Pyramid Quest (30 page)

Consider the experience of Drunvalo Melchizedek, a student of sacred geometry, who describes his encounter in the Great Pyramid in the second volume of his 2000 work
The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life.
Melchizedek experienced his vision not alone in the King’s Chamber like Napoleon and Brunton but with a group of colleagues in the Subterranean Chamber (which Melchizedek refers to as the “Well”) and the Blind Passage off the Subterranean Chamber. When Melchizedek crawled into the Blind Passage, he became immediately aware of the mass of stone surrounding him and, with his flashlight turned off, of the absolute darkness enclosing him. Like Brunton, fear rose up, a loathing of poisonous snakes that could be working their cool, serpentine coils along that blacked-out passage. In conversation with Thoth and repeating the seven Atlantean words the ancient god had given him, Melchizedek realized that the passage was now filled with light. He could see the others who had come in with him, even though none of them had turned on their flashlights.

After an hour, the group had to leave. Back outside the pyramid, they began to talk. “We exchanged stories later, and it was clear that each person had a different experience—depending on what they needed, we assumed. My sister’s story was extremely interesting to me. She talked about how she stood up in this little tunnel and was greeted by these very tall beings who took her into a special room for her initiation,” Melchizedek wrote. “Life is more than we know.”
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Another experience comes from the musician Paul Horn, a renowned jazz flautist who has played with everyone from Duke Ellington to Ravi Shankar. In the mid-1960s Horn embarked on a spiritual path that took him repeatedly to India. There he made a solo flute recording at night in the Taj Mahal and turned it into the hit album
Inside
(1968), which has since sold over 1 million copies and launched what is now known as New Age music.

The success of that album prompted Horn’s music publisher to send him to Egypt to make a similar recording inside the Great Pyramid. One of the books Horn read before leaving was Brunton’s
Search in Secret Egypt.
He also learned from an amateur Egyptologist that striking the coffer in the King’s Chamber would give off an A note exactly two cycles lower than the standard western A.

Before playing and recording, Horn and his engineer performed a puja ceremony, a Hindu ritual for teaching meditation that is meant to eliminate the teacher’s ego. He then meditated, and heard distant voices, “ ‘like angels softly chanting from far, far away.’”
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Horn’s engineer heard the same voices. Then, tapping the coffer, Horn heard that A note, exactly two cycles flat, and tuned his instrument to it. He wanted to be sure his music fit in.

Horn felt he was playing in a way dictated by the place.

At first glance, the experiences of Paul Brunton, Drunvalo Melchizedek, and Paul Horn have little in common. The one traveled out of his body into the zone of the undying. The next chatted with Thoth and saw darkness give way to spiritual light. The third played a jam session with ancient echoes. Yet, if you look a little deeper, something similar was happening in each case. All three had the experience of losing control and merging with what they perceived as the energy and atmosphere of the Great Pyramid. And each had a vision that made sense within the terms of his own background. Brunton’s experience told him to turn inward, a path he was already following as a practitioner of Hindu meditation and yoga. Melchizedek had yet another conversation with his personal Egyptian god and went through a revelation of illumination. Horn discovered a music he didn’t know he had, a music that told people what the Great Pyramid felt like and transferred that experience so powerfully that some of his listeners felt as if they had been there. The details of each vision differ; their impact and import for the people who experienced them do not.

Brunton, Melchizedek, and Horn represent three of many similar experiences related to the Great Pyramid that are found in the literature. Some of these are ostensibly factual, while others are speculative or couched in fiction—but each reiterates a core theme: the symbolic importance of the Great Pyramid. For example:

However one may view these disparate writers and their work, whether with acceptance, interest, or skepticism, they each point to the same conclusion: the Great Pyramid has a profound and deep significance for humankind.

No doubt spiritual experiences like the ones Brunton, Melchizedek, Horn, and others describe spring at least in part from the dreaming portion of the mind. A dream, however, is not a hallucination. As we know from the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud and the even more significant studies of Carl Jung, dreaming represents the emergence of an aspect of the mind that knows, experiences, and feels in ways different from waking life. Dreaming is not so much unreal as a fresh take on reality.

Many ancient and earth-based cultures considered dreams and visions as one and the same, and treated them as messages from the gods and goddesses. In the Book of Genesis, for example, a dream warns Joseph in advance of seven years of abundant harvest followed by seven years of famine. In yet another dream, Jacob wrestles an angel and sees a ladder reaching up into heaven. In the Christian gospels, angels in dreams tell the magi to avoid returning to the murderous King Herod on their return trip from Bethlehem and order Joseph to flee with Mary and the infant Jesus to safety in Egypt. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
are filled with portentous dreams that have a way of predicting the future, often in strange symbolic ways. And Black Elk’s visionary dream played a role in shaping the history of the Lakota before and after the battle of Little Big Horn.

Dreams, or visions, have something important to say. And the place where the dream or vision occurs can be a vital part of the substance of the dream or vision. Clearly, Brunton, Melchizedek, and Horn all felt that they were drawing on some energy or power inherent in the Great Pyramid. Although each had an experience that made sense in terms of the internal vocabulary he brought to the Great Pyramid, the experiences were specific to that structure. Elsewhere, they would have been different.

An interesting line of scientific research conducted in the School of Engineering /Applied Science at Princeton University provides a measure of how important place can be to experiences people describe as spiritual or religious. This research makes use of a device called a random event generator (REG). A REG uses a random physical process like radioactive decay to generate random numbers or random events. Developed for cryptography—where unwitting patterns can give away even a clever code—the REG has been adopted by the Princeton researchers as a way of measuring whether groups of people interacting in specific ways can shift a random series of numbers into a series with more pattern. The less random—or, conversely, the more patterned—the numbers, the stronger the energy created by the group consciousness (see further discussion in the appendices under “Selected Theories as to the Meaning and Purpose of the Great Pyramid: Site of Initiation and Sacred Mysteries”).

The REG experimenters have made measurements in a wide variety of settings and gotten interesting results. Professional talks in academic or business settings typically exhibit little or no deviation from random. But the REG showed a significant deviation from random during certain religious rites and group rituals, and even during a worldwide meditation for peace in 1997. Roger Nelson, then of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratories of Princeton University, traveled to Egypt in the 1990s with a portable REG—dubbed the FieldREG—and looked at the effects of focused group exercises in both various places in Egypt and at ancient sacred sites, such as the inner sanctums of Egyptian temples and the interior chambers of the pyramids. The data show that when the group engaged in communal spiritual activity, such as meditation or chanting in a mundane place like an airport or a sail repair shop, results deviated somewhat from random, but not enough to be statistically significant. In notable tourist sites that lack general religious meaning, as opposed to specific meaning for perhaps a certain pharaoh, such as Tutankhamen’s treasure room or the tomb of Ramesses IV, chanting or meditation produced results that showed still less randomness, yet not enough to achieve statistic significance. That came only at sacred sites, such as the Great Pyramid, the temple of Hathor in Dendera, and the Great Sphinx. The sacred sites alone, without group activity, produced results in the same range as group activity in notable tourist sites. According to Nelson’s studies, the most striking deviation from random came from group activity at sacred sites. It took both chanting or meditation, and the influence of the sacred site, to produce a significantly more patterned series of events from the FieldREG.

Of course, a single series of measurements is hardly definitive, and it would need to be replicated by other researchers in many other settings to be fully accepted as valid. Still, it is extremely interesting that the FieldREG results provide a measure for a type of religious experience in a sacred site that many people, including Napoleon, Brunton, Melchizedek, and Horn, have reported.

Widely considered the greatest scholar of comparative religion in the twentieth century, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) spent his life probing the nature of the human impulse toward spirituality and religion. In his fascinating book
The Sacred and the Profane
(1937), Eliade details how a sacred space, like the Taj Mahal or the Great Pyramid, differs from a profane one, like the toolshed out back or your neighbor’s garage. The profane space is built for some simple functional reason, like keeping hammers, saws, and automobiles out of the rain and snow. A sacred space may have practical uses, such as a burial ground or a communal gathering place, but what dictates its shape, form, and fundamental use is the intention to replicate the cosmos and thereby capture its sacredness.

A writer from a very different background than Eliade’s, Manly P. Hall (1901-1990) made a similar point in his analysis of the Great Pyramid’s internal passages. A Canadian who lived most of his life in Los Angeles, Hall began his career on Wall Street. There he witnessed something that changed his path: a man despondent over investment losses taking his own life. Realizing that everything was much less than it was cracked up to be, Hall entered upon a search for meaning. Largely self-taught, thanks to the bounty of the New York City Public Library and his ability to aquire then at affordable prices what are now rare and costly volumes, he wrote a book that is popularly known as
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
(first published in 1928) to codify the results of his quest and pull together the most unusual aspects of myth, religion, and philosophy. In the course of covering an extraordinary range of material, Hall looked at ancient Egypt and the Great Pyramid. “Much of the information concerning the rituals of the higher degrees of the Egyptian Mysteries has been gleaned from an examination of the chambers and passages in which the initiations were given,” Hall wrote.
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Hall was making the same point as Eliade—and, even in their own curious ways, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Robert Menzies, Morton Edgar, and David Davison. The key to understanding the purpose and meaning of the Great Pyramid lies in understanding the sacred import of its shape.