our DNA (Starfire) enables vision, illumination, lucid dreaming, and memory through death. Genetic memory is invoked to explain feelings and ideas inherited from our ancestors as part of a "collective unconscious". Entering the primal transformative spiral means entering the vortex of the internal structuring process, the natural kaleidoscope of shapes.
In a vortex of consciousness, questions and answers form in the scintillating swirling ether that also symbolizes the Collective Unconscious. Ezra Pound defined the vortex as, "a radiant node or cluster" "from which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." An image is a compositional vortex. Soulful images weave a vortex of longing. In the flow, the forces impel us. As we spin deeper into the creative vortex we are flooded with knowledge -- gnosis.
The interaction of fields, and the formation of a vortex of energy, the attractor, represents the beginning of our consciousness structure. This process culminates in the formation of separate identity, the ego. In therapy or shamanic Dreamhealing, the vortex can also heal. For example, an image of a deep red stab wound with a black center might become a swirling vortex pulling the dreamer and guide into a blackness. It is cold and empty, and the spinning of the vortex dismembers the dreamer. In fact, he experiences a sense of being disintegrated. The old self dies, so the transformed self image can be reborn, completing the transformational cycle.
The unconscious lends itself to the language of chaos. The whirling, twisting motion of a molecule of water in the chaotic world of non-laminar flow through a pipe is analogous to chaos consciousness. The disorienting, dizzying surrender to the vortex, tornado, or whirlpool is a surrender to chaos, an experience of no form and total confusion and disorientation. We penetrate deeper into the psyche -- into the vortex of the internal structuring process -- through progressively de-structuring patterns of organization.
It is like the experience of committing oneself to the fire and becoming it, then as the random flickering of the flames and torrid heat, disintegrating into pure energy. It means becoming the boiling, flowing, every-changing molten magma at the core of the earth, or the root of a volcano. A spiral or a vortex exerts a magnetic draw and the journeyers are drawn into it. Sensations of spinning and being drawn deeper often cause the journeyer to report intense dizziness and disorientation. Often there are feelings of flying apart, limbs and eventually all parts of the self flying off in the centrifugal forces experienced in the vortex.
These are all descriptions of the personal, subjective experience of total chaos. Always, after passing through this state, the new order which emerges of self-image, thought, emotion, and sensory perception reflectes the new and less dis-eased state of being. The deeper self-image undercut or superseded the old belief system, and began to create a new order of being, a new way of perceiving self and world. The new image provides a magnetic nucleus around which to order the personality, and often the physiology.
Carl Jung likened complexes to impersonal psychological vortex points, into which we are drawn. We mediate it through myths, ritual, art and dreams. The vortex is a focal point or eddy in the vast ocean of consciousness, in the individual stream of consciousness. It is an icon of the Flow State, from which creativity emerges. For active, trancendent consciousness, the center of the vortex is primordial emptiness, the gap between breaths, the stillpoint of illumination which is a royal marriage with the eternal. Our future is a vortex of emergent fateful change. Mythemes of the Vortex form their own widening gyre.
Chaos is self-organizing, self-iterating, and self-generating. It is an evolutionary force. The tendency of new forms emerging from chaos is toward a higher degree of adaptation, hence evolution. This "recycling" of consciousness leads to a self-referential vortex. Chaotic systems revolve around nexus points, known as strange attractors, because of their unpredictable quality. Rather than being "point-like," they are more like vortices within vortices. The Philosopher's Stone is like a psychic lodestone (or vortex). It acts like an inner magnet, ordering the contents of our consciousness around it (through feedback loops) in chaotic, yet meaningful fashion.
The Archaic Vortex
The Dragon Vortex is probably the oldest iconic symbol on Earth. It was by mystical Cosmic Fire that the earth was destroyed and renewed with the passing of each age and from which is born a new heaven and a new earth. The Cosmic Fire was seen as the mythical Vortex of change emanating from Spiritual Fluid which gives rise to the Vortex of Fate, which is that situation into which persons or things are steadily drawn, and from which they, like ships pulled into the Maelstrom, cannot escape; and the Vortex of Emotions with its increasing round of excitement or pleasure.
The Egyptians saw the cosmic Vortex as Nu, the primordial waters of creation from which the galaxies and solar systems of the universe were created. But it was the earthly Vortices which controlled their lives. The ancient Egyptians professed a knowledge of the workings of the vortic fields through which they could see the future, control the elements and not only control the spirits, but commune with the Gods. The Egyptians believed that during their mortal lives they could gain knowledge that would allow their spirits to make the perilous journey from the world of the dead to the heavens where the immortal Gods lived. It was the Vortices which gave the Priestesses of Isis their magic and power over life and death.
(c) Iona Miller
Vampire Sumaire: The Spiral Serpent of the Vortex
In THE DRAGON LEGACY, Nicholas de Vere notes, Sumaire is a Gaelic word for ’vampire’ that is pronounced shimarie, with the accent on the middle syllable - shim AR ri. Sumaire is translated as ’vortex’, meaning a whirlpool, tornado, or spiral, a labyrinth: a sucker, a reptile (serpent or Dragon). In the Upper Paleolithic, Goddess power is represented in labyrinth, vaginal, uterine, and other female designs.
Throughout the Neolithic, her forces are symbolized by the female figure positioned in holy postures and gestures of empowerment, with the presence of animals, primarily birds and snakes with whom she is intimately connected. These images appear in the Mediterranean area and extend into the late Bronze Age of Minoan Crete, (1600 BC) where she is represented as the refined serpent-goddess-priestess. Snakes coil around her arms, legs or are entwined in her hair and are shown whispering into her ear.
The serpent is a totem of the cycles of life, death and rebirth and the seasons. It is the connection to the fertile earth and to the underworld. It also symbolizes immortality as it was thought to shed its skin indefinitely. Because of this the serpent was placed in relationship to women throughout antiquity as they correspond to the immortal properties of the blood of menstruation. The serpent is also an emblem of the ocean as the sea was known as an earth girdling serpent.
The Labyrinth denotes the sacred womb and labia or vulva. It takes us along different elemental pathways on the initiate's nonlinear journey. This is a symbol of the life-giving, creative power of the feminine. Traveling in then out of the labyrinth is a symbolic death and leads like a vaginal passage straight from the centre. There is a symbolic association of the female vagina with the 'universal void', represented by the spiral/vortex and its associations with the symbolism of the Maze or Labyrinth. It implies sacred sex, Starfire, the menstrual blood of the Goddess, the “womb of the world.”
The labyrinth and its companion symbol, the spiral, appear in myths and ceremonies. The labyrinth itself is seen as the vaginal entryway to Mother Earth. The cave is a dark protected place, where inner vision and change can manifest. Our dreams are labyrinthine. The cave is a death lodge for all beings at the end of their lives. The temple is the ultimate development of the cave. The gate is the entrance into the sacred space, the womb of the goddess, where rebirth takes place.
The Altai Mountains of Central Asia are the primordial dragon homeland of the Saka or Scythians and the Royal Ashinas. A huge energy vortex is there known as the "umbilicus" of the Earth. The shamans built a trail of stone to tie the dead to the naval of the world, the center of everything. The umbilicus is marked out by a curved line of stone on the slopes of he Altai, the cradle of Scythian-Turkic culture that straddles Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan. According to the Altai tradition, Uch-Enmek is the umbilical cord of the Earth, maintaining the spiritual and energy balance of our planet, and regulating the weather and climate. Beluha Mountain is the umbilical cord of the planet.
Here in the dead center of Asia is where global shamanism originated, with its cross-cultural features. Tengrism was and is the religion revolving around the worship of nature and the endless Blue Sky which is the Blue Turban.The Believer has the duty to Honor of the Tengri by acheiving greater heights in his life. The Royal Ashina wolf is believed to reveal itself only to the worthy who have honored the Tengri. The vortex is also a metaphor for the continual ebb and flow of migrations for nomadic people.
Ancient structures, such as Gobekli Tepi and Arkaim, bore the marks of the sumaire, the spiral labyrinth or vortex design, thus emphasizing the creachaire - sumaire theme of the Dragon - witch - Vampire - Overlord theme. The Orobourus, the reptilian symbol of completeness is the Sumaire, the serpent that encircles and spirals to create an inhaling vortex, a black hole that draws all energy and life into it.
Reminiscent of the word shimmer, sumaire suggests 'to glow radiantly as with a light that had the power to fascinate'. It is pertinent because from the dawn of time the Elven Gods were called the Shining Ones. The word also relates to 'shaman' and 'shamanism', a primordial spiritual practice rooted in Northern Asia, the homeland of the speakers of ’Ar Sidhe Cantu’, being the Sundered Elven Tribe who went east.
The early maze was a figurative vortex; a tornado or whirlpool. The Chartres Maze is associated with Melusine and Sheba and their swastika-vortex, source of life and life's blood. The Maze is associated with the root word from which we derive the adjective "to amaze". The maze represented the shamanic "Spiral Dance of the Vortex" (sacrificial sword dance), and on another level "The Quest for the Holy Grail". It can be associated with the name Mazda or Ormuzd, the principle of light, suggesting that whatever was at the centre of a Maze rendered enlightenment and that ecstatic amazement, or wonder, accompanied it .
In THE DRAGON LEGACY, Nicholas de Vere notes, Sumaire is a Gaelic word for ’vampire’ that is pronounced shimarie, with the accent on the middle syllable - shim AR ri. Sumaire is translated as ’vortex’, meaning a whirlpool, tornado, or spiral, a labyrinth: a sucker, a reptile (serpent or Dragon). In the Upper Paleolithic, Goddess power is represented in labyrinth, vaginal, uterine, and other female designs.
Throughout the Neolithic, her forces are symbolized by the female figure positioned in holy postures and gestures of empowerment, with the presence of animals, primarily birds and snakes with whom she is intimately connected. These images appear in the Mediterranean area and extend into the late Bronze Age of Minoan Crete, (1600 BC) where she is represented as the refined serpent-goddess-priestess. Snakes coil around her arms, legs or are entwined in her hair and are shown whispering into her ear.
The serpent is a totem of the cycles of life, death and rebirth and the seasons. It is the connection to the fertile earth and to the underworld. It also symbolizes immortality as it was thought to shed its skin indefinitely. Because of this the serpent was placed in relationship to women throughout antiquity as they correspond to the immortal properties of the blood of menstruation. The serpent is also an emblem of the ocean as the sea was known as an earth girdling serpent.
The Labyrinth denotes the sacred womb and labia or vulva. It takes us along different elemental pathways on the initiate's nonlinear journey. This is a symbol of the life-giving, creative power of the feminine. Traveling in then out of the labyrinth is a symbolic death and leads like a vaginal passage straight from the centre. There is a symbolic association of the female vagina with the 'universal void', represented by the spiral/vortex and its associations with the symbolism of the Maze or Labyrinth. It implies sacred sex, Starfire, the menstrual blood of the Goddess, the “womb of the world.”
The labyrinth and its companion symbol, the spiral, appear in myths and ceremonies. The labyrinth itself is seen as the vaginal entryway to Mother Earth. The cave is a dark protected place, where inner vision and change can manifest. Our dreams are labyrinthine. The cave is a death lodge for all beings at the end of their lives. The temple is the ultimate development of the cave. The gate is the entrance into the sacred space, the womb of the goddess, where rebirth takes place.
The Altai Mountains of Central Asia are the primordial dragon homeland of the Saka or Scythians and the Royal Ashinas. A huge energy vortex is there known as the "umbilicus" of the Earth. The shamans built a trail of stone to tie the dead to the naval of the world, the center of everything. The umbilicus is marked out by a curved line of stone on the slopes of he Altai, the cradle of Scythian-Turkic culture that straddles Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan. According to the Altai tradition, Uch-Enmek is the umbilical cord of the Earth, maintaining the spiritual and energy balance of our planet, and regulating the weather and climate. Beluha Mountain is the umbilical cord of the planet.
Here in the dead center of Asia is where global shamanism originated, with its cross-cultural features. Tengrism was and is the religion revolving around the worship of nature and the endless Blue Sky which is the Blue Turban.The Believer has the duty to Honor of the Tengri by acheiving greater heights in his life. The Royal Ashina wolf is believed to reveal itself only to the worthy who have honored the Tengri. The vortex is also a metaphor for the continual ebb and flow of migrations for nomadic people.
Ancient structures, such as Gobekli Tepi and Arkaim, bore the marks of the sumaire, the spiral labyrinth or vortex design, thus emphasizing the creachaire - sumaire theme of the Dragon - witch - Vampire - Overlord theme. The Orobourus, the reptilian symbol of completeness is the Sumaire, the serpent that encircles and spirals to create an inhaling vortex, a black hole that draws all energy and life into it.
Reminiscent of the word shimmer, sumaire suggests 'to glow radiantly as with a light that had the power to fascinate'. It is pertinent because from the dawn of time the Elven Gods were called the Shining Ones. The word also relates to 'shaman' and 'shamanism', a primordial spiritual practice rooted in Northern Asia, the homeland of the speakers of ’Ar Sidhe Cantu’, being the Sundered Elven Tribe who went east.
The early maze was a figurative vortex; a tornado or whirlpool. The Chartres Maze is associated with Melusine and Sheba and their swastika-vortex, source of life and life's blood. The Maze is associated with the root word from which we derive the adjective "to amaze". The maze represented the shamanic "Spiral Dance of the Vortex" (sacrificial sword dance), and on another level "The Quest for the Holy Grail". It can be associated with the name Mazda or Ormuzd, the principle of light, suggesting that whatever was at the centre of a Maze rendered enlightenment and that ecstatic amazement, or wonder, accompanied it .
Secrets of the Serpent, Philip Gardiner, 2006
The Spiral Cosmos
The double spiral is a vortex. In another sense the labyrinth represents the ever moving, spiralling vortex of the galaxy and the cosmos at whose centre lies utter stillness as in the centre of the maze, the journey’s end; death of the lesser self, stillness and release. Thus the centre of the maze is the nix, the nil point, the womb and the tomb, where the worm of fear dies and is reborn as the embryo of new consciousness.
Next to the doorway to Hades Virgil locates a representation of the labyrinth, as a map of the underworld with, as we discover as the story unfolds, Elysium: Avallon, at its heart. As a teaching the story of the underworld quest incorporating the mistletoe can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, suggesting a Mesopotamian origin for the labyrinth concept. As the spiral vortex, it is related to the decorative motifs employed by the Ubaid culture of Scythia and Carpathia, the root origin of the royal Sumerian culture.
As in offerings made to Melusine’s father outside the cave in Northumbria, in the Canary Islands milk was poured into depressions and left to trickle away down the side of the monolith. The eight armed figure was believed by the islanders to be sacred to Isis. The virginal High Priestess of Waite’s alchemical Tarot gave "milk", the dew of the fleur de lys or rosicrucis, that flowed from the eight armed cross to form the Milky Way, the spiral vortex or labyrinth of the "cosmic" dragon, the Orouborus featured in the cross of the Dragon Court.
The word ’Viking’ has been explained in various ways. Originally spelt ’Wicking’ it was thought to derive from the word ’wic’ meaning the inlet or mouth of a Fjord, whilst the earlier meaning of the word from the Old Friesian and Old English had ’wic’ as an encampment. In Russia however the ’Vikhr’ was a whirlwind, a manifestation of the Zmei or Dragon king.
The Vikhr is a character which is common to both the Russians and the Irish and it will be remembered that Russia was actually founded by the Viking Ruotsi Clan, intimating that the actual definition of the word ’Viking’ is the same as the Irish word ’Sumaire’, a Dragon and a Vortex.
In tandem with their Aryan Hindu cousins, the Vikings used the symbol of the swastika -- the dynamic vortex. An example of its utilization by the Norse can be found in Iceland, whose early inhabitants emblazoned the blue swastika sacred to Kali Azura or ’blue Kali’, the sister of the Sumerian Cain or Qayin.
Variants of this figure inclue the hammer of Thor, earlier a copper, single-headed labrys or tomahawk common to the Ubaid. This is the shape of the spinning, creating the vortex, the spiral storm or tornado, which can also be found at numerous archaeological sites including Newgrange in its early spiralised form. This is the primal spiral design of the Sumaire of Sumeria. In its variant form, the swastika represents the curved Scythian sword reaping the whirlwind.
The double spiral is a vortex. In another sense the labyrinth represents the ever moving, spiralling vortex of the galaxy and the cosmos at whose centre lies utter stillness as in the centre of the maze, the journey’s end; death of the lesser self, stillness and release. Thus the centre of the maze is the nix, the nil point, the womb and the tomb, where the worm of fear dies and is reborn as the embryo of new consciousness.
Next to the doorway to Hades Virgil locates a representation of the labyrinth, as a map of the underworld with, as we discover as the story unfolds, Elysium: Avallon, at its heart. As a teaching the story of the underworld quest incorporating the mistletoe can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, suggesting a Mesopotamian origin for the labyrinth concept. As the spiral vortex, it is related to the decorative motifs employed by the Ubaid culture of Scythia and Carpathia, the root origin of the royal Sumerian culture.
As in offerings made to Melusine’s father outside the cave in Northumbria, in the Canary Islands milk was poured into depressions and left to trickle away down the side of the monolith. The eight armed figure was believed by the islanders to be sacred to Isis. The virginal High Priestess of Waite’s alchemical Tarot gave "milk", the dew of the fleur de lys or rosicrucis, that flowed from the eight armed cross to form the Milky Way, the spiral vortex or labyrinth of the "cosmic" dragon, the Orouborus featured in the cross of the Dragon Court.
The word ’Viking’ has been explained in various ways. Originally spelt ’Wicking’ it was thought to derive from the word ’wic’ meaning the inlet or mouth of a Fjord, whilst the earlier meaning of the word from the Old Friesian and Old English had ’wic’ as an encampment. In Russia however the ’Vikhr’ was a whirlwind, a manifestation of the Zmei or Dragon king.
The Vikhr is a character which is common to both the Russians and the Irish and it will be remembered that Russia was actually founded by the Viking Ruotsi Clan, intimating that the actual definition of the word ’Viking’ is the same as the Irish word ’Sumaire’, a Dragon and a Vortex.
In tandem with their Aryan Hindu cousins, the Vikings used the symbol of the swastika -- the dynamic vortex. An example of its utilization by the Norse can be found in Iceland, whose early inhabitants emblazoned the blue swastika sacred to Kali Azura or ’blue Kali’, the sister of the Sumerian Cain or Qayin.
Variants of this figure inclue the hammer of Thor, earlier a copper, single-headed labrys or tomahawk common to the Ubaid. This is the shape of the spinning, creating the vortex, the spiral storm or tornado, which can also be found at numerous archaeological sites including Newgrange in its early spiralised form. This is the primal spiral design of the Sumaire of Sumeria. In its variant form, the swastika represents the curved Scythian sword reaping the whirlwind.
Dynamic Vortex
Since prehistory, the swastika has been used as an auspicious symbol of happiness and truth by very diverse cultures in many locations all over the globe. It is a tamga like many icons found all over the pre-historic Steppe. Today it can still be seen throughout Asia as a symbol of general good luck.
Yungdrung Bön could be translated as the Religion of the Swastika, rich in symbolism. Primarily, it represents the unchangeable, indestructible state, Buddha-nature, the Nature of Mind, the fundamental ground of existence, light. The four arms and the centre of the yungdrung also represent the four directions and the centre. In Nepal, for instance, it features not only on religious monuments but also on wrought iron gates, above doorways, embroidered on clothes, bags and belts, and as a logo.
The swastika is also found reversed and both forms respectively are thought to be moon and sun symbols respectively. Wen we consider the the philosophy of the Druids and other Indo-European, Aryan philosophies, it is wise to bear in mind that the teachings and symbols operate on both the macro and microcosmic levels at the least. Often the symbolism is multi-faceted. Girdap in Turkish means whirlpool-vortex (probably "also" from Arabic, see Mahmud of Kashgar's dictionary: "qirma: something which is made round" or we have KIVIR: to twist, curl).
The symbol of the swastika is not explicitly connected with the ancient Aryan tribes or Vedic religion. Since prehistory it has been used by many cultures of Eurasia, America and Africa, so it was common among nations which are not even Indo-European, let alone Aryan. Secondly, it was never connected with anti-Semitism anywhere in the world until in the 19th century when Émile-Louis Burnouf (1821-1907), a French orientalist and racialist who completely misinterpreted the teachings of Vedas and Buddhist doctrines, came up with this erroneous connection. This misinterpretation was exploited by the German nationalists, and then by the Nazis.
The moon and the sun symbolism applies to energy dynamics, as the sun radiates or pushes energy out while the moon draws energy to it in the form of the sun’s rays. Its gravitational field also pulls the tides. Kali is the Sumaire, the whirlpool which is the sucker-in of blood and energy, like the moon draws the sun's rays and sucks up the tides; the solar swastika symbolizes the donor or benefactor who gives willingly of their essence.
The circular swastika is the mark of Lilith given to Cain and also the mark of Kali. In their original form they represent the scythe of the reaper, the Golden Sickle of the Druids spinning on its hilt. The swastika has another three-armed formed which appears again at Newgrange and also as the badge of the fairy king Manannan Mac Lir, Lord of the isle of Man and Lord of the Waters of the Sea. It compares to the dragon’s eye of the south and also the dragon’s eye of the north. In the northern hemisphere, mimicking the pull of the whirlpool, the rotation of these devices is to the left as you look at them, or clockwise from the point of view of the one summoning the sumaire in themselves.
If we think of the swastika as a turbine, the position of the arms indicates not the direction of rotation, but the angle at which the blades are set. The difference between the four and three armed swastika is that the four armed essentially represents the sowing or reaping of "the four winds", the pneuma, the spiritual or morphic energy, whilst the three armed cross, the swastika of Manannan of the waters, represents sowing (donating) or reaping (removing) the blood and waters of the Fountain of Life -- the Holy Grail.
The pineal gland is so-called because it is similar in shape to a pine cone. The dragon’s eye of the north looks similar to the plan view of a three sided pyramid and also represents the pineal gland that controls the secretion of the mystical fluids. In relation to the pineal gland the Grail is symbolized by the sacred head, the Baphomet or source of wisdom.
Related to the Solar disc and the Ajna chakra in Tantra, in Mithraism this stage of the Grail process is represented by the Dragon of the sun and so here the three armed swastika is the Dragon’s eye of the north representing the pine cone shape of the pineal gland and also the 15th letter of the Hebrew alphabet Ayin, the 15th path of the Tarot - the Devil - and the number of Ishtar or Venus in the roll of the seniority of the Gods. The Ayin is the ’All Seeing Eye of God’ (Enki or Samael) peering both in and out of the void.
At the end of their journey from the brain, through its third ventrical, down the spinal column to the womb, Graffenberg gland and urethra, the fluids rest until naturally or manually discharged. The womb becomes the grail Cup containing the waters of life, the Cubic stone of the Philosophers. The Dragon’s eye of the south = the Cup.
Thus the Grail, among other things, is both the Head and the Cup, and both ’eyes’ of the dragon - north and south - are the eyes that contain "The light that illumines the human spirit". It is also the pineal i - D, the Delta or Hebrew Daleth or Tau - The Doorway to the eternal.
In any form the swastika (vortex) is an emblem of life, of breathing (the breath of ravens) and of self-sacrifice. As such therefore, the swastika is one of the primeval symbols of Priest-Kingship and Dragon Maidenhood. Greatly to be abhorred then is the fact that the Nazi Party of Germany hijacked the swastika of Kali and, along with numerous other fairy symbols, and made it the most hated and feared glyph on the Planet. The Dragon Court in no way endorses Nazism, and never uses the vortex or swastika as a nazi emblem. The Dragon context of vortex and swastika comes from an antecedent, primordial context.
The word swastika came from the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote good luck. It is composed of su- meaning "good, well" and asti "to be" svasti thus means "well-being." The suffix -ka either forms a diminutive or intensifies the verbal meaning, so svastika can be translated literally as "that which is associated with well-being," corresponding to "lucky charm" or "thing that is auspicious."
The genesis of the swastika symbol is often treated in conjunction with cross symbols in general, such as the "sun wheel" of Bronze Age religion. Beyond its certain presence in the "proto-writing" symbol systems emerging in the Neolithic [proto-Scythians], nothing certain is known about the symbol's origin. There are nevertheless a number of speculative hypotheses.
One hypothesis is that the sun wheel, cross symbols and the swastika share a common origin in simply symbolizing the four seasons, where the division for 90-degree sections correspond to the solstices and equinoxes. This carries most significance in establishing a calendar that is seen to be more advanced than the lunar calendar (symbolized by the lunar crescent common to Islam) where the seasons drift from calendar year to calendar year. The luni-solar solution for correcting season drift was to intercalate an extra month in certain years to restore the lunar cycle to the solar-season cycle.
The Star of David is thought to originate as a symbol of that calendar system, where the two overlapping triangles are seen to form a partition of 12 sections around the perimeter with a 13th section in the middle, representing the 12 and sometimes 13 months to a year. As such, the Christian cross, Jewish hexagram star and the Muslim crescent moon are seen to have their origins in different views regarding which calendar system is preferred for marking holy days. Groups in higher latitudes experience the seasons more strongly, offering more advantage to the calendar represented by the swastika/cross.
Carl Sagan in his book Comet (1985) reproduces Han period Chinese manuscript (the Book of Silk, 2nd century BC) that shows comet tail varieties: most are variations on simple comet tails, but the last shows the comet nucleus with four bent arms extending from it, recalling a swastika. Sagan suggests that in antiquity a comet could have approached so close to Earth that the jets of gas streaming from it, bent by the comet's rotation, became visible, leading to the adoption of the swastika as a symbol across the world. Bob Kobres in Comets and the Bronze Age Collapse (1992) contends that the swastika like comet on the Han Dynasty silk comet atlas was labeled a "long tailed pheasant star" (Di-Xing) because of its resemblance to a bird's foot or track. Kobres goes on to suggest an association of mythological birds and comets also outside China.
The ubiquitous swastika pattern arises when parallel waves of neural activity sweep across the visual cortex during states of altered consciousness, producing a swirling swastika-like image, due to the way quadrants in the field of vision are mapped to opposite areas in the brain.
The Death’s Head of the SS is a corruption of the head of wisdom of the Templars - the Baphomet - whilst the Sig rune itself is the path of the serpent of wisdom descending the Tree of life. The swastika is the sumaire drawing life into it as the Moon draws the seas to her.
The self sacrificing Tantric priests of the Kaula Vama Marg shed the last vestige of their egos and their lives, to be left drained. As empty vessels they were then ready to be filled with primordial awareness -- the wisdom of the Cosmos and the power of the Siddhis.
However, we should never forget the shadow-side of the swastika represents the suffering of four million people sacrificed to the stupidity of a rogue nation. The Holocaust replicated the systematic persecution and annihilation of the Elven families for over a thousand years and for exactly the same reasons -- control, money and power.
Since prehistory, the swastika has been used as an auspicious symbol of happiness and truth by very diverse cultures in many locations all over the globe. It is a tamga like many icons found all over the pre-historic Steppe. Today it can still be seen throughout Asia as a symbol of general good luck.
Yungdrung Bön could be translated as the Religion of the Swastika, rich in symbolism. Primarily, it represents the unchangeable, indestructible state, Buddha-nature, the Nature of Mind, the fundamental ground of existence, light. The four arms and the centre of the yungdrung also represent the four directions and the centre. In Nepal, for instance, it features not only on religious monuments but also on wrought iron gates, above doorways, embroidered on clothes, bags and belts, and as a logo.
The swastika is also found reversed and both forms respectively are thought to be moon and sun symbols respectively. Wen we consider the the philosophy of the Druids and other Indo-European, Aryan philosophies, it is wise to bear in mind that the teachings and symbols operate on both the macro and microcosmic levels at the least. Often the symbolism is multi-faceted. Girdap in Turkish means whirlpool-vortex (probably "also" from Arabic, see Mahmud of Kashgar's dictionary: "qirma: something which is made round" or we have KIVIR: to twist, curl).
The symbol of the swastika is not explicitly connected with the ancient Aryan tribes or Vedic religion. Since prehistory it has been used by many cultures of Eurasia, America and Africa, so it was common among nations which are not even Indo-European, let alone Aryan. Secondly, it was never connected with anti-Semitism anywhere in the world until in the 19th century when Émile-Louis Burnouf (1821-1907), a French orientalist and racialist who completely misinterpreted the teachings of Vedas and Buddhist doctrines, came up with this erroneous connection. This misinterpretation was exploited by the German nationalists, and then by the Nazis.
The moon and the sun symbolism applies to energy dynamics, as the sun radiates or pushes energy out while the moon draws energy to it in the form of the sun’s rays. Its gravitational field also pulls the tides. Kali is the Sumaire, the whirlpool which is the sucker-in of blood and energy, like the moon draws the sun's rays and sucks up the tides; the solar swastika symbolizes the donor or benefactor who gives willingly of their essence.
The circular swastika is the mark of Lilith given to Cain and also the mark of Kali. In their original form they represent the scythe of the reaper, the Golden Sickle of the Druids spinning on its hilt. The swastika has another three-armed formed which appears again at Newgrange and also as the badge of the fairy king Manannan Mac Lir, Lord of the isle of Man and Lord of the Waters of the Sea. It compares to the dragon’s eye of the south and also the dragon’s eye of the north. In the northern hemisphere, mimicking the pull of the whirlpool, the rotation of these devices is to the left as you look at them, or clockwise from the point of view of the one summoning the sumaire in themselves.
If we think of the swastika as a turbine, the position of the arms indicates not the direction of rotation, but the angle at which the blades are set. The difference between the four and three armed swastika is that the four armed essentially represents the sowing or reaping of "the four winds", the pneuma, the spiritual or morphic energy, whilst the three armed cross, the swastika of Manannan of the waters, represents sowing (donating) or reaping (removing) the blood and waters of the Fountain of Life -- the Holy Grail.
The pineal gland is so-called because it is similar in shape to a pine cone. The dragon’s eye of the north looks similar to the plan view of a three sided pyramid and also represents the pineal gland that controls the secretion of the mystical fluids. In relation to the pineal gland the Grail is symbolized by the sacred head, the Baphomet or source of wisdom.
Related to the Solar disc and the Ajna chakra in Tantra, in Mithraism this stage of the Grail process is represented by the Dragon of the sun and so here the three armed swastika is the Dragon’s eye of the north representing the pine cone shape of the pineal gland and also the 15th letter of the Hebrew alphabet Ayin, the 15th path of the Tarot - the Devil - and the number of Ishtar or Venus in the roll of the seniority of the Gods. The Ayin is the ’All Seeing Eye of God’ (Enki or Samael) peering both in and out of the void.
At the end of their journey from the brain, through its third ventrical, down the spinal column to the womb, Graffenberg gland and urethra, the fluids rest until naturally or manually discharged. The womb becomes the grail Cup containing the waters of life, the Cubic stone of the Philosophers. The Dragon’s eye of the south = the Cup.
Thus the Grail, among other things, is both the Head and the Cup, and both ’eyes’ of the dragon - north and south - are the eyes that contain "The light that illumines the human spirit". It is also the pineal i - D, the Delta or Hebrew Daleth or Tau - The Doorway to the eternal.
In any form the swastika (vortex) is an emblem of life, of breathing (the breath of ravens) and of self-sacrifice. As such therefore, the swastika is one of the primeval symbols of Priest-Kingship and Dragon Maidenhood. Greatly to be abhorred then is the fact that the Nazi Party of Germany hijacked the swastika of Kali and, along with numerous other fairy symbols, and made it the most hated and feared glyph on the Planet. The Dragon Court in no way endorses Nazism, and never uses the vortex or swastika as a nazi emblem. The Dragon context of vortex and swastika comes from an antecedent, primordial context.
The word swastika came from the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote good luck. It is composed of su- meaning "good, well" and asti "to be" svasti thus means "well-being." The suffix -ka either forms a diminutive or intensifies the verbal meaning, so svastika can be translated literally as "that which is associated with well-being," corresponding to "lucky charm" or "thing that is auspicious."
The genesis of the swastika symbol is often treated in conjunction with cross symbols in general, such as the "sun wheel" of Bronze Age religion. Beyond its certain presence in the "proto-writing" symbol systems emerging in the Neolithic [proto-Scythians], nothing certain is known about the symbol's origin. There are nevertheless a number of speculative hypotheses.
One hypothesis is that the sun wheel, cross symbols and the swastika share a common origin in simply symbolizing the four seasons, where the division for 90-degree sections correspond to the solstices and equinoxes. This carries most significance in establishing a calendar that is seen to be more advanced than the lunar calendar (symbolized by the lunar crescent common to Islam) where the seasons drift from calendar year to calendar year. The luni-solar solution for correcting season drift was to intercalate an extra month in certain years to restore the lunar cycle to the solar-season cycle.
The Star of David is thought to originate as a symbol of that calendar system, where the two overlapping triangles are seen to form a partition of 12 sections around the perimeter with a 13th section in the middle, representing the 12 and sometimes 13 months to a year. As such, the Christian cross, Jewish hexagram star and the Muslim crescent moon are seen to have their origins in different views regarding which calendar system is preferred for marking holy days. Groups in higher latitudes experience the seasons more strongly, offering more advantage to the calendar represented by the swastika/cross.
Carl Sagan in his book Comet (1985) reproduces Han period Chinese manuscript (the Book of Silk, 2nd century BC) that shows comet tail varieties: most are variations on simple comet tails, but the last shows the comet nucleus with four bent arms extending from it, recalling a swastika. Sagan suggests that in antiquity a comet could have approached so close to Earth that the jets of gas streaming from it, bent by the comet's rotation, became visible, leading to the adoption of the swastika as a symbol across the world. Bob Kobres in Comets and the Bronze Age Collapse (1992) contends that the swastika like comet on the Han Dynasty silk comet atlas was labeled a "long tailed pheasant star" (Di-Xing) because of its resemblance to a bird's foot or track. Kobres goes on to suggest an association of mythological birds and comets also outside China.
The ubiquitous swastika pattern arises when parallel waves of neural activity sweep across the visual cortex during states of altered consciousness, producing a swirling swastika-like image, due to the way quadrants in the field of vision are mapped to opposite areas in the brain.
The Death’s Head of the SS is a corruption of the head of wisdom of the Templars - the Baphomet - whilst the Sig rune itself is the path of the serpent of wisdom descending the Tree of life. The swastika is the sumaire drawing life into it as the Moon draws the seas to her.
The self sacrificing Tantric priests of the Kaula Vama Marg shed the last vestige of their egos and their lives, to be left drained. As empty vessels they were then ready to be filled with primordial awareness -- the wisdom of the Cosmos and the power of the Siddhis.
However, we should never forget the shadow-side of the swastika represents the suffering of four million people sacrificed to the stupidity of a rogue nation. The Holocaust replicated the systematic persecution and annihilation of the Elven families for over a thousand years and for exactly the same reasons -- control, money and power.
The Spiral Dance, Starhawk
Minoan Egyptian
Contemporary Art Therapy - Katherine M. Sanford
SEPTEMBER 1976 Following the brief moment of balance reflected in paintings #53 and #54, I am again drawn back into the underground domain. This painting was an attempt to relate to a dream in which I discovered the serpents and the square containers in a cave. Elaborating on that symbolic dream imagery, the sunlight penetrates the cave from above, illuminating a central altar of fi e toward which the entwined serpents advance. The human woman shines her light of consciousness upon the serpents and brings an offering of milk. The Great Mother also contributes her light to the drama. Spectral figures emerge from the walls of the cave. Who knows what they will bring? I dedicated the next three years to fulfi lling a bachelor’s equivalency while earning a master’s degree, completing my training as a Jungian analyst, and becoming licensed as a marriage family therapist (M.F.T.). I did no paintings during this time. --KMS
For more see,
"The Serpent and the Cross: Healing the Split through Active Imagination"
FOR MORE VISIONARY PAINTINGS illustrating the vortex processes above,
CLICK HERE http://aras.org/sanford/serpent%20140pp.pdf
For more see,
"The Serpent and the Cross: Healing the Split through Active Imagination"
FOR MORE VISIONARY PAINTINGS illustrating the vortex processes above,
CLICK HERE http://aras.org/sanford/serpent%20140pp.pdf
The Golden Altai Mountains of Central Asia is the primordial dragon homeland, a huge energy vortex known as the "umbilicus" of the Earth, and the place where global shamanism originated. "Tengrism" demands that people become aware of the consequences of their actions. Tengrism was the religion revolving around the worship of nature and the endless Blue Sky which is the Blue Turban.The Believer has the duty to Honor the Tengri by acheiving greater heights in his life. The Royal Ashina wolf is believed to reveal itself only to the worthy who have honored the Tengri.
2. Siberian Shamanism of the Vortex
V. Doubrovsky (www.gotosibiria.ru)
What is the power source for Siberian shamanism and how can you access it?
by Carol Hiltner
Siberian shamanism is empowered by an extremely strong energy vortex centered at Mt. Belukha in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia. This article will discuss 1) the nature of this vortex, 2) a brief history of human interaction with this vortex, and 3) how you can access its power. Intersecting ideas in archeology, quantum and subtle energy physics, and oral history all shed light on this phenomenon.
What is the Altai energy vortex and how is its power imparted?
We exist in a living, holographic universe .[1]
The Earth is a living, breathing being of the type “planet,” as much as you and I are living beings of the type “human.”[2]
The thing that defines “life” for each type is the specific wave characteristics of our electromagnetic energy flow. “Flow” is the operant word here, because electromagnetism is, by definition, in motion—spiral motion in a “positive” or “negative” direction. The flow operates similarly to the “current” that lights up our houses, but human current is much more subtle. Our electromagnetic instrumentation is now sensitive enough to record the subtle human flows.
Generally, earth energy is negative, receiving, grounding; and sky energy is positive, giving, enlivening. In generic terms, sky energy is the food of life.
The vortex at Mt. Belukha is the Earth’s equivalent to an umbilical cord.
Sky energy, so powerful that it has been and can be seen by mystics for as far back as we can trace, is funneled into the planet at this place. It looks very much like a human umbilical cord, except it is immense. And, Mt. Belukha is located in almost the exact center of the Eurasian landmass, similarly to the central location of the human umbilicus.
The energy of the vortex heals us because our weaker fields are entrained in it.
The impact of an electrical charge is called a “field.” A remarkable characteristic of energy fields is that a weaker field will take on the resonance of the stronger field. Established medicine uses this characteristic diagnostically for MRIs (Magnet Resonance Imaging). Healers and gurus use it with their clients.
What is the human experience with this energy vortex?
The usual immediate response upon entering this energy field is disorientation—physically, emotionally, spiritually. The experience could be compared to stepping onto a moving walkway, except more prolonged because the adjustment is bigger. For many people, the most noticeable effect is emotional irritability as shut-down emotion—actually blocked energy flow in some aspect of the individual’s field—is re-activated by it proximity to the more powerful field of the vortex.
The longer-term response is improved health. The understanding of human health as a function of energy flow in the body is re-entering Western awareness through such Eastern “wholeness” practices as acupuncture. Since the energy flowing through Altai is pure life-force, the health of people entering that energy field is enhanced.
Ancient Russian legends describe an enlightened culture that existed in Altai before the last ice age—a people called the Aryans. When the climate changed because of the ice age, the people of this culture scattered throughout Eurasia and across the land bridge to the Americas, spreading the power of Altai through the spiritual practices that we now call shamanism. On-going archeological work and genetic research is demonstrating that such legends are accurate oral histories.[3]
The spiritual leaders of this culture changed dimensions, which we might call death, except that, down through the millennia, they have continued to appear as glowing, translucent white beings to people in that region (and continue appearing).They identify themselves as “White People.” “White Supremacists” have misunderstood the identity as racial rather than spiritual and have tried to usurp this extraordinary power. However, humans can be deceived, but the power cannot be usurped.
How can you access and use the power of Altai?
Altai energy can be accessed in two different ways:
Through the lineage of shamanism:
In the U.S. today, there are a few resident or visiting bona fide Siberian shamans. However, the traditional shamanic role is clan-based, meaning that each shaman serves and is supported by his family group or tribe. In the past, they have neither taught shamanism to outsiders, nor even shared the ceremonies, except in particular, privileged circumstances.
Such constraints have also been true for Native American shamans, although openness has been increasing in recent years. There are, however, teachers who have studied shamanism—in Siberia and elsewhere—and convey information about the practices in writing or through seminars. When the cultural overlays are stripped from shamanism, what remains is not an indigenous “religion,” but a powerful set of personal spiritual tools for healing and spiritual guidance inherited from the Aryans, that are accessible to everyone.
Through direct contact with the energy field:
The whole Altai region, which spans the borders of four countries in Central Asia, is a magnet for people seeking healing. Mt. Belukha (at 14500 feet, the tallest mountain in Siberia) is the high energy centerpoint. The mountain spans the Russia/Kazakhstan border, and lies within a few miles of China and Mongolia. The Himalayas lie directly to the south, beyond the high Xinjiang Plateau of China.
In Russian Altai, tourist camps dot the countryside. Spiritual communities settle here. And healing herbs from the wild cornucopia of indigenous plants (many of which grow nowhere else) are in demand all over Russia because of their purity and potency.
Access to this region by foreigners was restricted during Soviet times by the government. In present times, access is restricted by the extreme remoteness. The limited access has served to insulate the region fairly effectively against the incursions and pollutions of modern society, and protected its extraordinary ecosystem. One doesn’t go through Altai on the way to somewhere else—Altai is the ultimate destination.
However, the direct contact can also be made through meditation, dreams, and personal revelation—not just through physical presence. Because Altai is a primary source for planetary life force, we are all connected to it. And simply by knowing about it—as you now do—the energy can be consciously accessed and used to facilitate personal and global wholeness.
http://www.irazoo.com/ViewSite.aspx?q=siberian+shamanism+book&Page=1&irp=1&Site=http://www.altaibooks.com/Siberianshamanismarticle.htm
What is the power source for Siberian shamanism and how can you access it?
by Carol Hiltner
Siberian shamanism is empowered by an extremely strong energy vortex centered at Mt. Belukha in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia. This article will discuss 1) the nature of this vortex, 2) a brief history of human interaction with this vortex, and 3) how you can access its power. Intersecting ideas in archeology, quantum and subtle energy physics, and oral history all shed light on this phenomenon.
What is the Altai energy vortex and how is its power imparted?
We exist in a living, holographic universe .[1]
The Earth is a living, breathing being of the type “planet,” as much as you and I are living beings of the type “human.”[2]
The thing that defines “life” for each type is the specific wave characteristics of our electromagnetic energy flow. “Flow” is the operant word here, because electromagnetism is, by definition, in motion—spiral motion in a “positive” or “negative” direction. The flow operates similarly to the “current” that lights up our houses, but human current is much more subtle. Our electromagnetic instrumentation is now sensitive enough to record the subtle human flows.
Generally, earth energy is negative, receiving, grounding; and sky energy is positive, giving, enlivening. In generic terms, sky energy is the food of life.
The vortex at Mt. Belukha is the Earth’s equivalent to an umbilical cord.
Sky energy, so powerful that it has been and can be seen by mystics for as far back as we can trace, is funneled into the planet at this place. It looks very much like a human umbilical cord, except it is immense. And, Mt. Belukha is located in almost the exact center of the Eurasian landmass, similarly to the central location of the human umbilicus.
The energy of the vortex heals us because our weaker fields are entrained in it.
The impact of an electrical charge is called a “field.” A remarkable characteristic of energy fields is that a weaker field will take on the resonance of the stronger field. Established medicine uses this characteristic diagnostically for MRIs (Magnet Resonance Imaging). Healers and gurus use it with their clients.
What is the human experience with this energy vortex?
The usual immediate response upon entering this energy field is disorientation—physically, emotionally, spiritually. The experience could be compared to stepping onto a moving walkway, except more prolonged because the adjustment is bigger. For many people, the most noticeable effect is emotional irritability as shut-down emotion—actually blocked energy flow in some aspect of the individual’s field—is re-activated by it proximity to the more powerful field of the vortex.
The longer-term response is improved health. The understanding of human health as a function of energy flow in the body is re-entering Western awareness through such Eastern “wholeness” practices as acupuncture. Since the energy flowing through Altai is pure life-force, the health of people entering that energy field is enhanced.
Ancient Russian legends describe an enlightened culture that existed in Altai before the last ice age—a people called the Aryans. When the climate changed because of the ice age, the people of this culture scattered throughout Eurasia and across the land bridge to the Americas, spreading the power of Altai through the spiritual practices that we now call shamanism. On-going archeological work and genetic research is demonstrating that such legends are accurate oral histories.[3]
The spiritual leaders of this culture changed dimensions, which we might call death, except that, down through the millennia, they have continued to appear as glowing, translucent white beings to people in that region (and continue appearing).They identify themselves as “White People.” “White Supremacists” have misunderstood the identity as racial rather than spiritual and have tried to usurp this extraordinary power. However, humans can be deceived, but the power cannot be usurped.
How can you access and use the power of Altai?
Altai energy can be accessed in two different ways:
Through the lineage of shamanism:
In the U.S. today, there are a few resident or visiting bona fide Siberian shamans. However, the traditional shamanic role is clan-based, meaning that each shaman serves and is supported by his family group or tribe. In the past, they have neither taught shamanism to outsiders, nor even shared the ceremonies, except in particular, privileged circumstances.
Such constraints have also been true for Native American shamans, although openness has been increasing in recent years. There are, however, teachers who have studied shamanism—in Siberia and elsewhere—and convey information about the practices in writing or through seminars. When the cultural overlays are stripped from shamanism, what remains is not an indigenous “religion,” but a powerful set of personal spiritual tools for healing and spiritual guidance inherited from the Aryans, that are accessible to everyone.
Through direct contact with the energy field:
The whole Altai region, which spans the borders of four countries in Central Asia, is a magnet for people seeking healing. Mt. Belukha (at 14500 feet, the tallest mountain in Siberia) is the high energy centerpoint. The mountain spans the Russia/Kazakhstan border, and lies within a few miles of China and Mongolia. The Himalayas lie directly to the south, beyond the high Xinjiang Plateau of China.
In Russian Altai, tourist camps dot the countryside. Spiritual communities settle here. And healing herbs from the wild cornucopia of indigenous plants (many of which grow nowhere else) are in demand all over Russia because of their purity and potency.
Access to this region by foreigners was restricted during Soviet times by the government. In present times, access is restricted by the extreme remoteness. The limited access has served to insulate the region fairly effectively against the incursions and pollutions of modern society, and protected its extraordinary ecosystem. One doesn’t go through Altai on the way to somewhere else—Altai is the ultimate destination.
However, the direct contact can also be made through meditation, dreams, and personal revelation—not just through physical presence. Because Altai is a primary source for planetary life force, we are all connected to it. And simply by knowing about it—as you now do—the energy can be consciously accessed and used to facilitate personal and global wholeness.
- Search on “holographic universe” and David “Bohm” for comprehensive documentation.
- See the article http://www.altaibooks.com/spiritofmaat/LUGOVENKOBREATHE.HTM by Russian physicist Vladislav Lugovenko, and the profound, imaginative book Surfers of the Zuvuya by Jose Arguelles.
- Dawn behind the Dawn: A Search for the Earthly Paradise by Goeffrey Ashe; Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth behind the Myth of Shangri-la by Victoria LePage; The Seven Daughters of Eve, by Bryan Sykes.
http://www.irazoo.com/ViewSite.aspx?q=siberian+shamanism+book&Page=1&irp=1&Site=http://www.altaibooks.com/Siberianshamanismarticle.htm
RELIC POPULATIONS
Geographical isolations and glacial conditions probably made certain characteristics more prevalent in one group of archaic humans or the other. Were they were all one interbreeding population, at least during the interglacials? One of these isolated groups became what we now call Homo sapiens sapiens or more likely successfully interbred and overbred with the other archaics to become Homo sapiens sapiens. If this is the case, not only could Cro Magnons and Neanderthals interbreed but Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo erectus could interbreed. Do we have remnants of archaic DNA?
3. Are Dragons Crypto-Boskops?
This is a controversial subject as some say the Boskop never existed; others claim they did, but the jury is still out.
What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us?
Two neuroscientists say that a now-extinct race of humans had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens.
by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger
The following text is an excerpt from the book Big Brain by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, and it represents their own theory about the Boskops. The theory is a controversial one; see, for instance, paleoanthropologist John Hawks' much different take.
Copyright © 2008 by the authors and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C
In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.
These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. They brought the find to Frederick W. FitzSimons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.
The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.
The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.
Might the very large Boskop skull be an aberration? Might it have been caused by hydrocephalus or some other disease? These questions were quickly preempted by new discoveries of more of these skulls.
As if the Boskop story were not already strange enough, the accumulation of additional remains revealed another bizarre feature: These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. This phenomenon is sometimes used to explain rapid evolutionary changes. For example, certain amphibians retain fishlike gills even when fully mature and past their water-inhabiting period. Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates. Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop’s appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.
The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:
The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the intuitively attractive, almost irresistible idea that the whole great process leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessors. The pre-Darwin theories of evolution were built around this idea; in fact, Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) great and radical contribution was to throw out the notion of “progress” and replace it with selection from among a set of random variations. But people do not easily escape from the idea of progress. We’re drawn to the idea that we are the end point, the pinnacle not only of the hominids but of all animal life.
Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves.
We have seen reports of Boskop brain size ranging from 1,650 to 1,900 cc. Let’s assume that an average Boskop brain was around 1,750 cc. What does this mean in terms of function? How would a person with such a brain differ from us? Our brains are roughly 25 percent larger than those of the late Homo erectus. We might say that the functional difference between us and them is about the same as between ourselves and Boskops.
Expanding the brain changes its internal proportions in highly predictable ways. From ape to human, the brain grows about fourfold, but most of that increase occurs in the cortex, not in more ancient structures. Moreover, even within the cortex, the areas that grow by far the most are the association areas, while cortical structures such as those controlling sensory and motor mechanisms stay unchanged.
Going from human to Boskop, these association zones are even more disproportionately expanded. Boskop’s brain size is about 30 percent larger than our own—that is, a 1,750-cc brain to our average of 1,350 cc. And that leads to an increase in the prefrontal cortex of a staggering 53 percent. If these principled relations among brain parts hold true, then Boskops would have had not only an impressively large brain but an inconceivably large prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is closely linked to our highest cognitive functions. It makes sense out of the complex stream of events flowing into the brain; it places mental contents into appropriate sequences and hierarchies; and it plays a critical role in planning our future actions. Put simply, the prefrontal cortex is at the heart of our most flexible and forward-looking thoughts.
While your own prefrontal area might link a sequence of visual material to form an episodic memory, the Boskop may have added additional material from sounds, smells, and so on. Where your memory of a walk down a Parisian street may include the mental visual image of the street vendor, the bistro, and the charming little church, the Boskop may also have had the music coming from the bistro, the conversations from other strollers, and the peculiar window over the door of the church. Alas, if only the Boskop had had the chance to stroll a Parisian boulevard!
Expansion of the association regions is accompanied by corresponding increases in the thickness of those great bundles of axons, the cable pathways, linking the front and back of the cortex. These not only process inputs but, in our larger brains, organize inputs into episodes. The Boskops may have gone further still. Just as a quantitative increase from apes to humans may have generated our qualitatively different language abilities, possibly the jump from ourselves to Boskops generated new, qualitatively different mental capacities.
We internally activate many thoughts at once, but we can retrieve only one at a time. Could the Boskop brain have achieved the ability to retrieve one memory while effortlessly processing others in the background, a split-screen effect enabling far more power of attention?
Even if brain size accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, it is possible to conjecture what kind of average scores would be made by a group of people with 30 percent larger brains. We can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149.
This is a score that would be labeled at the genius level. And if there was normal variability among Boskops, as among the rest of us, then perhaps 15 to 20 percent of them would be expected to score over 180. In a classroom with 35 big-headed, baby-faced Boskop kids, you would likely encounter five or six with IQ scores at the upper range of what has ever been recorded in human history. The Boskops coexisted with our Homo sapiens forebears. Just as we see the ancient Homo erectus as a savage primitive, Boskop may have viewed us in somewhat the same way.
They died and we lived, and we can’t answer the question why. Why didn’t they outthink the smaller-brained hominids like ourselves and spread across the planet? Perhaps they didn’t want to.
Longer brain pathways lead to larger and deeper memory hierarchies. These confer a greater ability to examine and discard more blind alleys, to see more consequences of a plan before enacting it. In general this enables us to think things through. If Boskops had longer chains of cortical networks—longer mental assembly lines—they would have created longer and more complex classification chains. When they looked down a road as far as they could, before choosing a path, they would have seen farther than we can: more potential outcomes, more possible downstream costs and benefits.
As more possible outcomes of a plan become visible, the variance among judgments between individuals will likely lessen. There are far fewer correct paths—intelligent paths—than there are paths. It is sometimes argued that the illusion of free will arises from the fact that we can’t adequately judge all p ossible moves, with the result that our choices are based on imperfect, sometimes impoverished, information.
Perhaps the Boskops were trapped by their ability to see clearly where things would head. Perhaps they were prisoners of those majestic brains.
There is another, again poignant, possible explanation for the disappearance of the big-brained people. Maybe all that thoughtfulness was of no particular survival value in 10,000 B.C. The great genius of civilization is that it allows individuals to store memory and operating rules outside of their brains, in the world that surrounds them. The human brain is a sort of central processing unit operating on multiple memory disks, some stored in the head, some in the culture. Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society, the Boskops were unable to exploit the vast potential locked up in their expanded cortex. They were born just a few millennia too soon.
In any event, Boskops are gone, and the more we learn about them, the more we miss them. Their demise is likely to have been gradual. A big skull was not conducive to easy births, and thus a within-group pressure toward smaller heads was probably always present, as it still is in present-day humans, who have an unusually high infant mortality rate due to big-headed babies. This pressure, together with possible interbreeding with migrating groups of smaller-brained peoples, may have led to a gradual decrease in the frequency of the Boskop genes in the growing population of what is now South Africa.
Then again, as is all too evident, human history has often been a history of savagery. Genocide and oppression seem primitive, whereas modern institutions from schools to hospices seem enlightened. Surely, we like to think, our future portends more of the latter than the former. If learning and gentility are signs of civilization, perhaps our almost-big brains are straining against their residual atavism, struggling to expand. Perhaps the preternaturally civilized Boskops had no chance against our barbarous ancestors, but could be leaders of society if they were among us today.
Maybe traces of Boskops, and their unusual nature, linger on in isolated corners of the world. Physical anthropologists report that Boskop features still occasionally pop up in living populations of Bushmen, raising the possibility that the last of the race may have walked the dusty Transvaal in the not-too-distant past. Some genes stay around in a population, or mix themselves into surrounding populations via interbreeding. The genes may remain on the periphery, neither becoming widely fixed in the population at large nor being entirely eliminated from the gene pool.
Just about 100 miles from the original Boskop discovery site, further excavations were once carried out by Frederick FitzSimons. He knew what he had discovered and was eagerly seeking more of these skulls.
At his new dig site, FitzSimons came across a remarkable piece of construction. The site had been at one time a communal living center, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. There were many collected rocks, leftover bones, and some casually interred skeletons of normal-looking humans. But to one side of the site, in a clearing, was a single, carefully constructed tomb, built for a single occupant—perhaps the tomb of a leader or of a revered wise man. His remains had been positioned to face the rising sun. In repose, he appeared unremarkable in every regard...except for a giant skull.
Each of us balances the world that is actually out there against our mind’s own internally constructed version of it. Maintaining this balance is one of life’s daily challenges. We occasionally act on our imagined view of the world, sometimes thoroughly startling those around us. (“Why are you yelling at me? I wasn’t angry with you—you only thought I was.”) Our big brains give us such powers of extrapolation that we may extrapolate straight out of reality, into worlds that are possible but that never actually happened. Boskop’s greater brains and extended internal representations may have made it easier for them to accurately predict and interpret the world, to match their internal representations with real external events.
Perhaps, though, it also made the Boskops excessively internal and self-reflective. With their perhaps astonishing insights, they may have become a species of dreamers with an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.
“There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”
Boskops, then, were much talked and written about, by many of the most prominent figures in the fields of paleontology and anthropology.
Yet today, although Neanderthals and Homo erectus are widely known, Boskops are almost entirely forgotten. Some of our ancestors are clearly inferior to us, with smaller brains and apelike countenances. They’re easy to make fun of and easy to accept as our precursors. In contrast, the very fact of an ancient ancestor like Boskop, who appears un-apelike and in fact in most ways seems to have had characteristics superior to ours, was destined never to be popular.
What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us?
Two neuroscientists say that a now-extinct race of humans had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens.
by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger
The following text is an excerpt from the book Big Brain by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, and it represents their own theory about the Boskops. The theory is a controversial one; see, for instance, paleoanthropologist John Hawks' much different take.
Copyright © 2008 by the authors and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C
In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.
These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. They brought the find to Frederick W. FitzSimons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.
The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.
The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.
Might the very large Boskop skull be an aberration? Might it have been caused by hydrocephalus or some other disease? These questions were quickly preempted by new discoveries of more of these skulls.
As if the Boskop story were not already strange enough, the accumulation of additional remains revealed another bizarre feature: These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. This phenomenon is sometimes used to explain rapid evolutionary changes. For example, certain amphibians retain fishlike gills even when fully mature and past their water-inhabiting period. Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates. Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop’s appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.
The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:
The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the intuitively attractive, almost irresistible idea that the whole great process leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessors. The pre-Darwin theories of evolution were built around this idea; in fact, Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) great and radical contribution was to throw out the notion of “progress” and replace it with selection from among a set of random variations. But people do not easily escape from the idea of progress. We’re drawn to the idea that we are the end point, the pinnacle not only of the hominids but of all animal life.
Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves.
We have seen reports of Boskop brain size ranging from 1,650 to 1,900 cc. Let’s assume that an average Boskop brain was around 1,750 cc. What does this mean in terms of function? How would a person with such a brain differ from us? Our brains are roughly 25 percent larger than those of the late Homo erectus. We might say that the functional difference between us and them is about the same as between ourselves and Boskops.
Expanding the brain changes its internal proportions in highly predictable ways. From ape to human, the brain grows about fourfold, but most of that increase occurs in the cortex, not in more ancient structures. Moreover, even within the cortex, the areas that grow by far the most are the association areas, while cortical structures such as those controlling sensory and motor mechanisms stay unchanged.
Going from human to Boskop, these association zones are even more disproportionately expanded. Boskop’s brain size is about 30 percent larger than our own—that is, a 1,750-cc brain to our average of 1,350 cc. And that leads to an increase in the prefrontal cortex of a staggering 53 percent. If these principled relations among brain parts hold true, then Boskops would have had not only an impressively large brain but an inconceivably large prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is closely linked to our highest cognitive functions. It makes sense out of the complex stream of events flowing into the brain; it places mental contents into appropriate sequences and hierarchies; and it plays a critical role in planning our future actions. Put simply, the prefrontal cortex is at the heart of our most flexible and forward-looking thoughts.
While your own prefrontal area might link a sequence of visual material to form an episodic memory, the Boskop may have added additional material from sounds, smells, and so on. Where your memory of a walk down a Parisian street may include the mental visual image of the street vendor, the bistro, and the charming little church, the Boskop may also have had the music coming from the bistro, the conversations from other strollers, and the peculiar window over the door of the church. Alas, if only the Boskop had had the chance to stroll a Parisian boulevard!
Expansion of the association regions is accompanied by corresponding increases in the thickness of those great bundles of axons, the cable pathways, linking the front and back of the cortex. These not only process inputs but, in our larger brains, organize inputs into episodes. The Boskops may have gone further still. Just as a quantitative increase from apes to humans may have generated our qualitatively different language abilities, possibly the jump from ourselves to Boskops generated new, qualitatively different mental capacities.
We internally activate many thoughts at once, but we can retrieve only one at a time. Could the Boskop brain have achieved the ability to retrieve one memory while effortlessly processing others in the background, a split-screen effect enabling far more power of attention?
Even if brain size accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, it is possible to conjecture what kind of average scores would be made by a group of people with 30 percent larger brains. We can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149.
This is a score that would be labeled at the genius level. And if there was normal variability among Boskops, as among the rest of us, then perhaps 15 to 20 percent of them would be expected to score over 180. In a classroom with 35 big-headed, baby-faced Boskop kids, you would likely encounter five or six with IQ scores at the upper range of what has ever been recorded in human history. The Boskops coexisted with our Homo sapiens forebears. Just as we see the ancient Homo erectus as a savage primitive, Boskop may have viewed us in somewhat the same way.
They died and we lived, and we can’t answer the question why. Why didn’t they outthink the smaller-brained hominids like ourselves and spread across the planet? Perhaps they didn’t want to.
Longer brain pathways lead to larger and deeper memory hierarchies. These confer a greater ability to examine and discard more blind alleys, to see more consequences of a plan before enacting it. In general this enables us to think things through. If Boskops had longer chains of cortical networks—longer mental assembly lines—they would have created longer and more complex classification chains. When they looked down a road as far as they could, before choosing a path, they would have seen farther than we can: more potential outcomes, more possible downstream costs and benefits.
As more possible outcomes of a plan become visible, the variance among judgments between individuals will likely lessen. There are far fewer correct paths—intelligent paths—than there are paths. It is sometimes argued that the illusion of free will arises from the fact that we can’t adequately judge all p ossible moves, with the result that our choices are based on imperfect, sometimes impoverished, information.
Perhaps the Boskops were trapped by their ability to see clearly where things would head. Perhaps they were prisoners of those majestic brains.
There is another, again poignant, possible explanation for the disappearance of the big-brained people. Maybe all that thoughtfulness was of no particular survival value in 10,000 B.C. The great genius of civilization is that it allows individuals to store memory and operating rules outside of their brains, in the world that surrounds them. The human brain is a sort of central processing unit operating on multiple memory disks, some stored in the head, some in the culture. Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society, the Boskops were unable to exploit the vast potential locked up in their expanded cortex. They were born just a few millennia too soon.
In any event, Boskops are gone, and the more we learn about them, the more we miss them. Their demise is likely to have been gradual. A big skull was not conducive to easy births, and thus a within-group pressure toward smaller heads was probably always present, as it still is in present-day humans, who have an unusually high infant mortality rate due to big-headed babies. This pressure, together with possible interbreeding with migrating groups of smaller-brained peoples, may have led to a gradual decrease in the frequency of the Boskop genes in the growing population of what is now South Africa.
Then again, as is all too evident, human history has often been a history of savagery. Genocide and oppression seem primitive, whereas modern institutions from schools to hospices seem enlightened. Surely, we like to think, our future portends more of the latter than the former. If learning and gentility are signs of civilization, perhaps our almost-big brains are straining against their residual atavism, struggling to expand. Perhaps the preternaturally civilized Boskops had no chance against our barbarous ancestors, but could be leaders of society if they were among us today.
Maybe traces of Boskops, and their unusual nature, linger on in isolated corners of the world. Physical anthropologists report that Boskop features still occasionally pop up in living populations of Bushmen, raising the possibility that the last of the race may have walked the dusty Transvaal in the not-too-distant past. Some genes stay around in a population, or mix themselves into surrounding populations via interbreeding. The genes may remain on the periphery, neither becoming widely fixed in the population at large nor being entirely eliminated from the gene pool.
Just about 100 miles from the original Boskop discovery site, further excavations were once carried out by Frederick FitzSimons. He knew what he had discovered and was eagerly seeking more of these skulls.
At his new dig site, FitzSimons came across a remarkable piece of construction. The site had been at one time a communal living center, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. There were many collected rocks, leftover bones, and some casually interred skeletons of normal-looking humans. But to one side of the site, in a clearing, was a single, carefully constructed tomb, built for a single occupant—perhaps the tomb of a leader or of a revered wise man. His remains had been positioned to face the rising sun. In repose, he appeared unremarkable in every regard...except for a giant skull.
Each of us balances the world that is actually out there against our mind’s own internally constructed version of it. Maintaining this balance is one of life’s daily challenges. We occasionally act on our imagined view of the world, sometimes thoroughly startling those around us. (“Why are you yelling at me? I wasn’t angry with you—you only thought I was.”) Our big brains give us such powers of extrapolation that we may extrapolate straight out of reality, into worlds that are possible but that never actually happened. Boskop’s greater brains and extended internal representations may have made it easier for them to accurately predict and interpret the world, to match their internal representations with real external events.
Perhaps, though, it also made the Boskops excessively internal and self-reflective. With their perhaps astonishing insights, they may have become a species of dreamers with an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.
“There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”
Boskops, then, were much talked and written about, by many of the most prominent figures in the fields of paleontology and anthropology.
Yet today, although Neanderthals and Homo erectus are widely known, Boskops are almost entirely forgotten. Some of our ancestors are clearly inferior to us, with smaller brains and apelike countenances. They’re easy to make fun of and easy to accept as our precursors. In contrast, the very fact of an ancient ancestor like Boskop, who appears un-apelike and in fact in most ways seems to have had characteristics superior to ours, was destined never to be popular.
Deep Background
An Ice Age of about 150,000 years ago ended around 130,000 years ago with sea levels rising to nearly present levels,
then declining a bit with a significant dip marking the Toba Volcano eruption in Sumatra about 71,000 to 74,000 years ago, which may have killed off all but a few thousand of the humans then on Earth. After a brief post-Toba warming of about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago, a significant cooling around 50,000 years ago coincided with the evolutionary emergence of the basic current human form of Ychromosome DNA.
Around 35,000 years ago, at the beginning of Manetho's rule of Gods on Earth and the evolutionary emergence of the Boskops, an Ice Age almost as deep as that of 150,000 years ago. Around 20,000 years ago, at the beginning of Manetho's rule of DemiGods and Spirits of the Dead, an end to the cooling trend and a relatively constant low sea level as shown in Eurasia / North Africa is shown in this image from "The Times Atlas of World History" (Times Books (4th ed) 1993). Red shows the extended land area due to low sea levels about 20,000 years ago, and green and yellow show areas favorable for human habitation in wet and dry periods, respectively. The two turqouise squares show the locations of the Sphinx-Giza complex at the mouth of the Nile River and of Gora Belukha (highest peak in the Altai Mtns) in Central Asia, which may be known in China as Kunlun Shan, home of Xi Wang Mu, the Queen of the West, and in India as Su Meru, home of Indra). Around 11,600 years ago, at the beginning of Manetho's rule of Man and the evolutionary
disappearance of the Boskops, a warming trend lead to the present warm interval sea levels.
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/BoskopFuture.pdf
An Ice Age of about 150,000 years ago ended around 130,000 years ago with sea levels rising to nearly present levels,
then declining a bit with a significant dip marking the Toba Volcano eruption in Sumatra about 71,000 to 74,000 years ago, which may have killed off all but a few thousand of the humans then on Earth. After a brief post-Toba warming of about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago, a significant cooling around 50,000 years ago coincided with the evolutionary emergence of the basic current human form of Ychromosome DNA.
Around 35,000 years ago, at the beginning of Manetho's rule of Gods on Earth and the evolutionary emergence of the Boskops, an Ice Age almost as deep as that of 150,000 years ago. Around 20,000 years ago, at the beginning of Manetho's rule of DemiGods and Spirits of the Dead, an end to the cooling trend and a relatively constant low sea level as shown in Eurasia / North Africa is shown in this image from "The Times Atlas of World History" (Times Books (4th ed) 1993). Red shows the extended land area due to low sea levels about 20,000 years ago, and green and yellow show areas favorable for human habitation in wet and dry periods, respectively. The two turqouise squares show the locations of the Sphinx-Giza complex at the mouth of the Nile River and of Gora Belukha (highest peak in the Altai Mtns) in Central Asia, which may be known in China as Kunlun Shan, home of Xi Wang Mu, the Queen of the West, and in India as Su Meru, home of Indra). Around 11,600 years ago, at the beginning of Manetho's rule of Man and the evolutionary
disappearance of the Boskops, a warming trend lead to the present warm interval sea levels.
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/BoskopFuture.pdf
Another (possibly related) type of enhanced mental capacity might occur if the Boskop produced increased
amounts of endogenous DMT. According to "Endogenous hallucinogens as ligands of the trace amine receptors: a possible role in sensory perception." by J. V. Wallach (Med Hypotheses. 2009 Jan;72(1):91-4. Epub 2008 Sep 20): "... The recent discovery of the trace amine associated receptors and the activity of DMT and other hallucinogenic compounds at these receptor sites leads to the hypothesis that the endogenous hallucinogens act as neurotransmitters of a subclass of these trace amine receptors ... the trace amine receptors along with their endogenous hallucinogen ligands may serve an endogenous role in mediating sensory perception in the mammalian central nervous system. Thus the theory proposed states that these compounds act as true endogenous hallucinogenic transmitters acting in regions of the central nervous system involved in sensory perception. ...".
Endogenous DMT need not be produced in the brain itself (and so could be produced in such organs as the pineal glant), as noted by Michael S. Jacob, David E. Prest in their article "Endogenous psychoactive tryptamines reconsidered: an anxiolytic role for dimethyltryptamine" (Medical Hypotheses (2004)) where they said: "... DMT production could occur outside the brain and still have activity in the brain because DMT can readily cross the blood brain barrier. This would be different from most neurotransmitters, which do not have significant blood&endash;brain-barrier permeability and thus must be produced within the brain. ...".
What killed off the Boskop around 11,600 years ago ?
Around11,600 years ago, about when the Vela X supernova was seen in Earth, a very sudden (50 years or so) warming event ended the Ice Age and marked the start of the HOLOCENE AGE of warm climate and glacial retreat, and rising sea levels flooded much productive land creating shortages of food and consequently competition for available food, and what Terence McKenna called "tooth-and-claw dominance". As Gary Lynch and Richard Granger said in their 28 December 2009 Discover Magazine article: "... human history has often been a history of savagery. ... Perhaps the preternaturally civilized Boskops had no chance against our barbarous ancestors ...".
Not only might the "preternaturally civilized" Boskops have been at a physical disadvantage in fighting smaller-brain humans, but the social organizations useful in forming successful armies to seize resources might tend to create evolutionary pressure in favor of humans with less creativity and more blind-faith obedience to authority. As examples from the dominant power of the late 20th century, the USA Army trained soldiers that "there is the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way, and you will do it the Army way" because "you can't fight the Green Machine", and the USA Navy would disqualify sailors from working on nuclear power plants of ships and submarines if their test results showed too much creativity.
Further, as John Hawks said on his weblog on 30 March 2008, "... brains are [energetically] expensive ...brains take a long time to mature ... brains require high protein and fat consumption ...", all of which factors would work against the Boskop in an age of scarcity after about 11,600 years ago, so it is not surprising that John Hawks also noted that "... "... there has been a reduction in the average brain size in South Africa during the last 10,000 years, and there have been parallel reductions in Europe and China -- pretty much everywhere we have decent samples of skeletons, it looks like brains have been shrinking ...".
amounts of endogenous DMT. According to "Endogenous hallucinogens as ligands of the trace amine receptors: a possible role in sensory perception." by J. V. Wallach (Med Hypotheses. 2009 Jan;72(1):91-4. Epub 2008 Sep 20): "... The recent discovery of the trace amine associated receptors and the activity of DMT and other hallucinogenic compounds at these receptor sites leads to the hypothesis that the endogenous hallucinogens act as neurotransmitters of a subclass of these trace amine receptors ... the trace amine receptors along with their endogenous hallucinogen ligands may serve an endogenous role in mediating sensory perception in the mammalian central nervous system. Thus the theory proposed states that these compounds act as true endogenous hallucinogenic transmitters acting in regions of the central nervous system involved in sensory perception. ...".
Endogenous DMT need not be produced in the brain itself (and so could be produced in such organs as the pineal glant), as noted by Michael S. Jacob, David E. Prest in their article "Endogenous psychoactive tryptamines reconsidered: an anxiolytic role for dimethyltryptamine" (Medical Hypotheses (2004)) where they said: "... DMT production could occur outside the brain and still have activity in the brain because DMT can readily cross the blood brain barrier. This would be different from most neurotransmitters, which do not have significant blood&endash;brain-barrier permeability and thus must be produced within the brain. ...".
What killed off the Boskop around 11,600 years ago ?
Around11,600 years ago, about when the Vela X supernova was seen in Earth, a very sudden (50 years or so) warming event ended the Ice Age and marked the start of the HOLOCENE AGE of warm climate and glacial retreat, and rising sea levels flooded much productive land creating shortages of food and consequently competition for available food, and what Terence McKenna called "tooth-and-claw dominance". As Gary Lynch and Richard Granger said in their 28 December 2009 Discover Magazine article: "... human history has often been a history of savagery. ... Perhaps the preternaturally civilized Boskops had no chance against our barbarous ancestors ...".
Not only might the "preternaturally civilized" Boskops have been at a physical disadvantage in fighting smaller-brain humans, but the social organizations useful in forming successful armies to seize resources might tend to create evolutionary pressure in favor of humans with less creativity and more blind-faith obedience to authority. As examples from the dominant power of the late 20th century, the USA Army trained soldiers that "there is the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way, and you will do it the Army way" because "you can't fight the Green Machine", and the USA Navy would disqualify sailors from working on nuclear power plants of ships and submarines if their test results showed too much creativity.
Further, as John Hawks said on his weblog on 30 March 2008, "... brains are [energetically] expensive ...brains take a long time to mature ... brains require high protein and fat consumption ...", all of which factors would work against the Boskop in an age of scarcity after about 11,600 years ago, so it is not surprising that John Hawks also noted that "... "... there has been a reduction in the average brain size in South Africa during the last 10,000 years, and there have been parallel reductions in Europe and China -- pretty much everywhere we have decent samples of skeletons, it looks like brains have been shrinking ...".
Comparison of Manetho Chronology with Mesopotamian Chronology of Berossos and
with Vedic Chronology:
According to "Berossos and Manetho" by Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham (Michigan 1996,
2001)
"... Only two men partially succeeded in preserving the old Mesopotamia and Egypt for the new Greek Mesopotamia and Egypt. Berossos wrote a history of Babylonia in Greek, and Manetho wrote a history of Egypt in Greek. Unfortunately, their works have not survived from antiquity ...[and]... neither Berossos nor Manetho insprired successors who would build on the history each had written ... we are totally dependent on what survives [in secondary sources] from
Berossos and Manetho for an organized attempt to present the entire history of ancient Babylonia and ancient Egypt
Boskop Civilization 1/9/10 2:34 AM
file:///Users/Tony/Desktop/boskop/boskopciv.html Page 13 of 19
Manetho ... was living and active ... when the successors of Alexander the Great had become kings in their own right and own name ... [Syncellus asserts]... that Manetho's work (specifically the History of Egyp) appeared at about the same time as or slightly after that of Berossos ... Berossos was born during Alexander's reign over Babylon ... between 330 and 323 B.C. ... he published his History of Babylonia in Greek ... most likely around 290 B.C. for the Macedonian
king Antiochos I ...". Manetho's Rule on Earth of Gods, Demigods and Spirits of the Dead covered the period of about 24,925 years (roughly the time of one Earth precession period and also roughly the travel time of a light beam from the Center of our Galaxy to our Sun) from about 36,525 years ago until about 11,600 years ago (the time of the Great Flood at the beginning of our Warm Interval in our Ice Age).
As for Berossos, in "Berossos and Manetho" Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham say "...Berossos reports, according to Apollidoros, that there were ten kings friom Aloros, the first king, to Xisouthros, under whom, he says, the ... Great Flood took place ... The times of this rule of these kings he reckoned as 120 saroi ... the Babylonian saros ... consists of 3,600 years .... ". Therefore, the total period for the Berossos chronology analagous to Manetho's Gods, Demigod and Spirits of the Dead was about 432,000 years, giving for the Berossos chronology from about 443,600 years ago until about 11,600 years ago (the time of the Great Flood at the beginning of our Warm Interval in our Ice Age).
Can Manetho's Antediluvian Period of 24,925 years be reconciled with Berossos's Antediluvian Period of 432,000 years ? Feuerstein, Kak, and Frawley, in their book In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (Quest 1995), say "...The principal and, taken in its totality, the oldest of the four Vedic hymnbodies is the Rig-Veda. ... The Sanskrit word ric, which for euphonic reasons is changed to rig, means literally "praise". ... The Sanskrit word veda means literally "knowledge" or "wisdom". ... The Rig-Veda is the oldest book in the Sanskrit language ... More than that, if we are correct, it is the oldest book in the world ...". Therefore, it seems likely to me that Babylonia of Berossos inherited its chronology from the older Vedic civilization of India, which itself had direct contact via the Indian Ocean (the map below is adapted from "Past Worlds, The Times Atlas of Archaeology" (Crescent Books 1995)) with the oldest civilization on Earth - Africa, whose culture, including IFA Divination, was not preserved in writing.
It also seems likely that Babylonians such as Berossos may not have inherited and used the oldest, most fundamental version of Vedic cosmology, but instead have used a later, not so fundamental version, such as that described by Ronnie Gale Dreyer in her book "Vedic Astrology" (Weiser 1997):
"... The Indian system of epochs (known as Yugas) ... is made up of four ... eras which, when added together, comprise Maha Yuga (literally "great age"). Consisting of 4,320,000 years, Maha Yuga is divided into ratios of 4:3:2:1 as follows:
Krtia Yuga (Golden Age) 1,728,000 years = 4
Treta Yuga (Silver Age) 1,296,000 years = 3
Dvapara Yuga (Copper Age) 864,000 years = 2
Kali Yuga (Earthen [Bronze, Iron, etc] Age) 432,000 years = 1 ...".
So, it appears to me that the 432,000 year Antediluvian Period of Berossos was imported from Vedic India
the Earthen Age Kali Yuga part of the Maha Yuga.
with Vedic Chronology:
According to "Berossos and Manetho" by Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham (Michigan 1996,
2001)
"... Only two men partially succeeded in preserving the old Mesopotamia and Egypt for the new Greek Mesopotamia and Egypt. Berossos wrote a history of Babylonia in Greek, and Manetho wrote a history of Egypt in Greek. Unfortunately, their works have not survived from antiquity ...[and]... neither Berossos nor Manetho insprired successors who would build on the history each had written ... we are totally dependent on what survives [in secondary sources] from
Berossos and Manetho for an organized attempt to present the entire history of ancient Babylonia and ancient Egypt
Boskop Civilization 1/9/10 2:34 AM
file:///Users/Tony/Desktop/boskop/boskopciv.html Page 13 of 19
Manetho ... was living and active ... when the successors of Alexander the Great had become kings in their own right and own name ... [Syncellus asserts]... that Manetho's work (specifically the History of Egyp) appeared at about the same time as or slightly after that of Berossos ... Berossos was born during Alexander's reign over Babylon ... between 330 and 323 B.C. ... he published his History of Babylonia in Greek ... most likely around 290 B.C. for the Macedonian
king Antiochos I ...". Manetho's Rule on Earth of Gods, Demigods and Spirits of the Dead covered the period of about 24,925 years (roughly the time of one Earth precession period and also roughly the travel time of a light beam from the Center of our Galaxy to our Sun) from about 36,525 years ago until about 11,600 years ago (the time of the Great Flood at the beginning of our Warm Interval in our Ice Age).
As for Berossos, in "Berossos and Manetho" Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham say "...Berossos reports, according to Apollidoros, that there were ten kings friom Aloros, the first king, to Xisouthros, under whom, he says, the ... Great Flood took place ... The times of this rule of these kings he reckoned as 120 saroi ... the Babylonian saros ... consists of 3,600 years .... ". Therefore, the total period for the Berossos chronology analagous to Manetho's Gods, Demigod and Spirits of the Dead was about 432,000 years, giving for the Berossos chronology from about 443,600 years ago until about 11,600 years ago (the time of the Great Flood at the beginning of our Warm Interval in our Ice Age).
Can Manetho's Antediluvian Period of 24,925 years be reconciled with Berossos's Antediluvian Period of 432,000 years ? Feuerstein, Kak, and Frawley, in their book In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (Quest 1995), say "...The principal and, taken in its totality, the oldest of the four Vedic hymnbodies is the Rig-Veda. ... The Sanskrit word ric, which for euphonic reasons is changed to rig, means literally "praise". ... The Sanskrit word veda means literally "knowledge" or "wisdom". ... The Rig-Veda is the oldest book in the Sanskrit language ... More than that, if we are correct, it is the oldest book in the world ...". Therefore, it seems likely to me that Babylonia of Berossos inherited its chronology from the older Vedic civilization of India, which itself had direct contact via the Indian Ocean (the map below is adapted from "Past Worlds, The Times Atlas of Archaeology" (Crescent Books 1995)) with the oldest civilization on Earth - Africa, whose culture, including IFA Divination, was not preserved in writing.
It also seems likely that Babylonians such as Berossos may not have inherited and used the oldest, most fundamental version of Vedic cosmology, but instead have used a later, not so fundamental version, such as that described by Ronnie Gale Dreyer in her book "Vedic Astrology" (Weiser 1997):
"... The Indian system of epochs (known as Yugas) ... is made up of four ... eras which, when added together, comprise Maha Yuga (literally "great age"). Consisting of 4,320,000 years, Maha Yuga is divided into ratios of 4:3:2:1 as follows:
Krtia Yuga (Golden Age) 1,728,000 years = 4
Treta Yuga (Silver Age) 1,296,000 years = 3
Dvapara Yuga (Copper Age) 864,000 years = 2
Kali Yuga (Earthen [Bronze, Iron, etc] Age) 432,000 years = 1 ...".
So, it appears to me that the 432,000 year Antediluvian Period of Berossos was imported from Vedic India
the Earthen Age Kali Yuga part of the Maha Yuga.
Around 11,600 years ago, at the conclusion of the Rule of the Demigods and Spirits of the Dead, just before the present Warm Interval ended the Last Ice Age, the Rule of Man on Earth began. Roughly at the same time, about 11,400 years ago, a supernova exploded in the constellation Vela. The Distance to the Vela Supernova Remnant was measured by Cha, Sembach, and Danks, who reported in astro-ph/9902230 that "... the Vela SNR has ... a ...distance ... of 250 +/-30 pc, with a conservative upper limit of 390 +/- 100 pc. ...". They also state that people on earth saw the explosion about 11,000 years ago as a star of magnitude -10, as bright as a 7-day old Moon. According to Timothy Ferris in his book "Coming of age in the Milky Way" (William Morrow & Co. 1988) the Sumerians, who were living on the plains of the Tigris-Euphrates,
identified the supernova with their god Ea, who invented writing and agriculture. The Vela X supernova may have roughly coincided with the primary breakup of a large parent comet of Comet Encke and the Taurid meteors. Possibly associated with Vela X, Comet Encke, and the Taurids might be Comet Hale-Bopp, which recently had perihelion in 1997, also had perihelia about 4,200 years ago, about 7,800 years ago, and, coincident with Vela X, about 11,400 years ago.
identified the supernova with their god Ea, who invented writing and agriculture. The Vela X supernova may have roughly coincided with the primary breakup of a large parent comet of Comet Encke and the Taurid meteors. Possibly associated with Vela X, Comet Encke, and the Taurids might be Comet Hale-Bopp, which recently had perihelion in 1997, also had perihelia about 4,200 years ago, about 7,800 years ago, and, coincident with Vela X, about 11,400 years ago.
4. MEET X-WOMAN : Proto-Human of Siberia
Denisova Proto-Human of Middle Earth
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18699-meet-xwoman-a-possible-new-species-of-human.html
Meet X-woman: a possible new species of human
18:00 24 March 2010 by Ewan Calloway
The human family tree may be in for a dramatic rewrite. DNA collected from a fossilised finger bone from Siberia shows it belonged to a mysterious ancient hominid – perhaps a new species.
"X-woman", as the creature has been named, last shared an ancestor with humans and Neanderthals about 1 million years ago but is probably different from both species. She lived 30,000 to 50,000 years ago.
"This is the tip of the iceberg," says Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the find. More hominids that are neither Neanderthal nor human are likely to be discovered in coming years, particularly in central and eastern Asia, he says.
Roaming Asia Previously, anthropologists thought that Neanderthals and humans were the only hominids roaming Europe and Asia during the late Pleistocene. The discovery of 17,000-year-old Homo floresiensis – the "hobbit" – dispelled that notion, but many anthropologists look on H. floresiensis as an anomaly, isolated from the human–Neanderthal hegemony on the mainland.
The newly discovered creature, which probably lived in close proximity to humans and Neanderthals, suggests that things were not that simple. "The picture that's going to emerge in the next years is a much more complex one," says Svante Pääbo, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Pääbo and colleague Johannes Krause discovered the specimen in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia, and sequenced DNA from its mitochondria. It is impossible to say what the creature would have looked like based on a single pinkie bone, so Pääbo and Krause are hesitant to call it a new species.
Though the creature's sex is not known, they are for now referring to her as X-woman because mitochondria are inherited maternally. "No one really knows what she would look like," Pääbo says.
X-woman's mitochondria differ from a human's at nearly 400 DNA letters; Neanderthals show only half as many differences.
African ancestry This suggests that X-woman shared an African ancestor with the two other species somewhere between 780,000 and 1.3 million years ago, before striking north and east. This expansion is distinct from the one that occurred around 500,000 years ago that gave rise to Neanderthals, and from our own species' peregrinations from about 50,000 years ago.
The split seems too recent for X-woman to be related to Homo erectus, which began moving out of Africa around 2 million years ago.
However, Clive Finlayson, a palaeoanthropologist at the Gibraltar Museum, says the idea that there were just a handful of hominid migrations out of Africa is a vast oversimplification that ignores how other species expand their range over time. "To talk about one or two expansions from a particular region doesn't make any biological sense," he says. "There were probably hundreds, thousands of migrations out of Africa."
Though there is no complete skeleton for X-woman, her lineage could mean she is related to any number of more complete specimens recovered in Asia that don't neatly fit human or Neanderthal body patterns, says Stringer. "This new DNA work provides an entirely new way of looking at the still poorly understood evolution of humans in central and eastern Asia."
Nuclear DNA Pääbo and his team are hesitant to speculate too much about X-woman's nature until they obtain DNA sequences from the nuclear genome's 3.1 billion letters. That project is already under way, and the first results should come within months. Pääbo's team will likely want X-woman's genome to answer the same questions they are asking of the Neanderthal genome, which is due for publication soon.
For instance, humans and Neanderthals share unique mutations in a gene linked to speech and language called FOXP2. If X-woman's sequence is complete enough, they will be able to determine if it possesses the same change – and potentially the capability for language.
There is no sign in X-woman's mitochondrial genome that her kind interbred with humans or Neanderthals, but the nuclear genome will offer a far better chance of finding out.
Neanderthal neighbours Given the close proximity of Neanderthal remains dated to the same time and artefacts that appear to be human, interbreeding is not unlikely, Pääbo says. "Having in about the same time window three different forms [of hominids], increases the potential of all types of interactions, including genetic."
X-woman's mitochondrial DNA begins to paint a picture of what she was like, if only a blurry one. The protein-coding genes do not contain any surprising mutations that would cause disease.
Finlayson would love to link X-woman to other bones, and even stone technologies, though the chances of doing this may be slim. "Ideally we would like to have all that information, but we don't. The fact that we've got this genetic result is important, it's very important."
Pääbo hopes that such a connection will come through sequencing DNA from other Asian hominid fossils. But he, too, is prepared for the possibility that such bones may never turn up.
He sees in X-woman the beginning of a new way of understanding human history. "It gives another picture of our past, a molecular picture of the evolution of our genome" which he says is in some aspects even more conclusive than fossils. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08976
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/03/24/the-x-womans-fingerbone/
So–how to explain this? A couple possibilities present themselves.
1. The DNA belongs to a species of hominid that’s neither human nor Neanderthal.
This is the most interesting, most science-fictionish possibility.
Our hominid ancestors evolved into upright apes in Africa some six million years ago. By about 1.9 million years ago, some of those hominids had made their way out of Africa and strolled all the way to Indonesia. They go by the name of Homo erectus, and they stuck around Asia for quite a long time–some would argue they were still around 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals appear to have evolved from another wave out of Africa, which spread to Europe and Siberia several hundred thousand years ago. Meanwhile, our own ancestors appear to have stayed put in Africa. The oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans come from Africa 200,000 years ago, for example, and studies on human DNA find that African lineages are the oldest.
The Denisova DNA split too recently from our own to have been carried by H. erectus, the first globe-trotting hominids. But paleoanthropologists have found a fair number of other hominid fossils in Europe and Asia that might belong to more recent waves out of Africa. (Here, for example, is a report on hominids in Europe 1.2 million years ago.) So perhaps there was at least one other wave aside from H. erectus, the expansion of Neanderthals, and the spread of modern humans. If that’s true, this new discovery also means that this wave produced a long lineage of hominids that survived long enough to live alongside humans. We coexisted with yet another species of hominid–along with Neanderthals, H. erectus, and those lovable hobbits, Homo floresiensis–for thousands of years. Our current solitude is a recent fluke.
If #1 turns out to be true, then this DNA deserves a species name of its own. But for now, Paabo and his colleagues have refrained from giving it one. Instead, they’ve nicknamed the source of the DNA “X-woman.” Why the reticence? Probably because of possibility #2…
2. The DNA comes from the finger of a Neanderthal or a human–thanks to a love that dare not speak its name. Imagine, if you will, that an early Neanderthal male takes a morning constitutional in search of woolly rhinos when, gadzooks, he meets up with a fetching X-woman hominid. For whatever reason, the two of them decide to have an interspecies tryst, and X-woman gets pregnant. She gives birth to a girl carrying Neanderthal and X-woman DNA in her nucleus–and nothing but X-woman DNA in her mitochondria. Somehow this girl becomes a part of Neanderthal society; she has Neanderthal children of her own, and they continue to carry the X-woman mitochondrial DNA.
Remember that in every generation, nuclear DNA gets mixed up. Half of the DNA a child carries in the nucleus comes from its father, half from its mother. And with the generation of new eggs and sperm, chromosomes from each parent get chopped up and shuffled back into new combinations. So over generations, the X-woman DNA might gradually dwindle away from the Neanderthal gene pool–but some Neanderthals might still carry X-woman mitochondria, handed down from mother to daughter to grand-daughter.
(It’s also possible that the interbreeding male in this scenario was a human–although just in terms of timing, that’s less likely, since Neanderthals were out of Africa sooner than we were.)
One reason to take this possibility seriously is the fact that other primate species regularly mix up their DNA in just this way. Mongoose lemurs expanded into the range of brown lemurs, for example, and mitochondrial DNA ended up jumping the species barrier. In many cases, the species were separated by a million years or so, just like the Denisov DNA and human/Neanderthal DNA. (This is why it’s hard to use DNA-barcoding to tell closely related primates apart.) Another reason to take this possibility serious is lies in our own genomes. Some scientists have made a forceful case for the presence of ancient non-human DNA in the gene pool of living humans.
Still, even if this scenario turned out to be right, it would mean that a previously unknown X-woman hominid line expanded out of Africa and lived in Asia until relatively recently. Whether that lineage could be rightly considered a separate species of its own is tricky. (For more on that trickiness, see my article, “What is a Species?” from Scientific American.)
I can imagine other possible interpretations, but I’m not sure how plausible they really are. I’ve sent out some queries to some experts, and will add anything interesting I get back [Update: See the end of the post]. Fortunately, it may be possible to rule some possibilities out in just a few months. Paabo and company are busily churning out the sequence of the nuclear DNA from the Denisova pinky. It’s conceivable that the nuclear DNA will be a lot more like human DNA, or a lot more like Neanderthal DNA–making it likely that the fossil belongs to a hybrid. But if the nuclear DNA is just as exotic as the mitochondria, then perhaps the finger bone really does belong to a distinct species that lived 40,000 years ago–a species, it’s worth pointing out, that left its bones behind in the same layer of sediment where Russian scientists have dug up tools and ornaments made of stone and antler.
The possibility of a highly intelligent Siberian Other will have to dance in our heads until more studies come out.
Update: After I posted this, the paleoanthropologist John Hawks offers an alternative explanation on his blog. I followed up with a few questions via email, and based on his post and his reply, here’s my quick distillation:
Maybe the X-woman was not a separate species at all.
Wind back the clock to a million years ago. In Africa, there’s a population of hominids that will eventually give rise to Neanderthals and humans. The Neanderthal lineage expands out across Europe and Asia. They take with them a wide diversity of mitochondria. Most of the studies on Neanderthal DNA have focused on European Neanderthals–and have thus only captured a limited sample of that diversity. Now, in Siberia, Paabo and his colleagues have moved so far from the areas they had studied before that they’re finally getting to other branches of Neanderthal mitochondria.
In this scenario, Neanderthals play a role similar to that of Africans in the diversity of living humans. In Africa, you can find people with genes belonging to very old lineages. The Khoisan bushmen of southern Africa, for example, have genes that branched off from all other human lineages long ago. In other words, the genes of other Africans share a closer ancestor with genes from people out of Africa. Likewise, some Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA is more like human DNA than it is to the Neanderthal DNA found in the Denisova pinky.
[3/27/10: Time to go Borges: an update within an update! The Atavism (which has already displayed great skills in visualization by illustrating my recent reader survey) whipped together a diagram that gets this concept across nicely:
So–how to explain this? A couple possibilities present themselves.
1. The DNA belongs to a species of hominid that’s neither human nor Neanderthal.
This is the most interesting, most science-fictionish possibility.
Our hominid ancestors evolved into upright apes in Africa some six million years ago. By about 1.9 million years ago, some of those hominids had made their way out of Africa and strolled all the way to Indonesia. They go by the name of Homo erectus, and they stuck around Asia for quite a long time–some would argue they were still around 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals appear to have evolved from another wave out of Africa, which spread to Europe and Siberia several hundred thousand years ago. Meanwhile, our own ancestors appear to have stayed put in Africa. The oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans come from Africa 200,000 years ago, for example, and studies on human DNA find that African lineages are the oldest.
The Denisova DNA split too recently from our own to have been carried by H. erectus, the first globe-trotting hominids. But paleoanthropologists have found a fair number of other hominid fossils in Europe and Asia that might belong to more recent waves out of Africa. (Here, for example, is a report on hominids in Europe 1.2 million years ago.) So perhaps there was at least one other wave aside from H. erectus, the expansion of Neanderthals, and the spread of modern humans. If that’s true, this new discovery also means that this wave produced a long lineage of hominids that survived long enough to live alongside humans. We coexisted with yet another species of hominid–along with Neanderthals, H. erectus, and those lovable hobbits, Homo floresiensis–for thousands of years. Our current solitude is a recent fluke.
If #1 turns out to be true, then this DNA deserves a species name of its own. But for now, Paabo and his colleagues have refrained from giving it one. Instead, they’ve nicknamed the source of the DNA “X-woman.” Why the reticence? Probably because of possibility #2…
2. The DNA comes from the finger of a Neanderthal or a human–thanks to a love that dare not speak its name. Imagine, if you will, that an early Neanderthal male takes a morning constitutional in search of woolly rhinos when, gadzooks, he meets up with a fetching X-woman hominid. For whatever reason, the two of them decide to have an interspecies tryst, and X-woman gets pregnant. She gives birth to a girl carrying Neanderthal and X-woman DNA in her nucleus–and nothing but X-woman DNA in her mitochondria. Somehow this girl becomes a part of Neanderthal society; she has Neanderthal children of her own, and they continue to carry the X-woman mitochondrial DNA.
Remember that in every generation, nuclear DNA gets mixed up. Half of the DNA a child carries in the nucleus comes from its father, half from its mother. And with the generation of new eggs and sperm, chromosomes from each parent get chopped up and shuffled back into new combinations. So over generations, the X-woman DNA might gradually dwindle away from the Neanderthal gene pool–but some Neanderthals might still carry X-woman mitochondria, handed down from mother to daughter to grand-daughter.
(It’s also possible that the interbreeding male in this scenario was a human–although just in terms of timing, that’s less likely, since Neanderthals were out of Africa sooner than we were.)
One reason to take this possibility seriously is the fact that other primate species regularly mix up their DNA in just this way. Mongoose lemurs expanded into the range of brown lemurs, for example, and mitochondrial DNA ended up jumping the species barrier. In many cases, the species were separated by a million years or so, just like the Denisov DNA and human/Neanderthal DNA. (This is why it’s hard to use DNA-barcoding to tell closely related primates apart.) Another reason to take this possibility serious is lies in our own genomes. Some scientists have made a forceful case for the presence of ancient non-human DNA in the gene pool of living humans.
Still, even if this scenario turned out to be right, it would mean that a previously unknown X-woman hominid line expanded out of Africa and lived in Asia until relatively recently. Whether that lineage could be rightly considered a separate species of its own is tricky. (For more on that trickiness, see my article, “What is a Species?” from Scientific American.)
I can imagine other possible interpretations, but I’m not sure how plausible they really are. I’ve sent out some queries to some experts, and will add anything interesting I get back [Update: See the end of the post]. Fortunately, it may be possible to rule some possibilities out in just a few months. Paabo and company are busily churning out the sequence of the nuclear DNA from the Denisova pinky. It’s conceivable that the nuclear DNA will be a lot more like human DNA, or a lot more like Neanderthal DNA–making it likely that the fossil belongs to a hybrid. But if the nuclear DNA is just as exotic as the mitochondria, then perhaps the finger bone really does belong to a distinct species that lived 40,000 years ago–a species, it’s worth pointing out, that left its bones behind in the same layer of sediment where Russian scientists have dug up tools and ornaments made of stone and antler.
The possibility of a highly intelligent Siberian Other will have to dance in our heads until more studies come out.
Update: After I posted this, the paleoanthropologist John Hawks offers an alternative explanation on his blog. I followed up with a few questions via email, and based on his post and his reply, here’s my quick distillation:
Maybe the X-woman was not a separate species at all.
Wind back the clock to a million years ago. In Africa, there’s a population of hominids that will eventually give rise to Neanderthals and humans. The Neanderthal lineage expands out across Europe and Asia. They take with them a wide diversity of mitochondria. Most of the studies on Neanderthal DNA have focused on European Neanderthals–and have thus only captured a limited sample of that diversity. Now, in Siberia, Paabo and his colleagues have moved so far from the areas they had studied before that they’re finally getting to other branches of Neanderthal mitochondria.
In this scenario, Neanderthals play a role similar to that of Africans in the diversity of living humans. In Africa, you can find people with genes belonging to very old lineages. The Khoisan bushmen of southern Africa, for example, have genes that branched off from all other human lineages long ago. In other words, the genes of other Africans share a closer ancestor with genes from people out of Africa. Likewise, some Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA is more like human DNA than it is to the Neanderthal DNA found in the Denisova pinky.
[3/27/10: Time to go Borges: an update within an update! The Atavism (which has already displayed great skills in visualization by illustrating my recent reader survey) whipped together a diagram that gets this concept across nicely:
Update, 3/25/10 10:15 am: Laurent Excoffier, a biologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, who has published models of human evolution indicates that there has been little, if any interbreeding between our own lineage and Neanderthals or other hominids. Excoffier has argued that some genes that have been claimed to have entered our lineage through interbreeding were actually already present in ancient African human populations. I wondered if the mitochondrial DNA in the Denisova pinky might just be from an old human, not a separate species. Excoffier was skeptical:
This seems relatively unlikely, since it is difficult to understand why this mtDNA lineage would not have been preserved in Africa. Of course some otherwise rare mutations (or DNA sequences) can surf to higher frequencies during range expansions, and this could potentially explain why it could be seen outside Africa and not within Africa. But if that was the case, then it would be difficult to understand why this once frequent sequence would then have disappeared. So, I would thus consider this hypothesis as very unlikely.
I then asked if he thought the best explanation for this DNA was that it came from a separate species, or that it spread from a separate species into Neanderthals or humans through interbreeding.
If this sequence is really true (not an artefact from next-gen sequencing) and if there was no contamination, then a more plausible explanation would be that this sequence comes from a divergent Homo species, as claimed by the authors of the paper.
It is indeed plausible that some non-modern homo or non-Neanderthals roamed in Asia before modern humans spread there, and this sequence could well belong to one of them.
The interesting point for me is that if this sequence is representative of, say, erectus mtDNA diversity in Asia 40-60,000 years ago, then it means that some divergent erectus were there when modern humans expanded into that region, and that did NOT hybridize with them, or at least not enough to be introgressed by them during their expansion (which is the expectation when hybridization can occur between a local and an invading species).
So there’s a vote for possibility #1.
Reference: Krause et al., “The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia” Nature, doi:10.1038/nature08976 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/03/24/the-x-womans-fingerbone/
This seems relatively unlikely, since it is difficult to understand why this mtDNA lineage would not have been preserved in Africa. Of course some otherwise rare mutations (or DNA sequences) can surf to higher frequencies during range expansions, and this could potentially explain why it could be seen outside Africa and not within Africa. But if that was the case, then it would be difficult to understand why this once frequent sequence would then have disappeared. So, I would thus consider this hypothesis as very unlikely.
I then asked if he thought the best explanation for this DNA was that it came from a separate species, or that it spread from a separate species into Neanderthals or humans through interbreeding.
If this sequence is really true (not an artefact from next-gen sequencing) and if there was no contamination, then a more plausible explanation would be that this sequence comes from a divergent Homo species, as claimed by the authors of the paper.
It is indeed plausible that some non-modern homo or non-Neanderthals roamed in Asia before modern humans spread there, and this sequence could well belong to one of them.
The interesting point for me is that if this sequence is representative of, say, erectus mtDNA diversity in Asia 40-60,000 years ago, then it means that some divergent erectus were there when modern humans expanded into that region, and that did NOT hybridize with them, or at least not enough to be introgressed by them during their expansion (which is the expectation when hybridization can occur between a local and an invading species).
So there’s a vote for possibility #1.
Reference: Krause et al., “The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia” Nature, doi:10.1038/nature08976 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/03/24/the-x-womans-fingerbone/
5. The Almas of Altai
The Almas Wild Men of Mongolia
Almas of Mongolia
http://www.altereddimensions.net/creatures/AlmasWildMen.aspx
The Almas, Mongolian for "wild man," is a purported half-man, half animal creature that lives in the Altai Mountains in southern Mongolia and the Caucasus and Pamir Mountains in central Asia. Typically described as human like animals between five and six and a half feet tall, bodies covered in reddish-brown hair, and human like facial appearances and human like hands. Scientists note that descriptions are remarkable similar to descriptions of Neanderthals.
Speculation that Almases may be something other than legendary creatures is based on purported eyewitness accounts, alleged footprint finds, and interpretations of long-standing native traditions that have been anthropologically collected. Almases appear in the legends of local people, who tell stories of sightings and human-Almas interactions dating back several hundred years. Apparently nomadic creatures who frequently move throughout the countryside, sightings by farmers and villagers are common even today.
Drawings which some have interpreted as Almases also appear in a Tibetan medicinal book. British anthropologist Myra Shackley noted that "The book contains thousands of illustrations of various classes of animals (reptiles, mammals and amphibia), but not one single mythological animal such as are known from similar medieval European books. All the creatures are living and observable today."
Sightings recorded in writing go back as far back as the 15th century. In 1430, Hans Schiltberger recorded his personal observation of these creatures in the journal of his trip to Mongolia as a prisoner of the Mongol Khan. He noted that Almasty are included as entries in Mongolian and Tibetan medical books, along with thousands of other animals and plants that live today. Schlitberger observed the Almas creatures himself and described them as hairy wildmen.
In 1871, Nikolai Przhevalsky, a Russian geographer, observed the animals. Przhevalsky was on a Russian funded expedition with 10 other men. Their journey to Mongolia was intended partly as a spy mission (China was experiencing a large Muslim uprising at the time) and partly as a mapping project whereby Przhevalsky would map the Russian-Chinese border. He estimated that the animal weighed around 500 pounds and when running, moved approximately 40 miles per hour.
A reported encounter with a male Almasty in 1941, shortly after the German invasion of what was then the USSR. According to the story, a creature somewhat similar to Zana was found in the Caucasus Mountains region by a detachment of the Red Army under the control of a Lt. Col. Vargen Karapetyan. According to Karapetyan, the beast was very human-like, but was covered in fine, dark hair. Interrogation revealed the creature’s apparent inability to speak. The beast was later killed.
Ivan Ivlov's recorded an observation of a family group of Almas in 1963. Ivlov, a pediatrician, decided to interview some of the Mongolian children who were his patients, and discovered that many of them had also seen Almases. It seems that neither the Mongol children nor the young Almas were afraid of each other. Ivlov's driver also claimed to have seen them.
Russian researcher Alexei Sitnikov was travelling to Kake Tonee in 1993 when he and his team of researchers encountered an Almas. Sitnikov was on an expedition to search for a possible giant serpent that had been reported in the far eastern part of Russia. The group of researchers had just begun their trip when they encountered an Almas. They were crossing a river on a raft when they noticed a man covered with reddish fur lurking on the opposite side of the river. The man made a few grunting noises and then scampered into the nearby woods. Sitnikov beached their raft and began pursuit. They did not find the creature but did discover footprints in the sands of the beach. The weather was sunny and clear and the creature was plainly visible to Sitnikov and several of this research team.
Its head was somewhat triangular in shape, widening toward its base. (The base was straight, but from the forehead toward the crown the head narrowed.) The creature had small eyes, wide nostrils, and a slit in place of a mouth. The neck was not visible, and it looked as if the head was placed on wide shoulders. It possessed a powerful chest. Sitnikov had collected many descriptions of the "snow man" and has gathered statements from the local populace, including hunters who have encountered Bigfoot in the wilds. Secret settlements have been found deep in the thick woods.
It has been speculated that the Almases are a relict population of Neanderthals while others have speculated that they are surviving specimens of Homo erectus. Others insist they are related to the Yeti of the Himalayas, being closer to apes than to humans.
Almas of Mongolia
http://www.altereddimensions.net/creatures/AlmasWildMen.aspx
The Almas, Mongolian for "wild man," is a purported half-man, half animal creature that lives in the Altai Mountains in southern Mongolia and the Caucasus and Pamir Mountains in central Asia. Typically described as human like animals between five and six and a half feet tall, bodies covered in reddish-brown hair, and human like facial appearances and human like hands. Scientists note that descriptions are remarkable similar to descriptions of Neanderthals.
Speculation that Almases may be something other than legendary creatures is based on purported eyewitness accounts, alleged footprint finds, and interpretations of long-standing native traditions that have been anthropologically collected. Almases appear in the legends of local people, who tell stories of sightings and human-Almas interactions dating back several hundred years. Apparently nomadic creatures who frequently move throughout the countryside, sightings by farmers and villagers are common even today.
Drawings which some have interpreted as Almases also appear in a Tibetan medicinal book. British anthropologist Myra Shackley noted that "The book contains thousands of illustrations of various classes of animals (reptiles, mammals and amphibia), but not one single mythological animal such as are known from similar medieval European books. All the creatures are living and observable today."
Sightings recorded in writing go back as far back as the 15th century. In 1430, Hans Schiltberger recorded his personal observation of these creatures in the journal of his trip to Mongolia as a prisoner of the Mongol Khan. He noted that Almasty are included as entries in Mongolian and Tibetan medical books, along with thousands of other animals and plants that live today. Schlitberger observed the Almas creatures himself and described them as hairy wildmen.
In 1871, Nikolai Przhevalsky, a Russian geographer, observed the animals. Przhevalsky was on a Russian funded expedition with 10 other men. Their journey to Mongolia was intended partly as a spy mission (China was experiencing a large Muslim uprising at the time) and partly as a mapping project whereby Przhevalsky would map the Russian-Chinese border. He estimated that the animal weighed around 500 pounds and when running, moved approximately 40 miles per hour.
A reported encounter with a male Almasty in 1941, shortly after the German invasion of what was then the USSR. According to the story, a creature somewhat similar to Zana was found in the Caucasus Mountains region by a detachment of the Red Army under the control of a Lt. Col. Vargen Karapetyan. According to Karapetyan, the beast was very human-like, but was covered in fine, dark hair. Interrogation revealed the creature’s apparent inability to speak. The beast was later killed.
Ivan Ivlov's recorded an observation of a family group of Almas in 1963. Ivlov, a pediatrician, decided to interview some of the Mongolian children who were his patients, and discovered that many of them had also seen Almases. It seems that neither the Mongol children nor the young Almas were afraid of each other. Ivlov's driver also claimed to have seen them.
Russian researcher Alexei Sitnikov was travelling to Kake Tonee in 1993 when he and his team of researchers encountered an Almas. Sitnikov was on an expedition to search for a possible giant serpent that had been reported in the far eastern part of Russia. The group of researchers had just begun their trip when they encountered an Almas. They were crossing a river on a raft when they noticed a man covered with reddish fur lurking on the opposite side of the river. The man made a few grunting noises and then scampered into the nearby woods. Sitnikov beached their raft and began pursuit. They did not find the creature but did discover footprints in the sands of the beach. The weather was sunny and clear and the creature was plainly visible to Sitnikov and several of this research team.
Its head was somewhat triangular in shape, widening toward its base. (The base was straight, but from the forehead toward the crown the head narrowed.) The creature had small eyes, wide nostrils, and a slit in place of a mouth. The neck was not visible, and it looked as if the head was placed on wide shoulders. It possessed a powerful chest. Sitnikov had collected many descriptions of the "snow man" and has gathered statements from the local populace, including hunters who have encountered Bigfoot in the wilds. Secret settlements have been found deep in the thick woods.
It has been speculated that the Almases are a relict population of Neanderthals while others have speculated that they are surviving specimens of Homo erectus. Others insist they are related to the Yeti of the Himalayas, being closer to apes than to humans.
"Boom boom." Not Basil Brush's catchphrase, but the call of a less unlikely sounding animal, the alma or almasty of the Caucasus mountains east of the Black Sea. It is a sound that a Franco-Russianexpedition heading for area last summer was hoping to record forposterity preferably along with some physical evidence and photographsof the elusive yeti-like creatures locals have long claimed stillinhabit the more out-of-the-way areas of an already remote region. The expedition was to be led by a remarkable 73-year-old Russian, Dr Zh. I Kofman (her name is usually given as Marie-Jeanne Koffman in western press reports) and a French documentary maker, Sylvain Pallix,who was to raise the cash for its high-tech equipment.
The ten scientists who made up the main body of the party (they were to be accompanied by a TV crew, as seems inevitable these days) were promised infra-red cameras, remote controlled helicopter camera platforms, motorised hang gliders and motorbikes - all of which were to be decked out with sponsors' stickers. The aim, according to Pallix, was to capture an alma and take a mould of its face, plusspecimens of its blood, hair and skin before fitting it with a radiotransmitter and turning it loose.
FOOTPRINTS
It was all a bit of a change for Kofman, a French-born cryptozoologist, who, after an adventurous early career in the Red Army, spent over 20 years travelling the mountains on horseback to interview an estimated 500 eye-witnesses, collect unidentified footprints and examine piles of suspected alma droppings. Her research enabled her to produce a detailed composite of the mystery figures,sometimes supposed to be relic Neanderthals, driven into the wilderness by their more successful Cro-Magnon cousins tens ofthousands of years ago.
The almas, according to Kofman's witnesses,walk upright, stand up to 6ft 6in tall, have reddish-brown fur and can move extremely rapidly - at up to 40mph, according to some reports. They are nomadic, mostly nocturnal and extremely shy. Alma babies,when they are seen, are "exactly like human babies, except they are smaller." They have pink skin and are not hairy. From the depth of the footprints she found, Kofman estimates an adult alma weighs up to 500lbs. Working from the droppings, she suggests it lives on a diet of berries, roots, eggs, frogs, lizards and small rodents. Kofman, who recently retired on a 100 pound a month pension and returned to France, summarised her find- ings in two articles published in the journal Archeologiain 1991 and it was these that brought her to Pallax's attention. http://web.ncf.ca/bz050/HomePage.yeti.html
The ten scientists who made up the main body of the party (they were to be accompanied by a TV crew, as seems inevitable these days) were promised infra-red cameras, remote controlled helicopter camera platforms, motorised hang gliders and motorbikes - all of which were to be decked out with sponsors' stickers. The aim, according to Pallix, was to capture an alma and take a mould of its face, plusspecimens of its blood, hair and skin before fitting it with a radiotransmitter and turning it loose.
FOOTPRINTS
It was all a bit of a change for Kofman, a French-born cryptozoologist, who, after an adventurous early career in the Red Army, spent over 20 years travelling the mountains on horseback to interview an estimated 500 eye-witnesses, collect unidentified footprints and examine piles of suspected alma droppings. Her research enabled her to produce a detailed composite of the mystery figures,sometimes supposed to be relic Neanderthals, driven into the wilderness by their more successful Cro-Magnon cousins tens ofthousands of years ago.
The almas, according to Kofman's witnesses,walk upright, stand up to 6ft 6in tall, have reddish-brown fur and can move extremely rapidly - at up to 40mph, according to some reports. They are nomadic, mostly nocturnal and extremely shy. Alma babies,when they are seen, are "exactly like human babies, except they are smaller." They have pink skin and are not hairy. From the depth of the footprints she found, Kofman estimates an adult alma weighs up to 500lbs. Working from the droppings, she suggests it lives on a diet of berries, roots, eggs, frogs, lizards and small rodents. Kofman, who recently retired on a 100 pound a month pension and returned to France, summarised her find- ings in two articles published in the journal Archeologiain 1991 and it was these that brought her to Pallax's attention. http://web.ncf.ca/bz050/HomePage.yeti.html
Editorial - Living your Enlightenment
When you started out on the Dragon path, you probably sensed
that an extraordinary spiritual transformation was possible--a
radical realignment at the deepest levels of your being that would
not only liberate you from personal suffering but would infuse your
life with a sacred, cosmic sense of meaning, purpose and wholeness.
Yet after years or even decades of working on yourself, you may
have begun to doubt whether that initial intuition of possibility
was grounded in reality.
The highest possibility you've glimpsed, the most glorious potential you've sensed is not a figment of your imagination but a real possibility. And even more than that is possible.
It is possible for life to make perfect sense. It's possible for YOUR life to make perfect sense. It's possible to come into such profound alignment with the moral and spiritual axis of the universe that every moment of your life is a walk in grace, and that you know without any doubt that you are in the right place at the right time.
It's possible for all existential doubt to disappear, and to live with unwavering conviction in the inherent goodness of the life process.
It's possible to awaken so deeply to the divine evolutionary impulse at the heart of existence that we know that we are living our lives in service to the highest calling there is. And in this knowing, to discover an unimaginable and abiding liberation from the suffering of the confused, neurotic, separate sense of self.
It's possible to be truly free.
What I'm speaking about is a completely different kind of human life than most of us have ever encountered. This is not simply about "being in the now" or "loving and accepting what is in every moment."
It is not about simply accessing a more expansive state of awareness or being able to stand back and abide as the Witness of all that arises. And it's not just about cultivating a sustained feeling of compassion for the suffering of all beings.
All of these are good experiences to have and important capacities to cultivate. But we're speaking about something more.
We seek authentic Realization in which the ego has been radically overridden by the ultimate principle, by the creative force of the cosmos, by what Buddha called "the roar of the timeless beyond."
It's a life where our personal motive to have and get for ourselves has been replaced by a passion to give everything for the greatest good. In this ultimate submission to and alignment with the Absolute, the human being becomes a living, breathing force for higher evolution.
And this changes our relationship to being alive in unimaginable ways.
Experientially, one finds oneself in a state of profound receptivity and openness. A deep and abiding simplicity pervades one's life, and an ongoing sense of flow permeates everything. One has let go of identification with the mind, abandon any attachment to the self, and live as a transparent, vibrant vessel for the Infinite.
There is remarkable mental clarity at times, but there is no clinging on to that clarity. Insights come and go, but there is the knowledge that "I can't hold onto any of this." And so there is no grasping on. But in moments when clarity is needed, it miraculously appears, integrating all of one's knowledge and lived experience in a moment of intuitive knowing.
Experiences come and go, too, and there is no longer any clinging to ecstasy, bliss or love. One has discovered the source of all these things and so feels no compulsion to cling to them.
More importantly, and contrary to popular belief, one awakens to a profound awareness of the moral order of the cosmos. One feels, in a sense, for the Whole of Life. One feels the pain of the whole and the ecstasy of the whole as one's own pain and one's own ecstasy. One becomes the seeing, sensing, feeling organ of the whole, of the
cosmos.
And at the center of one's being is a burning passion for evolution and transformation, a calling to transform the world into an expression of the divinity one has discovered.
All of this may sound very big and beyond reach, but this is not a pipe dream drawn from ancient books. This is what it's really like. This is really what's possible for a human life--for your life--to become.
Now, just because it's possible to awaken to this radically different kind of life does not mean that it's easy. Indeed, it is without question the most challenging endeavor a human being can undertake.
We have to recognize that, even if we feel deeply that we want to surrender to the Divine, to be an agent of evolution, there is a big part of us that wants nothing to do with that. A part of us that desperately wants to maintain control, to keep our life small and manageable.
So, if we want our life to change that profoundly, we have to come to terms with what we're doing here. That means cultivating a clear and unwavering intention to bring our life into alignment with that which is greater than us.
Cultivating this kind of intention requires a 24/7 commitment, but you can begin engaging this inquiry by engaging the following exercises on a daily basis. Any of these exercises can be engaged as a silent contemplation, as a journal exercise, or as a dialogue with a trusted spiritual friend.
1) Every morning, before you do anything else, take fifteen minutes and contemplate what you are really living for. Ask yourself: what is the most important thing in life? What is of ultimate significance? And what do I need to do to align with that? To be an expression of that in the world? Don't simply ask these questions with your mind. Ask them with your whole being, as if your life depended on it.
2) Then, every evening, take another fifteen minutes, and again ask yourself: What is the most important thing in life? What is of ultimate significance? How did I live my day? Did I do everything I could to live in accord with the deepest truth I know? To align with a higher purpose? Where could I have given more?
3) Ask yourself: What would I need to give up or let go of to be able to align with the divine evolutionary impulse? To be a vessel for a greater intelligence and power in this world? What is in the way of me stepping into full submission to and partnership with the creative force of the Cosmos? When will I be ready to leave that behind?
The spiritual path has always been about surrender. But the truth is that in this evolutionary awakening, this integral
enlightenment, there is a further goal, which is the willingness to not only surrender to the Evolutionary Impulse but to step up and take full responsibility for its manifestation and expression in the world.
In the end, we realize that the very power we've surrendered to is also our truest self, and that it needs us to fully embody that, to dare to be a creative agent of evolution, to align our own being with it so completely that we become the conscious choosing aspect of the Divine principle on Earth.
In this radical realignment at the core of our being, we begin incarnating divinity and we give our every breath to making that divinity known and fully expressed in this world. In this unconditional stand, we discover our final liberation from the world, even as we give everything to transforming the world into an expression of the sacred. And when enough of us learn to live in this way, we will have Heaven on Earth.
7. NOW AGE PHYSICS
Holographic Subquantum-Mind Theory
A Brief Explanation of Holographic Subquantum-Mind Theory
A basis for consciousness, reincarnation, ESP and telepathy
by Louis Malklaka
In light of the myo-electric research demonstrating that cognition takes place outside of the body (placing the physical body and brain squarely in the role of “radio receiver”), I use the analogy of a “thin client” computing system to explain how the Holographic Quantum-Mind (actually a misnomer, as the mind actually exists at the sub-quantum level...but again, for laypeople, the explanation suffices) functions.
The body/brain acts as the “dumb terminal” (mixed analogy here, as I explain that, rather than being wired into an ethernet network, as is a thin-client computing system, the brain/body acts as a very sensitive “radio receiver”, with each being “tuned” to its own “sub-quantum holographic hard drive”, the DNA serving in a similar capacity {no pun intended} to a radio’s tuning capacitor, though incredibly more complex), the body’s bio-energy field (“Aura”, Orgone, Chi, Kundalini, Prana — whatever they choose to call it, depending upon their various backgrounds and predispositions) acts as the “antenna” (a bridge to the sub-quantum realm, where their “hard drive” is actually stored — so here, you have your “medium”, so to speak ), and, of course, the “Holographic Sub-Quantum Hard Drive” storing, not only your memories (“data”), but the “programs” that comprise your personality.
I go on from this point to explain that, while the analogy of a “hard drive” is convenient, we are not dealing with an actual physical construct, as the sub-quantum realm exists outside of space-time. I ask them to think of their individual “storage space” as “whirlpools in the river”; i.e., they have their own individual characteristics, but are “composed” of the same “substance” (again, I make clear that we are using analogy, and not speaking literally — many of these people tend to be VERY literal, as you might imagine from their professions!) as the rest of the sub-quantum realm.
In other words, their own “personal” holographic storage space, rather than being “partitioned off” from the rest of the sub-quantum realm, is actually part-and-parcel of the holographic “fabric” of the sub-quantum realm. They are able to access their “data” and “programs” strictly by virtue of their physical/energetic resonant signature (I do NOT go into the pcar (phase-conjugate-adaptive-resonance) issue, as their eyes would glass over, and I would lose them: but they can grasp resonance, and especially those familiar with signal routing through fiber-optic networks understand the concept of multiplexing, which builds a mental bridge for them to grasp this concept as applied to consciousness), which is matched to their “hard drive”.
This explains Jung’s “Collective Unconscious”, and the “Akashic Records” of the ancient Tibetans. Further, we can see how supposed “reincarnation” functions: I make the analogy to cordless phones/cell phones and “crossed signals”, due to a crowded frequency spectrum — something with which they are all familiar. While everyone’s physical/energetic signature is unique, there are bound to be certain “overlaps”, which allow a person living NOW to “tap into” the “quantum hard drive” of someone who is “dead”. i.e., that person’s “data” and “programs” still exist in the sub-quantum realm, and are thus available to be “tapped”, providing that one can “get into resonance”, or “tune” to that person’s signature.
Mediums do this voluntarily (the trend seems to be to call such people “channelers” these days), while in cases of reincarnation (and, at the extreme end, “possession”), there is a certain amount of resonance purely by chance. Incidentally, this also explains “genetic memory”: as the DNA is so instrumental in the “tuning” process, it can be understood how people of close genetic relation, thus sharing elements of their DNA, may “tap into” ancestors’ memories.
Telepathy can be similarly understood: when two people develop a close rapport, a “resonance” between themselves, their resonant signatures “overlap” to a certain extent, allowing for the “sharing” of “data”, and, in some cases, even their “programs” (personality traits, etc.).
With the audience having “followed the bouncing ball” thus far, and grasped via these analogies the basic concepts I am trying to convey, I inevitably get a question regarding “Astral Projection”/”Remote Viewing” and/or the “Near death Experience” (NDE). Usually, a brief review of the non-local nature of any realm outside of space-time is sufficient to answer questions about remote sensing: since space and time are illusory constructs confined to “space-time”, and the “mind” exists in the sub-quantum realm, OUTSIDE of space-time... (there is usually some “forehead slapping” at this point — in most cases I don’t have to go much further on that issue...).
With NDE, however, I have to get a bit more in-depth. Since the physical body is a tuning mechanism, and does not immediately decay upon physical death, the tuning apparatus remains relatively intact for a period of time. And, if we look at the work of Wilhelm Reich, explaining the energy dynamics of “Orgone” (Chi, Prana, etc.), we can see that the Bio-energy field (“Aura”, etc.) will remain coherent and attached to the physical body for a period of time as well. Thus, our receiver, antenna, and of course, the “sub-quantum hard drive”, are all intact for quite a while after death. During this time, the consciousness may de-focus from space-time, as can also happen during “Astral Travel” and/or “Remote Viewing”...and if the body is revivified, these memories may be retained, and a NDE is then reported.
At this point, questions usually lean toward the more esoteric aspect of Astral Travel/NDE, and the fact that certain constructs seem to be reported by various people: “Christians” may see “Jesus”, or other appropriate religious figures, while Buddhists see Buddha, etc., etc. I explain the “form follows energy” principle, and show that the more mental energy is given to a construct, whether in THIS “space-time” realm, or any other, the more “real” it becomes.
Thus, with BILLIONS of human minds lending energy to their various belief systems, it should come as no surprise that people find what they EXPECT to find in the NDE state. I even posit that space-time itself may be the result of a group of entities in the sub-quantum realm having “concocted” space-time, in much the same way that programmers of Virtual Reality systems create “worlds”, either for entertainment, or for university educational programs.
After some metaphysical meanderings along this line, I usually re-cap the main points of the “Holographic Quantum-Mind” theory, and send them on their way. All in all, I have found that people take to this VERY well...almost as if, on some level, they know it to be true...and while most cannot hope to ever comprehend the details of the high-end mathematics and physics involved, they grasp it very well at the intuitive level.
(c) by Louis Malklaka
http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/2010/09/brief-explanation-of-holographic.html
A basis for consciousness, reincarnation, ESP and telepathy
by Louis Malklaka
In light of the myo-electric research demonstrating that cognition takes place outside of the body (placing the physical body and brain squarely in the role of “radio receiver”), I use the analogy of a “thin client” computing system to explain how the Holographic Quantum-Mind (actually a misnomer, as the mind actually exists at the sub-quantum level...but again, for laypeople, the explanation suffices) functions.
The body/brain acts as the “dumb terminal” (mixed analogy here, as I explain that, rather than being wired into an ethernet network, as is a thin-client computing system, the brain/body acts as a very sensitive “radio receiver”, with each being “tuned” to its own “sub-quantum holographic hard drive”, the DNA serving in a similar capacity {no pun intended} to a radio’s tuning capacitor, though incredibly more complex), the body’s bio-energy field (“Aura”, Orgone, Chi, Kundalini, Prana — whatever they choose to call it, depending upon their various backgrounds and predispositions) acts as the “antenna” (a bridge to the sub-quantum realm, where their “hard drive” is actually stored — so here, you have your “medium”, so to speak ), and, of course, the “Holographic Sub-Quantum Hard Drive” storing, not only your memories (“data”), but the “programs” that comprise your personality.
I go on from this point to explain that, while the analogy of a “hard drive” is convenient, we are not dealing with an actual physical construct, as the sub-quantum realm exists outside of space-time. I ask them to think of their individual “storage space” as “whirlpools in the river”; i.e., they have their own individual characteristics, but are “composed” of the same “substance” (again, I make clear that we are using analogy, and not speaking literally — many of these people tend to be VERY literal, as you might imagine from their professions!) as the rest of the sub-quantum realm.
In other words, their own “personal” holographic storage space, rather than being “partitioned off” from the rest of the sub-quantum realm, is actually part-and-parcel of the holographic “fabric” of the sub-quantum realm. They are able to access their “data” and “programs” strictly by virtue of their physical/energetic resonant signature (I do NOT go into the pcar (phase-conjugate-adaptive-resonance) issue, as their eyes would glass over, and I would lose them: but they can grasp resonance, and especially those familiar with signal routing through fiber-optic networks understand the concept of multiplexing, which builds a mental bridge for them to grasp this concept as applied to consciousness), which is matched to their “hard drive”.
This explains Jung’s “Collective Unconscious”, and the “Akashic Records” of the ancient Tibetans. Further, we can see how supposed “reincarnation” functions: I make the analogy to cordless phones/cell phones and “crossed signals”, due to a crowded frequency spectrum — something with which they are all familiar. While everyone’s physical/energetic signature is unique, there are bound to be certain “overlaps”, which allow a person living NOW to “tap into” the “quantum hard drive” of someone who is “dead”. i.e., that person’s “data” and “programs” still exist in the sub-quantum realm, and are thus available to be “tapped”, providing that one can “get into resonance”, or “tune” to that person’s signature.
Mediums do this voluntarily (the trend seems to be to call such people “channelers” these days), while in cases of reincarnation (and, at the extreme end, “possession”), there is a certain amount of resonance purely by chance. Incidentally, this also explains “genetic memory”: as the DNA is so instrumental in the “tuning” process, it can be understood how people of close genetic relation, thus sharing elements of their DNA, may “tap into” ancestors’ memories.
Telepathy can be similarly understood: when two people develop a close rapport, a “resonance” between themselves, their resonant signatures “overlap” to a certain extent, allowing for the “sharing” of “data”, and, in some cases, even their “programs” (personality traits, etc.).
With the audience having “followed the bouncing ball” thus far, and grasped via these analogies the basic concepts I am trying to convey, I inevitably get a question regarding “Astral Projection”/”Remote Viewing” and/or the “Near death Experience” (NDE). Usually, a brief review of the non-local nature of any realm outside of space-time is sufficient to answer questions about remote sensing: since space and time are illusory constructs confined to “space-time”, and the “mind” exists in the sub-quantum realm, OUTSIDE of space-time... (there is usually some “forehead slapping” at this point — in most cases I don’t have to go much further on that issue...).
With NDE, however, I have to get a bit more in-depth. Since the physical body is a tuning mechanism, and does not immediately decay upon physical death, the tuning apparatus remains relatively intact for a period of time. And, if we look at the work of Wilhelm Reich, explaining the energy dynamics of “Orgone” (Chi, Prana, etc.), we can see that the Bio-energy field (“Aura”, etc.) will remain coherent and attached to the physical body for a period of time as well. Thus, our receiver, antenna, and of course, the “sub-quantum hard drive”, are all intact for quite a while after death. During this time, the consciousness may de-focus from space-time, as can also happen during “Astral Travel” and/or “Remote Viewing”...and if the body is revivified, these memories may be retained, and a NDE is then reported.
At this point, questions usually lean toward the more esoteric aspect of Astral Travel/NDE, and the fact that certain constructs seem to be reported by various people: “Christians” may see “Jesus”, or other appropriate religious figures, while Buddhists see Buddha, etc., etc. I explain the “form follows energy” principle, and show that the more mental energy is given to a construct, whether in THIS “space-time” realm, or any other, the more “real” it becomes.
Thus, with BILLIONS of human minds lending energy to their various belief systems, it should come as no surprise that people find what they EXPECT to find in the NDE state. I even posit that space-time itself may be the result of a group of entities in the sub-quantum realm having “concocted” space-time, in much the same way that programmers of Virtual Reality systems create “worlds”, either for entertainment, or for university educational programs.
After some metaphysical meanderings along this line, I usually re-cap the main points of the “Holographic Quantum-Mind” theory, and send them on their way. All in all, I have found that people take to this VERY well...almost as if, on some level, they know it to be true...and while most cannot hope to ever comprehend the details of the high-end mathematics and physics involved, they grasp it very well at the intuitive level.
(c) by Louis Malklaka
http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/2010/09/brief-explanation-of-holographic.html
Interstellar Meditation, Walter Bruneel, 2007
(c) 2011, Imperial & Royal Dragon Court; All Rights Reserved
Iona Miller, Editor
Iona Miller, Editor