The Bigger Picture....
By Glenn Kreisberg
These days, contemplating the origins of civilization, modern human thought and culture, requires nothing less than a major shift in our way of thinking regarding from where we all came.
The paradigm is shifting rapidly.
Thanks to authors and researchers such as Graham Hancock, John Anthony West and Robert Schoch, the dogmatic and impenetrable walls of academia are beginning to crumble under the weight of evidence coming to light that, indisputably refute the current explanations for the earliest chapters of the Human story. Sumer, in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, is out and the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley in India and the Canal site in the Supe Valley of Peru, are in as the latest candidates for the oldest civilization yet discovered on Earth. And, recent finding in the Bay of Cambay off India’s west coast point to evidence of cities and civilizations that are far older. What the oceans give up to archaeologists over the next century will be truly astounding I believe.
What is some of the new evidence you may ask. Well, consider the Conference on Precession and Ancient Knowledge (CPAK).
CPAK is a yearly academic conference which brings together some of the leading thinkers in Archaeoastronomy and Esoteric Archaeology. Hancock, West and Schoch are regular participants. The conference allows for presenters to discuss and examine evidence on the topics of ancient cultures, mythology, anomalous science, and the cyclical theory of civilization, examining their relationship to the observable known as precession, or the Precession of the Equinox.
All ancient cultures possessed certain myths, legends and folklore that spoke of the ages of humankind: The ancient kingdoms of Egypt tied to the Zodiac, the Indian Vedic concept of Yugas, Plato and the early Chinese had the Great Year, and the Central American Mayan had the Long Count calendar. All these cultures and more have in common the equivalent of a mythological Iron, Bronze, Silver and Golden Age for their people, coinciding with the passage of time and the movements of celestial objects.
In myths and legends, The Golden Age of a society is always marked by a high level of conscious enlightenment, peace, and prosperity. The Indian Yugas describe our current time as the end of a dark age in which shallow, superficial materialism rules. I’d say they nailed it. However, according to the Indian Yugas, since we have digressed and have passed the extreme lower end of the consciousness cycle, we have now entered a slow but gradual rise to an age of greater enlightenment, leading again eventually, to a new Golden Age for Human Beings.
Could there be more to this than mere myth?
At CPAK, It was shown and demonstrated by several researchers that the ages of man, ubiquitous with ancient cultures worldwide, are directly related to and divisible by the intervals of time related to the cycle of precession which lasts approximately 26,000 years. This is either an amazing coincidence or the Ancients were far more adept at math and astronomy than given credit for.
The mysterious ancient stone circles or henge’s scattered all over Europe and the World for that matter, are a stark reminder of the importance the Ancients held in calculating and tracking precession. Recent evidence shows this was a function of many of these mysterious, yet sacred sites. In Hamlets Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth (David R. Godine, 1969) authors Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend postulated that precession was the single greatest preoccupation of all ancient cultures. And encoded in their myths, legends and sacred structures are cosmological clues to celestial events that affected their lives. So, in these ancient sacred sites and in the lost lore connected to their creators, there is apparently a deeper hidden message and lesson for us to learn.
From the childhood game of telephone, we all know that messages can get greatly distorted over time and distance. Many times the original message eventually becomes indiscernible. Logic dictates the longer the time elapsed, the greater chance the original message is distorted or lost. Considering this, do we really know what was and is the true message of Stonehenge or of the Great Sphinx or the Pyramids. If these were great memorials, what great, epic event were they memorializing; surely not the life and death of a single man but more likely the death of an entire civilization. Could the message and event be so important that Humankinds very existence depends upon us interpreting that message correctly?
Some, such as Schoch and West, believe this to be the case.
Someone once said science is like a game of darts. The surface of the dartboard, albeit perhaps infinite, represents all the science there is to know. Each theory confirmed through experiment and scientific method, represents a dart hitting its mark on the dartboard of science. While the surface of the board may have many darts in it, most of it, as of yet, remains untouched by a dart. And of course, sometimes one dart thrown may knock out a previously thrown dart from its apparently secure location. In other words, there is still a great deal of true science yet to be discovered and confirmed and perhaps some ideas that may need to be unlearned. Above all, the perspective with which we search is perhaps the key to what we discover.
An important lesson may be taken from the device known as the Antikythera Mechanism. This device has been in the news lately as in recent weeks it’s been subjected to the latest in resonant imaging technology. The result confirmed the astounding authenticity of this ancient artifact. The device, discovered over 100 years ago on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, has been found by archeologists to be 2000 years old. Because the device suggests that the ancient Greeks had the mechanical sophistication of 18th century Swiss watchmakers, historians and scholars have generally ignored it. Could this device be evidence that a period of technological devolution, as a general trend, took place over many thousand of years in fields such as mathematics, mapmaking, mechanics and more? Can the same claim be made for astronomy or precession theory? Was much more known, much earlier on, than what most current evidence supports and the academic world is willing to accept? The truth is absolutely much older than we think.
The question whether civilization is far older than currently accepted is an important one to consider. If civilization is linked to some great celestial cycle, discovering the context in which we fit into that cycle may be the single most influential factor in how we see ourselves as a culture and people and what we aspire to. Is evolution truly as linear as we believe or is it superimposed upon the wheel of a celestial mill that sometimes grinds out salt and other time’s gold?
Nothing less than a major realignment in the approach to these mysteries needs to occur in order for a full debate and examination of the facts and theories to take place within the established academic community. It may prove a difficult struggle, for as the clear line between science and ancient wisdom begins to blur, with a new science of quantum spirituality eventually emerging, the forces of resistance to such ideas will intensify. But, the fact is the Antikythera Mechanism does exist, as do many other anomalies of science and history. From its day, nothing like it would be built for another thousand years, but most certainly at least a thousand years of technology led up to it. Its purpose, it turns out, was to accurately calculate the Sun, Moon and planets position within the Zodiac; in other words to calculate precession. No, it does not fit into the context of established history, but to not consider it as part of a larger picture, that is far from complete, does a great disservice to our pursuit of truth and knowledge.