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Derek Pugh is a vigorous man of 73 who wears shorts in cold weather, runs up stairs, and almost always runs the mile home after his morning meditation in the dome. He is a former track star who says he learned to run fast by running from the law. He is also co-author (with his son, Nirmal) of a new book, titled Unveiling Creation: Eight is the Key, demonstrating that the structure of the universe, as found in seven ancient creation stories, and the structure of our modern sciences and arts, is encoded in the first eight syllables of the Rig Veda of India, the oldest record of human wisdom.
Dr. Pugh (he studied geology at the University of Paris) has lived in Fairfield for 14 years and is Visiting Professor of Physics at Maharishi University of Management. But in the late 1940s and early '50s he was the British running champion, winning the European 400-meter dash in 1950 in 47.3 seconds--which broke the record for that event, and was the third fastest quarter-mile ever run by a Briton.
Among his memorabilia is a newspaper account of that race by sports columnist Harold M. Abrahams. Abrahams himself was a star runner: his performance in the 1920 Olympics in Paris, along with that of teammate Eric Lidell, was the subject of the award-winning 1981 movie, Chariots of Fire.
"More records are broken running from the police than around tracks," Dr. Pugh says. "In my youth in Britain, the boys played a game called scrumping, which meant stealing apples on the London Commons and getting away as fast as you could. In my early days on the track, I heard the starter's gun as the shout of the park warden who had spotted us. Running from authority gave me a feeling of freedom, not fear. Maybe that's why, although I was pursued on foot and on wheels, I was never caught." There is no hint of boasting or regret in Dr. Pugh's kindly eyes and soft smile, just the wisdom that has made peace with the past.
"I have always sought freedom," he says. "I was born wearing a label that said, 'Destination: freedom.' I ran to be free, to break boundaries."
By his late teens Derek Pugh's thirst for freedom was manifesting in hiking and mountain climbing as well as in running; it was also expanding into genuine spiritual experience. At 18 he had decided to walk the road for the rest of his life, and the next summer he hiked 600 miles in six weeks in the Scottish Highlands.
"One afternoon I was standing on a high hill gazing into the haze in the direction of London. Waves of what I can only call intense silence began to pass over me from my right side. I thought of my family and friends and school so far away to the south, and none of it seemed real somehow. It was a questioning of reality, not from the intellect, but from a different mode of consciousness. This silence came upon me twice more that summer."
Derek Pugh was on a path to ultimate unboundedness; he was also on a path to the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. But the latter was not meant to be.
In December of 1951, at age 24, while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, he contracted polio. He was put in an iron lung, and his wife was told that there was little hope of his surviving the day. He recovered quickly--which the amazed French doctors attributed to "divine intervention" and his "will to win"--and six months later was hiking in the Alps. But he had realized he could never run competitively again.
While in Calgary, Alberta, where he worked for 30 years with the Geological Survey of Canada, Dr. Pugh learned the Transcendental Meditation technique in 1966 and a year later became a TM Teacher at a course with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India. He learned the TM-Sidhi program in 1977. "Not until after I learned TM did I think I could finally make the Olympics," Dr. Pugh laughs. "I knew then, as I had actually known all along, that running is not with the legs, but with the mind. From TM I also learned that my previous experiences were real, not illusions or aberration. And because the meditation is systematic, I no longer had to rely on random occurrence."
Maharishi's unveiling of the Constitution of the Universe on January 12, 1994, was the beginning of Unveiling Creation: Eight is the Key. "We took to heart Maharishi's statement that the Constitution of the Universe [the opening hymns of the Rig Veda as the fundamental template of creation] was 'the most significant accomplishment in the revival of complete knowledge,' " Dr. Pugh says.
The first eight syllables of Rig Veda--which make up the first pada, or foot, of the first verse--stand for the eight primal qualities of Nature (the eight prakritis) from which the entire physical universe is ultimately structured: ego, intellect, mind, space, air, fire, water, and earth. The first padas of the next eight verses are self-commentaries--elaborations, or refinements--of the original eight syllables, to make 64, a second unit, or template; so that physical creation is an eternal compounding of the eight fundamental qualities of nature.
Dr. Pugh was inspired by parallels between the 8x8 structure found in Rig Veda and the E8 x E8 Heterotic Superstring of modern physics, as demonstrated by John Hagelin, a world-renowned theoretical physicist and Chairman of the Physics Department at Maharishi University of Management. Dr. Pugh then teamed with Nirmal, a 1994 summa cum laude graduate of M.U.M. in biology and biochemistry, to begin research for the book.
The authors found the 8x8 theme clearly manifested in the basic structure of physics, biology, physiology, electronics, chemistry, crystallography, music, color, and architecture. They located the same theme in the creation metaphysics of ancient Sumeria, Persia, Israel, China, Egypt, Greece, and Mexico. There is something here for every student and any serious seeker of knowledge. Below are summaries of three of the Pughs' findings.
• "In Leonardo da Vinci's famous diagram called the Canon of Proportions (the figure of man in a square within a circle), a series of short lines, usually unnoticed, divides the figure vertically into eight segments representing the eight prakritis--from the top of the head (ego) to the feet (earth). Another eight lines divide the figure horizontally to yield 64 rectangles, which are considered to represent the energy fields that are elaborations of man's eightfold physical nature."
• "The ancient Sumerian concept of the creation of the universe appears as a diagram of eight horizontal lines (representing four aspects of time and four aspects of energy) intersected by eight vertical lines (four aspects of space and four of matter). The resulting 64 squares were colored alternately light and dark to create the first 'chessboard,' upon which, using real people, an annual ritual was performed to remind the citizens of cosmic order and inspire them in the quest for perfection in accord with the forces of light."
• "I-Ching, the ancient Chinese subjective science of prediction, involves eight fundamental trigrams (three-line figures), each of which carries an image--purity, movement, lake, space, wind, fire, water, and mountain--corresponding to the eight prakritis. These eight trigrams are then combined with each other in various ways to form 64 hexagrams (six-line figures), which represent the 64 fundamental processes of change responsible for all possible permutations of the universe."
Any book of this nature is necessarily detailed. But the authors make it easy reading by clear explanations that keep you referring back to the basic unit of eight, the first pada of Rig Veda. They also provide elaborate, annotated diagrams designed for quick summary of each system. Furthermore, after the first chapter, other chapters can be read in any order or selected to suit the reader's interest. This is one of those books whose precise presentation of detail stimulates your ability to think critically in other areas.
There have been many books comparing the creation myths of ancient cultures; Unveiling Creation is the first one to explain the similarities as deriving from a common source.
One of Dr. Pugh's favorite research items was Leonardo's drawing, in which the human figure represents the transformative power that can unite the circle of heaven with the square of earth. Perhaps he had that man and that awesome power in mind when he said, "Our only goal from the beginning of this project was to get this knowledge into the hands of the people."
Unveiling Creation is available at 21st Century Bookstore in Fairfield.
