Rating: 
Summary: Not What I Expected, BUT WHAT A SURPRISE!
Review: The only thing wrong with this book is that it takes itself seriously. It could be a hilarious fantasy extravaganza on the order of "The Illuminatus Trilogy" if only it weren't trying to convince us that it's real. It reminds me of the shrink in "The Terminator," who comments that Kyle Reese's psychotic delusion is brilliant because it doesn't require a shred of proof. Same here: The reason our archaeologists can't find evidence of the 500 million years of advanced civilizations on Earth is because they all occurred on a higher dimension. Dolphins and whales are much smarter than we are, but it doesn't seem so because "advanced beings create everything they need internally." Drunvalo Melchizedek, the book's putative hero, is ten billion years old and came from the center of the galaxy to help us, but he doesn't look it because he's "borrowing" the body of an ordinary human. What's more he doesn't even remember any of that because to retain memories of the thirteenth dimension while in the third "would be just too painful." Our sun is currently undergoing a period of intense solar flares that are engulfing the Earth, but we're not aware of it because a group of benevolent aliens from Sirius B constructed a holographic grid around the entire planet so we would think life was going on as normal, until "we could get to where we could handle a wall of flame."Like I said, this is great stuff. I'm surprised no one's made a movie about this; it would be a blockbuster. The closest I've seen is the movie "Stargate," in which we learn that the ancient Egyptian gods were actually aliens who created humans as a genetically-engineered slave race to work their mines. (That one's in this book too.) Interspersed with these fantastic chapters are boring sets of instructions on how to breathe so that you can inhale psychic energy or "prana" along with your oxygen; and a treatise on "sacred geometry." What makes the geometry useless is that Frissell claims the sacred geometry is "the morphogenic structure behind reality itself," but discusses it through the use of metaphors and vague references to familiar mathematic terminology. Geometry, of course, is a very specific discipline, but Frissell avoids specificity, saying instead things like "Life doesn't know how to deal with something that has no beginning because there is nowhere to start. So this sequence, which has become known as the Fibonacci Sequence, is life's solution to that problem." The flaw in Frissell's "brilliant delusion" is that he starts making predictions about the future, which is always risky for psychotic nuts. By the end of the century (that's the 20th century, by the way -- this book was written in 1994), the Earth as we know it will have disappeared and most of us will have successfully transcended to the fourth dimension, where we'll live in the harmony of christ-consciousness and understand everything. This transcendence was evidently meant to be a conscious one, implying that it probably couldn't occur without our realizing it. Now it's 2003 and I think it's time for a sequel explaining what went wrong with this plan. On the other hand, if you're adrift in the world, if you've accomplished nothing and done nothing practical with your life and you're getting on in years, isn't it comforting to believe that very soon none of it will matter anymore, because you'll ascend to a higher plane of consciousness and be fully invested with your cosmic destiny as an immortal master whose purpose is to save the universe? At the very least, it means I don't have to worry about not having any retirement savings.
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