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Gerrit Teule is a Dutch writer on the subject "Evolution of Consciousness". He is a board member of the Dutch Teilhard de Chardin Foundation and maintains the public part of the website for this foundation, including the discussion forum (www.teilharddechardin.nl). For 30 years he was a technician and computer specialist with IBM, specialising in large systems, complex networks and usage of computers by people without IT knowledge. He later specialized on computer usage by disabled people. Since 1990 is an independent writer. His own website is www.elektromagnetischekracht.nl. Email: [email protected]. This essay is a shortened translation of the last chapter in his book "Our soul has deep grounds" (still unpublished) .

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY GERRIT TEULE

Collective Amnesia
and the Apocalypse

Gerrit Teule

Following my previous article, published on Integral World with the title “The Eon hypothesis in a nutshell”, this essay continues the eonic thought with a discussion about collective unconsciousness, the catastrophes in evolution and man's reaction to this. In my previous article I described the “eonic matrix”, the collection of eons/electrons all around and within us, also known as the collective unconscious mind. The kernel of the eonic theory and hypothesis is that mind, inside of eons/electrons, is continuing its development since the big bang. Consciousness is the result from the cooperation between the eonic mind and neurons in our brain and body. This evolution is in essence an evolution of consciousness, where human beings play a temporary role, together with all previous creatures in the past.

In this essay I want to explore the possibility, that our collective and individual minds can be damaged by disasters in history, recent as well as far before our human time. The question at hand is now: can the collective unconscious mind, as brought forward by psychologists as Carl Jung and Roberto Assagioli, and physically structured by the eon hypothesis (Jean Emile Charon) suffer a kind of mental illness and amnesia, due to a world-wide disaster, that might have taken place approximately 10.000 years ago? In other words, can a collective mind have an illness that has a duration of several millennia? And do we, in our present time, recognize in our collective memory the imprint of this catastrophe in the past? Is the human race nowadays still suffering from the consequences of an ancient trauma?

Different viewpoints about evolution

There are several viewpoints about the course of the evolution. A strong and still dominant point of view came up with the Darwinism. This is the conviction that evolution always had a steady pace, without great events and with a gradual transition from one species to another. Around 1980 this conviction even became an academic dogma and since that time it has been an obstacle for the development of new visions and also an obstacle for the intelligence of many scientists. The long name for this dogma is uniformitarianism. The dogma works as Thomas Kuhn described the word paradigm. People, who proposed other visions, were ridiculed or put aside from the academic consensus. Their articles were refused by the scientific press. Slavishly following this dogma, it seems obvious to think that evolution did not cause any mental trauma. Besides, in a pure materialistic science there is no such a thing as 'mental', let alone a 'mental trauma'; it's all pure chemical.

The counterpart of this long word is catastrophism. This thought came forward from the geological evidence of numerous catastrophes, which occurred during evolution. Some of these catastrophes almost killed all life on earth or they damaged life very seriously, causing particular species to be eliminated completely. In the light of catastrophism the Darwinist 'survival of the fittest' should be rephrased into 'survival of the luckiest', because in many cases the survival was just a matter of finding a deep cave somewhere close by to hide (and being small enough to fit into that cave). The most well-known disaster happened approx. 66 million years ago, when a large meteorite hit the earth in Mexico, wiping out the life of the dinosaurs (and making human life possible in the process).

In the scientific literature we find studies about ice ages, movements of the earth crust in relation to the liquid kernel, reversions of the earth magnetic field, raising and sinking of continental plates, devastating water floods by the collapse of ice dams, periods of great heat and dryness. More recently there are reports of a world-wide disaster, probably 10.000 years ago, that left its scars not only in geological structures, but also in the collective mind and myths of the human race. Descriptions of this disaster can be found in stories about the deluge, where the old Noah played an important role. It is not only the bible that tells us this story. Other stories (Gilgamesh, Atlantis and lots of other myths all over the world) tell us about a similar flood. Lots of people don't take these stories very serious, because they don't want to believe in the associated religion, but these stories have a deeper source than the religions which were built around them later on.

There are more and more indications for the possibility that there existed a highly developed civilization, or even more civilizations, more than ten thousand years before our time, in which the consciousness and technical knowledge already reached high levels of development. De flood washed the remembrance of this time almost completely to the bottom of the sea, hidden under thick layers of mud. The real question is: how could this happen? In some occasions the evidence comes to the surface again. Some artefacts endured the disaster, like the Egyptian Sphinx (with scars of heavy water erosion), older fundaments under the pyramids, stone constructions of the Tolmecs and Tiahuanaca, old stone constructions under sea level in the Gulf of Bengalen, etc. They are still waiting for the right interpretations.

In short there are four recognised viewpoints on evolution, brought forward by several investigators.

1. According to De Lamarck (1744 - 1829) the evolution illustrates the great adaptability of life to new circumstances. Evolution is in his opinion straight forward, aiming at a purpose and ascending. This is the uniformitarianism in its original form, as Darwin supported it, except for the purposefulness.
2. According to Georges Cuvier (1769 – 1832) the whole evolution is accompanied by (cosmic) disasters with mass extinctions, followed by a rapid evolution of new species. This theory became known as catastrophism. A catastrophe is not necessarily bad, especially on the long term; it creates new possibilities. The fact that human beings are in abundance present nowadays is most likely made possible by the catastrophe that destroyed the dinosaurs. Cuvier, was a French geologist, pathologist-anatomist, zoologist en palaeontologist. According to his vision the earth layers witnessed of a catastrophic formation; there was a succession of different prehistoric 'worlds' everyone with its own flora and fauna. A creative and Devine force fills the earth again and again with fresh life after a depopulating and/or sterilizing catastrophe per continent or the earth as a whole. This theory explains the sudden and astonishing succession of earth layers and the discontinuities of the biota (life communities).
3. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) described the principle of calm and undisrupted evolution without a purpose, without any mental driving source, and via natural selection on the basis of random mutations. (This was in particular valid for the periods between catastrophes, of which Darwin apparently had no knowledge.) Darwin estimated the total age of the world to be some million years. He seemed to have a second thought with this assumption. He wanted to avoid the thinking about a Devine influence. All evolution had to be developing from itself (automatically, as we say today) and slowly. Critics on this vision were that the available time in evolution is too short to allow for the evolution of extremely complex organs or processes. With his strong emphasis on the “struggle for life” he also missed the point of close cooperation (symbiogenesis).[1]
4. Since some decennia the new and at the same time very old insight comes forward, that there is a psychic-spiritual force pushing the evolution forward to more and more complexity. In the materialistic and mechanistic science this spiritual power was abandoned, because the dogma of the Darwinian evolution theory without a mind was untouchable. But now the 'evolution of consciousness' comes forward again, demonstrable and theoretically founded: evolution with a strong support from mind and consciousness. Chance in combination with memory and the intelligence to choose is something totally different compared to pure and undirected chance. It delivers a possibility for a rapid evolution of complex constructions with an 'irreducible complexity' (a cell with DNA, an eye, etc.). I described this spiritual force in my previous article “The eon hypothesis in a nutshell”, with the message: this spiritual force is identical to the (inside of the) electromagnetic force, the building force of the evolution.

A world-wide trauma; evolution through catastrophes

In this essay I describe the hypothesis that mankind received an enormous trauma in the recent past and reacted to this trauma collectively as an individual would do to a trauma: repression, amnesia and even aggressive denial and mental illness. Following this hypothesis there is a big hole in our collective memory, starting 10.000 years ago. This could explain why orthodox archaeology has a tendency to give a starting date to human civilization of 5000 years B.C. and refuses to look at the upcoming evidence of earlier signs of highly developed civilizations.

More than 10.000 B.C. the sea level was tenths of meter lower than nowadays. England was connected to Netherlands via dry tundra.[2] Rising sea levels with tenths of meter would inundate lots of cities at the coasts, the most popular place to start a city (because of transportation, agriculture, industry, food, trade, and climate). How a flooding-scenario could have taken place, is still unknown. There are hypothesis about cosmic explosions far away that activated series of volcano's and shake the earth crust. A supernova could send lots of particles (aerosols) into the earth atmosphere, and this could cause heavy rain fall and a sharp decline of the temperature. Another hypothesis was a strange coming together of the planets Venus, Mars and Jupiter (Immanuel Velikovsky: “Worlds in collision”, 1955). But it could also have happened as was described in the excellently documented book “Und die Sintflut gab es doch, vom Mythos zur historische Wahrheit” (Droemer, Knaur, 1993),[3] written by the geologists Edith en Alexander Tollmann. I use and describe this scenario, because it contains an original and well documented vision that may not be recognised by main consensus yet, but it is very instructive. It is, so to speek, a public lesson in cosmic violence and the enormous consequences on the world-wide evolution of human consciousness.

Lots of catastrophes happened in the early days of the earth formation, far before mankind came forward. After 1980 geological indications came forward to underline this catastrophe theory. These indications were known for a longer time, but ignored by the scientific establishment and consensus. Investigators like Velikovski and, more recent, Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods, 1995) published about this subject and they were ridiculed and opposed. But the last catastrophe, approx. 10.000 years ago, is kept in the remembrance of the collective mind as 'The Flood'. The book “Und die Sintflut gab es doch, vom Mythos zur historische Wahrheit” by the Tollmans contains a thorough geological and historical study about a hypothetical large asteroid, breaking into pieces. These pieces hit the earth on several places in the oceans and on dry land. It must have been an asteroid with a size of several kilometres. The gravitational forces caused a breakdown of this asteroid in approx. ten big pieces. The largest pieces dropped in the sea, but countless smaller pieces and debris hit the land or burned in the atmosphere.

This is the story of a worldwide disaster that could have caused the Flood. I tell this story, because it's a good illustration of what Cuvier really meant. Above that, it gives a good and instructive impression of what a cosmic and catastrophic disaster really means in terms of horror and devastation and how a collective consciousness reacts to that with a deep collective post-traumatic stress and amnesia. So, the psychological main question is: is the present mankind still traumatized by this ancient Flood and is our world history after 5000 years B.C. with all her violence, aggression and despair a description of the human struggle to deal with this trauma?

Brown spots mark impact sites on
Jupiter's southern hemisphere.

You may remember the asteroid Shoemaker/Levy, which hit the planet Jupiter in 1994, between July 16 and 22. That asteroid did also break into large pieces by the pulling power of the planet, and the pieces landed one after the other on the surface of Jupiter. Each of these separate pieces would have been large enough to destroy all life on earth. Only after these huge impacts, so close by in our own solar system, the scientific community understood the message that this could happen on earth as well. Suddenly the catastrophism theory got more support. On the 30st of June in 1908 a smaller asteroid (approx. 100 meters in diameter) came down in Siberia, at the Stony Toengoeska River. This asteroid did not hit the ground, but exploded in the air and destroyed an area of forest with a size of 65 kilometres in diameter. If that had happened above the most densely part of Holland (the Randstad, with 6 million inhabitants) of the London area, then we would see this as a world-disaster with millions of casualties. This would have been a collective trauma for Europe and the world. Undoubtedly this would have changed the history of the last century completely.

The same as what happened on Jupiter, but with a smaller asteroid, happened approx. 9.500 years ago on earth, according to the Tollmann hypothesis. Asteroids are mostly rather loose structures from ice and stone blocks, which can easily break into pieces by strong gravitational forces. Above that, asteroids have a great speed compared to the earth speed, some hundred thousand kilometres per hour. This gives the pieces an enormous kinetic energy. Through the rotation of the earth these pieces fell in succession on different places of the earth, as is shown in the picture below. Most pieces came down in the oceans. One piece landed on earth at Köfels in Tirol.

The effects of these impacts must have been horrible; an unimagable apocalyptic violence, that rumbled over the earth. In those days the total human population was approx. five million people; at least, that was the conviction of the orthodox science. But if the hypothesis of lost civilizations are true, than this number of people could have been much larger, more than half a billion. The majority of these people lived near the coasts, because of the climate circumstances and the possibilities for trade and sea-food. Remember also, that in those days the sea-level was tenths of meter lower than today. The large fragments of stone and ice caused massive flood waves, consisting of boiling and whirling water that reached at the coastal line, with heights of almost one kilometre. Imagine a wall of boiling water of several hundreds of meters high, coming in your direction with speeds of a jet fighter. At the coasts nobody had a chance to survive this ordeal. The only chances for survival existed high in the mountains, hidden away in a deep cave. There a small number of survivors sat down, shivering of horror and fear, and later on shivering of cold.

Effects of an impact

To get a realistic idea of the scope of such a catastrophe, it is good to analyse the successive phases of the impact. An impact like this has a series of effects and today we are able to reconstruct such an event precisely. Suppose a big clump of stone or ice hits the earth surface with a speed of more than 100.000 kilometres per hour. That impact releases an enormous amount of kinetic energy; thousands of hydrogen bombs explode at the same time. In the first second after the impact there will be a fountain of overheated steam and vapored or molten rock that spouts vertically from the bottom of the sea into the highest regions of the atmosphere. After cooling down a bit, the material spreads horizontally in the atmosphere and over land. The massive shockwave spreads with supersonic speeds over the sea and the land. Immediately after this shockwave follows a hot pyroclastic storm, that rages over sea and land. Anyone who survived the shockwave in some way will be killed by this heat-storm. Right after this shockwave and heat-storm the immense flood waves of boiling water rage over the land, deep into the country, and the waves stop only against the nearest mountain range. Then the water, loaded with debris, returns back to the sea with a thundering violence, taking with them all living and dead bodies. At the same time glowingly hot specks of molten stone, flying though the atmosphere, fall back to the earth and ignite anything that can burn. Together with the storm this causes immense fire storms raging across the continent. The violent shockwaves in the earth crust cause lots of volcano's to burst out and streams of lava and pyroclastic dust clouds add to the total disaster and destruction. After the devastating flood waves and fires one can expect darkness for months, because the air is totally filled with smoke and dust. There will be an extreme rainfall, first with hot and red sour rain (described in old myths as “dead blood”), with rainfalls of ten meters a day, and of course the heavy flooding that go along with these amounts of water and mud. This rain can last for months or even years. In the rain there are lots of dust-particles, so that the first rain consists of glowing hot, sticky and biting acid mud, falling from the air. The impacts also cause lots of pyrotoxines in the air; poisoning stuff that kills all unprotected man and animals, as far as they miraculously survived all the other devastations. The multiple impacts also damage the ozone-layer. Unfiltered UV-radiation will harass the earth violently. And finally there is the 'greenhouse' effect of all vapours, smoke and dust in the atmosphere. It will take ages to repair all these planetary damages, although nature can recover very fast. For the people at that time this whole complex of disasters must have been a total catastrophe, an absolute apocalypse in its most hideous form, beyond any imagination. This seems a good basis for the notion of a hell, deeply hidden in our sub-consciousness.

Did this really happen?

This seems to be what happened all over the world, 10.000 years ago according to the Tollmann hypothesis and lots of evidence that they brought together. Deep in our collective memory we all carry the remembrance to this ordeal and on many paintings we find the expression of this. Asteroids with their tail became a symbol of the devil and all the bad stings that can happen. In churches, where clergyman pour out hell and damnation over the pious people, they misuse this trauma to support their message of salvation.

Millions of people, living in the coastal areas, were killed instantly. They did not suffer very long. But on some places it took more time than a few seconds. A dramatic testimonial came from the Kurnai, a tribe of the Gippsland in Victoria, Southeast Australia. That region was inhabited for thousands of years by Aborigines. On the open terrain they had no chance against the glowing stones and firestorms, falling on their heads. In their despair they killed their children, men killed their wives and brothers killed their brothers. Their dead bodies were taken by the raging waters, first inland and later back to the sea. For human artefacts and bones we will have to search in the oceans, under tenth of meters of water en sediment. These people did not have any chance whatsoever.

The map of the impacts shows that these effects occurred all over the world, close to the coastal lines of Australia, South and Middle America, North Europe, Africa, India and China. The floods and apocalyptic effects were almost everywhere. In the ice-seas billions of tons of ice melted and floes of ice were deposited high in the mountains as a fast melting icecap. The impacts also caused strong shockwaves through the deep oceans, killing lots of animals. Only a few animals survived in deeper waters, far away from the impacts, or hidden in caves.

Such a horrible happening must have made a deep traumatic impression on the few survivors, who, spread over the world, thought that they alone survived the catastrophe. The total number of survivors could be some ten thousands and not more. Stories about this Flood , the 'sin-flood' and 'sin--fire', were kept alive in numerous old myths and legends across the whole world. The Tollmanns and others collected and analysed these stories and the found a rather precise date for the catastrophe. This date was concluded by analysing sediment layers, layers of soot and iridium, deposited by the impacts. Even the time of day was constructed with the analysis of the old myths and traditions. It must have happened 7553 years before Christ plus or minus some years, during new moon in the beginning of autumn (northern hemisphere) and around 03.00 hour GMT. Add to that the 2012 years of our time table and we get 9565 years. This is a point in time from where the human race still keeps memories alive in the form of myths, legends and old religious books.

Of course, as can be expected with every epoch-making theory or hypothesis that contradicts the established consensus of uniformitarianism, the publication of the Tollmanns in 1993 was followed by a true flood of critics and ridiculisation. See under Wikipedia: Tollmann's hypothetical bolide. Carl Sagan said already: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The same Sagan humiliated the pioneering work of the scientist Velikovski. And indeed, proof requires a worldwide research on all kinds of phenomena. The effects of such a disaster are not always clearly visible and there are effects of older catastrophes on top of each other. Also the enormous influences of rain and wind blur the traces of a disaster. The research requires a number of scientific disciplines cooperating closely. Lots of scientists however stay slavish within the limits of their own discipline and that makes it very difficult to conduct multi-disciplinary investigations; the gathering and combining of data from different disciplines is even actively counteracted. However, this does not mean that this line of research (in nature and in old myths, combined) should not be done. The results are stunning.

The story of creation revisited

It is well known that the Biblical story about creation by the Almighty should not be seen as a correct historical representation of evolutionary facts. To support this thought you don't have to be an atheist. The two great stories, evolution and the Divine creation, don't go together very well, when you take Bible texts as literally true. But on the other hand it is really amazing how well the Biblical story of creation connects precisely with the story after the catastrophic Flood, as described above. Suddenly it all fits together like two praying hands. In the following text I mixed the Bible texts (in italic) with the happenings after the Flood to make this clear. The Bible texts were copied from the Book of Genesis (the King James Bible version).

• When the world came to rest after the floods and the heat/storms, weeks after the catastrophic impacts, the whole world looked ruined; dark and bare. All plants were gone, except for some roots or trunks, peeking out of the mud. The rest, including all houses, constructions and all bodies of man and animals, were taken away by the returning waters to the bottom of the sea. Black clouds, rain, snow, hail, and abominable odours raged over the earth (“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”).
• Weeks after the impact the skies became somewhat lighter. (“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.")
• Slowly the sun became visible again through the raging clouds. (“And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”).
• The water leaked away from the layers of mud and flowed back to lakes and to the seas. (”And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear”).
• The branches and roots of destroyed trees were still buried in the ground and seeds were spreads all over the fertile mud. Very soon, even within days, there was a haze of green spreading over the land. (“And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth.”).
• Also the stars became visible again after a long time of darkness by clouds of dust and steam. (“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.”).
• In the seas and the deep lakes the water animals, who survived the shockwaves, came out of their hiding places. Also birds, who had found a hiding place, came into the air again (“And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”).
• Some people crawled out of their deep caves, so few that they saw themselves as the only survivors. (“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”) In this story Adam and Eva are symbolic for the very few survivors and their loneliness. They were allowed to walk through the fresh green of the exploding vegetation. Other people on other places of the earth came forward as well, distracted looking around, many of them insane or at least heavily traumatized and/or mentally ill. (It is not so astounding that Kain killed his brother Abel.)

Apparently the creation story in the Bible is all about recreation, where the Flood seems to be the starting point. The Tollmanns state therefore that the story of the Flood in itself is not untrue, but the story is misplaced in the Bible. Of course, the story of Noah with his Ark cannot be true. Not any building of wood could withstand the cosmic forces of the impact and the gigantic tsunami's and fire-storms, not to mention the logistic problem of gathering and feeding all the animals of the world in pairs of two. Besides, the warning time before the impacts was almost zero. Noah's story is invented only to support a message of salvation. More intriguing is the Book of the Revelation of St. John in the latest part of the Bible: the apocalypse. This seems not to be a story about something in the future, but it seems a remembrance of the apocalyptic happenings in the past, deeply buried in the collective unconsciousness of mankind. My hypothesis is that the composers of the Bible, hundreds of years after Christ, used this story in another context, just to support their message of faith. They have rearranged the chapters in the Bible in such a way, that it underlines their salvation message: “Sinners of the world, convert, because the end times are near!” To serve this purpose they have put the bible-books back to front. The correct order should be:

• First: the apocalypse, also described in the Revelation of St. John; not a prophecy for the future, but a remembrance of the grey past.
• Immediately after that: The Flood, as described in Genesis and also known from various myths and legends all over the world.
• And thereafter: the story of recreation, as described in the first part of Genesis and in other myths.

This again is an indication of the remarkable religious context of the Flood and the Apocalypse. The Bible-writers wanted to underline their message of the final judgement day: the cruel punishment for all not-converted sinners. The reversed order, as I described in the three points above, does not threaten mankind with this kind of apocalypse in the future, although cosmic accidents can happen anytime. This proposed order seems a good alternative to the melancholic expectations of the fundamentalists: a horrible judgement day as painted by Hieronymus Bosch and all kinds of morbid last-judgement prophecies. This is very relevant today, because of the wide spread pessimism about man's future that emerges in our time (due to overpopulation, shortage of raw materials, energy crisis, financial crisis, etc.). Lots of people nowadays still believe in the coming Last Judgement. This pessimism is strongly influenced and stimulated by the Christian religious doom-day expectations. Why should we take care of this earth, as it will soon be destroyed anyway?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, although a Roman Catholic priest, saw this in a different way. The trauma lies behind us, or, as he expressed it: “The paradise is before us”. With this sentence Teilhard shows again his own religious conviction, and not his scientific discipline. I think that there will neither be an apocalypse, nor a paradise in the future. What may come depends on our own world-wide initiatives and is also dependent of random moving pieces of matter, flying through the universe. In this time of the fast development of our consciousness, also with the help of our latest super-telescopes and our view on the cosmic environment, we are very aware of these problems and possibilities, better than ever.

According to modern scientific insights the expansion of this universe is accelerating, influenced by mysterious dark matter and dark energy. However, the hypothesis about dark matter and energy is questioned by plasma physicists. They think that these theories about dark matter and energy are emergency measures, only meant to give an obsolete theory a longer life. Nobody really knows what will happen in the far future. The big crunch, the final violent collapse of this universe (the ultimate Armageddon), will not happen, probably; a shame for doom-thinkers and other catastrophe-lovers. And, speaking about cosmic affairs, would an asteroid, somewhere on the other side of our galaxy, have made a little detour just to hit a bunch of bad people on our earth and to teach them a lesson? 'A lesson' is a very weak expression for this world-wide massacre. It is ridiculously anthropocentric to think that mankind with its (bad) behaviour has any influence on the orbit of a lump of stone and ice somewhere in the depth of this universe. The writers and composers of the Bible converted the Flood into a Sin-flood, initiated by a local and revengeful Yahweh, because it served their peculiar message of salvation. But these impacts were only a strange and cruel caprice of nature; it had nothing to do with guilt or penance. In the whole history of this earth it happened very often. In the book of the Tollmanns they gave precise lists of these impacts during the whole evolution of this earth. During the evolution of man, since the time that man started to walk upright (according to science almost 3,5 million years ago), there have been a lot of smaller impacts, of which approx. 30 are detected.

The visions of Darwin and Cuvier

The correctness of the practical Darwinian vision of a calm and slow evolution via natural selection and chance, as far as this happens in the longer periods between the catastrophes, was supported by the discoveries about genetics and the unravelling of the DNA. That showed the connections between the common ancestors of all mammals over millions of years. But one cannot eliminate the strong influence of successive distinctions of many species by world-wide catastrophes. The catastrophe of 66,4 million years ago of a large meteorite impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, thus enabling the evolution of smaller creatures like man. It made the further evolution of mankind possible.

In the time-frame that humans walk around on two legs, the Flood was probably the heaviest catastrophe. And even more remarkable, this catastrophe was the only one that has left traces in myths and legends. The exact influence of this Armageddon can hardly be explained, except that the human population was decimated from many millions to a few individuals, widely spread over the world (or the phantasy of 144.000 'lucky dogs' as mentioned in the Book of Revelations?). Mostly these people must have lived somewhere in the mountains and the inlands, where deep caves were available to hide. In general these people did not participate in the cultivated centres of trade at the coastal areas. This would mean that the intellectual evolution had to restart almost from scratch.

It is also clear what the influence of such a disaster would be if it happened in our own time. Nowadays billions of people live in the coastal areas, packed together in super/cities. With an impact of comparable size as the ´Tollmann bolide´ they would not have a ghost of a chance. Recently we got, on a very small scale, a little foretaste and warning with the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan. About the escape and rescue-plans for many millions of people we cannot have illusions. We should not worry too much about the small meteorites, that burn in the atmosphere. But sometimes we experience a near-escape as is shown in this press article of June 17, 2011:

LOS ANGELES - An asteroid with the size of a robust lorry has passed the earth on Monday, above the southern Atlantic Ocean on a distance of 12.000 kilometres. For spatial distances this is very close to a collision. This was reported by the American space organisation NASA. The asteroid 2011 MD with a diameter between 5 and 20 metres passed the earth with a boomerang-like orbit, just as the NASA scientists had calculated. The speed was approx. 100.000 kilometres per hour. According to NASA it happens one time in six years that an asteroid of this size passes the orbit of the earth. If it would enter the earth atmosphere, it would probably burn without hitting the surface.

A collective disorder?

The purpose of this essay is not to frighten the reader (after all the Armageddon of the impact, that created the Flood, is supposed to have happened 9.500 years ago). The purpose is to show that in the recent history of mankind there could have been a catastrophe that caused a world-wide amnesia, a collective trauma or in present terms: a collective posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of the human kind as a whole. The illness PTSD is generally known as something individual, but here we ask ourselves if a global and collective PTSD can exist, where the whole mankind suffers and of which the consequences spread over thousands of years. Seen from the perspective of the 'evolution of consciousness' and the permanent memory in the 'eonic matrix', as I described in my previous article, the collective memory of all mankind is kept alive in the form of deep archetypes, just as the psychologist Carl Jung described them. In my books I called them 'active metaphors', because they are active in our minds every day. The aggressive and psychopathic human history of the last 10.000 years, including the stubborn denial of previous far developed cultures by modern materialistic science, seems to bear the characteristics of a world-wide repression of something that really is too bad to talk about.

An individual PTSD bears the following characteristics, according to a text from Wikipedia:

"PTSD is believed to be caused by experiencing any of a wide range of events which produces intense negative feelings of 'fear, helplessness or horror' in the observer or participant. Sources of such feelings may include (but are not limited to):

• experiencing or witnessing childhood or adult physical, emotional, or sexual abuse;
• experiencing or witnessing physical assault, adult experiences of sexual assault, accidents, drug addiction, illnesses, medical complications;
• employment in occupations exposed to war (such as soldiers) or disaster (such as emergency service workers);
• getting a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness"

This can lead to the symptoms:

• Sustained avoidance of experiences that remembers the patient to the trauma, blocking the reactive abilities.
• Attempts to avoid thoughts, feelings or conversations that reminds to the trauma.
• Attempts to avoid activities, places or people that stimulate memories to the trauma.
• Inability to remember important aspects of the trauma.
• Clear diminishing interest and participation in important activities.
• Feelings of disbelief of alienation with other people.
• Disability to connect to or love other people.
• Feelings of a limited future (f.i. no expectations of ones career, marriage, children or one's normal life expectation).

Scaled up to a world-wide level the question is of the whole humanity, consisting of billions of people, can suffer collectively from this disorder, including all symptoms mentioned above. Can individual feelings of 9500 years ago be continued into a collective state of mind that hangs like a black cloud over a discouraged humanity? It has been said often, that this world is a “valley of tears” and that human history gives lots of reasons for this thought.

How this world-wide disaster could have occurred 10.000 years ago becomes ever clearer. In the book Forbidden History lots of essays have been brought together by J. Douglas Kenyon. A whole procession of researchers report their findings and investigations, about tangible artefacts from the pre-history that could never be made by primitive hunters or nomads, as well as lots of messages from the myths of mankind.

The idea that an Armageddon in the past still influences our present behaviour is clear for everyone who really wants to see it. Lots of symptoms of a collective PTSD, as we experience them today, come forward in these essays, in further literature and in our daily newspapers or on TV:

• The denial by orthodox archaeology and the unwillingness of many scientists to accept this knowledge, a collective amnesia of archaeologists for everything that is older than 5000 years B.C. and the aggression with which researchers of this prehistory are treated.
• The false trail of pure materialism that keeps modern humanity going astray into a clearly unsustainable future.
• The phenomenon that modern man has the compulsion to float away from reality on illusions of richness and comfort, hedonism and a life without prehistory. Anything is better than horrible memories.
• The existence and extreme influence of a complete sub-world aside from real life, in the form of financial markets.
• A human history that is a concatenation of cruel and bloody wars, on local scales and on a world-wide level, killing millions of people.
• A schizophrenic world economy that reserves wealth for a 'happy few' and leaves billions of people in poverty.
• And last but not least: the fascination and escape of billions of people in irrational religions, superstition, obtuse TV entertainment, astrology and voodoo, the “opium for the people”.

All these symptoms do not stand alone; they are connected by the same world-wide PTSD.

Can this disorder be cured?

As I pointed out in my previous article, this new age will be the age of the development of our (self)consiousness: the recognition that the evolution, in which the human kind participates, is in essence an evolution of consciousness. An important part of that growing consciousness is also the healing of this trauma by (psychotherapeutical) research and the re-examination of old traumatic history to be able to grow further, leaving the PTSD symptoms behind in history. This is exactly what psychologist like Jung and Assagioli meant with their collective unconscious mind, but now on a world-wide level. It gives hope that nowadays the study of catastrophes in the evolution is going on strongly. The total list of literature on this subject (as shown in the book Forbidden History and the book of the Tollmans) is impressive and it is only the beginning. The thorough investigation to these trauma's and the psychological dealing with these facts are a big and necessary step in the on-going evolution of consciousness, wherever it may lead to.

Literature

“Forbidden history, prehistoric, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization””, edited by J. Douglas Kenyon, 2005, Bear & Company , Rochester, Vermont, ISBN 978-159143045-2

“De Zondvloed, van mythe tot Historische Werkelijkheid”, Edith en Alexander Tollmann, Tirion, 1993, ISBN 90-5121-409-X

“Fingerprints of the Gods”, translation: “Het ontstaan en het einde van alles”, Graham Hancock, Tirion.

“Underworld, Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age”, translation: “Onderwereld, De mysterieuze wortelen van onze beschaving”, Graham Hancock, 2002, Tirion, ISBN 90-4390-338-8

“Wat Darwin niet kon weten” (What Darwin could not know), Gerrit Teule, 2009, Ankh Hermes, ISBN978-90-202-0332-5

Notes

[1] See “Symbiogenesis, a new principle of evolution”, Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyanski, 1924, again published by Victor Fet and Lynn Margulis in 2010. Harvard University Press.

[2] In a Dutch newspaper, the NRC, a reader remarked that this fact alone clearly shows how short-sighted the idea is to store nuclear waste 'for ten thousands of years' in a building a few meters above sea level.

[3] Translated title: “The Flood happened indeed, from myths to historic fact.”