The Nag Hammadi Library has earned a reputation. From its discovery it has been surrounded by extremism, intrigue and mystery. It has been difficult to assess, to translate and awkward to comprehend. The accidental discovery of the large jug containing the N.H. codices (a type of book) occurred in 1945, by one of two peasant brothers come to collect nitrate-laden rocks for fertilizer at the base of large cliffs flanking the Nile river valley. There were in these cliffs of Upper Egypt dynastic tombs nearby, already plundered long ago.

Surrounding the discovery or associated with the retrieval of the documents were murders too ghastly to imagine, the most banal ignorance, capital greed and occasionally a little sense of the historic on the part of a few. Those codices that were not burned found their way into various hands, including those of a priest, the priest's brother who taught English on an itinerary circuit, illiterate Muslims, a gold merchant, a grain merchant, a one-eyed outlaw who acquired most of them, a Belgian antiquities dealer and even the Jung Institute in Switzerland. Now, all remaining codices are conserved in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Many of these are fruitlessly fragmentary. Nevertheless, about 30 fundamentally complete passages (called tractates) have survived their ordeal out of the jug.

All the tractates had been translated from Greek into Coptic, which is the hieroglyphic language of ancient Egypt written with the Greek alphabet. The writing styles vary greatly and I wondered if they were in the vernacular of the day and by whom; for certainly, they were not written for everyone, since few could read. The modern translators have stressed the fact that these ancient translations vary markedly in quality: the apparent degree of understanding possessed by the ancient translators of the often subtle ideas was sometimes incomplete. Moreover, it is conjectured that the various codices may have been written almost anywhere in the ancient world and translated over several centuries by different translators living in entirely different societies. Still, students of this era have discerned many slight hints and pieced together probable conjectures.

Most but not all of the tractates have been described as Gnostic writings from the early centuries after the death of Jesus Christ. Many contain quotations of Jesus. Some contain references to the Bible as well as extensive quotations from it. However, the subject matter varies extensively, and some tractate titles do not seem to fit our already-established conceptual categories for sacred writing (e.g., The Hypostasis of the Archons or the Paraphrase of Shem).

None of the tractates is particularly long and in this sense they facilitate reading. Quite often editorial marks (denoting missing words or other problems with the textural material) necessitate a slower passage through the texts. Some tractates appeared to me to be rather more historical in nature than others. Frankly, these interested me less than others, some of which are magnificent, profound, expressing difficult-to-discover insights.

One such is the Gospel of the Egyptians which contains marvelous passages attributed to Seth, a main character in the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris. Anyone who has studied Gurdjieff's primary work, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson or Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell will feel a pounding heart upon reading certain passages of this tractate. Throughout these passages, long strings of vowels appear, identified as glorious names (mantras). Near the end of the tractate is this sentence: This great name of thine is upon me, O self-begotten Perfect one, who art not outside me. I felt, after completing this tractate, that its author had attained an elevated psychological stature.

Another monumental one is the Tripartate tractate, which tells us the origin of the universe. In particular, I found the long passage on the nature of God astounding in its approach to the subject and insightful in its ability to avoid the undesirable propensities of the intellect. Re-reading this several times one can gain a real sense and deep feeling of the limitations of our, especially in these times, over-cherished and underdeveloped intellect. Whoever wrote this understood these deficiencies and intentionally avoided them. Thunder, Perfect Mind, Authoritative Teaching, Apocalypse of Adam, the Exegessis of the Soul and On the Origin of the World will each provide one with useful insights and food for thought.

The tractates do not readily lend themselves to quotation. Rest assured they are powerful and inspiring. You can verify for yourself quite readily that the popular writings of today are in no way superior to the writings of these never-to-be known people from earlier millennia. Humanity is neither more intelligent now, nor more capable in thought than in bygone eras. Today, there are thousands of new titles published (for profit!) every year. Quite possibly, we might learn more from reading old and ancient writings such as these than we might from reading almost any modern ones.

This last idea arose repeatedly as a question in my mind: it wanted to be pondered. Is it perhaps true that humanity already may have available in its seldom-read inspired works, disregarded sacred writings and the teachings of its documented avatars everything necessary to guide us through the period of transition into a new age? Is it possible that the recent spate of channeled books, by someone who receives the royalties, is called an author, yet is not responsible for the information conveyed, exert a negative influence on the readers of them? While wondering this, I chanced upon a relevant quotation from 1971(!), by J.G. Bennett, a student of G.I. Gurdjieff. It is, We are now in a period of transition to a New Epoch; and new illusions are arising to replace the old ones. The question arose quickly: If this is so, are the illusions coming in books? To shed a little light on this question, I decided to read a popular channeled book, Bringers of the Dawn: teachings from the Pleiadians by Barbara Marciniak, which was first published in 1992. I had no idea the surprises that awaited me.

According to this book, some time, long ago, new owners of earth (by conquest), created versions of humans with a different DNA, the two-stranded, double-helix DNA. Originally, said the Pleiadians (who are described as a collective of energy from the Pleiades) humans had a 12-strand DNA: that was disassembled but left in the human cell, unplugged. After that, a frequency fence...was put around the planet... to limit the presentation of the frequencies of light-information. Readers of the book, and the Pleiadians too, are members of the Family of Light: we are system busters and will work with the consciousness of light.

The 12 helixes (helices?) of DNA (of which ten constitute the dormant part of the DNA that has baffled the scientists) correspond to 12 chakras. These five additional chakras are alleged to be outside of the body, some of them located millions of miles above one's head, out beyond our solar system. Our DNA, which consists of light-encoded filaments that carry information, is in the process of being naturally mutated... Right now, say the Pleiadians, There are some pretty chaotic tunes being played on this planet, and there is a purpose to all of them. In fact, there is a galactic tidal wave of light from the future coming toward your planet.... It will be as if the entire planet has a unilateral raise in consciousness. We can expect to experience the evolution of super-consciousness, the evolution into the highest aspect of your being. You do not need to worry about becoming this being, for you already are this being, and you just need to remember it.

We system busters are ourselves the Bringers of the Dawn. It is we who carry the rays of the sun and living light and knowledge. Indeed, we have a resume to back us (resume?); if we go in for this game plan to bust the system... we can, defy the laws, and complete the assignment. Once we have discovered for ourselves, that the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and sense of touch are deceivers of reality, we will begin to understand secrets and also, to Move beyond the boundaries of self. Significantly, the big secret that has been kept from the human species is that thought creates experience, and thought creates reality. Once the uninitiated are given the inside scoop by our spreading the light (light is defined as, the promoting, dispensing, and sharing of information), more and more changes will occur.

Many of these changes will be personal. Foremost, perhaps, will be our capability to allow your brain cells to click into being without your rational conscious mind wanting to define things... We will, strengthen the self..., and eventually, Allow your intuitive self to be the standard bearer of your experience, which is experience no one else is going to validate. It will be possible to correctly relate to our sexuality (especially women), to masturbate without guilt and to appreciate sex for what it is, namely, a doorway to the higher realms of consciousness. Women have been poorly used by the system and a special piece of advice is given them. You don't need abortion: you never need to get pregnant in the first place if you don't desire it. How? By will. All of us, must be able to master who you are.

This is the first channeled book I've read in many years. However, I did read most of the Seth books, dictated by Jane Roberts in trance and written down by her husband, whom Seth called Joseph. And I've studied many books by Emanuel Swedenborg, who took dictation from angels and penned thousands of discussions with them. Bringers... is not at all like these. Those books, in which similar or identical topics are considered, impressed me with their intelligence, their descriptive, careful phrasing, contributing to a definite clarity of thought. Deep insights, wisdom and objectivity permeate these books. By comparison, Bringers... is twelfth rate at the very best. Furthermore, it is absolutely replete with errors of knowledge which one would expect the star-seeding Pleiadians to have had. One egregious example is their use of the phrase, eyes of Horus, at least three times.

The Eye of Horus is a remarkable ancient Egyptian hieroglyph: its esoteric meaning transcends greatly its physical qualities. Most marvelously, this enigmatic eye is comprised of the glyph for each fraction used in ancient Egypt, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and 1/64 which together total 63/64, and not by accident. Numerous additional serious errors of various types induced me to wonder: How advanced were these Pleiadian energies?

I ask you: would intelligent, evolved and beneficent beings have allowed their elevated thought and profound insights to be expressed in slipshod, sloppy writing? Would they have selected every kind of platitude, shallow journalistic phrase, adolescent slang and current misuse of our language to describe their revolutionary, essential and foreign ideas to us? Or would they have had so little discernment as to have picked a channel and writers (three women worked on the Pleiadian tapes) incapable of expressing their transmitted ideas except in language intrinsically demeaning of these ideas themselves? I would hope not. And, I think any and all advanced beings, who universally communicate by telepathy, are supremely skilled in language of all sorts: it is part of their intelligence and is as necessary to their philosophy, science, and technology as eggs are to our omelets.

I accept Ms. Marciniak's stated good intentions. Nevertheless, I doubt that they shall be achieved; there are far too many serious deficiencies in Bringers... for it ever to be really beneficial as a spiritually oriented book. For one thing, readers will (falsely but legitimately) conclude that neither special practices nor continual effort are necessary for evolution of their consciousness: indeed, not even meditation is mentioned. Worse, readers are lulled into complacency, and why not? A big wave is sweeping over us. However, there is an occasional truth in the book and a few good ideas too. But so many statements show such shallow or non-understanding, as well as a deplorable disregard for well-established fact and rationality, that the effect of the book cannot help but be undesirable on all readers save those whose discernment places them squarely beyond this book. A wonderful, relevant saying of a great Swami, (Swami Rama Tirtha) who came to America in 1902, arose in my mind. It is, Head as high in the clouds as you like, but feet firmly anchored on the ground. Psychological evolution has never been free, nor has it ever depended upon irrationality and reality distortion.

Speaking of Swamis, Paramhansa Yogananda was an earthling born in India in 1893. Following his long years in training as a monk and his graduation from the University of Calcutta, he came to the United States at the behest of his guru. In 1920, he founded the Self-Realization Fellowship, headquartered in California. Toward the end of Yogananda's life a fellow, J. Donald Walters, entered his ashram. Walters had come from a wealthy area just west of Philadelphia having recently been graduated from an elite college there. In The Essence of Self-Realization: the wisdom of Paramhansa Yogananda, Walters says that Yogananda had encouraged his note-taking during informal gatherings. Since Yogananda, who died in 1952, did not edit this book (published in 1990), the thoughts conveyed have passed through Walters own brain; this process might well have modified them (as could occur in channeled books).

Personally, I found the informality of these quotations edifying and frequently provocative. Everyone can relate to the ideas presented in them and if they choose to, people can strive to put them into practice in daily life. There is, by the way, a useful index, by chapter and quotation number, organizing all the topics discussed by Yogananda in this book.

Under General Counsel, I found an interesting thought, namely, people usually praise or criticize others for all the wrong reasons. And then, Accept both praise and criticism with equanimity. If, however, you must prefer one of these to the other, then prefer criticism. Uncommon advice, in my experience, and not so easily lived.

In the chapter, On Meditation, are the following ideas: Meditate more and more deeply, until calmness and joy become second nature to you. To be ecstatic is not difficult. It is thinking that it is difficult that holds you apart from it. I found these thoughts important for two reasons, each associated with the gradually changing definitions of words. Firstly, as the derivation clearly indicates, ecstasy involves a degree of being beside oneself, of standing apart from oneself. In itself, this state is an altered and a higher state of consciousness than our ordinary state. Secondly, meditation has become, in numerous books and in the minds of many thousands of people, a pondering, considering activity, one in which the brain is active. Ironically, this is not the meditation Yogananda meant. That meditation, Eastern meditation in its various forms, quells the cerebral intelligence, the intellect, the (lower case) mind, a phenomenon well-established in many dozens of electroencephalographic (eeg) experiments.

There is an entire chapter concerning karma, which Yogananda believed many did not understand properly. Here are several quotations. Even when indulging a bad habit, because you can't help yourself, let your mind be constantly resistant to it. Bad karmic tendencies can be overcome not by concentrating on them, but by developing their opposite good tendencies. First, destroy in yourself the source of karmic involvement. That source is your attachment to the ego. Repeatedly, we are advised to establish a goal and to work toward it in a practical manner, just as we might work to gain a skill, or even financial security. And finally he says, An important factor in overcoming karma is meditation.

People seemed frequently to ask him about sin. It's a word one seldom hears these days. Perhaps the most inclusive statement he made on this subject is the following: Spiritual ignorance is the greatest sin. It is what makes all other sins possible. It may be noteworthy that in French, the word for conscience (our guardian against sin) and consciousness are one and the same.

The thoughts of Yogananda (as transcribed by Walters) strike me as compelling. Even when disturbing, one can feel they are true. This book is useful and worthwhile to pick up frequently, read a few pages, and then go about one's activities, bearing the thoughts in mind. In this way one may establish a psychological milieu supportive of psychological evolution which cannot occur without one's diligent and continuous effort.