The Omega Point

AUTHOR’S NOTE The World of The Omega Point

What if the world really did end? What would we do? How would the human species come to a close—in terror and chaos, or according to some sort of hidden plan?

If there is a plan, there will also be chaos, that’s clear enough. No matter how sublime the plan, people are likely to be quite upset, so I am happy to report that I don’t have any specific information that the world will end in 2012, 2020, or, for that matter, anytime soon. But I can assure you that, one day, for one reason or another, planet Earth will become unable to sustain human life, and there are people, or will be people, who will face this distressing inevitability.

So, what happens? Is it all simply random or is there some sort of meaning? Is there an afterlife, perhaps, or some other place we can go, or is our species condemned to join all the others who have emerged here, lived for a while, then died out and been forgotten?

Or, put another way, is the universe essentially random and chaotic, but so large that the emergence of conscious life here and there is more or less inevitable?

Modern science says that human beings are biological machines and that we emerged out of a long period of evolution that is mechanical and random. To make matters even more dolorous, the fossil record demonstrates with terrifying eloquence that gigantic, devastating extinctions are the norm on our innocent-seeming little planet. Add to that the fact that modern science says that death is the end of everything, and a pretty dreary picture emerges.

However, modern science’s vision is quite a new approach to the meaning of life, and there are reasons—a few—that enable legitimate speculation that it may not be correct. My own life has unfolded so far outside of what science tells us that we should expect, I really do wonder if we might not be having, as we live, quite a different experience from what appears to be the case, and one that is only partially explained by a mechanistic view.

Over the course of this little essay, I’ll tell some of the stories from my own experience that suggest—at least to me—that life may be much more than it seems, and there may be good reason for our inability to perceive the whole truth of it. Of course, I would be the last person to assert that I’m right and the entire scientific establishment is wrong.

In fact, I’m more than a little embarrassed at ending up so far outside of the mainstream. In terms of getting things like book reviews, for example, it’s been quite inconvenient. But I love quiet, and being an outsider certainly brings plenty of that. It also brings undeserved opprobrium and spittle-hazed rage. In my career, I have encountered many pumping carotids, and I confess to taking an evil pleasure in inducing bluster and outrage.

I’m annoying and, unfortunately, I enjoy this. But there’s a larger reason. I don’t think that I’m wrong about the marvels that have filled my life, and I do want others to enjoy them, as well, and to find the same delightfully light and deep meaning that they have brought me.

It is incredibly freeing to know—as, in my heart, I do—that human life is indeed part of a vast continuum of consciousness that persists after death, and that is woven into the extraordinary glory that is intelligent life in the universe.

So I’m full of joy, because I have had, and am having, a marvelous adventure that suggests that the secular and essentially mechanical vision of ourselves that has become a shorthand and core belief in scientific and intellectual circles, is not true, and that what is true about us is so far beyond even the most optimistic imaginings of the ancients that we actually live on a hidden frontier. Just beyond the lowering clouds that choke the present horizon lies a world of wonders, and the electrifying discovery of what we truly are.

I don’t think that, at any time in recorded history, we have been right about our true nature. Certainly, the old Western theocracy that arose out of the dismal Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 is wrong, and probably even more wrong than modern science.

I suppose that leaves me more or less out on a limb—or, more properly, a plank. Without science or religion, I certainly have no established allies. Maybe secret societies could take up my cause, but so far, no cigar.

It’s quite fun on my plank. Out here, if you jump you may just fly. Out here, we are a delicious mystery that goes far beyond the intricacies of physical life, but is also divorced from the guilty weight of conventional religion.

I do not think that we live in the highest civilization ever known, and I think that the modern intellectual enterprise has failed in two fundamental ways. It has been unable, or unwilling, to look at the past objectively, and it has been unable to devise any means to detect the existence of the soul as a part of the physical universe—a measurement that, I think, must be possible. If I am correct, it must also be the foundation of a much truer science than we now know.

I think that the modern failure to realize that energy can itself be conscious is as fundamental to our progress as was the failure of the ancient world to understand the potential of steam power.

Around A.D. 120, Heron of Alexandria invented a device called the aeolipile, a simple steam engine, which was used to open the doors of a temple, and also showed up in Roman playrooms as a toy. The potential of the technology was never understood by the Roman world. Without any ability to see the soul, and penetrate into its reality with technology, modern science is at least as far from understanding the truth about human life as the Romans were from understanding steam power.

If the experience gained from lives like mine is at all true, then we have two forms, one that is active and embedded in the physical body, and another that is contemplative and lives on when the body dies, in an energetic state. I believe that consciousness cycles back and forth between the two, but both are essentially part of physical reality. The soul is not in any way outside of nature, but human death is a transformation into another form, in the same way that a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

To me, the physical world is far richer than would be suggested by a mechanistic model of reality. I do not believe that religious traditions such as that of resurrection, which emerges in earliest times in the form of the story of Osiris, and continues to the promise of Christ, involve the supernatural at all. They are about living in the physical world in a way that leads to the preservation of individuality when the body dies and consciousness enters the energetic state.

From Osiris to Christ, I wonder if the resurrection stories might not reflect an ancient science of the soul that was lost as our increasing focus on the material world caused us to become soul-blind and thus god-blind and therefore also blind to the most vividly alive aspect of our own being?

As a result of this change in focus, we no longer live to die, we live to live. On the surface, this seems nicer, of course. But that’s only on the surface. In that it assumes that death has no meaning, it also assumes that life has no meaning.

I think that it has led to a situation where most of us are completely unprepared for death. So we enter the other world in confusion, clinging to the residue of our physical lives. It has also led us to our fantastic obsession with material existence, and our addictive habits of consumption.

It’s interesting to contemplate just how awkward it must be for some people when they arrive on the other side. Christians who find no Saint Peter, or Muslims who are not greeted by dancing virgins—except, perhaps, for the women. Or people like Jean-Paul Sartre or, say, Nietzsche, whose embarrassment must have been quite fantastic. The truth, I suspect, is that on dying we enter another kind of life, but it is, also, ordinary life. Chiefly, it offers an immeasurably detailed reconstruction of our physical experience that can enable us to rise above the whole process altogether and, seeing ourselves with true objectivity, ascend into unimagined realms.

This is what is happening in The Omega Point, to the vast numbers of people who are ascending into the enigmatic higher reality. David Ford never quite understands what is happening to them, or why it doesn’t happen to him, so he soldiers on in his elegantly unsure way, trying to find the sense of his own very different mission.

Certain parts of the Bible, and traditions such as the ancient Egyptian religion, suggest that there may once have been more objective understanding of this other reality, and that it may have been addressed with the lost science of the soul. Among the relevant documents in the Bible, the Gospels are a chronicle of how to live to die in a state of compassion and forgiveness that enables us to let go of the concerns of physical life and ascend, rather than cling to them and end up eventually returning to this state—a fate which cannot possibly be considered as other than a pretty mawkish outcome, once one has become aware of the greater potential that one might have realized.

This is why, in The Omega Point, Christ is seen as a scientist. I think that’s exactly what he was, and his miracles reflect not supernatural powers but scientific knowledge of the way the energetic world actually works, and an ability to apply its principles to physical reality, thus effecting cure and defying death.

Developing this assertion, it would therefore be probable that he learned his techniques during the time he spent in Egypt, and that he was specifically chosen because of his Davidic heritage, by practitioners who understood that their own world was coming to an end, and were seeking to bequeath their knowledge to the future. When the Romans tacked that sign on his cross, KING OF THE JEWS, they weren’t just being sardonic but also stating a fact: he was the heir to the House of David and thus the mortal enemy of Rome’s client-king Herod.

If this knowledge still existed in Jesus’ time, it must have already been quite isolated from the central and public stream of Egyptian culture. For example, what we know of Egyptian religion suggests, in its elaborate use of magical implements and ritual, that it was enacting something that had lost its true meaning, somewhat like what happens when children who have observed an adult drive a car play at doing the same thing.

As a child I did this—unfortunately, though, with a real car. I was no more effective at driving down the street at the age of ten than the Egyptians were, I suspect, at engaging conscious energy with their rituals.

During World War II, natives in the mountains of New Guinea were exposed to Western technology for the first time when the U.S. Air Force began building bases in the area. When they saw planes landing and disgorging an unimaginable cornucopia of supplies, they responded by using sympathetic magic. They cleared jungle air strips. They built airplanes out of bamboo and leaves, and wove objects that looked to them like the refrigerators the airmen had. Then they devised ritual movements and sounds that to them mimicked the movements of the U.S. personnel back and forth between the airplanes and the refrigerators.

But when they opened the doors to their “refrigerators,” no beer came out, and I speculate that this could be what was happening when Egyptians concluded their rituals, which mimicked the operations of a much older lost science, but were no more functional than bamboo airplanes.

All was not lost, though, not entirely. Here and there, some traditions had retained at least some of that knowledge, and later in the discussion we will speculate about who and where.

Nevertheless, for the most part, the science that once gave these rituals potency had been lost, I believe, in a phenomenal upheaval that swamped the world thousands of years before Egyptian civilization even appeared.

Around twelve thousand years ago, the last Ice Age ended. And, as is not uncommon on planet Earth, this was a violent event. As the Laurentide glacier melted, sea levels around the world rose precipitately, and other upheavals caused further chaos.

There is enigmatic evidence—necessarily ignored by modern science—that a much more potent human presence existed then, probably hugging coastlines which are now submerged to a depth of hundreds of feet, and in some cases actually swept into the abyssal deep.

At the same time that this civilization was flourishing in the lowlands of the late Pleistocene, in the highlands of that world, human life was primitive. But go into a mountainous region today. Almost everywhere, you will find there the poorest people in the world. And where are our greatest cities? Hugging the coasts. If the future had only the remains of life in the Himalayas and the Andes to tell us about this world, it would not realize that our civilization had even existed.

Many books have been published about the evidence of a lost civilization, but I would like to mention here just one telling piece of it that is rarely referred to, but which I find fascinating. It is that there are seventeen ancient ritual sites and cities around the world, all situated on the same great circle, with a southern axis point that falls about five hundred miles from the coast of Antarctica, and a northern axis in British Columbia roughly fifteen hundred miles from the present geographic North Pole.

In itself, it is remarkable that places as diverse as the first Sumerian city, Ur, the Giza Plateau, Easter Island, Nazca, and the ancient Indian city of Mohenjo Daro would all be on the same great circle, but they are.

Modern science has no real explanation for this, except that it must have been just random happenstance. But surely that isn’t enough of an answer. It’s satisfactory only if you want to cling to cherished theories and ignore evidence.

I no longer ignore evidence. The last time I did that, I ended up being dragged out of my house by aliens. The evidence that such things could happen was abundant, but I assumed that it was absurd. So what might have been a fascinating meeting turned into a screaming confusion for me. It could have been more civilized, surely, but I will never forget the ghastly shock that coursed through me a few days later when my doctor said, “You’ve been raped.” It was so humiliating that it took me twenty years to actually utter those words. To this day, I suffer pain from the injury I sustained on that night, which I mentioned only in passing in Communion as the “rectal probe” that has made me such a laughingstock. Rape and laughter don’t actually go together all that well, though, at least not to the victim.

Had I been aware that such things could happen, I would certainly have been more calm, and perhaps the experience would have been less chaotic. Over the eleven years of contact that followed, I ended up in a sort of school, the lessons of which were glimpses into the greater reality in which we actually live. In short, what started out pretty badly became the most precious of treasures. Even the fear became entertaining and profoundly instructive, especially when I realized that the outré little beings I have called “the visitors” found me every bit as terrifying as I did them.

It’s too bad that science has not acknowledged their presence, because, even without direct contact with them, there is a wealth of physical evidence available for study. But they don’t fit our theories of the cosmos. According to modern theory, it is impossible for there to be physical travel across the universe because the distances are too great. But there is also no evidence of where they are from. Maybe they are far stranger even than aliens from another planet.

As our rational culture has matured, it has also become, as is inevitable, more decadent. In science, this decadence finds expression in the fact that we’ve slipped into the trap of putting theory before evidence, which is the core reason that we are missing so much of what is real all around us.

Given the evidence of all the sites along that great circle, for example, it is also likely that, in very ancient times, somebody knew that the Earth was round, had an awareness of its size, was in planetwide communication, and intentionally built these sites on a great circle measured from the physical North and South poles, which, during the cataclysm, moved when the earth’s crust shifted on its mantle.

If such a movement were to have taken place, as Charles Hapgood first postulated and Rand Flem-Ath developed in his book When the Sky Fell, the consequences would have been fantastic destruction, a catastrophe beyond imagining.

But what’s so unusual about that? This is planet Earth, where catastrophes beyond imagining happen pretty darned frequently.

An earth movement that great and that sudden would have changed the planet’s coastlines—as, in fact, it did. But underwater archaeology is in its infancy. We have barely explored the ancient coastlines of the planet, but what we have explored, as Graham Hancock demonstrates in his book Underworld, seems to be populated with enigmatic ruins.

Great catastrophes are ordinary events on Earth, and even mass extinctions are relatively common. Much more common are the smaller disasters that are not classifiable as mass extinctions, and there have been at least two of these just in the past fifteen thousand years.

My story refers to the infamous upheaval that ended the Ice Age 12,600 years ago.

Whether or not a sequel to that disaster is building now is unknown, but certainly something is causing persistent changes in our solar system, and has been for about forty years, and possibly longer.

A Dr. Alexey Dimitriev allegedly published an article in 1997 suggesting that charged particles were entering the solar system from the outside, resulting in changes to all bodies within the solar system. I say “allegedly” because I have been unable to contact Dr. Dimitriev, and there is some evidence that the paper may be a fabrication.

But, in this case, that isn’t important. The Omega Point is fiction and, frankly, I would be flabbergasted if the world in 2020 was anything like what appears in the book. At the same time, though, more than one ancient calendar points to the immediate future as being a time of great change.

Whether Dimitriev’s paper is real or not, there is evidence of increased planetary heating not only on Earth, but also on Mars and Jupiter. Planetologists observed an approximate 1 degree Fahrenheit warming on Mars between 1970 and 1990, and in recent years the Martian polar cap has retreated. An increase in the number of red spots of Jupiter, and other signs on various planetary bodies and moons in our solar system, point to the widespread presence of this phenomenon.

As of this writing, the sun is also acting in an unusual manner, but rather than increasing solar activity, which would be expected if it was being bombarded from the outside, it has become unexpectedly quiet.

At the same time, the amount of observed cometary and asteroid activity in the solar system may have been increasing. Because the amount of observation and the sensitivity of instruments is also increasing, it’s difficult to be certain. But when the Shoemaker-Levy comet struck Jupiter in 1994, it was thought to be a thousand-year event. Just fifteen years later, though, another large object struck Jupiter, surprising astronomers. It would never have been noticed, except that the scar it left was photographed by an amateur astronomer. A day before the object’s scar was seen on Jupiter on July 20, 2009, a similar scar appeared on Venus. Whether this was the result of an impact is not known, but if it was, then the object that produced it was a large one. Had it struck Earth on July 20 instead of Venus, it would have resulted in a massive planetary catastrophe very much like the one that overtook us 12,600 years ago.

So, are we more than ordinarily exposed to an asteroid strike right now? Truthfully, nobody can be certain, but observation does suggest that there is more debris in the solar system just now.

In my story, by the time 2020 has come around, the amount of material entering it has increased exponentially from where it was in 2012, and as a result the sun has begun to be affected by it.

It is difficult to imagine the scale of what is happening, certainly for those living through it in the story, but as author and readers, we can visualize matters more clearly. A supernova emits two forms of material. The first is a radiation burst that moves at about 90 percent of the speed of light. This generally spreads through space as a gigantic expanding ball of energy. The second is a mass of debris, which moves much more slowly and unevenly, with the densest parts expanding most slowly.

As a result, this expanding cloud has an irregular front, and it is this fact that gives rise to the fundamental premise of the story, that our solar system passed through one node of it 12,600 years ago, and is now entering another.

While there is no certain evidence that this is actually happening, something must be causing the changes we are seeing in the solar system at the present time.

One thing has become clear in the past few years: 12,600 years ago, there was indeed a tremendous upheaval on planet Earth. It hit North America the hardest, and was responsible for the mass extinctions that took place then, including the destruction of the entire human population of North America that existed at that time, the Clovis culture, and the extinction of no fewer than thirty-five animal genera, including most large animals in North America, such as the American horse, the mammoth, the mastodon, the American camel, and many others.

There are dozens of myths about a time of flooding and upheaval in the world, some of which may date to this very early period.

On May 23, 2007, in the General Assembly of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco, Mexico, the work of a multiinstitutional twenty-six-member team proposed the theory that just such an impact caused the upheaval that ended the last Ice Age.

They presented substantial evidence of the event, and three of them also published a popular book on the subject, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, which lays out their evidence for the nonscientific reader.

But the event that took place 12,600 years ago was hardly unique in Earth’s history. In fact, it is simply one of a continuum of such events.

Approximately 5,200 years ago something extraordinary caused the collapse of Mediterranean civilizations from archaic Greece to Egypt. Terrible drought struck the area. At the same time, in Peru, leafy plants were frozen so quickly that they did not wither—in other words, in a matter of seconds, like frozen food. Subsequently they were covered over by glaciers that remain intact even now.

The climate there went from temperate to extremely cold in a matter of minutes or even seconds, and has remained extremely cold ever since in the area where Professor Lonnie Thompson of the Byrd Polar Research Institute studies these glaciers, in the Andean highlands.

During the same period a man running through an alpine meadow in the Tyrol was overtaken by a blizzard and frozen. He—and the meadow—were then covered by a glacier that melted enough to expose his remains only in 1991, when the mummified form of Otzi the Ice Man was discovered lying in the frost of the retreating glacier.

What sort of event would cause changes this sudden and yet long lasting across the globe? The simple answer is that the universe is a very messy place and even though Earth happens to be packed with a mind-boggling mass of sensitive, intelligent creatures who urgently seek to survive, it is still subject to arbitrary and random catastrophes, and—in terms of geologic time—they are relatively frequent.

This book started with a thought: what if it happens? What if the world really does end for us?

Teresa McDonald of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum says that 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived are extinct right now, so extinction is certainly the norm—and, in fact, unless we happen to establish ourselves somewhere else in the universe, our time on planet Earth will sooner or later run out. And not only that, there is, in fact, no way at all to determine when this might happen.

If an object that we happen to be able to see collides with the planet, we might have some warning, but there are many perils on Earth and in space—in fact, most—that will come as complete surprises.

But was that always true, and need it still be true?

Conventional modern wisdom asserts that time is immutable, reality is limited to what we can measure now, and that both evolution and civilization display rigid progressions occasionally punctuated by unanticipated changes, which are entirely unpredictable.

However, that may not be entirely true, and it could be very far from true. As an example, there are buried in our past suggestions that somebody understood the world very differently from the way we do today, and perhaps saw a structure in the development of human civilization to which we have become blind.

One of the oddest facts about our past is the number of very long-term calendars that exist, the most famous of which are the Zodiac and the Mayan Long Count calendar. The reason that this is odd is that our modern understanding of the ancient world leaves no room for the need for such calendars, let alone any ability to create them. For example, creating the Zodiac required understanding the precession of the equinoxes, which must necessarily involve thousands of years of observation as the Earth slowly gyrates and the stars its poles point at gradually change. Who could have made such long-term observations and recorded them? No civilization in recorded history has lasted long enough to create such a record.

But then again, our understanding of the past does not have any room in it for the building of cities and sacred sites along the same great circle around the planet, either.

One bit of evidence that cannot be disputed is that the authors of both the Old and New Testaments knew very well which signs of the Zodiac the books were being written under, and wove this knowledge into their texts.

The Old Testament was written under the sign of Aries, the ram, and the ram is mentioned seventy-two times in it, more than any other animal. But, of course, that could be dismissed as a coincidence.

But not when one realizes that the New Testament was written at the beginning of the next 2,300-year astrological cycle, Pisces, and its primary symbol, even more than the cross, is that of the fish. Jesus is the Fisher of Men. He gathers his apostles from among fishermen. Among early Christians, the universal symbol of recognition was the fish.

The Old Testament that was written under Aries also reflects the demanding, stubborn characteristics of that sign, the exemplar of which is the dour personality of its governing deity, Yahweh. Similarly, Jesus with his message of compassion is characteristically Piscean. In addition, Pisces the fish swims in nurturing, supportive water, so if we are Pisces, then Earth is our water, providing us with everything we need to live.

But not always. At present, we are leaving Pisces and entering Aquarius, and the water that has sustained us so long is being poured out. And indeed, Earth is already being plagued by droughts. In 2008, the southeastern United States came close to a catastrophic drought. In 2009, droughts afflicted much of Asia, parts of Europe and Africa, Mexico and the American Southwest, and the potential for catastrophic drought was reaching an extreme in Australia.

In the February 28, 2009, issue of The New Scientist, it was suggested that a 4-degree Centigrade rise in planetary temperatures is likely by the end of the century, with the result that huge areas of Earth, including much of the United States, Africa, India, the Middle East, and most of the Amazon, are going to become much too dry to sustain the populations that now live in those areas. According to James Lovelock, the author of The Gaia Hypothesis, the situation is likely to lead to something approaching a 95 percent reduction in the human population of Earth, and, given present worldwide temperature changes, the predicted increase is probably already inevitable. In addition, as ocean currents slow, there could be serious and unpredictable shorter-term weather events, such as ferocious storms and, as the temperature of the planet becomes more even, the slowing and eventual stopping of essential air circulation.

Were air circulation to stop, dozens of cities across the planet would become unlivable in a matter of weeks.

Obviously, this is a horrific prognosis for the future of man, but there is a different way of looking at it, and in The Omega Point, the journey of David Ford, Caroline Light, and the class expresses the importance of ways of thinking that are completely new, and bear no reference to the entire system of values and way of life that have led us to the peril in which we now find ourselves.

The first signs of human industrial activity on Earth become visible during the middle centuries of the Roman Empire, when residue from smelting activities in Britain and Spain was deposited on glaciers in Greenland.

This is also when there was a fundamental change in the way human beings conceived of their lives. For the first time, material well-being became more important to a large social class that also became divorced from spiritual awareness. Previously, material opulence had been part of the ritual presence of leaderships that were both temporal and spiritual. During the great Roman peace, however, there came into being a class of people who were more or less irreligious, and whose interests focused primarily on material wealth. This secular class was focused on material consumption and longevity, not on preparing for an afterlife in which they no longer had any belief. And the more devoted to the material world they became, the less real the soul seemed to them.

After Rome collapsed, the Western world returned to theocracy, but it was not a healthy theocracy. Christ taught the triumph of resurrection, but in A.D. 325, the Council of Nicaea changed the focus of the church from joy at Christ’s triumph over death to guilt at our—probably entirely fictional—birth into sin. Prior to Nicaea, Christ had often been portrayed as carrying a magician’s wand that promised new life. Now, he was portrayed as suffering on a cross that was our fault.

This change was made for political reasons, because guilty people can be controlled by those who claim the power of forgiveness. As a result Christianity sank into the long trance of guilt and retribution from which it is just beginning to emerge.

Growing wealth in the fifteenth century caused the reemergence of a secular community, followed by a revolt against the oppression of the church. This, in turn, led to a second and more formidable rise of materialism. And now we are at the climax of material civilization. Most of us are either soul blind or passive to the idea that our lives may matter in some larger way. Most of us live to live, and struggle against death as if it was an absolute and final end, whether we have cherished beliefs about an afterlife or not. We have, in short, gone soul blind, which is another of the core themes of the book.

Largely because of extraordinary, unstoppable population growth, we find ourselves in a situation where only the most heroic efforts, probably already beyond both our capacity and our will, would enable the planet to continue to sustain us.

We are almost exactly in the place anyone watching the stately movement of the Zodiac would expect us to be, and whether anything unusual happens precisely on December 21, 2012, or not, the Mayan Long Count calendar has also been uncannily accurate in predicting vast change during this period.

It is strange enough that these calendars even exist, but far stranger is the fact that they are in any way at all accurate. Even stranger is the fact that there exists knowledge of a great plan of some sort concealed in the Bible.

If modern perceptions of the human past did not make it seem impossible, there would be no question but that people in earlier times possessed deeper understanding of the human situation than we do, and recorded their understanding in long count calendars that can have no purpose other than to mark great cycles of life that are hidden to the modern mind.

In fact, somebody in the past did understand. The Maya understood. The creators of the Zodiac understood. The authors of the Bible understood. But we no longer understand.

But what did they understand, and why did they understand it? Is it possible that they had skills that we no longer possess, such as the skill that is recovered by Herbert Acton and Bartholomew Light in the book, in the jungles of Guatemala?

This gets us to one of the central elements in the story: white powder gold. The existence of this substance was first brought to my attention by an old friend, Laurence Gardner, in his book Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark, which basically asks the question, was the Ark of the Covenant an artifact of an ancient science now lost, and, if so, does it have any relevance now?

Gardner describes a substance the Egyptians called mfkzt and the Hebrews shem. It was believed to confer great powers of concentration and physical health, and to enable users to enter the world of the gods and confer with these higher powers. It is depicted in reliefs as a conical white substance, and was apparently created under extremely high heat. A quantity of it was unearthed at a dig on Mount Horeb in the Sinai peninsula by Sir Flinders Petrie in 1904.

Sir Flinders found this substance while excavating the only Egyptian temple ever found outside Egypt. In the 270-foot-long temple he discovered a metallurgist’s workshop, and hieroglyphs indicating that the site had been in active use for fifteen hundred years, up to the reign of Akhenaton in 1350 B.C. Most of what Petrie found of the white substance was abandoned at the site and blew away, and both the sample he returned to England and his notes have been lost.

The actual formula for this substance remains lost to history, but it may have been accidentally rediscovered by a farmer called David Hudson while he was attempting to restore some land to arability in Arizona. He was a wealthy and politically conservative man, and had no interest in or awareness of ancient alchemical formulations. The soil was full of salt, so he was using sulfuric acid on it when he noticed that black and red material was appearing in the soil that he could not identify. When it dried, it exploded with a silent flash and disappeared, taking the paper on which he had put it with it.

Naturally, he was intrigued. He soon discovered that the flash did not cause a change of air pressure. So it was a release of light, not an explosion. After crucible reduction, he was left with beads of gold and silver that shattered like glass. But there is no alloy of these elements that is that brittle. So what did he have?

By heating, he eventually created a substance that was a white powder, which was 56 percent lighter than the original material. This could be explained by the material partly volatizing away, but when he heated it to the point that it fused into the glass container where it was being tested, all of its weight returned.

He had found a very unusual substance, one that Dr. Hal Puthoff, of the Austin Institute for Advanced Studies, said “bends” space and time.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that colloidal gold does help people with rheumatoid arthritis, and can even raise I.Q., but this is different from white powder gold.

Because the modern substance doesn’t seem to be as dramatically efficacious as the ancient one, in The Omega Point some of the ancient substance must be acquired first before the material that is used in the story can have its full effect.

This effect involves the ability to see events outside of time, before they have actually happened, as well as the ability to physically move into the past and the future.

Now, one would assume that such things are fiction. My problem with that is that I have actually done them. I’ve gone into the past and into the future both, and have often had physical experience of events before they happened.

From time to time I’ve read things in newspapers, only to look again a moment later and find them gone—and then to discover them weeks later in the latest edition of the same paper. Sadly, these little visions have not involved the stock market tables. An annoyance, to be sure.

The first of these involved the Claude Chabrol film, A Girl Cut in Two. I saw a listing of it in the Los Angeles Times in June of 2008, looked up and said to my wife, “There’s a new Chabrol movie. We’ve got to go.” I then turned back to the paper to find out where it was playing, and the listing had completely disappeared. There was no mention of it in the paper at all. So I went online and discovered that it had not yet been released.

Six weeks later, in August, I saw the same listing again. Naturally we went to the film.

But what had happened? Well, truthfully, I’m not at all sure. It was as if I read a listing from August in June. Since then, this has happened to me three or four times.

It is far from the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me involving time. The most amazing of these events took place in March of 1983, when we lived on LaGuardia Place in Manhattan. One rainy Saturday morning, I was crossing Houston Street on the way to the bank when I suddenly heard a terrific creaking and sloshing and clip-clopping in front of me. This symphony passed me and turned the corner, and I turned with it, to see an immense wagon come into view as if out of nowhere. It was stacked with barrels and there was a strong smell of pickles. High atop it sat a man wrapped in a black leather apron. It was being drawn by a huge horse, I assume a dray horse.

Of course, I thought that it was one of the Budweiser Clydesdales, but it was worn and dirty, and the smell was very clearly not beer.

As it passed up the street, I found that LaGuardia Place had changed entirely. Gone was the street I knew, with modern co-op towers on the northeast side of LaGuardia and Houston. Instead, a man in a derby stood across the street, much closer and in front of a row of smaller buildings. He shouted something, and at the same moment, there was movement to my right, and I turned to see a small woman dressed entirely in black go skittering away from me. Then I saw, coming up what in 1983 was West Broadway, a group of five or six riders on gorgeous horses, looking like some sort of equestrian team.

I became aware of the fact that this was no longer the New York of 1983, but that, somehow, I was seeing the same street corner in the past. I noticed an odd, curved curb at my feet, then a bit of paper in it. I thought, if I get that paper, that’ll prove what’s happening. But as I bent down, something that felt like ice-cold water seemed to pour right through my body, and with it came a loneliness so intense that, had it persisted for more than a few moments, it might have driven me mad.

The thought came that, if I touched that paper, I would remain here forever, and I froze. Slowly, the sharp smell of coal and the denser stench of manure dissipated. Then the sound of cars returned. When I looked up, everything seemed normal.

Forgetting about the bank, I rushed home, frightened that something was terribly wrong and I might never see my family again. This was before my 1985 close encounter, so I was totally unprepared for anything in the least unusual.

It never happened quite like that again, but I never forgot it. I went to the library and read endless microfiche records of old newspapers, looking for classified ads that might have been placed by people trapped in time. I didn’t find anything.

These experiences, though, have led me to think that we are not fixed in time, and that we don’t really need any technology more exotic than the human body to move through it.

In The Omega Point, movement through time has been developed to an art and a science, and the time machine involved is a mixture of both. It is a scientific device, in that the colors mixed for it contain chemical properties that enable movement through time. But it is also created with love and artistry, and it is the combination of science and art that confers its amazing properties on it.

This is because it is constructed using not the arid principles of modern science, but those of the lost science of the soul, which combines, in my novel and perhaps in reality, a rigorous physical technology with a carefully controlled and immeasurably potent emotional state, the love that Caroline Light needs so badly to succeed, and gets, after a struggle, when her beloved David finally remembers what they shared as children.

Christian principles of love, compassion, and forgiveness are explored throughout the book, and it is love, in the end, that confers on mankind the ability to move on into time, and reestablish our presence in the physical world.

I am not a conventional Christian, but I am certainly a believer in the intelligence and compassionate insights of Jesus, and the meaning of his resurrection. I reject the idea that it was done to free us from some sort of sin. It was an example of what happens when a person lives an ethical life that feeds the soul, and dies without attachment to life’s hungers.

One of the most ancient of all human ideas is that there is a judgment after death. The Egyptians saw the soul as being weighed, and in my story, greed, cruelty, and arrogance weigh souls down to the point that, when the body dies, the soul literally drops out of it and ends up imprisoned in the depths of the earth, remaining there, presumably, until the end of time. Other souls—the great majority—which are light enough to rise, ascend into a state that is never described in the book, because its mystery has never really been explored, and perhaps cannot be explored.

So far, the plan described in The Omega Point mirrors the one in the Book of Revelation. But then it takes a turn in another direction. In the Sermon on the Mount, which is probably the most profound statement ever made, there is mention that the meek will inherit the earth.

To me, this is promise of some surcease from the ages-long torment that the ordinary human being has experienced at the hands of the more aggressive and powerful. In my story, the great of the world are left hiding in their holes to die, I suppose, a lingering death. The innocent majority ascend, as well as those chosen for the special work of constructing a new home for mankind to move forward in time and continue our ages-long journey toward ecstasy, but this time without the cruel, the avaricious, and the arrogant, only with those who are fully human.

When I was a young man, I had the extraordinary privilege of being an occasional student of P. L. Travers, who was deeply involved in esoteric work. She taught a powerful ethics of the meek, whom she used to call “the little cottagers,” and this ethic was present not only in her talks but also in the letters I received from her. It affected me profoundly, and I have never forgotten that it is, in the end, the humble man at the bottom of the world, the one who is entirely overlooked by the grand and the powerful, who is forced into war, starved, left to die, ignored, and broken on the wheel of the avarice of the great, who emerges into immortality while, as Jesus put it so succinctly, those who display their excellence receive their reward in life.

Is there really a plan for us, one that brings justice to this unjust world? When one thinks of all the ages of oppression and injustice that define our history, one can only hope that, somewhere in time, the promise of the Sermon on the Mount will indeed be fulfilled. If so, then the earth will wind up in the hands of those who will cherish her, riding her in joy and respect, into the reaches of time.