I tried to start my MacBook but nothing happened. I felt a sudden pressure filling the room that I couldn’t get away from. As I stared at the blank screen, my heartbeat began pound in my ears. The screen remained black. Beating faster, my heart now a belligerent to my brain desired full supremacy. Failed technology seemed not only intent on shutting down my computer but me as well.
I turned the computer off then on again. An icon I’d never seen before appeared in the center of my screen: a picture of a file folder with a flashing question mark—not a good sign. I repeated the off and on again to the same result. The nightmare I had feared had arrived. In disbelief, I could only think of my life’s work in writing being annihilated.
As has happened previously when staring over the edge of the cliff of panic, taunting me to jump, my brain seems to kick into action. A hand seemed to reach inside my chest and ease my pounding heart. I had backed up three days before. I was not in unfamiliar territory either as less than a month before panic had snuck up on me after receiving an emergency message that my wife was lost on a hiking trail; but that’s a story for another time.
At once I was on my phone and Googling the file folder/flashing question mark icon in front of me. I followed the instructions. Still my computer wouldn’t start up.
I called Apple support; my world was slowing. I thought of the sign, “Keep Calm and Carry On” though finding “calm” is tricky.
My experience with Apple has been remarkable. This time was no different.
I share this experience, as it is part of our world today. “My computer doesn’t work, what do I do?” It’s agonizing but part of being the best, smartest, most advanced civilization in history, or more, the best, smartest, and most advanced human beings that have ever lived. At least that’s how many see it; we’re certainly better than our ancestors, right? Today, we carry technology in our hands and pockets that’s equivalent to all the computing available to put the first person to the moon over 50 years ago. Our computers allow us access to information from anywhere in the world about anything known for as long as we have known it—instantly (if it’s not instant in our hyper-active world, we hear “this sucks!”) As the great Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” When technology is working, as we have come to expect it to, it is usually the best of the times. When technology fails, it isn’t.
Technology failed me as I was finishing Part 3 of Do We Know Why We Know but just before that, one of the topics for this article came in an email from a friend about the archeological site, Gobekli Tepe.
What, you might ask, is Gobekli Tepe and why? Gobekli Tepe is one of the most important archeological sites in the world today. Gobekli Tepe is a Neolithic archeological site near the city of Sanliurfa in Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey. Why? Because it is rewriting our history books as we know them. It seems a perfect way to continue what I started writing about in my article A Changing Frame-Of-Reference.
Neolithic is by definition the later part of the Stone Age where ground or polished stone weapons and tools existed. The Neolithic period preceded the Bronze Age and dates between 10,000 and 4,500 B.C.
The limestone megaliths found at Gobekli Tepe date back 11,600 years. That’s 7,000 years before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza, 6,000 years before the invention of writing and 500 years before the development of agriculture. In the megalithic columns found on the site are indications of the earth’s precession (I briefly described precession in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference). Some see Gobekli Tepe as the world’s first observatory. A central column at the site, Column 43, is dated at 10,950 B.C. but there seems to be evidence that parts of Gobekli Tepe date back 14,000 years that place it directly in the time of the Younger Dryas period.
Again, from my A Changing Frame-Of-Reference article where I wrote about Younger Dryas, its revelation and recognition has relevance in the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and what is being revealed about our ancient history. The Younger Dryas was a period of glacial condition globally. Caused by multiple fragments of a giant comet disintegrating and hitting earth plunging the earth’s temperature in 10,800 B.C. (12,800 B.P.). Fragments from the same comet impacting the oceans again in 9,600 B.C. (11,600 B.P.) saw a dramatic rise in temperatures. The science of what happened is still not clear but whatever the cause, the evidence on the ground is not in dispute. The global temperatures soared and the polar ice caps collapsed into the sea causing an enormous pulse of sea level rise. What is astonishing is that the 9,600 B.C. date is the same date that Plato gives for the submergence of Atlantis.
Whoa! Just a second here, where did Atlantis and Plato come from? You were talking about Gobekli Tepe?
You’re paying attention. Good. I haven’t yet mentioned Atlantis or Plato but introduce them here as from another ancient text in perhaps telling us why we know what we know. Written by Plato, a Greek philosopher and an important figure in the development of Western thought, Atlantis is a story that most believe is fiction not unlike what I’ve heard about the stories I’ve been writing about from The Bible.
Atlantis, from Plato’s dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, was an advanced civilization lost to the ocean in 9,600 B.C. It’s hard to believe that date exactly aligns with not only the time Gobekli Tepe existed but also for the enormous rise in sea level of the Younger Dryas period. There are many theories on where Atlantis existed including the archeological site at Gunung Padang in West Java, Indonesia and Santorini, the classic Greek island of Thera. There are also theories of Atlantis in Donana National Park in Andalucia, Spain, Crete in Greece, a Minoan Civilization, and Gibraltar, in the straits of Morocco. There’s much more on Atlantis, which may find a place in a future post.
But what if these ancient stories are not made up but actually took place? The metastory or story within a story perhaps best describes their function that is left to us to figure out. Remember Homer’s epic poem The Iliad and the supposed mythical city of Troy that was found at Hisarlik, Turkey. The stories may be an explanation on what happened without the availability of writing or language as we know them today, filtered by or construed in our unconscious until language further found its way into us to give us a means of explanation; the purpose of which we’ve yet to fully comprehend. What if the ancient stories we read today, though having passed through a multitude of storytellers, are based on what was true? The storytellers and those experiencing the events—as spectacular, fantastic, and impossible, as they seem to our minds today—were limited in what tools (language, writing, pictures) they had at their disposal to formulate a record of what they experienced. We, in a lesser way, experience the same today with the limitations of language in trying to write or speak what we mean.
I used the example previously of the Great Pyramids of Giza not being described in The Bible but surely existed having been built according to the historic timeline nearly a thousand years before biblical times. Were the pyramids originally included in the texts but removed because the Jewish and Hebrew writers did not want to share what they saw as Egyptian greatness, and incredible craftsmanship, with the rest of the world? Or were the pyramids not there in the timelines of the stories of The Bible with the Jewish people coming out of Egypt even longer ago than we know (though that history seems well documented)? I did write about “time” in Do We Know Why We Know and being recognized as a dimensionally measurable thing. The Egyptians were the first to measure time, some time before 1500 B.C., using the sundial, on what we know today.
We’re told in The Bible we’re not supposed to understand, in passages like Philippians 4:7, “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Or similarly in Psalm 139:6, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” But are they related to understanding God as opposed to the stories told by the people about who we are and experiences on this planet. As I wrote in Part 2, we’ve been given this propensity to feed on information. Our brains react to it, according to Jordan Peterson, the same way we react to food; we need to be fed. But then there’s the warning in 2 Timothy 3:7, “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” This leaves me unsettled and in a quandary.
In another part of Psalm 139, verse 15, seems another clue both mythical and magical in speaking to why we know what we know. “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” Archeology discoveries are in the earth but most often close to the surface like Gobekli Tepe. But, as the psalm verse indicates, what lies even deeper beneath the ground we stand on?
We have incredible resources leading us into space. That apparent final frontier, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Hollywood loves it. But does any ancient text describe that that’s where we need to go to find out more about the secrets of life? Psalm 139:15seems pretty clear that it’s “in the depths of the earth.” I’m now in Proverbs in my reading of The Bible but I don’t recall space or planetary travel having yet been mentioned.
So let us go into the earth. Almost two-dozen people to date have descended to Challenger Deep (the deepest known point in the earth’s seabed at 36,200 feet) of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean (including film director James Cameron). But even at that great depth it doesn’t come close to the distance it is to the center of the earth at 20.9 million feet.
What one man imagined lies in the earth can be read in Jules Verne’s science fiction story Journey To The Center Of The Earth. The deepest man has drilled towards the center is with the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia. I’d never heard of it. A scientific drilling project by the Soviet Union started in May 1970 in Pechengsky District on the Kola Peninsula near the Russian border with Norway was to drill as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust. A 9-inch diameter hole was drilled a record 40,230 feet by 1989. Drilling had to stop as higher than expected temperatures of 180°C were reached exceeding the expected 100°C. Along with the higher temperatures, lower density and greater porosity rock, that behaved like plastic, made drilling any farther impossible at that time. That’s thirty years ago!
But they did find fossils of microscopic plankton almost 20,000 feet down. There’s much more to investigate here.
After learning of this limited effort to explore the inside of the only planet humans have ever existed on, I am intrigued further by the text in Psalm 139. What is down there that would cause someone to write such text? This takes me back to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Kekule Problem” on our unconscious and language, the central topic of my three prior articles on Do We Know Why We Know. What would cause the passage of Psalm 139 to remain through the multitude of edits this ancient text has had to have gone through? Why such a limited investigation into earth and obsession and drive into outer space?
This causes me to pause and reflect on the three areas that will be the focus of Do We Know Why We Know going forward. We know because of what we learn from: one, the space above us (the universe and everything outside of us); two, the space below us (when standing on the ground); three, the space inside us (our unconscious). Ancient texts like The Bible have much to feed us.
Space today is our focus. It’s our future, like Columbus sailing the ocean blue for new lands (or a shorter route to India). But it’s also what we see all around us two thirds of every day. (I couldn’t find how long our eyes are open each day on average. I’ve conservatively used two thirds if we sleep for 8 hours every 24). Visually, we consume what’s around us, while our eyes are open (our second most complex organ next to our brain) but have little idea what and how much our brains are recording. That leaves less than one third of our time for the “eyes closed” part of our unconscious that goes on inside of our heads. What’s below our feet, the earth, we cannot see into and maybe part of the reason for its limited exploration. The earth is where we come from and where our body goes when we die. Every thing that we’re made of comes from the earth as written in Ecclesiastes 3:20, “All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.” Seeing that everything we’re made of and being where we go when this incredible gift of life ends, is it any wonder it gets such little attention?
But maybe there’s more beneath our feet than we realize. The fact that it seems much more challenging to get to than all we see around us, like space, is a significant hindrance but when did that ever stop us. There are certainly enough stories about what we might find to persuade us.
Sheol is known as the abode of the dead and also, the Netherworld, beneath the earth’s surface, beneath our feet. “And the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them,” Numbers 16:30 describes Sheol. Interesting is Sheol is known as the abode of the Rephaim, the people described as being greater-than-average height and stature as found in Genesis 14:5 and Deuteronomy 2:11 to name but two of the instances where these giants are mentioned in the Old Testament. The Rephaim are also referred to as “shades”, “spirits”, or “dead”. Other names of the giants in this ancient textinclude the Nephilim (fallen angels) and the Anakim (a race of giants descended from Anak). Goliath, the giant that David slew, was a Rephaim. The earth is sure to offer us much more on these ancient ancestors and who we are.
Interestingly the inner core of our planet is nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. The sun’s surface is estimated to be about 5,500°C where as the earth’s core is about 5,420°C!
“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” Jules Verne, Journey To The Center Of The Earth.
More on the earth, the universe and our unconscious, and what the ancient texts tell us in my next article.
But now to finish my Apple story …
The woman from Apple had made an appointment for me locally. Unbelievably, the Apple dealer is across the street from us. Things were coming together though I remained concerned about all my writing on the drive.
‘What if,’ the voice that speaks in the back in my head. A voice that has been there for some time, maybe my whole life, only I listen to it now more than I used to. The voice was repeating a phrase I hear often, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” from Matthew 8:26.
I broke down why I was worried. If the drive was toast and I’d lost everything on it, what would I do? My calmer state of mind realized The Actor, The Musician and The Drive In, my first novels, were published. They would be unaffected. My recent work, as I described in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference was on a drive I share with my agent. Also, as I wrote at the beginning of this article, I had my entire drive backed up. Why was I still worried? All I might have lost was what I’d done over the weekend. That wasn’t colossal. But still …
As it turned out, Jeremy, the outstanding tech at Apple, discovered the cable connecting the drive had failed. Everything on the drive was recoverable. Not as good a story as one where everything was lost but, to be sure, that story could remain fictional as far as I was concerned. The bad news was a new cable was a few days away. Most, I think, would have left it there—having done their job—but not Jeremy. He jury-rigged an external drive so by late afternoon I was back and working on my MacBook Pro like nothing had happened but a bad dream.
Osiris and Marduk might be next. Stay tuned.
* * *
There’s much more to come. Who knows where we’ll go.
Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician my first three books. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.
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