So man was ape, not angel. Nevertheless, there are still a great many people who take Disraeli’s side of the great question. For example, on July 13, 1994, Naomi Albright, author of several books about her contacts with angels, related to me this encounter: “I had entered into a state of consciousness that I call ‘living vision.’ A living vision is not like something imagined. It is perfectly clear to you that you are there live and in person. In this state, an angelic being appeared before me. He said I should call him ‘Lighter than Light,’ as his real name would be unpronounceable by me. After identifying himself as an angel, he told me that I should accept the fact that I had been one of them, an angel, since the Beginning, but that I had come down to the human form, and had been reincarnating on this level for a long time.” Experiences such as this point back to the cosmos of Disraeli, with its God and angels, its gods and goddesses, all somehow linked to human origins and destinies. Cultural anthropologists might call Albright’s “living vision” and angel encounter “an altered state of consciousness (ASC).” Such ASC reports are widespread. Anthropologist E. Bourguignon (1973, p. 9) surveyed 488 world cultures and found that 90 percent of them have welldeveloped experiences of such altered states. These would include, for example, the experiences reported by shamans, who regularly contact spirit beings in their trances. Albright’s angel-contact testimony shows, however, that ASCs are not confined to tribal peoples. Modern accounts of contacts with alien beings in connection with UFO experiences provide another example of ASCs from advanced cultures.
Many cultural anthropologists and clinical psychologists studying ASCs in non-Western cultures classify them as psychopathological—as neurotic or psychotic departures from normal consciousness, as defined by Western psychology (Price-Williams and Hughes 1994, pp. 4–5). A more charitable approach dispenses with Western psychopathological interpretations and evaluates ASCs as normal or abnormal according to the standards of the culture in which the states occur. In modern civilized societies, persons claiming to be in contact with a spirit being, and acting as if this were so, would be labeled psychotic. But in many other societies such claims and behavior would be considered normal, perhaps even prestigious. Nevertheless, most psychologists and anthropologists, although dispensing with negative descriptive language, would not normally regard a contact with an angel, spirit, or UFO entity as real, in the sense of the human subject actually contacting another existing personality. At most, those taking a Jungian point of view would say that there is contact with a real archetype from the human subconscious.
But some anthropologists are now considering a different approach. Katherine P. Ewing, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University, has raised the issue of positive belief as a valid stance for an anthropologist to take in relation to reports of paranormal phenomena. While engaged in researching Sufis in Pakistan, Ewing met a Sufi saint. This saint told her that he would come to her while she was sleeping. When this in fact occurred, in what Ewing took to be a dream, she felt someone touch her. The sensation was so real that, startled, she awoke sitting upright on her bed. In order to maintain her self-image as a professional anthropologist, she resisted what she called “the temptation to believe.” She found herself instinctively “placing the phenomenon immediately within a psychological interpretive scheme in which dreams come only from the dreamer’s internal states” (Ewing 1994, p. 574). In other words, she convinced herself that the saint had not actually come to her in the dream. But she noted, “To rule out the possibility of belief in another’s reality is to encapsulate that reality and thus, to impose the hegemony of one’s own view of the world” (Ewing 1994, p. 572). A better approach to experiences that challenge the worldview of Western science would be to “take them seriously and allow them to play a role in shaping what are ultimate realities we share as participants in a global human community” (Ewing 1994, p. 579).
When this step is taken, we find ourselves confronted with a wealth of empirical evidence that tends to support the worldviews of traditional cultures. When this evidence is taken into account, it would appear that human beings are not modified apes who arose on this planet by a process of physical evolution. Instead we are fallen angels, beings who came to this planet by a process of devolution from spiritual forms that preexisted in another dimension of reality.
As Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita (15.7), “The living entities in this conditioned world are My eternal fragmental parts. Due to conditioned life, they are struggling very hard with the six senses, which include the mind.” God is an eternally conscious person, and the living entities are also eternally conscious persons. In their original state, the deathless living entities exercise their free will to act in connection with God, in the pleasure-filled realm of pure spiritual energy. Some of the living entities, however, misuse their free will to act independently of God. Attracted by the material energy, they become covered by bodies composed of mind and matter. In this state, their natural freedom is constrained by the conditions imposed upon them by their bodies, with which they struggle to enjoy the material energy, in a cycle of repeated births and deaths. It is possible, however, for such living entities to regain their deathless and blissful spiritual state.
Forbidden Archeology:
The Hidden History of the Human Race
Upon hearing the proposal that human beings are devolved spirits rather than the modified descendants of extinct apelike creatures, one might ask: Has not science, using physical evidence, demonstrated beyond doubt that we did in fact evolve, by natural selection, from more anatomically primitive hominids? There is certainly a lot of talk and writing to that effect. But in the 932 pages of Forbidden Archeology, Richard Thompson and I documented abundant physical evidence contradicting the current evolutionary theory of human origins. Forbidden Archeology (also available in abridged form as The Hidden History of the Human Race) is thus the indispensable prelude to Human Devolution. In this chapter, I will summarize the essential points made in Forbidden Archeology. But there is no substitute for reading the entire book and seeing for oneself the massive amounts of evidence that contradict the idea that anatomically modern humans evolved within the past 6 million years from very apelike hominid ancestors. This evidence confirms that we really do require an alternative to the present theory.
William W. Howells, emeritus professor of physical anthropology at Harvard University, and one of the chief architects of the modern theory of human evolution, wrote to me on August 10, 1993: “Thank you for sending me a copy of Forbidden Archeology, which represents much careful effort in critically assembling published materials. I have given it a good examination. . . . Most of us, mistakenly or not, see human evolution as a succession of branchings from earlier to more advanced forms of primate, with man emerging rather late. . . . To have modern human beings . . . appearing a great deal earlier, in fact at a time when even simple primates did not exist as possible ancestors, would be devastating not only to the accepted pattern. It would be devastating to the whole theory of evolution.” Yes, and it would demand an alternative hypothesis. Howells went on to say, “The suggested hypothesis would demand a kind of process which could not possibly be accommodated by evolutionary theory as we know it, and I should think it requires an explanation.” Human Devolution provides the explanation Howells requested, the explanation of a process that lies outside the range of current evolutionary theory. But first, we should understand exactly why such a new hypothesis is in fact required.