FRONTIER SCIENCE/SOCIAL CHANGE

by Paul Von Ward

"WHENCE HUMAN KNOWLEDGE?"

Conventional scientists assert that knowledge only comes from external experience, our own or others', through the accumulation of discrete bits of information via the five physical senses: A researcher does an experiment and notes the results. Someone writes of or photographs direct experience and others must see or hear it to know it. To claim that such processes are the exclusive path to knowledge is incompatible with human experience. All of us receive our knowledge through many channels.

Writers, scientists, and inventors must clearly articulate and place their "knowledge" in the public domain. When it appears, they frequently discover the ideas were not unique to themselves. Innumerable cases document separate but simultaneous scientific discoveries or inventions, without prior communication between the parties. Writing a periodic column in advance, frequently I used to feel chagrined when "my point" surfaced in another's story before mine. Now I realize we do not steal each other's ideas; we both, somehow, tap the same universal source.

Let's review some of the many ways humans come to have knowledge? Obviously, we do receive much information through our physical senses. However, basic scientific principles, and even whole fields of knowledge, apparently come from sources outside the awake, five-sense state.

We have flashes of intuition, where an idea, picture, or concept springs full blown into awareness. Albert Einstein (daydream in a tram leads to theory of relativity), Nikola Tesla (design for AC motor comes in unbidden flash), James Watson (ruminating on borrowed ideas leads to view of DNA form as double helix), and many others less well known have reported such moments of inspiration. They obviously received valid knowledge because it proved itself in the subsequent testing.

Practical problem solving through dreaming is now a well-known and widely practiced procedure. Group brainstorming can get workable results, new solutions never previously considered by any of the participants. Controlled meditation uncovers unique and valid knowledge (e.g., health diagnoses). Going into a trance enables one to channel usable knowledge from sources outside the person (e.g., history or remote information).

One can access these general fields of knowledge by conscious choice or simply being in a state of relaxation or openness. Shamans, psychics, or healers deliberately seek information from inner sources. Described in Jeremy Narby's wonderful book The Cosmic Serpent, Amazon-area shamans using a hallucinogen can obtain pharmacological and DNA knowledge about plants from the noumenal field. Psychics search people's energy fields to discern alternate life choices. These areas of knowledge appear to be available to any seeker.

Using the scientific rule of Occam's razor, what is the most simple and direct explanation of these various nonphysical routes to knowledge? ALL KNOWLEDGE EXISTS IN A SINGULAR FIELD (NOUMENA) TO WHICH ANY CONSCIOUS BEING HAS ACCESS. (The noumena is what many physicists now call "non-local consciousness.") All other explanations require hypothetical go-betweens, special channels, selective rituals, external authorities, or other imagined routes to truth. With these more elaborate explanations, one must have blind faith in the supposed intermediate variables that cannot be tested by others in our four-dimensional universe.

What are the implications of a universal consciousness club of which we are all born equal members? (1) It is common to all of us; no individual owns any part. (2) Any one can challenge any other's assertion of truth? (3) Alleged facts that oppose each other must be resolved in synthesis before they can be considered true. (4) Everyone is obliged to explicitly distinguish between beliefs or hypotheses and collectively established facts. If these four points are correct, it is contrary to the laws of the universe for any being to claim ownership of any knowledge or the guardianship of a sole path to truth.

In addition to getting knowledge from direct experience, other humans, and the noumena, there is also much evidence that we receive knowledge from nonhuman conscious beings. People from the most primitive societies, through historic civilizations, to the modern era claim ideas, inventions, intellectual disciplines, and practical instructions for living come from AB's. The way the information is transferred implies advanced understanding, thus revealing something about our place in the universe and our relationship to other conscious beings?

The new story emerging from frontier science provides an extraordinary picture of other beings and other realms, among whom humans are Johnnies come-lately, apprentices rather than masters of knowledge. The most advanced ideas of succeeding generations appear to have come from AB's, whether Earth-based or non-terrestrial, this dimension or another. According to the late Lt.Col. Corso and others, the continuing practice of knowledge transfers has contributed to current scientific advancements.

Humans do not know how early civilizations developed; we do not even know which is the earliest. Whichever one we pick as a starting point, its traditions point to earlier peoples and their receipt of knowledge from AB's. An Inkan shaman in Peru told me the megalithic ruins in the Andes were constructed by ancient ones who preceded the Inkans. Furthermore, those ancients were taught the techniques by the "Apus" (light beings).

Returning to themes more familiar to the Judeo-Christian culture, the Jewish Old Testament is replete with stories of AB's communicating higher knowledge to early leaders: Noah learned of the impending flood from one of the gods who was sympathetic to the human plight (Zecharia Sitchin identifies that god as Enki of the Anunnaki, colonists on Earth from Nibiru). The Zoroastrians, Aztecs, Indians, Druids, Scandinavians, and others have similar stories of an AB who came to the rescue of their own Noah-like ancestors. The god Yahweh handed Moses engraved tablets and dictated to him civic and religious regulations for the Israelites. Ezekiel received plans from the gods for the Temple at Jerusalem, walked with them, and even left the Earth with them in a "fiery chariot."

From other traditions we find similar tales. In Indian antiquity (see the Hindu Ramayana) the Nagas, known as the "educators of the world," taught navigation, military principles, and architecture. On the other side of the globe, the Chippewa's Manaboshu (a Noah-like personage at the end-of-the last-ice-age deluge) received instructions from an AB on how to make a good bow and arrow and work with copper. The ancient Frisians of Northern Europe had an AB named Minno as a seer and philosopher. Their Earth-mother Frya also gave them "laws that would result in a good society." In Old Mexico, Zanna, who led the ancestors of the Aztecs from the East to the Yucatan, was considered the "author of civilization" and the source of their alphabet.

The people from whom the Mayans say they descended, according to the Popol Vuh, received "fabulous knowledge" from an AB. The Serpent God, again Enki according to Sitchin, gave to Eve and Adam knowledge from the Tree of Life. Prometheus gave "fire" to the prehistoric Greeks, after stealing it from the heaven inaccessible to humans. A "water spider" who swam to the burning island no human could reach presented the "gift of fire" to the primal Cherokees.

Why is it that not one of these stories has any crucial knowledge resulting from the unaided efforts of humans? Why do they not say "so and so human did it or discovered it?" AB's get the credit for the seminal turning points of all these societies; there is no record of humans being told something they already knew. Such a universal story, given what we know of human egos, gives credibility to the underlying message: Human societies were "jump started" at various points within our collective memory.

Many familiar Greek stories were variations of history passed on from the Egyptians. For example, Solon spoke of the goddess who gave proto-Greeks cosmology, divination, medicine, and law in the antediluvian era. However, his Egyptian mentors said the AB Thoth gave this knowledge to their ancestors. Thoth was credited with the invention of writing, arithmetic, architecture, surveying, geometry, astronomy, medicine, and surgery. According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, he possessed all secret knowledge on 36,535 scrolls in a vault in the sky,

Many of the above AB's reportedly came from the heavens (sky), while others allegedly arrived from a mystical land to the East or the West, depending on which side of the Atlantic the civilization was located. The latter, of course, point to the fabled continent of Atlantis. (New research links much evidence on all continents to such a pre-flood reality. See Atlantis by Shirley Andrews.) However, when the origin of scientific knowledge is pushed back to Atlantis, we find the Atlanteans reportedly received it from a celestial advisor: Poseidon, the god who ruled the sea on Earth and came from the Pleiades.

Some of these transfusions of knowledge can only be inferred, as in the case of the Bible Code discovered by Israeli mathematicians. Upon learning that the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament has numerical sequence codes (not unlike those used by NSA, DOD, CIA, and others in secret computer codes), they concluded there must have been AB's with prophetic knowledge and computing capacities beyond the Hebrews of the period.

Given the mass of evidence to the contrary, only selectively represented here, it is ignorant arrogance to pretend 20th-century humans embody the most highly developed consciousness in the universe or even on Earth. We depend on the singular source of all knowledge and our siblings in the cosmic family for much of our inspiration and insight into the nature of reality.

Copyright 1999
Paul Von Ward
All Rights Reserved