Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (15 page)

13
R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz’s Magnum Opus

The Keys to Understanding the Wisdom of the Ancients Have Been Preserved

Joseph Ray, Ph.D.

F
rom time to time, significant events occur unbeknownst to virtually everyone. Great discoveries, formidable inventions, and even profound legacies have been delivered to humanity in relative obscurity and sometimes against its unconscious collective will. Such an event occurred in late 1998 with the publication of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz’s greatest work,
The Temple of Man
.

The Temple of Man
is an accomplishment of truly Herculean proportions. Nothing written in the past two hundred years, with the exception of only one book, even approaches it in enormity of purpose, scope, subject matter, majesty, and profundity. It is also physically enormous, as well as beautiful, and to read it properly is a year’s commitment. To comprehend it and finally to understand it may require additional years of effort, rereading, pondering, and, most significantly,
revelation
.

One needs to learn to read this book and then immerse oneself in it. Were one to do this, and assuming diligence, sincerity, determination, and some ingenuity by the reader, the outcome toward which all human life is aimed, the evolution of consciousness, is ensured. “Consciousness cannot evolve unconsciously,” said G. I. Gurdjieff. His great work,
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson,
conveys much of the occult and profound teachings set forth in
The Temple of Man,
requires similar effort, and can exert a similar effect upon the reader.

Essential in both is the reader’s open-mindedness and state of receptivity, produced by consciously suspending mental reactions until the teachers (the ancient sages whose mode of thought is being transmitted) have completed their work and the transcribers of this knowledge, the authors, have exhausted their understanding.

Every man who attempts to fathom the profound expresses himself about it uniquely. This includes his turns of phrase, the ordering of his thoughts, and the very manner in which he thinks (by hops, leaps and bounds, one rung at a time, or in a direct line). To become his student, which is to say to place oneself in a state of maximum sensitivity to the ideas he expresses, one must familiarize oneself with his turns of phrase and mode of expression. To the extent that one becomes able to think, reason, and ponder in a fashion similar to one’s teacher, a psychological fusion can occur. This fusion, by a sort of inner “resonance” in the reader-student, metaphorically speaking shakes loose the embedded knowledge from its innate repository, the “Intelligence of the Heart” and a fresh understanding emerges.

The more subtle, oblique, and ineffable knowledge is, the less suited is the cerebral intelligence to it and the more it will react against it. “Knowledge (or even elements of the knowledge) cannot be conveyed through writing alone; the symbolism of the image is indispensable,” Schwaller de Lubicz says. The “symbolique,” then, is “the concrete image of a
synthesis
that cannot be expressed in time . . .” and it is these
images
that evoke the synthesis. It may sound awkward, but the process is straightforward. True symbols appeal to the Intelligence of the Heart, where they draw knowledge from it. Ordinary language and the thought expressed in it, the currencies of cerebral intelligence, are ill suited to this knowledge and always distort it.

However, not only the pharaonic mode of thought but its mode of perception, as well, differed from our own. We are, says Schwaller de Lubicz, the victims of our own “mechanistic mentality” and as such suffer from a materialistic misunderstanding of nature. (It is worth noting that, ever since Schwaller de Lubicz’s time, materialism has further extended its grip on human thought. Today, despite inaccuracy and verbal inefficiency, practically everything is described in terms of “amount”—e.g., a “fair amount” of: knowledge, accuracy, time, skill, speed, and/or any psychological resource. Not everything is quantity or volume!)

To become adept in the pharaonic mode requires effort, suffering, and experiment. Two shorter works by Schwaller de Lubicz,
Nature Word
and
The Temple in Man,
are desirable precursors to
The Temple of Man,
either new or in rereading. Casual readers need not be deterred either, for they may discover themselves being hooked by the beauty, interconnectedness, and depth of these extraordinary teachings of the ancient sages. This knowledge is for those willing to struggle, and Schwaller de Lubicz warns against concluding “that the ancients meant to say something that we understand; rather one should try to find out why they expressed themselves thus.”

The Temple of Man
is not a straightforward presentation of ancient teachings. Nor is it Schwaller de Lubicz’s own path, recounted in somewhat objectified form but based upon his personal discoveries and illuminations. It is both and much more. Schwaller de Lubicz assimilated what the ancients taught: He allowed himself to be
affected
(impacted emotionally) by the symbolic language transcribed into the Temple of Luxor. This language transcends ordinary language, is vital and not dead, and thus is the only means of transmitting the ineffable to future humanity free of distortion.

The Temple of Luxor is a pedagogical device, built to embody and encode knowledge through the use of a variety of subtle cues (e.g., the representation of an incorrect anatomical detail such as two left hands, a missing detail present on the other side of a wall). Painstakingly, the ancients integrated occult knowledge into visual, auditory, conceptual, and architectural symbolic expressions. In so doing, they specifically intended to bypass cerebral intelligence
.

Their goal was to evoke from the student the sublime, evanescent knowledge they knew to be embedded in the student’s Intelligence of the Heart. This
true
education, involving experience, emotional impact, and work (action), causes the student to
become
the knowledge, as opposed to remembering something. As Gurdjieff said, “A man is what he knows.”

True education is an end in itself, yet is also a means of consciousness evolution, for it incorporates its own form of suffering.
The Temple of Man
can teach the reader by means of Schwaller de Lubicz’s experience rendered as his understanding. Our experience will be less rich, but understanding can develop because the ideas themselves vivify.

How will the “scholars” within the Egyptological establishment react to this seminal work? A handful may peruse it; many will avoid (i.e., feign ignorance of)
The Temple of Man.
Some may describe the work as a concoction of Schwaller de Lubicz’s fertile imagination. In this regard, it needs to be stated: No mere mortal ever, in history or in the future, could have an intelligence so vast, an imagination so fecund, and an integrative capacity so complete as to have made up, somehow or other, the contents of
The Temple of Man.

It proves itself in its very unimaginability. Moreover, many of the teachings and unifying conceptions in it can be found in sources entirely independent of ancient Egyptian thought. Consider the “science of correspondences”—knowledge that underlies the ancients’ selection of symbols.

Swedenborg, who lived during the eighteenth century and never visited Egypt, wrote at length on the subject of “correspondences,” and it became the title of one of his books. A section of
Heaven and Hell
is devoted to the subject. “The most ancient people, who were celestial men, thought from correspondence itself, as the angels do”; “The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world . . .”; “the knowledge of correspondences is now wholly lost.”

Indeed, the seminal Anthropocosmic principle, upon which correspondence depends and that underlies pharaonic teaching, is considered extensively by Swedenborg, who described the universe as “The Grand Man” and humanity as this in miniature. Schwaller de Lubicz uses the phrase “Colossus of the Universe” as he confirms and amplifies all that Swedenborg told us in 1758.

The Temple of Man
is organized into six parts. It contains forty-four chapters and is presented in two large volumes. Chapter 27 onward concerns the particular architecture of the Temple of Luxor: These chapters contain 101 plates and about a third of the book’s three hundred figures.

These latter chapters include commentaries on the plates and their subject matter. Occasionally, the style of presentation varies, as required by the topic. The earlier chapters form a basis for many of the later discussions. Some are difficult and some possibly are of lesser interest. When I felt that rereading a chapter would facilitate the growth of my understanding of it, I did so immediately. One must not be deterred by an apparent opacity of the text and the ideas therein that may be beyond present comprehension: Mental alchemy can and will occur.

Schwaller de Lubicz warns that “effort” is required. This effort is a form of suffering. And the ancient sages stated clearly that suffering is the engine for the evolution of consciousness: “It is suffering that causes the widening of consciousness,” where suffering “is understood as a profound experience brought about by the conflict of consciousness, not as sorrow.” Acquiring just some of the pharaonic mentality is suffering itself as the modern, “mechanistic mentality presents a formidable barrier,” in Schwaller de Lubicz’s words. He describes the nature of cerebral intelligence, ordinary thought, as constrictive and “centripetal.”

Indeed, most of us live within the cage of ordinary consciousness established and maintained by the cerebral intelligence. Conversely, pharaonic mentality, the “noncerebral” Intelligence of the Heart, is expansive, synthetic (as opposed to analytic), intuitive, noncomparative, direct, and innate, and thus evoked. Getting there is one’s personal death and life story: Suffer gladly.

Schwaller de Lubicz wrote
The Temple of Man
“. . . first to show the means of expression used by the ancients to transmit knowledge,” and “. . . second, to present an outline of the doctrine of the Anthropocosmos, the guide to the way of thinking of the sages.” To fulfill this goal required the consideration and discussion of subjects seldom seen in occult, esoteric, or spiritual writings: Anthropocosmos, Pharaonic Calculation, Cosmic Principle of Volume, The Covered Temple, The Head, Crossing, The Knees, Receiving and Giving are examples.

One must acquire a good feeling for Elements, Consciousness, and Irreducible Magnitudes, as well as Symbolique, to begin to fully appreciate all of these latter chapters. This may take some time. As mentioned, however, even casual readers—that is, nonstudents—will find wise statements everywhere, conjectures verified now by time (this book is more than forty years old), and remarkable insights: The pages contain much spiritual food, some of which may be ingested raw.

“The Anthropocosmic doctrine [holds that] each plant and animal species represents a stage in the evolution of consciousness . . .” Man is a microcosm of the macrocosm. “Thus the Universe is incarnate in man and is nothing but potential Man, Anthropocosmos.” In this system, creation and generation are central; the forces of genesis and the moment of expansion are the subject matter.

Humanity, by the way, procreates but creates nothing. In applauding our pseudo-understanding of life because we genetically engineer a plant, clone a sheep, or grow a human pinna (ear) on a mouse’s back, we succumb to pride and self-delusion, our great foibles.