From Atlantis to the Sphinx (42 page)

What is so important about
The Dance of Life
is that it makes us aware that the ‘other’ way of perceiving the world is not some vague and ‘occult’ concept, but a reality that can be studied scientifically. Hall’s colleague William Condon came to this conclusion via a study of philosophy—specifically Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl was concerned to deny the view that has become a cornerstone of western philosophy: that meaning is ‘in the mind’. Condon wrote: ‘There is a genuine coherence among the things we perceive and think about, and this coherence is not something we create, but something we discover.’

Condon got hold of a 4½-second clip of film made by Gregory Bateson of a family eating dinner, and realised that by studying it closely, he could discover all kinds of things about the family and its relationships. He was so fascinated that he spent a year and a half running the film over and over again until he wore out 130 copies of it.

Hall pursued the same method. He shot some footage of a film of the Indian market in the plaza in Santa Fe, then studied it frame by frame, astonished by how much it revealed of the different attitudes of the Indians, the Spanish-Americans and the Anglo-Americans. One 30-second shot of a middle-class American woman talking to a Pueblo Indian woman behind a stall was a mini-drama in itself, as the American woman held out her arm, her finger pointed like a rapier, in the face of the Indian, until the Indian turned her head away, an unmistakeable look of disgust on her face. Later, Hall asked unprepared students to, watch the footage without telling them what to look for. Usually it took days, while the bewildered and bored student stared at the film in a state of awful frustration—until, suddenly, it broke through. Once it had broken through, the student could discern endless depths of meaning in the film. Like Crowley’s ‘student’ Jane Wolff, a new level of perception had suddenly emerged.

Hall points out that this kind of perception is natural to Japanese culture, and can be found in the Zen tradition, which attempts to create insight by the same method of ‘frustration’. It is not simply a new level of perception that emerges, but a new level of doing and being. Eugen Herrigel describes in
Zen in the Art of Archery
how his teacher taught him to allow ‘it’—the ‘other self’—to fire the arrow. Herrigel’s teacher fired his arrow down a long, dark hall, with only a candle illuminating the target, and still split a target arrow in two.

St Augustine said: ‘What is time? When I do not think about the question, I know the answer.’ This is essentially the principle of Zen, and the principle that underlies the lives of the Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo and Quiché described by Hall.

In the last section of the book, Hall speaks about Cro-Magnon man, and about Alexander Marshack’s discoveries of the ‘moon-marks’ on the 35,000-year-old bone, as well as about the stone circles studied by Thom and Gerald Hawkins. And it is at that point, as he speaks of the essential
continuity
of their culture and that of the Native American Indians, that it becomes clear that he has in mind a completely different kind of evolution from Darwin’s survival of the fittest.

In one of the most important pages of
The Dance of Life
, Hall describes how one of his students decided to film children in a playground. To avoid making them self-conscious, the student filmed them from an abandoned car. When he viewed the result, it at first seemed disappointing—just children playing. But after repeated viewings at different speeds—which was part of the technique taught by Hall—he observed that one lively little girl seemed to be affecting everybody else in the playground. As she skipped and danced and twirled, her rhythms seemed to be conveyed to every group she approached.

After watching it dozens of times, the student began to sense an underlying beat, as if watching a kind of ballet. Moreover, the beat struck him as familiar. He called on a friend who was a rock enthusiast, and asked him to watch the film. After a while, the friend took a cassette from a nearby shelf. When played alongside the film, the children seemed to be dancing to the rock music, as if it had been specially written for them. ‘Not a beat, not a frame, was out of sync.’ What had happened, Hall thinks, is that the children were dancing and playing to some basic musical beat of life, which the composer had also ‘plucked out of the air of the time’. Which is why Hall uses for this chapter the title of the whole book, ‘The Dance of Life’. There is, he believes, some basic rhythm of life—a quite definite rhythm, which could be defined in musical terms—to which our modern left-brain awareness leaves us deaf.

Now this, clearly, is what Schwaller is talking about in the chapter of
Sacred Science
called ‘Magic, Sorcery, Medicine’. ‘The higher animals, as well as the human animal, are totally bathed in a psychic atmosphere which establishes the bond between the individuals, a bond as explicit as the air which is breathed by all living things... Every living being is in contact with all the rhythms and harmonies of all the energies in his universe.’

But is there any way to turn this rather vague and abstract statement into something more concrete and down to earth? After all, harmonies and rhythms can be measured in the physicist’s laboratory, and described in terms of amplitude or wavelength. Can we not be more precise about them?

This is a question which, almost by accident, came to preoccupy an ex-advertising salesman named Michael Hayes.

Ever since late childhood—spent in Penzance, Cornwall, where his mother owned a hotel—Hayes had been preoccupied with the question of why we are alive, and what we are supposed to do now we are here.

In 1971, at the age of 22, he went to live in Mashad, Iran, where his brother was in the senior management of an international trading company. These were the years before the Shah was deposed, when Iran was still swarming with hippies. During his seven years in Iran, Mike Hayes—as he prefers to be known—took the opportunity to travel to India, Pakistan, Kathmandu and Afghanistan. It was during this time that he was introduced by a hippie friend to the ideas of Gurdjieff—via Ouspensky’s
In Search of the Miraculous—
and began to think more purposefully about the basic problems of human nature.

In Mashad he had been deeply impressed by the great mosque of Imam Reza. It was obvious from the sheer number of worshippers, and their devoutness, that for them religion was a living reality, as it had been for the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages. And travelling in India and Pakistan, were he had a chance to come into contact with Hinduism and Buddhism, he again had this sense of the tremendous vitality of the religious tradition. It took him by surprise for, apart from hymns at school and an occasional visit to church, his childhood had not been particularly religious. The sheer
size
of these religious territories impressed him, and the effect of the religious founders on their followers. ‘... I decided that there was very definitely something
supernatural
about all this. Whoever they were, these “saviours” of mankind certainly knew how to make their presences felt.’

Back in England, he felt that it was time to catch up on his education, which he could now see had been less than thorough. He signed on for a course in extramural studies at Leicester University, and it was there that he attended some classes on DNA and the genetic code.

DNA is, of course, a thread-like material in living cells which carries genetic information, such as whether a baby is born with brown or blond hair, blue or brown eyes, and so on. It transmits this information by means of a code, which was finally cracked in the early 1950s by James Watson and Francis Crick. They showed that the DNA molecule has a spiral structure, and looks rather like two spiral ladders held together by rungs made of four chemical ‘bases’ called adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. These bases are strung together in what looks like a random order—perhaps AGTTCGGAA—but it is the order of these bases that makes the difference between brown hair and blond hair, etc. When a cell splits into two—which is how it reproduces—the ‘ladder’ comes apart, and each half attracts to itself various molecules of the bases that are floating free, until there are now two identical ladders. This is how living things reproduce themselves.

It was when he learned that 64 is the number in which the four bases can form into triplet units called RNA codons that Mike Hayes had a vague sense of
d
é
jà vu
. The number 64 awoke vague memories. The same thing happened when he learned that these codons correspond with the twenty amino acids necessary for the manufacture of protein—but since there are also two which are the coded instruction for ‘start’ and ‘stop’, the basic number is 22. This again seemed vaguely familiar.

Then he remembered where he had come across the number 64—in the
I-Ching
, the Chinese Book of Changes, which is used as an oracle. And the basic unit of the
I-Ching
is, of course, a ‘triplet’ of lines, either broken or unbroken, corresponding to the principles of Yin and Yang, which might be regarded as darkness and light, or the male and female principles, or the moon and the sun.

Hayes recalled that when he had studied the
I-Ching
in his hippie days, he had wondered vaguely why the number of its ‘hexagrams’ (each one made up of two trigrams) should be 64—eight times eight—and not seven times seven or nine times nine. And now he learned that each of the triplet units of RNA links up with another triplet in the DNA molecule. So the ‘double helix’ of information in the heart of all reproductive cells is made up from 64 hexagrams, as in the
I-Ching.
Could this really be just coincidence?

Since his extramural course left him with time to kill, he began looking more closely into this ‘coincidence’. Of course, it seemed unlikely that Fu Hsi, the legendary creator of the
I-Ching
, had stumbled upon some kind of mystical insight into the ‘code of life’. But it seemed worth investigating.

If it was not coincidence, then there should be eight trigrams hidden in DNA. And when he learned that this was so, Mike Hayes began to feel that he had stumbled upon something that could be very important indeed.

Then he recalled where he had seen the number 22. This was nothing to do with the
I-Ching
, but with Pythagoras, the Greek ‘father of mathematics’. The Pythagoreans regarded the number 22 as sacred because it represented three musical octaves, and the Pythagoreans saw music as one of the basic secrets of the universe. Of course, an ordinary musical scale has seven notes—doh, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti—and a final doh of the next octave completes it and begins the next octave. But three octaves—and the Pythagoreans also attached a mystical significance to the number three—begins on doh, and ends on another doh 22 notes later.

Mike Hayes had played the guitar since his early teens, so knew a certain amount of musical theory. In the quest that followed, it proved to be of central importance.

But at this early stage, in the late seventies, a suspicion was beginning to form in his mind: that these numbers involved in the DNA code might express some basic law of the universe. He was in the position of Edward T. Hall’s student who realised that the children in the playground were dancing to some basic rhythm of life, a rhythm that is totally unsuspected by the rest of us. Mike Hayes came to believe that rhythm is basically musical in nature. And this, in turn, meant that he was a kind of Pythagorean.

Pythagoreanism is sometimes called ‘number mysticism’, and Pythagoras attached great importance to the numbers three and seven, and to the laws governing musical notes. Gurdijieff had also spoken of the ‘Law of Three’ and the ‘Law of Seven’. The Law of Three states that all creation involves a ‘third force’. We are inclined to think in terms of dualities: positive and negative, male and female, good and evil. Gurdjieff—who derived the idea from the Sankhya philosophy of India—stated that, instead, we should try to think in terms of three. Positive and negative merely counterbalance one another, but if anything is to come of them, they must be given a push by a third force. An obvious example would be the catalyst in a chemical reaction. Oxygen and sulphur dioxide do not naturally combine; but if passed over hot platinised asbestos, they form sulphur trioxide, from which sulphuric acid is made. The platinised asbestos remains unchanged.

Another simple example would be a zip. The left and right side of the zip need the fastener in the middle to make them combine.

But perhaps Gurdjieff’s most interesting illustration is of someone who wishes to change, to achieve greater self-knowledge, and in whom the forces of laziness act as a counterbalance. In this case, the breakthrough can occur through
knowledge—
a perception of
how
it can be achieved, which brings a new drive and optimism. In other words, the third force is a kind of kick, an outside force that alters the balance of a situation, breaks a deadlock.

The Law of Seven is illustrated by the seven notes of the musical scale; here the final doh somehow draws them together so they can move on to a higher octave. Again, the seven colours of the spectrum are ‘drawn together’ into white light.

When Mike Hayes began to study the major world religions, he was struck by how often the numbers three, seven and 22 recur. The legendary founder of Hermetic philosophy—identified with the Egyptian God Thoth—is known as Thrice Great Hermes. The number pi—the relation of the diameter of a circle to its circumference—which was supposed to have been discovered by Pythagoras, is 22 divided by seven.

In the story of Noah’s Ark, Noah is told by God to build an ark and take on board two pairs of every animal and bird. After seven days it begins to rain. When the flood starts to subside, Noah sends a raven to see what is happening. It fails to return, and after seven days, he sends a dove, which is unable to find land. After another seven days, Noah sends the dove again, which returns with an olive branch in its beak (the olive branch which has become the symbol of the most important of third forces—reconciliation). After another seven days he releases the dove again, and this time it fails to return, having found land.