• AP Magazine

    An alternative way to explore and explain the mysteries of our world. "Published since 1985, online since 2001."

  • 1
Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, October 2022










Sacred Geometry of the Starcut Diagram:
The Genesis of Number, Proportion, and Cosmology
By Malcolm Stewart

Inner Traditions
Bear & Company
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
2022, 320 pages, 8” x 10” Hardcover, U.S. $40.00
ISBN: 978-1-64411-430-8

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

The author, Malcolm Stewart, a resident of Tilford, Surrey, England, is a former priest, television producer, a UN project director, and an administrator for Ockenden Venture, a refugee relief charity. A man of many talents, he is not only an author but also a musician and a designer who creates mosaic, stained glass, landscape, and interior designs for a range of secular and sacred environments. Thus, he is the perfect author for a volume on sacred geometry.

Filled with beautiful artwork, pictures, and illustrations, the reader is guided step-by-step in the workable knowledge of the ancient Starcut diagram. Furthermore, Stewart assures the reader/student that he/she will be able to make precise mathematical measurements and build perfect structures without a computer, calculator, slide rule, plumb bob, or a laser level.

Stewart offers a return to the very basics of the ancient knowledge of sacred geometry. He describes how the Starcut diagram was key to building humankinds first cities, how it was at the very foundation of ancient building and design, and how it even reveals the ancient geometric knowledge of pi, the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Number, Phythagorean shapes, and seals, the power of sacred numbers, and magic squares, and how it even embodied the ancient knowledge of the Tree of Life and the Kabbalah.


**********



The Mind of God:
A Spiritual-Virtual Reality Model of Consciousness &
The Contact Modalities
By Reinerio (Rey) Hernandez, JD, MCP

Independently published Amazon Publishing, Inc.
2022, 209 pages, 8.5” x 11” Paperback, U.S. $19.99
ISBN: 9798845836328

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

This book is an introductory overview of four separate and very extensive volumes entitled A Greater Reality that are edited by Rey Hernandez, JD, MCP, and a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley, and four Ph.D.’s. who are Rudy Schild, a retired Harvard University astrophysicist, Jon Klimo, a retired professor of psychology, Michael Grosso, former professor of philosophy, and Jeffrey Long, an MD Oncologist. These volumes were compiled from the research and investigative efforts of members of the Consciousness and Contact Research Institute (CCRI), a 501c3 academic research institute, that is comprised of more than 25 Ph.D. academics and medical doctors. Their fields of expertise include astrophysics, theoretical physics, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, quantum biology, information sciences, parapsychology, and medical science.

The four volumes of A Greater Reality consist of over several thousand pages. Hernandez, who is the director of CCRI, felt this book would perhaps be more appealing for readers who might, at least initially, be interested in processing an overview of what the rather massive four volumes contain. Volumes 1 and 2 are already available at this time (the other two will follow soon) and are described as theoretical volumes and consist of more than 45 PhD academics, medical doctors, and researchers who are focused on striving to understand the X Factor underlying consciousness and what Hernandez has come to call the “Contact Modalities,” which are a vast range of anomalies that manifest beneath the broad umbrella of the “paranormal,” with instances of orbs, poltergeists, precognition, paraphysical entities that can levitate, appear and disappear, walk through solid walls, and communicate telepathically, and much more.

Volumes 3 and 4 is to consist of articles by experiencers who have had a wide range of various “contact experiences” with the “Greater Reality,” which Hernandez identifies with the late Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell’s multidimensional concept called the “Quantum Hologram.” These experiences again would be on a par with Hernandez’s “Contact Modalities,” which could be NDEs, OBEs, spirit encounters, UFO related contact encounters – virtually everything under the broad umbrella of the “paranormal.” Hernandez explains that the majority of authors who submitted to these volumes viewed these experiences as more consciousness-based phenomena as opposed to physical-based, the non-local aspect of quantum physics. CCRI was created following the five-year study that was done by the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE), that concluded with the publication of Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non-Human Intelligence (2018). It was for that reason that the extensive FREE survey of several thousand UFO contact experiencers, and all of the “Contact Modalities” that arose in conjunction with the surveyed UFO contactees, that CCRI was created so that a much broader and comprehensive landscape of interconnected anomalous phenomena could be more extensively studied. As well-known UFO author and journalist John Keel noted half a century ago, Ufology might be better served as a branch of parapsychology. I am honored that Volume 2 has a chapter I wrote on Keel entitled, “The Keelian Perspective: The Integration of Ufology and the Paranormal Contact Modalities.” Keel was an early pioneer and investigator of the “Contact Modalities,” though that term wasn’t around in his day.


**********



A Greater Reality:
The New Paradigm of Nonlocal Consciousness, the Paranormal,
& the Contact Modalities
Volume #1: Theoretical Chapters
Editors Rey Hernandez, JD, MCP, Dr. Rudy Schild, PhD,
Dr. Jon Klimo, PhD, Dr. Michael Grosso, PhD, and Dr. Jeffrey Long, MD

Amazon Publishing, Inc.
2022, 808 pages, 7.5” x 9.5” Paperback, U.S. $29.99
ISBN: 9798846149694

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

Volume one, as you’ll realize from reading the review of the previous introductory book by Reinerio (Rey) Hernandez, The Mind of God, is a theoretical volume based upon the accumulated evidence of these so-called “Contact Modalities” that Hernandez describes as “all of the diverse ways that humans are ‘piercing the veil’ of our physical reality and having perceived contact with consciousness-based Higher Forms of Intelligence.” Hernandez pressed even further with how consciousness is primary and how our physical world is a manifestation of consciousness.

Confused? It is certainly heady stuff.

In his Prologue, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Ph.D., points out the great challenge confronting those of us willing to truly tackle the “Contact Modalities” and their potential and profound implications. After all, once we recognize that everything seems connected, we must next seek to determine why so many of these things all seem so different. It is here that he invokes the term “imaginal.” However, he quickly points out that he doesn’t intend to imply by using this term that its simply “imaginary.” He sees the term imaginal as a symbolic translation or medium of communication that allows for us to connect the dots lurking behind these phenomena. He adds that no “Contact Modality” should be taken literally, but rather as a symbolic expression.

Kripal then, for attempted clarity, uses a metaphor. He mentions how as a kid he recalls the stain glass windows in the church he grew up in. In those stain glass windows there were images and stories that were culturally and religiously related to that particular place of worship. He then points out how other worship sites would have other kinds of stain glass windows with different images and stories. What united them, he pointed out, was the sunlight shining through them. Thus, there was the artistic expression, the translation, and the medium of contact. Otherwise, one is simply left totally confused. The believer focuses on the images as the literal whole truth and the debunker dismisses it all as simply too absurd and convoluted. Both missing the proverbial mark.

I would strongly advise in this context that those interested in the apparent absurdity aspect read Dr. Greg Little’s take on the archetypal Trickster in his and Andrew Collins’ book Origins of the Gods (2022). Jacques Vallee, in his book Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (1988), tried dealing with the apparent absurdity of contacts and communications by proposing that some of them might have been what he called metalogical events. He cited a reported encounter between a man and a ufonaut in France in 1954, where the being asked the man, “What time is it?’ The man replied, “It’s 2:30,” to which the alien bluntly fired back, “You lie; it is four o’clock.” Vallee speculated that the response may have been symbolic; the intent perhaps to convey something like how “any measurement of time can only be relative”; “time is not what you think it is.” Vallee also added how abductee Barney Hill tried to explain to his abductors how time was important to us here on earth. They seemed to have difficulty understanding this. Vallee wondered if such exchanges might have symbolically been indented to convey that consciousness transcended time itself.

A review of some of the chapters and their authors contained in this volume will hopefully be helpful to the reader as far as illustrating the caliber of thought-provoking and significant subject matter covered in this volume and the impressively qualified and academic authors who contributed said chapters. For example, A Medical Doctor and her Many Contact Modalities Experiences by Melinda Greer, MD; Contact with Transcendent Mind by Michael Grosso, PhD; The One Mind by Larry Dossey, MD; Perception, Resonance and Communications with Non-Corporal Beings: The Legacy of Dr. Edgar Mitchell & Other Pioneers by Glen Rein, PhD; Consciousness, the Brain, the Soul, and God: A Computer Model of Consciousness & the Contact Modalities by Rudy Schild, PhD; The Quantum Hologram Theory of Consciousness Reconciles the Physical and Psychic Nature of the UFO Phenomenon and is Compatible with Dr. Jacques F. Vallee’s Consciousness Hypothesis by Giorgio Piacenza, MA; The Quantum Hologram: Discovering the Nature of Reality by Joe Lewels, PhD; Throuigh Time and Space: The Evidence for Remote Viewing by Stephan A. Schwartz; Transpersonal and Transformative Potential of Out-of-Body Experiences by Julia Sellers; Lucid Dreams & Consciousness by Daniel Rekshan. And more.

There’s certainly a great deal of intellectually challenging theories and information to ponder and process in this massive volume.


**********



King Solomon on Magus:
Master of the Djinns and Occult Traditions of East and West
By Claude Lecouteux

Inner Traditions
Bear & Company
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
2022, 288 pages, 6” x 9” Hardcover, U.S. $35.00
56 b&w illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-64411-243-4

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

The author, Claude Lecouteux, a resident of Paris, is a professor emeritus of medieval literature and civilization at the Sorbonne. He’s previously authored many books on medieval and pagan afterlife beliefs and magic, among them his acclaimed Dictionary of Ancient Magic Words and Spells.

In King Solomon the Magus, Lecouteux reveals details that would not be common knowledge to many about the man the majority would only know here in America as one of the great kings of Biblical prehistory. However, besides the Christian Bible, Solomon was also heavily described in the Koran and in the writings of Flavius Josephus.

Lecouteux introduces details from a variety of these ancient sources that describe Solomon’s magical possessions like a ring given him by Gabriel that gave him powers over animals, the weather, demons, and the djinn. He examines extensive folklore and traditions worldwide about Solomon and his influence in schools of Solomonic magic in works such as The Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon the King and The Hygromancy of Solomon.


Friday, October 04, 2024