The Sky Machine

An essay by S D Anugyan

A friend recently chided me that I didn’t share much of my life with other people, that I was guilty of a certain holding back. To which I agreed, saying that I probably only share about 5% of my experiences, and that gets me into enough trouble. Well, with what I am about to write here, I’m oomphing it up to 6% and we’ll see how people handle this one. (He writes, chuckling mischievously.)

I’d always had a strong relationship with water and the sea, in part perhaps because the first year of my life was in the fishing village of Findhorn in Scotland. Then in Canada, at about five years old, I witnessed – and still remember clearly – a couple of times, an odd phenomenon of water coming down and splashing in front of me on a dry hot day. I can still see and hear it. Yet when I ran up to it there would be nothing there. People around me saw and heard nothing. They didn’t know what I was talking about. Round about the same time, I was playing with other kids on the shore of a lake in Quebec and I experienced what I can only describe now as a sort of satori – something to do with the location by water, a lightness of being, and something descending over me that was transcendent and blissful. It was one of the happiest moments of my childhood, and very fleeting.

The falling water phenomenon left me alone for the rest of my life until a few years ago in Cornwall, and it was exactly as before. I was walking towards the bus stop on a day that was dry but not particularly hot. There were people walking towards me, and suddenly I saw and heard the water fall on the pavement between us. Because of the childhood experience, I wasn’t surprised that those approaching walked right through the water as if it weren’t there; and, by the time I reached the place where it had fallen moments later, it had vanished for me too. The pavement was completely dry.

The sense I got from all this, even as a child, was that it was as if our world is surrounded by water that is suspended somehow. It also doesn’t tally with our reality quite, so if it does slip through on occasion, it will be temporary – and seen only by some. This can, of course, all be put down to a brain glitch, but there is both mystical and scientific evidence that it’s not just delusional on my part.

In Hinduism there is a complex system describing several worlds and seas, and how the Earth and various types of consciousness fit in, often signifying various types of spiritual richness, such as the Sea of Wine, and the Sea of Ghee. The complexity demands more attention than I have hitherto given it, but at my cursory glances I was impressed at how this world and its relationship with others had been mapped out, always with vast oceans in between.

The other culture in which I have come across something similar, is that of the Vikings, where they talk of a vast ocean surrounding our world called garsecg. This is a somewhat mysterious word, with scholars debating as to what it actually means, and my original source which referred to the ‘vast ocean’, I have inconveniently lost. But I know it was there, much as I knew the water splashing down was there, despite what anyone might say!

There is scientific evidence of something which could possibly support this. When I was going through a bit of a mad scientist phase, covering my walls with diagrams and equations, I hypothesised that when dealing with five dimensions rather than our usual four (space and linear time), physical mediums such as fire and water would be unlimited. This would explain the outbreaks of fire and flooding in poltergeist cases, which I saw as situations where the distinctions between four and five dimensions break down.

To further this hypothesis, I predicted that with multi-directional gravity (don’t ask, it’s to do with my five-dimensional paradigm), there should be poltergeist cases where the water was flowing in different directions, not just downward. Later I discovered this prediction to be correct, first with an episode of Paranormal Witness where water flowed indoors from the floor to the ceiling, then with older cases, though the water sometimes would be heard and not seen. One of the best scientific accounts I’ve read is The Rochdale Poltergeist by Jenny Ashford and Steve Mera, where ‘inside rain’ is described as falling upwards or sideways. When a sample was taken, it was discovered to have an extremely high electrical charge, unlike the tap water in the house. It was, they concluded, ‘electrically driven’.

This may all seem like an annoying preamble to the main feature, but it’s a necessary background to what was to unfold more recently.

I am certainly not alone in my fascination with the megalithic monuments of western Europe. Whether the superstars of Carnac or Stonehenge, or the numerous stone circles and rows of Dartmoor, there is an undeniable mysteriousness about it all. No one is truly immune to the enigma. It haunts us, all of us. This is reflected by the amount of literature and art on the subject, ranging from scientific and technical to the mystical and poetic. There is so much about it, that here at this point in the essay I am aware of limitless paths I can take before reaching my point. What helps is if I focus specifically on the use of water at neolithic sites.

When I wrote Sesonsfin I was focusing on the late Bronze Age, and was backed up by both archaeological research, and personal experience through dreams and meditation. It was during the first lockdown where I was trapped very happily in an area of Wiltshire, surrounded by Bronze Age artefacts and paths. When out walking that hot dry summer, I became aware that I could go for miles without coming across any streams, rivers or ponds. As a lifetime traveller, the importance of always carrying water was never lost on me, but it seemed to take additional significance in this mystical landscape. This was paralleled by the questions being asked in the archaeological literature about why stone circles etc. were often placed near bodies of water. Francis Pryor in Seahenge – one of the best books I have read on the subject – talks about the importance of liminal placement, on the boundaries of human settlement thus, symbolically, between the physical and spiritual worlds. One settlement in Etton, Cambridgeshire, rather than being high and dry on a large hill, was built nearby on a much smaller, regularly flooded one.

When I wrote Sesonsfin and did the research for it, I was aware that the period I was attempting to describe was quite late in the game as far as the purpose of the megalithic monuments was concerned. The Bronze Age started giving way to the Iron Age after 1000 BC. The henges were built much earlier. Stonehenge, for example, was begun 3000 BC and finished 2000 BC approximately. Therefore the protagonists of my novel, along with their peers, were riding on the back of a technology that was over a thousand years old.

I use the word ‘technology’ advisedly. The subtitle of Uriel’s Machine by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas is The Prehistoric Technology That Survived the Flood. The authors provide a good argument that the ancient structures were designed as astronomical calendars. In itself, this isn’t that new a theory, astronomical alignments of various natures being ascribed to numerous locations, such as the solstices with Stonehenge. A feverish erecting of wooden posts also seemed to take place around the time of lunar eclipses. I’ve always felt the alignments to be an aspect of something far greater, a goal of which we knew nothing. Besides, a cartoon I saw recently summed the situation up perfectly, where a stone age man is boasting to a neighbour about how he’s built this amazing stone circle which you can use to predict moon phases etc. “Oh?” says the neighbour. “I just stuck a calendar on my wall.”

What I did take away from Uriel’s Machine, other than the cool title, was first a sense of the megalithic structures being one gigantic whole rather than separate structures. Sure, they were built over a lengthy period of time and across a considerable distance, but that is to my mind an organic growth, always following the same blueprint. It looks like once that blueprint had reached the Orkney Islands from Europe, the builders slowly started making their way south. Stonehenge and Avebury came later in the game.

The other thing I got from the book was, once again, the importance of water. There was evidence, for instance, that the henge at Stenness in Orkney would have been intentionally flooded. The authors believe this was to aid astronomical observation (though from my perspective, that was more a means to an end). They also refer to a passage in the Old Testament where Elijah took twelve stones to make an altar, surrounding it with a trench which he filled with water. (1 Kings 18:30-35) This is apparently the only known reference to a circle of stones and a henge outside the British Isles – and adds weight to the argument that “the henges were meant to be flooded.”

Research and theory can only get one so far though. I knew this already from my work as a geomancer and Feng Shui consultant, that clients were – understandably – more interested in results. Pragmatism was always the order of the day. Little did I know the scope and magnitude of that pragmatism when it came to the ancient structures spread over our landscape. The revelation was to come about a year ago, in south Devon.

It all happened very fast, but there is also a timelessness to these experiences as anyone who has had them, or anything similar, knows.

I was lying on my bed in a state between sleeping and waking, a technique I have written about before in Osho News. I can’t claim to be that accomplished with it, despite years of practice, and tend to hurtle clumsily between one state and another chaotically and unpredictably.

This was certainly the case here where I found myself out of my body and looking down at southern Dartmoor, particularly aware of the stone rows and circles and the shining water courses alongside them. In a flash I realised the artefacts had been built to echo and amplify the energetic effect of the water.

This effect was like a catapult, which propelled me further into the sky and over the sea. This was daytime and the sea was glistening with sunlight, but here I was faced with a dilemma.

One of the many useful things I gleaned from Osho’s Psychology of the Esoteric, was how dreams and reality became closer together as one progressed along the more subtle bodies such as the astral. Physical dreams are easy to distinguish from reality – you’re not really riding a unicorn, for example – astral dreams can be a lot closer to the truth, yet not quite the truth. Here I was unsure whether I was above the actual ocean or an astral dream of it.

Even as I was having these thoughts, the experience overwhelmed me, and the ocean became something even more vast:

It was like an ocean surrounding the entire world.

I had had glimpses of this previously, with nature being almost symbolic of something greater – the tip of the iceberg if you like – but this was surpassing those glimpses, being so extraordinarily beautiful and transcendent.

It was over all too soon, and I found myself returning to my body, in waking consciousness, albeit in a somewhat dazed and blissed-out state.

It took time to absorb what had happened. It took even more time to try and comprehend what was going on.

This is where I got to:

The neolithic network of stone was built always with water in mind, whether natural water courses or artificially added water, needed as both the fuel and the medium. How this works precisely is lost to us and our sciences, but I would suggest it to be linked to what the Chinese would call the ch’i of the water, its lifeforce. Water as a medium between worlds is well-established in mystical traditions, and there are, of course, the various oceans between worlds as described in Indian mythology, mentioned at the start of this essay. What I experienced that day was that the ‘machine’ acted like a catapult in order to propel me into – well, in my research I would call it a five-dimensional perspective, but that means little to most people, so I will settle by calling it – the closest one can get to a near-death experience without actually dying.

The question then follows, why bother? Why create this vast network in order to give people a taste of the afterlife? I would emphasise immediately here that it wasn’t about a ‘taste’ and there was nothing ‘after’ about it. It was constant and all-pervading.

The first thing to bear in mind is that, unlike the ancient rituals in evidence in ancient Egypt, this technology was available to everyone, not just the ruling elite. Family, immediate and extended, was everything in Bronze Age culture from what we know – and can probably surmise about the Stone Age as well, as they were the ones who built the original structures.

Related to this is the high mortality rate, particularly infant mortality. Francis Pryor relates how one of the most profound questions he received was from a schoolchild, about whether Bronze Age people cared less about their children due to the sheer amount of them dying. Death was not an abstract, far-away thing, something that could be forgotten about till a distant point in the future. This is as far from our dominant contemporary values as possible. As the comedian Dylan Moran reminded everyone, death is not something people choose to acknowledge in the modern world.

The third factor I would like to mention is the nomadic nature of these communities all over Europe for thousands of years. ‘I remember wondering why on earth these people wanted to move around all the time. It seemed, and indeed it still seems, an odd way to behave,’ is Pryor’s observation in Seahenge.

I cannot provide an easy answer for the latter, why the constant movement over such distances, but I can testify as to the effect it has on the psyche. Having grown up as a military brat, I was constantly on the move, always having to let go of people I was forging connections with. This is a pattern that has repeated itself throughout my life, every hello containing a goodbye. As someone who has lived all over the world and, until recently, always without a ‘fixed abode’, I have formed close connections with people who are separated from me geographically but not in spirit. They are my family. Modern communications help, but they don’t replace the intimacy of living with people on a day-to-day basis.

This constantly having to let go of those I love has made coming to terms with death a lot easier. Now I’m at the age where I’m having to face that a lot more, but in prehistoric societies – as mentioned – death was with one all the time, at all ages. There was no escaping from it.

I have had clients come to me for various reasons, and sometimes it would concern connections they still felt with someone they had been close to but had died, often a family member. The reason they would come to me for help is that they were convinced that person had not, in fact, passed on but was still with them. This would not necessarily manifest in the form of a classical haunting – which tends to be something else I won’t get into here – but more subtly, through unequivocal signs and indications. The more I worked with people on this, I became aware of families extending beyond the physical form. A repeated theme from those who have experienced near-death experiences, is that nothing is ever truly lost, including connections with those we love.

Returning to a prehistoric culture where family and connections were all-important, faced with physical death on a regular basis, where spiritual experience was powerful and universal – if the means existed to remove the sting of death, would they not do so?

Two major errors have been made in attempts to understand the megaliths, in my view.

The first is that researchers tend to theorise about spiritual ‘beliefs’. These were not beliefs, they were rooted in experience, much as any meditation technique is. The popularity of mindfulness today, for example, is nothing to do with belief – it’s a technique that has been proven to work.

The second error is that we limit ourselves as to what technology actually is, tending to think in terms of metal, wires, optics, plastics etc, because it is what we use. The technology of our prehistoric machine was using water as a fuel and medium, and stone – particularly that with quartz embedded – as some kind of amplifier or projector, for want of a better word.

There was much more to it than that, obviously, including the use of countless wooden posts, and planetary alignments, but we won’t get into that here – particularly as I don’t understand it fully myself! (You can read a fictionalised account of it in action in Sesonsfin.) I would also emphasise the recognition of ch’i energy (which Anita Moorjani also refers to quite a bit whilst experiencing an NDE in Dying to be Me) manifesting in the earth as lung mei, otherwise known as dragon veins or ley lines.

And this is what we have: a society facing death on a daily basis, which – if confined to a mere physical perspective – could be mind-numbing and soul-destroying. One would be wary of forming any sort of attachment to anybody. But by establishing life as something far beyond the physical on a daily basis, there would be nothing to fear. Death becomes a mere change of form, and nothing is truly lost.

The means to establish this on a social scale, the technology as it were, was getting old by the time of the late Bronze Age. This could be attributed to many factors, including a shift in consciousness, and the new types of – more settled – communities forming. By the time the Iron Age had taken over, the old ways were already becoming myth, like half-remembered dreams.

Perhaps something remained a bit longer though, in fragments.

Penwith, on the western tip of Cornwall, is riddled with ancient stone structures, including the Iron Age village of Carn Euny, which was occupied from about 400 BC till the end of the Roman occupation in 400 AD.

Exploring the various structures, one is inevitably drawn to the fogou, an underground passage only known to occur in west Cornwall. It runs from north-east to south-west, a recurring direction in megalithic architecture – and a particularly significant one in eastern geomancy, the north-east being respected for its power. (Related to puja, worship, in India.)

Adjacent to the passage is a chamber which struck me, when I first visited, as being a rather comfortable place to lie down and relax. I could picture a person doing so, going into a trance, with a few people sitting around guiding and supporting. Their body would be aligned with the fogou, feet pointing perhaps to the sea only a few miles to the south-west.

That first day I visited, the passageway was also flooded with water.

Which makes me wonder.