Sunday, September 23, 2018

Simply Mu




George Schwimmer is a spiritual explorer in the areas of past life regression, astral travel (in another book, he recounts his experiences with Robert Monroe's techniques) and shamanism. While I happen to think there might be “something to it”, I would question many of the author's interpretations, which range from extraterrestrial influence to Edgar Cayce's readings. This little pamphlet deals with a subject somewhere in the grey zone between the real world and the twilight zone: the lost continent of Mu, often conflated with Lemuria.

While I used to be a skeptic of all things “Atlanto-maniac”, I now think there might have been several “lost civilizations” on Earth before the great floods at the end of the latest Ice Age. However, I doubt Mu was one of them, since Schwimmer – following Cayce and James Churchward – places it in the Pacific Ocean. In this version, Mu was adjacent to modern California, the home of the New Age. Surely not a co-incidence! A more reasonable location, also mentioned by Schwimmer, would be Sundaland, the former landmass formerly joining Asia and Australia. This would place Mu closer to Lemuria, traditionally placed in the Indian Ocean. Note also that a lost civilization isn't the same thing as a modern “high tech” civilization. For all we know, Atlantis and Lemuria could have been Stone Age civilizations, perhaps similar to the megalith-builders in Europe. On this point, Schwimmer seems to agree, at least when it comes to Mu, which he describes as a “spiritual” civilization, more interested in building temples than developing high technology.

The evidence for Mu-Lemuria given by the author is of extremely varied quality. Some of it is questionable, even naïve. The fact that the syllable “mu” shows up in various words in Native American languages supposedly has something to do with the lost continent, and Schwimmer even wonders whether the Mexican “Dia de los Muertos” (Mu-ertos) has something to do with it. Ahem, no, because Muertos is Spanish. The author also believes in the notorious forgery known as the Ica stones, and expresses surprise at finding fossils of sea-living creatures in the hills! Other pieces of evidence sound more interesting, such as genetic and cultural similarities between Polynesians and Native Americans, or the Vedic claims of a sunken continent in the East. The author's belief that the temple complex at Tiwanaku in Bolivia is 15,000 years old is rejected by modern archeology, which claims its only about 2000 years old, but I admit that this isn't entirely conclusive, since even “new” temples could encode ancient knowledge. The author's main reason for belief in Mu is impossible to asses by modern scientific means: Schwimmer believes *he* is a reincarnated former inhabitant of the sunken continent, presumably based on past life regression. However, I think even some occultists admit that there is a lot of static in past life memories or clairvoyant research of the Akasha!

That being said, this short e-book (which also contains short presentations of other works by the same author) is nevertheless a relatively good “teaser trailer” about the Mu problem as seen by a person interested in Native American spirituality, and I therefore give it three stars.

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