Issue 134 – JESUS & THE GNOSTICS

In This 88-page edition:

  • ANCIENT MYSTERIESJESUS & THE GNOSTICS
    The Quest for Historical Reality Takes Some Startling New Turns
    BY MARTIN RUGGLES
  • LOST HISTORY
    OAK ISLAND: THE INCA/SPANISH CONNECTION
    Following the Evidence to South America
    BY FRANK JOSEPH
  • UFOs
    ROSWELL TO THE 33RD DEGREE
    A Former Air Force UFO Investigator Makes Some Startling Observations
    BY WILLIAM B. STOECKER
  • LOST HISTORY
    DENISOVANS IN AMERICA?
    A Closer Look at DNA and the Coming of the “Thunder People”
    BY ANDREW COLLINS
  • ANCIENT MYSTERIES
    PYRAMIDS & THE GODS OF WEATHER
    An Electrifying New Take on Possible Lost Ancient Technology?
    BY KONSTANTIN BORISOV, Ph.D.
  • LOST HISTORY
    PYGMIES & DWARFS
    Is There More Truth to the Legends than We Realized?
    BY CLAUDE LECOUTEUX
  • POPULAR CULTURE
    THE MANY FACES OF “SKEPTICISM”
    Taking a Closer Look at Where All the Noise Is Coming from
    BY MICHAEL E. TYMN
  • ANCIENT MYSTERIES
    PROPHECIES AND THE THIRD TEMPLE
    Are We About Due for the Apocalypse?
    BY JONATHON PERRIN
  • ANCIENT MYSTERIES
    JESUS IN KASHMIR?
    Did the Bible Tell the Whole Story?
  • ARCHAEOLOGY
    SEARCHING FOR EGYPTIAN ORIGINS IN NIGER
    Could the “Zinder Pyramid and Sphinx” Hold Clues to Zep Tepi?
    BY ROBERT M. SCHOCH, Ph.D.
  • THE FORBIDDEN ARCHAEOLOGIST
    A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH ROBERT SALAS
    BY MICHAEL CREMO
  • ASTROLOGY
    THE “LONG ZODIAC” OF DENDERA
    Unlocking the Mysteries of Cancer
    BY JULIE LOAR
  • PUBLISHER’S LETTER
    ON THE TRAIL OF OSIRIS AND THE “FIRST TIME”
    BY J. DOUGLAS KENYON
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Jesus & The Gnostics

In November of 2018, not only did archaeologists report discovery, in the Israel desert, of a 1500-year-old painting said to…

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Atlantis & the Bible 7-PAK

Enjoy feature writings about Atlantis & the Bible in this Group 7-PAK. Contains 7 complete issues.

Includes:

  • #135 “The Way of St. James,” Steven Sora
  • #134 “Jesus & the Gnostics”, Martin Ruggles
  • #128 “The Tower of Babel Question”, Steven Sora
  • #127 “In Search of Tarshish,” Steven Sora
  • #125 “Menorah–The Akhenaten Connection, Jonathon Perrin
  • #121 “Searching for the Man Called Noah” Susan Martinez
  • #112 “Atlantis and the Book of Ezekial”, David Hershiser

Contain  7 complete issues in download PDF format

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Philip K. Dick & Reshaping the ‘Matrix’

Everything we think we know about the world and the universe in which we live, whatever we have been led to believe concerning the course of human history, could very well be completely wrong and misinformed. There is a growing belief that some unseen—unknown—intelligence or force may assist or, perhaps, hamper our daily existence and take away our free will.

The late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s gift to mankind was his ability to show us alternate realities that may or may not be parallel to our own. Where did his insight come from? Who was the muse who helped Dick lead us to ways of seeing other worlds? Dick said a kind of supernatural force entered his life and granted him the ability to live in two or more realities simultaneously.

It was Dick who first proposed the idea that what we call reality is really a computer simulation. As John Lennon wrote in the song Strawberry Fields Forever, “Nothing is real.” The movie franchise, The Matrix, is based on Dick’s ideas, though he never received any official credit for his concept from the film’s producers.

Publisher, and the book’s co-author, Timothy Green Beckley, has been experiencing many strange synchronicities since childhood. Included in the book are his memoirs of meaningful ‘coincidences,’ both happy and sad, and his belief that we are all just prisoners who are enclosed in the ‘matrix’ Dick posited.

If we accept the existence of the ‘matrix,’ does that mean that we can also escape it? Can we exert freewill in spite of the unknowably complex nature of the machinery that generates our reality? The Matrix Control System of Philip K. Dick and the Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley tries to answer that question.

The Matrix 

Philip K. Dick remains one of the most revered writers in the history of the science fiction genre. His books and stories have been translated to the big screen many times, in such megahits as Total Recall, Blade Runner, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2006, hipster director Richard Linklater did an animated version of A Scanner Darkly, and Amazon has streamed one take on Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, which takes a look at what the world might be like if the outcome of World War II had been different and the Axis powers had won.

Dick is also widely credited with originating the concept behind the movie The Matrix. Although never officially acknowledged by the filmmakers, Dick was the first modern sci-fi writer who conjectured that what we think of as everyday reality, the reality where you knock on a table and feel it in your knuckles, is not reality at all. [The basic idea has been around for millennia—at least as far back as Plato.—ED]

Instead, in the modern version, it has been proposed, we live in a computer simulation of reality where unseen puppet masters can bend us to their will at any time. This theory, this concept, has since grown in popularity in UFO and paranormal circles, due in large part to parallel statements and research from the likes of Charles Fort (who thought we were like movable pieces on a giant chest board), UFO researcher Dr. Jacques Vallee, and seminal paranormal writer John A. Keel.

The programmers/overlords “playfully” make themselves known with moments of synchronicity, with meaningful coincidences that cannot possibly have happened by mere chance. Since our lives in the matrix are all we know, it is difficult to even imagine escaping from the predestined existence that has been meted out to us.

Girding Up His Loins to Make War on ‘Reality’

Sometimes described as the Hunter Thompson (‘gonzo journalist’) of UFO and Paranormal research, Timothy Green Beckley doesn’t quite agree with the dismal, hopeless perspective of many ‘Matrix’ believers. Beckley believes, as perhaps a prisoner of war might, that it is his duty to at least try to set himself free from the arbitrary control of the program’s designers. If we can imagine freedom from the matrix, does the mere act of imagining make it possible?

Meeting the many challenges of ‘the Matrix’ is the thrust of the book. Four hundred and fifty pages long The Matrix Control System of Philip K. Dick and the Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley is well-documented and illustrated for a book on such an elusive subject. Written in an easy-to-comprehend, conversational style, with only minor references to more intellectually obscure and complex figures, such as Carl Jung, whose concepts on synchronicity can sometimes be difficult too follow for even his most ardent students.

The new book opens with an introduction by the late Dick’s widow, Tessa. “Tim Beckley has a firm handle on the nature of the strange incidents,” she writes, “that occurred in the life of my husband, Philip K. Dick. Whereas many writers have chosen the easy way out, offering explanations ranging from epilepsy to drug abuse, Beckley has dug deep into the story of Phil’s life and unearthed evidence that such things really do happen to many people.”

According to Tessa, her late husband often questioned his own sanity, a form of self-doubt, which, for those who experience synchronicity and the paranormal, seems to come with the territory.

“He told stories for a living,” Tessa writes, “and he told stories for fun. He took the little anomalies of our world and spun them into alternative realities. He also warned us of the police state in which we live. The Nazis won World War II, and the Empire never ended. We must wake up and see the world as it is, not as the media present it to us. Behind the propaganda, this world is all about control.”

A Life-Changing Knock on the Door

The visionary mysticism that would come to dominate Philip K. Dick’s final years began in 1974, with a visit from the local drugstore. It was a pivotal moment in Dick’s life and has been much written about and analyzed since.

Dick had recently been to see the dentist about an impacted wisdom tooth. The procedure included a dose of sodium pentothal. Next, a young woman delivered a bottle of Darvon tablets to Dick at his apartment in Fullerton, California. She was wearing a necklace with a pendant of a golden fish, an ancient Christian symbol that had been adopted by the Jesus counterculture movement of the late 1960s.

The fish pendant, he later recalled, began to emit a golden ray of light and he suddenly experienced what is called “anamnesis,” the recollection of the entire sum of knowledge. It is also called “intellectual intuition,” the direct perception by the mind of a metaphysical reality behind the screens of appearance. Dick had seen the ultimate nature of what he called “true reality.”

In the following days and weeks, he would have psychedelic visions and see phantasmagorical light shows. He also heard “voices” and experienced prophetic dreams. These phenomena would continue until his death eight years later at the age of 53.

After the 1974 experience with the pendant and his sudden awakening, Dick dedicated the rest of his life to understanding what it all meant. He wrote a lengthy, 8,000-page analysis of the events called “Exegesis,” what he called “an attempt to understand my own understanding.”

That understanding would lead Dick to practice a form of Christianity called Gnosticism, which New York Times columnist Simon Critchley, in writing about Dick’s conversion, called “the worship of an alien God by those alienated from the world.”

Dick believed that he, along with the rest of us, were all living simultaneously in the present day as well as the time of the first Christians in Rome. The political and economic structure of our modern world is really the BIP, or Black Iron Prison, which is opposed to the spiritual redemption offered by the PTG, or Palm Tree Garden. This is again a belief heavily influenced by the Gnostics, many of whom held that the physical, material world is really the creation of the God of Evil and that we await salvation from an “alien” God, a true “extraterrestrial,” not bound up in the wickedness and oppression on our planet’s surface.

At one point, Dick’s voices and visions drove him to attempt suicide, and he was placed in a mental hospital. “When I believe, I am crazy,” he wrote. “When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression.” But elsewhere Dick says more optimistically, “I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.”

There is, of course, the tritely familiar expression that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. Philosophers have also argued that there is a fine line between madness and genuine religious experience. Could Dick’s “alien God” truly free us from the Matrix? Did Dick mark a path to freedom that we might one day follow?

The Strange Ups and Downs of Synchronicity

The second part of the new book’s title is The Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley. As a memoirist of meaningful coincidence, Beckley has few equals. His life is saturated with moments that he believes force him to acknowledge the invisible maker of all things in the ‘matrix.’

According to his biography on the Coast to Coast radio show website, Beckley’s life, since early childhood has virtually revolved around the ‘paranormal.’ At age three, his life was saved by an invisible force. The house he was raised in was thought to be haunted. His grandfather saw a headless horseman. Beckley vividly recalls out-of-body experiences starting at age six and saw his first UFO at age ten. He has had two more sightings since, and even attempted to communicate with one of those.

Beckley has written over 25 books on everything from rock music to the secret MJ12 papers. He has been a stringer for the national tabloids such as the Enquirer and editor of over 30 different magazines. He is one of the few Americans ever invited to speak before closed-door meetings on UFOs, presided over by the late Earl of Clancarty at the House of Lords in England.

Perhaps one of Beckley’s most “intimidating” experiences with the matrix would involve Philip K. Dick, himself, and an Episcopal clergyman, Bishop James Pike. In 1966, Pike performed the wedding ceremony for Dick and his fourth wife, Nancy Herbert.

Pike was himself an anomaly. He was under fire from the church for what were considered at the time to be “radical” views, like the ordination of women to the priesthood, racial desegregation, and the acceptance of LGBT people within the mainline churches. Pike also had controversial opinions on the Virgin Birth, the Second Coming of Jesus, and other basic church doctrines.

A few months before the bishop officiated at Dick’s wedding, Pike’s son committed suicide. The young man had been residing in a single room in a hotel off Broadway in midtown Manhattan. He had been depressed and using drugs, and just couldn’t take it anymore.

A friend of Beckley’s, a woman named Sandra, whose family lived in an apartment next door to young Pike’s, said the condition of the room had been “messy” in the aftermath of Pike’s use of a handgun to take his own life. “But I didn’t realize,” Beckley said, “until I spoke to Sandra recently, that I had slept in the very room where the tragic event had taken place.” The room had eventually been merged with the apartment rented by Sandra’s family, and Beckley had stayed there many times. But no one had ever told him about the history of Room 429.

There is a lot more to the story Beckley has to tell about Dick, Pike, and Pike’s son, events that would come to involve a well-known spiritualist and medium named the Reverend Arthur Ford as well as Diamond Jim Brady, the dapper man-about-town of the early twentieth century. For the full story, read the book, as Beckley recounts a chain of events that is both amazing and nightmarish but which cannot be briefly summed up in the space here.

Transcending the Matrix

The Matrix Control System of Philip K. Dick and the Paranormal Synchronicities of Timothy Green Beckley also offers contributions from an extensive cast of paranormal writers and researchers, including: Tim Swartz, Brad Steiger, Nick Redfern, Diane Tessman, Valerie D’Orazio, Brent Raynes, Cynthia Cirile, Hercules Invictus, and Joseph Green.

The various authors discuss their own experiences with synchronicity and provide an overview of some of the “real-world” factors that support Dick’s concept that our reality has been preprogrammed by computer “designers,” of whose existence we can barely conceive, let alone, claim to understand.

Our existence means something. It is important to us, even if we live in a mechanized contrivance that is basically indifferent to our struggles and hardships. Perhaps, by coming to understand what synchronicity really is, we will be taking that first step to a truly free form of consciousness that transcends the ‘matrix’ entirely.

Consciousness

Nov/Dec 2018 – #132

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‘Dragon man’ may replace Neanderthals as closest relative

A near-perfectly preserved ancient human fossil known as the Harbin cranium sits in the Geoscience Museum in Hebei GEO University. The largest of known Homo skulls, scientists now say this skull represents a newly discovered human species named Homo longi or “Dragon Man.” Their findings, appearing in three papers publishing June 25 in the journal The Innovation, suggest that the Homo longi lineage may be our closest relatives — and has the potential to reshape our understanding of human evolution.

“The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human cranial fossils in the world,” says author Qiang Ji, a professor of paleontology of Hebei GEO University. “This fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the evolution of the Homo genus and the origin of Homo sapiens.”

The cranium was reportedly discovered in the 1930s in Harbin City of the Heilongjiang province of China. The massive skull could hold a brain comparable in size to modern humans’ but had larger, almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth, and oversized teeth. “While it shows typical archaic human features, the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters setting itself apart from all the other previously-named Homo species,” says Ji, leading to its new species designation of Homo longi.

Scientists believe the cranium came from a male individual, approximately 50 years old, living in a forested, floodplain environment as part of a small community. “Like Homo sapiens, they hunted mammals and birds, and gathered fruits and vegetables, and perhaps even caught fish,” remarks author Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University. Given that the Harbin individual was likely very large in size as well as the location where the skull was found, researchers suggest H. longi may have been adapted for harsh environments, allowing them to disperse throughout Asia.advertisement

Using a series of geochemical analyses, Ji, Ni, and their team dated the Harbin fossil to at least 146,000 years, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene, a dynamic era of human species migration. They hypothesize that H. longi and H. sapiens could have encountered each other during this era.

“We see multiple evolutionary lineages of Homo species and populations co-existing in Asia, Africa, and Europe during that time. So, if Homo sapiens indeed got to East Asia that early, they could have a chance to interact with H. longi, and since we don’t know when the Harbin group disappeared, there could have been later encounters as well,” says author Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Nature History Museum in London.

Looking farther back in time, the researchers also find that Homo longi is one of our closest hominin relatives, even more closely related to us than Neanderthals. “It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens,” says Ni.

Their reconstruction of the human tree of life also suggests that the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals existed even further back in time. “The divergence time between H. sapiens and the Neanderthals may be even deeper in evolutionary history than generally believed, over one million years,” says Ni. If true, we likely diverged from Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years earlier than scientists had thought.

The researchers say that findings gathered from the Harbin cranium have the potential to rewrite major elements of human evolution. Their analysis into the life history of Homo longi suggest they were strong, robust humans whose potential interactions with Homo sapiens may have shaped our history in turn. “Altogether, the Harbin cranium provides more evidence for us to understand Homo diversity and evolutionary relationships among these diverse Homo species and populations,” says Ni. “We found our long-lost sister lineage.”

source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210625120419.htm

Denisovan DNA in North America
By Andrew Collins
A Closer Look at the Coming of the ‘Thunder People’
Atlantis Rising Magazine #134, March/April, 2019