Christopher Hills
Encyclopedia
Christopher Hills was a well-known author, philosopher, scientist, popularly described as the "Father of Spirulina," for popularising spirulina
cyanobacteria as a food supplement. He also wrote 30 books on consciousness, meditation, yoga & spiritual evolution, divining, world government, aquaculture and personal health.
Christopher Hills was variously described by the press as a “Western Guru Scientist”, "Natural Foods Pioneer", “Evolutionary Revolutionary” and a “Modern Merlin”
As a successful commodities trader and art patron in Jamaica he retired from business at an early age to follow a spiritual quest that took him around the world as a speaker, author, entrepreneur and pioneer of algae as one of the most efficient sources of food and fuel for humanity.
Encountering problems with South American contract law when a client reneged on a deal, Hills moved to Jamaica
, where business was conducted under the British judicial system. There he founded nine companies specializing in sugar, citrus, credit, insurance, telegraph communications and agricultural commodity exports such as pimento, nutmegs and ginger. In 1950 he married a young English woman, Norah Bremner, deputy headmistress of Wolmer's School in Kingston, whose father, Bernard E. Bremner B.E.M., was the Magistrate, Chief of Customs and Mayor of King's Lynn
, Norfolk. They have two sons, both born in Jamaica. The family frequently sailed to England for events such as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and Mayor Bremner's presenting Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother with Freedom of the Borough which encompassed the royal family's home at nearby Sandringham
.
Believing that Jamaica’s strength lay in its agriculture, Christopher Hills co-founded the Jamaica Agriculture & Industrial Party (AIP) as an alternative to the two major political parties: Jamaica Labour Party
(JLP) and People's National Party
(PNP), both of which he felt were too busy warring with each other to look out for the middle class and the country people who were the backbone of Jamaica’s rural economy. Despite competing vigorously in the polls, the Hills couple were nevertheless close friends with JLP leader Sir Alexander Bustamante
and Norman Manley
, head of the PNP, who both served as Jamaican Prime Ministers. Norman Manley in fact had been best man at the Hills’ wedding.
In 1951 Christopher and Norah Hills founded Hills Galleries Ltd which, in cooperation with the Prime Minister’s wife Edna Manley
, became a nexus of the Jamaican art movement in the fifties and sixties. The Gallery & Antiques showroom at 101 Harbour Street, Kingston, supplied and exhibited local celebrity artists Ian Fleming
and Noel Coward
, enjoyed the patronage of British royals and such high profile clients as Winthrop Rockefeller
, Elizabeth Taylor
, Ladybird Johnson, Grace Kelly
and Errol Flynn
. Hills Galleries was also the main agent for Rowney's, Grumbacher and Windsor & Newton art supplies in the West Indies. Through multiple exhibitions the Hillses nurtured and launched the careers of a plethora of talented Jamaican artists such as Ken Spencer, Carl Abrahams
, Barrington Watson
, Albert Huie
, Seya Parboosingh, Vernon Tong and the revivalist preacher/painter/sculptor Mallica "Kapo" Reynolds.
Christopher Hills opened a Hills Galleries branch on Jamaica’s north coast at Montego Bay, mooring his yacht the Robanne, at Round Hill, a popular resort for foreign leaders and industrialists vacationing in the Caribbean. It was there he met Vice President Lyndon Johnson and CBS president William S. Paley
who in 1959, sponsored a Hills Galleries exhibition of Jamaican art at Barbizon Plaza in New York City which awoke U.S. art collectors to Jamaica’s dynamic sphere of artistic talent. In 1955 Hills had just returned from sailing the Robanne to Havana when he met Adlai Stevenson vacationing in Jamaica. Over dinner Hills shared his observations of simmering revolution in Cuba while he and Stevenson shared their concepts on justice, democracy, conflict and dictatorships — a conversation that helped inspire Hills to make a difference for the world’s underprivileged masses: views later expressed in his landmark volume Rise of the Phoenix.
who were being oppressed in the late fifties. He gave Rastafarians jobs as wood carvers, free paints to poor artists such as the now-famed Ras Dizzy and bailed them out of Spanish Town prison while encouraging rasta brethren to sustain themselves through art and music. Christopher and Norah Hills were personally thanked for their years of support for struggling rastas by Mortimo Planno, the Rasta teacher of Bob Marley and one of the few Rastafarian elders to have met with H.I.M. Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Christopher Hills also "reasoned" Gandhian non-violence with Leonard Howell
, the original "Gong" activist who founded Pinnacle, a Rastafarian community farm at Sligoville
a few miles from Hills’ home. In 1958 Pinnacle was raided in a brutal crackdown by the authorities, ostensibly for growing marijuana, but in fact Rastafarianism at that time was regarded by The Crown as a threat to social harmony. Hills interceded with the Prime Minister but, with an election coming, law & order politics prevailed and many sustainable farming families had to leave the land. For his support Hills was given the moniker “The First White Rasta”. Unlike his skeptical friends and business colleagues he saw Rastafarian spirituality as a righteous way of life, indeed growing out his hair and beard in solidarity and also in keeping with his emerging interest in the sadhus and enlightened sages of India who had much in common with the vegetarian mystical Rastafarians.
. Prolific research papers and lectures came out of Hills’ laboratory in the Blue Mountains (Jamaica)
on subjects such as bioenergetics, hypnosis, tele-thought, biophysics, effects of solar radiation on living organisms, resonant systems of ionosphere and capacitor effects of human body on static electricity and electron discharge of the nervous system. In 1960 he began a 30-year project to document the effects of sound and color on human consciousness and states of health.
hired him to shoot 1000 photographs of their projects in far away countries, which appeared in an exhibit at United Nations headquarters.
Hills’ global odyssey’s itinerary grew out of publishing his views on conflict resolution and alternative government in a manifesto Framework for Unity that was circulated to The Commission for Research in the Creative faculties of Man, a network he had founded of thinkers around the world which, in 1961, included Prof. Oliver Reiser, Humphrey Osmond, Dr. Andrija Puharich, David Ben Gurion, and Lady Isobel Cripps
among its 500 members.
After teaming up with his good friend and noted lawyer Luis Kutner
(co-founder of Amnesty International
) Hills decided to search the world for a spot to establish a Center where a dedicated community could live and test his World Constitution for Self-Government by Nature’s Laws, which he published in a book with an introduction by Bertrand Russell
.
, he met Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
to discuss possible Indo-Pakistan cooperation in algae
cultivation in the climatically suitable Gujrat-Sind border region, which is where Bhutto and his ancestors were from. Later, when Bhutto was overthrown in a military coup, Hills orchestrated urgent appeals to General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
for clemency but, like many westerners protesting Bhutto’s imprisonment, was ignored and Bhutto was hanged.
In the 1950s Hills became known to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
through his friend the Deputy leader of India's Congress Party, Surendra Mohan Ghose a Bengali revolutionary and relative of Sri Aurobindo
. Hills invited Ghose to Jamaica, to speak at the 1961 Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference and together they formed a partnership to promote World Union and global famine relief through algae aquaculture. S.M. Ghose was one of the founders of Auroville
, an experimental sustainable-living International Village in Pondicherry. In 1962 Ghose took Hills to Sri Aurobindo Ashram
for a personal audience with Aurobindo’s successor, spiritual head of the ashram, Mirra Alfassa
known as "The Mother". Later Ghose arranged for Christopher Hills' son, John Hills, to give the keynote address at the World Parliament of Youth in Pondicherry in 1971.
In 1959 Hills had lobbied Nehru to approve a government in exile for the Dalai Lama
fleeing persecution in Tibet
and to grant full refugee status to exiled Tibetans. He had become connected to the Tibetans through his study of Buddhism
and in 1960 provided funding for his English friend Freda Bedi
(Gelongma Karma Kechog Palmo, the first Western woman to take ordination in Tibetan Buddhism) to start the Young Lamas Home School
in Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh. Later he contributed to Freda Bedi's building of the Karma Drubgyu Thargay Ling nunnery in Kangra Valley and helped organize her journey to the West with His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje in 1974.
When Hills arrived in India he found Nehru besieged by border disputes with China and discussion inevitably turned to Hills’ theories of conflict resolution and how to avoid war. Their connection also evolved out of the fact that India was experiencing severe famine in some states. With heavy dependence on wheat shipments from the United States, Hills helped lobby President Johnson for an increase in wheat aid which was granted. But when Hills mentioned his research with algae as a food source Nehru became interested and offered to support cultivation in India. (PDF will be posted)
While in New Delhi Hills spent time with the prime minister at Teen Murti Bhavan, enjoying Jawaharlal Nehru’s rose gardens and meeting his daughter Indira Gandhi. Hills was the guest of Indian industrialist G.D. Birla where on his first day in India he had met Swami Shantananda, an enlightened sage and a remarkably politically connected guru with whom Hills would travel throughout India for two years much like a roaming sanyassin.* On one of his “pilgrimages” Hills was taken by Shantananada and Nehru’s Parliamentary Secretary S.D. Upadhyaya to Brindavan for a private audience with India's highest female yogini Sri Anandamayi Ma, from whom he felt a “genuine sublime holiness” and received one of the most significant blessings in his life.
In Patna, Bihar, Hills, along with Dr Raynor Johnson, were the only Europeans to attend the 1961 Science & Spirituality Conference where seeds were sown for Hills’ decade of cooperation with hundreds of Indian scientists and yogis, many of whom eventually journeyed to visit Hills' centers in the West and who comprised many of the delegates for a 1970 Yoga conference Hills staged in New Delhi.
In 1963, Aurobindo ashram and Gandhi Peace Foundation sponsored another conference in Patna hosted by Dr. Rajendra Prasad
, Mahatma Gandhi’s longtime right hand disciple and first President of India. Prasad was supposed to speak at the conference but became ill and Hills’ guru Shantananda was leading prayers for him every day at the Sadaqat Ashram in Patna. Prasad requested to meet Hills whose goals for World Union he had heard about. Hills considered Prasad the most spiritual of the founders of Independent India and their meeting was a profound encounter in which Prasad gave his blessing for Hills’ global endeavors but then the president lost consciousness tightly holding onto Hills’ hand. Apparently Prasad never recovered and at the time there was a controversy that the man who, through satyagraha, had resisted multiple British governments and Viceroys and been jailed by them for so many years had said his last words to an Englishman.
(himself a marine biologist) who asked Nakamura to research alternative food sources for Japan after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had devastated food supplies. The goal of Hills and Nakmura’s organization Microalgae International Union, was to develop strains of algae as a way of harnessing the sun’s energy for biofuels and human nutrition and as a solution to World Hunger. Presented with M.I.U’s feasibility studies, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru endorsed Hills’ proposal for bringing the cultivation of protein-rich Chlorella
algae to the villages of India.
With India’s Home Minister, Gulzari Lal Nanda, Hills had co-founded the Institute of Psychic and Spiritual Research in New Delhi. A devout Gandhian, Nanda feared social upheaval and possible communal violence if poor and hungry villagers started migrating to India’s cities so he threw his support behind Hills’ plan for developing rural economies via small footprint aquaculture that could help villages become sustainable. A detailed plan for a pilot project in the Rann of Kutch
was approved by the Indian government. However, the initiative became mired in bureaucracy when Nehru died in 1964. Nanda became acting prime minister but only until the new Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri was nominated to succeed Nehru. Shastri continued working with Hills and had his staff prepare a budget request for Parliament to fund the chlorella algae project. However, because it competed with traditional agricultural interests the aquaculture project became victim to political jockeying as well as an outbreak of war with Pakistan. With Shastri’s mysterious death at the 1966 India-Pakistan peace conference in Tashkent, the project lost its key sponsor.
Nevertheless the networks Hills established with the founders of modern India proved valuable when his son, John Hills, was introduced by Nanda and S.M. Ghose to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who helped the younger Hills garner support among India's Congress party and religious leaders for India's largest conference of Western scientists and Indian yogis.
who helped Hills find and purchase a six-story Edwardian building in London’s leafy Kensington. There Christopher Hills founded Centre House, a self-discovery and human potential community, known as a nucleus of yoga and spirituality in the emerging New Age
movement throughout the late sixties and seventies. Seekers came from all over the world to study with visiting gurus, such as Swami Satchidananda
, Muktananda
, B.K.S. Iyengar
and John G. Bennett
as well as Sanskrit scholar Dr. Rammurti Mishra, Tibetan lamas, chief Druids, homeopathic doctors and scientists studying meditation, telepathy and neuroplasticity in Hills’ Yoga Science laboratory. It was here Christopher Hills wrote his magnum opus, Nuclear Evolution - recognized as a definitive treatise on the chakras as they relate to the human endocrine system, light frequencies and human personality. Yoga Journal
described the book as "Synthesizing a vast amount of information ranging from the structure of DNA to the metaphysics of consciousness" and also as "A giant step forward in integrating science with religion in a meaningful way."
Centre House was an experiment in group consciousness where the majority of residents were well educated students, teachers, scientists interested in the convergence of science and spirituality. For a while the large basement kitchen was a macrobiotic restaurant called Gandalf’s Garden which counted John Lennon
amongst its health-conscious patrons. Its founder, Muz Murray (Ramana Baba), was one of the early residents of Centre House and there published the first issues of Gandalf's Garden
magazine, a publication chronicling the vitality of London's New Age scene.
and the Nehrus’ yoga master Dhirendra Brahmachari
to steer a fractious committee of MPs, ministers and often competitive spiritual leaders from disparate religions and castes into creating a uniquely diverse and widely hailed program of events. The actor James Coburn
, a yoga and martial arts practitioner, described the World Conference on Scientific Yoga as “Very rewarding for me, definitely worth the time and money getting here.”
Post-conference, the select delegates' presentations were published in CHAKRA magazine, founded by Tantra scholar Nik Douglas and Indian art patron Virendra Kumar and co-edited by John Hills.
The conference was deemed a success and Christopher Hills was encouraged by many of the delegates to establish a World Yoga University somewhere on the planet. A mission that would take him from the United Kingdom to the United States.
The campus housed University of the Trees Press which published Christopher Hills' writings and the research of a number of resident students who obtained degrees at the university and wrote books on light & color frequencies and the science of Radionics. A small workshop produced pendulums for dowsing and a line of negative ion generators. With the build up of the vitamin business surrounding discoveries that spirulina had significant weight loss benefits University of the Trees became one the largest employers in the San Lorenzo Valley and leased more than 10 buildings in Boulder Creek for housing students and warehousing a burgeoning nutritional products business based on spirulina.
From this base in California, Hills extended his hospitality to a pantheon of visiting scientists, writers, philosophers and scholars such as Alan Watts
, Barbara Marx Hubbard
, Alan Ginsberg, Thelma Moss
, Hiroshi Motoyama
, Sri Lanka president Ranasinghe Premadasa, Menninger Foundation
’s Swami Rama
, Dr. Evarts G. Loomis
, Bernard Jensen
and countless others in the fields of religion, quantum physics, human potential and alternative medicine.
and the internal exile and police surveillance of Andrei Sakharov
and the denial of an exit visa for Natan Sharansky
's emigration to Israel. Christopher Hills' lifelong crusade against dictatorships and Man's inhumanity was manifested in the book Rise of the Phoenix while his passionate beliefs against deficit spending were set forth in a book on the global economy — The Golden Egg. A recurring theme throughout all Christopher Hills' approaches to world, local and family problems was a process he developed called "Creative Conflict" — the same principles of solving differences between individuals, political parties and even nations that Hills had debated with Adlai Stevenson, Nehru and Luis Kutner.
Throughout the seventies and eighties Hills focused on international affairs, particularly the emergence of democracy in the Soviet Republics, eventually traveling to Russia to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev
where he joined the Soviet Peace Committee. Both President Reagan and President Bush senior bestowed awards on Hills for his commitment to democratic freedom and his humanitarian support for victims of oppression.
The Christopher Hills Foundation donated more than $9 million worth of spirulina products to charitable organizations in the U.S. and abroad. When the Soviet Union had occupied Afghanistan, Hills learned from his friends in Peshawar that Afghan freedom fighter Ahmad Shah Masoud’s mujahadeen troops and many Pashtun tribals were starving because supply routes had been cut by Russian forces. Hills donated and shipped $300,000 worth of spirulina, which was packed in by mules with help from Senator Charlie Wilson (Texas politician) to sustain the Afghans.
In 1989 Sri Lanka president Ranasinghe Premadasa
, struggling to find a formula to end the Sri Lankan Civil War
, traveled to Boulder Creek to meet with Hills and learn more about his conflict resolution concepts. The two men shared a spiritual connection and established a close friendship. Premadasa then brought the Ceylon conflict closer to a democratic solution than any other Sri Lankan president had. However, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
hierarchy had split and in 1993 a faction assassinated Premadasa in a suicide bombing that killed 23 people.
but its cellular structure was too small to be collected without expensive centrifuges. However, in 1967, while Dr Nakamura was living at Centre House, they discovered that women at Lake Chad were harvesting an algae in baskets to make dihé, a highly nutritious sun-baked biscuit. After studying the lakes of Africa, Hills and Dr Nakamura developed seed culture for a strain of 70% protein algae called spirulina
that they had collected from Lake Aranguachi in Ethiopia. Later, in 1981, Dr Hills made an expedition to Lake Chiltu at the invitation of Mr. Wollie Chekal, Minister of Trade for the Ethiopian Revolutionary Government and brought back a new set of spirulina samples to his California laboratory for hybridizing an optimal strain for commercial cultivation.
For millennia spirulina had been a food staple for natives of Lake Chad and also for the Aztecs but Hills funded much of the early experimentation needed for its successful modern day mass cultivation, described in Dr Nakamura’s book Spirulina: Food for a Hungry World.
To manufacture spirulina nutritional products Hills started the Light Force company in Santa Cruz, California which was one of the early models for multi-level marketing
. Customers began reporting weight loss and health benefits from spirulina and the success story was featured in The National Enquirer
. Sales skyrocketed into the millions of dollars propelling Light Force to 50,000 distributors worldwide. To grow that much spirulina Hills formed joint ventures with Koor Foods in Eilat, Israel, Taiwan Aqua in Taipei and Sosa Texcoco at Lake Texcoco
in Mexico. Hills also had an association with Cyanotech on the Big Island of Hawaii which grew a very pure Pacifica brand of spirulina. By 1995 more than 5000 tons of spirulina a year were being imported for Light Force products. To encourage domestic research and production Hills purchased a 150 acre farm and built raceway ponds filled from the land's own natural geothermal aquifer in Desert Hot Springs, California. Professor Nakamura’s student and protégé Dr Kotaro Kawaguchi relocated from Japan as chief research scientist and working with Sebastian Thomas, an algae cultivation expert from India, they refined desert-grown spirulina into consumable powder using the world’s first 90000 sq ft (8,361.3 m²). solar heated dryer.
While a staff of 40 ran the Southern California "Green Gold Farms," harvesting its own US-grown spirulina for Light Force, Hills built a 13000 square feet (1,207.7 m²) home/laboratory on a mountain in the redwoods of Boulder Creek, California dedicated to researching neutraceuticals and as a gathering place for scientists, innovators and spiritual “map makers”. Three years after moving to the new home Norah Hills died from Alzheimers eliciting an outpouring of affection from the many who had seen her as the “divine mother” and a significant force in all that Christopher Hills had produced.
In 1996, after three decades of globetrotting, Hills visited Vietnam to invest in a naturally carbonated underground spring water venture. He contracted an obscure virus which caused a deterioration of his health. Light Force and the research company Biogenics were sold to Royal Body Care which continued to market the products.
Christopher Hills died at home January 31, 1997 leaving his wife Penny Slinger Hills, two sons, John Hills and Anthony Hills and four grandchildren. He believed that “Algae biomass was God’s way of providing an inexhaustible source of energy from the sun”. Today millions of health conscious people enjoy the health benefits of spirulina in myriad products worldwide. Recent innovations have moved algae to the front burner as researchers recognize its efficiency as a carbon sequestration mechanism and alternative biofuel.
Hills' legacy of bio-innovation and commitment to hunger relief is being carried forward by the Christopher Hills Foundation.
Spirulina
Spirulina may refer to:* Spirulina , a health-food supplement* Spirulina , a cyanobacterium group* Ochthephila spirulina, species of gastropod in the Hygromiidae family...
cyanobacteria as a food supplement. He also wrote 30 books on consciousness, meditation, yoga & spiritual evolution, divining, world government, aquaculture and personal health.
Christopher Hills was variously described by the press as a “Western Guru Scientist”, "Natural Foods Pioneer", “Evolutionary Revolutionary” and a “Modern Merlin”
As a successful commodities trader and art patron in Jamaica he retired from business at an early age to follow a spiritual quest that took him around the world as a speaker, author, entrepreneur and pioneer of algae as one of the most efficient sources of food and fuel for humanity.
Early biography
Born in Grimsby, England to a family of fishermen, Hills grew up sailing the bleak and turbulent North Sea. In 1940 he enrolled as a cadet in Nautical school and joined the Merchant Navy during World War II. At sea Hills had several life and death experiences that formed his views on karma, divinity and destiny. On one occasion a rogue wave swept him off the deck hundreds of yards away from the vessel but another wave picked him up and threw him back onto the ship, cutting open his forehead but saving him from freezing to death. As German U Boats sank 2,828 British Merchant ships he watched colleagues incinerated in the flaming oil-slicked Atlantic. At the end of the war, as navigating officer for an oil tanker, Hills found himself docked in Curaçao where he set up shop as a commodities trader with branch offices in Venezuela and Aruba.Encountering problems with South American contract law when a client reneged on a deal, Hills moved to Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
, where business was conducted under the British judicial system. There he founded nine companies specializing in sugar, citrus, credit, insurance, telegraph communications and agricultural commodity exports such as pimento, nutmegs and ginger. In 1950 he married a young English woman, Norah Bremner, deputy headmistress of Wolmer's School in Kingston, whose father, Bernard E. Bremner B.E.M., was the Magistrate, Chief of Customs and Mayor of King's Lynn
King's Lynn
King's Lynn is a sea port and market town in the ceremonial county of Norfolk in the East of England. It is situated north of London and west of Norwich. The population of the town is 42,800....
, Norfolk. They have two sons, both born in Jamaica. The family frequently sailed to England for events such as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and Mayor Bremner's presenting Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother with Freedom of the Borough which encompassed the royal family's home at nearby Sandringham
Sandringham
Sandringham can refer to:Places*Sandringham, Johannesburg, a suburb of Johannesburg, Gauteng Province, South Africa*Sandringham, Norfolk, a village in Norfolk, England*Sandringham House in the aforementioned village, owned by the British Royal Family...
.
Jamaica business leader
From 1949 - 1967 Christopher and Norah Hills became influential forces in Jamaica's commerce, art, politics and culture.Believing that Jamaica’s strength lay in its agriculture, Christopher Hills co-founded the Jamaica Agriculture & Industrial Party (AIP) as an alternative to the two major political parties: Jamaica Labour Party
Jamaica Labour Party
The Jamaica Labour Party is one of the two major political parties in Jamaica, the other being the People's National Party. Despite its name, the JLP is a centre-right, conservative party.-Background:...
(JLP) and People's National Party
People's National Party
The People's National Party is a social democratic and social liberal Jamaican political party, founded by Norman Manley in 1938. It is the oldest political party in the Anglophone Caribbean and one of the main two political parties in Jamaica. Out of the two major parties, it is considered more...
(PNP), both of which he felt were too busy warring with each other to look out for the middle class and the country people who were the backbone of Jamaica’s rural economy. Despite competing vigorously in the polls, the Hills couple were nevertheless close friends with JLP leader Sir Alexander Bustamante
Alexander Bustamante
Sir William Alexander Clarke Bustamante GBE, National Hero of Jamaica was a Jamaican politician and labour leader....
and Norman Manley
Norman Manley
Norman Washington Manley MM QC National Hero of Jamaica , was a Jamaican statesman. A Rhodes Scholar, Manley became one of Jamaica's leading lawyers in the 1920s...
, head of the PNP, who both served as Jamaican Prime Ministers. Norman Manley in fact had been best man at the Hills’ wedding.
In 1951 Christopher and Norah Hills founded Hills Galleries Ltd which, in cooperation with the Prime Minister’s wife Edna Manley
Edna Manley
Edna Manley OM was a sculptor and contributor to Jamaican culture, as well as the wife of Norman Manley, the founder of the Jamaican People's National Party. She is often considered the "mother of Jamaican art". She is the daughter of English cleric Harvey Swithenbank and a Jamaican woman by the...
, became a nexus of the Jamaican art movement in the fifties and sixties. The Gallery & Antiques showroom at 101 Harbour Street, Kingston, supplied and exhibited local celebrity artists Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
and Noel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
, enjoyed the patronage of British royals and such high profile clients as Winthrop Rockefeller
Winthrop Rockefeller
Winthrop Rockefeller was a politician and philanthropist who served as the first Republican Governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction. He was a third-generation member of the Rockefeller family.-Early life:...
, Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age...
, Ladybird Johnson, Grace Kelly
Grace Kelly
Grace Patricia Kelly was an American actress who, in April 1956, married Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, to become Princess consort of Monaco, styled as Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, and commonly referred to as Princess Grace.After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of...
and Errol Flynn
Errol Flynn
Errol Leslie Flynn was an Australian-born actor. He was known for his romantic swashbuckler roles in Hollywood films, being a legend and his flamboyant lifestyle.-Early life:...
. Hills Galleries was also the main agent for Rowney's, Grumbacher and Windsor & Newton art supplies in the West Indies. Through multiple exhibitions the Hillses nurtured and launched the careers of a plethora of talented Jamaican artists such as Ken Spencer, Carl Abrahams
Carl Abrahams
Carl Abrahams OD was a Jamaican painter from the parish of St. Andrew. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica and began his career in commercial art at the age of 17 as a cartoonist and an illustrator for The Daily Gleaner and The Jamaica Times...
, Barrington Watson
Barrington Watson
Barrington Watson is Jamaica’s master painter. Born in 1931 in Lucea, Jamaica, Barrington Watson made his original mark in Jamaica as a football player for Kingston College. However, he ultimately followed his artistic yearnings by enrolling at the Royal College of Art in London. He traveled...
, Albert Huie
Albert Huie
Albert Huie was a Jamaican painter.Huie moved to Kingston when he was 16 years old; in the 1930s he became part of the "Institute Group" at the Institute of Jamaica, where he received his first formal training, with Koren der Harootian.In the early 1940s he worked as an assistant...
, Seya Parboosingh, Vernon Tong and the revivalist preacher/painter/sculptor Mallica "Kapo" Reynolds.
Christopher Hills opened a Hills Galleries branch on Jamaica’s north coast at Montego Bay, mooring his yacht the Robanne, at Round Hill, a popular resort for foreign leaders and industrialists vacationing in the Caribbean. It was there he met Vice President Lyndon Johnson and CBS president William S. Paley
William S. Paley
William S. Paley was the chief executive who built Columbia Broadcasting System from a small radio network into one of the foremost radio and television network operations in the United States.-Early life:...
who in 1959, sponsored a Hills Galleries exhibition of Jamaican art at Barbizon Plaza in New York City which awoke U.S. art collectors to Jamaica’s dynamic sphere of artistic talent. In 1955 Hills had just returned from sailing the Robanne to Havana when he met Adlai Stevenson vacationing in Jamaica. Over dinner Hills shared his observations of simmering revolution in Cuba while he and Stevenson shared their concepts on justice, democracy, conflict and dictatorships — a conversation that helped inspire Hills to make a difference for the world’s underprivileged masses: views later expressed in his landmark volume Rise of the Phoenix.
Rastafari movement
Christopher Hills also became an advocate for Jamaica's Rastafari movementRastafari movement
The Rastafari movement or Rasta is a new religious movement that arose in the 1930s in Jamaica, which at the time was a country with a predominantly Christian culture where 98% of the people were the black descendants of slaves. Its adherents worship Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia , as God...
who were being oppressed in the late fifties. He gave Rastafarians jobs as wood carvers, free paints to poor artists such as the now-famed Ras Dizzy and bailed them out of Spanish Town prison while encouraging rasta brethren to sustain themselves through art and music. Christopher and Norah Hills were personally thanked for their years of support for struggling rastas by Mortimo Planno, the Rasta teacher of Bob Marley and one of the few Rastafarian elders to have met with H.I.M. Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Christopher Hills also "reasoned" Gandhian non-violence with Leonard Howell
Leonard Howell
Leonard Percival Howell , known as The Gong or G.G. Maragh , was a Jamaican religious figure. According to his biographer Hélène Lee, Howell was born in an Anglican family...
, the original "Gong" activist who founded Pinnacle, a Rastafarian community farm at Sligoville
Sligoville
Sligoville is a small community approximately 10 miles from Spanish Town in the parish of St. Catherine on the island of Jamaica.Sligoville is named after the Marquess of Sligo, Governor of Jamaica in 1834, the year that freedom came to the enslaved people of Jamaica. Sligoville was said to be the...
a few miles from Hills’ home. In 1958 Pinnacle was raided in a brutal crackdown by the authorities, ostensibly for growing marijuana, but in fact Rastafarianism at that time was regarded by The Crown as a threat to social harmony. Hills interceded with the Prime Minister but, with an election coming, law & order politics prevailed and many sustainable farming families had to leave the land. For his support Hills was given the moniker “The First White Rasta”. Unlike his skeptical friends and business colleagues he saw Rastafarian spirituality as a righteous way of life, indeed growing out his hair and beard in solidarity and also in keeping with his emerging interest in the sadhus and enlightened sages of India who had much in common with the vegetarian mystical Rastafarians.
Spiritual awakening
By 1960 Christopher Hills had accumulated a large metaphysical library on frequent trips to Samuel Weiser Books in New York, while writing his own books, Kingdom of Desire, Power of the Doctrine and The Power of Increased Perception. At 30 he retired from business and began to research multiple spiritual paths and the physics of what Einstein called Unified field theoryUnified field theory
In physics, a unified field theory, occasionally referred to as a uniform field theory, is a type of field theory that allows all that is usually thought of as fundamental forces and elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field. There is no accepted unified field theory, and thus...
. Prolific research papers and lectures came out of Hills’ laboratory in the Blue Mountains (Jamaica)
Blue Mountains (Jamaica)
The Blue Mountains form the longest mountain range in Jamaica. They include the island's highest point, Blue Mountain Peak, at 2256 m . From the summit, accessible via a walking track, both the North and South coasts of the island can be seen...
on subjects such as bioenergetics, hypnosis, tele-thought, biophysics, effects of solar radiation on living organisms, resonant systems of ionosphere and capacitor effects of human body on static electricity and electron discharge of the nervous system. In 1960 he began a 30-year project to document the effects of sound and color on human consciousness and states of health.
Global outreach
With Norah Hills running the galleries, Hills set forth on a two year journey traveling Asia, Europe, Pakistan and India meeting with members of the UN and calling on politicians, scientists and religious leaders. UNESCOUNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
hired him to shoot 1000 photographs of their projects in far away countries, which appeared in an exhibit at United Nations headquarters.
Hills’ global odyssey’s itinerary grew out of publishing his views on conflict resolution and alternative government in a manifesto Framework for Unity that was circulated to The Commission for Research in the Creative faculties of Man, a network he had founded of thinkers around the world which, in 1961, included Prof. Oliver Reiser, Humphrey Osmond, Dr. Andrija Puharich, David Ben Gurion, and Lady Isobel Cripps
Isobel Cripps
Dame Isobel Cripps, GBE , also known as Lady Cripps, was a British overseas aid organiser and the wife of Sir Stafford Cripps....
among its 500 members.
After teaming up with his good friend and noted lawyer Luis Kutner
Luis Kutner
Luis Kutner , U.S. human rights activist and lawyer who helped found Amnesty International in 1961 and created the concept of a living will. He is also notable for his advocacy of "world habeas corpus", the development of an international writ of habeas corpus to protect individual human rights...
(co-founder of Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
) Hills decided to search the world for a spot to establish a Center where a dedicated community could live and test his World Constitution for Self-Government by Nature’s Laws, which he published in a book with an introduction by Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
.
Friendship with Nehru
Working his way on a speaking tour through Europe in the direction of India, Hills decided to make a precarious expedition to the remote Himalayan Hunza Valley where he had long been curious about the diet and extraordinary longevity of the Pashtun, Balti and Uzbek hill tribes. In Pakistan, Hills was the guest of Professors Duranni and Walid Uddin at Peshawar’s College of Engineering. Visiting Sufi holy men and Islamic scholars in KarachiKarachi
Karachi is the largest city, main seaport and the main financial centre of Pakistan, as well as the capital of the province of Sindh. The city has an estimated population of 13 to 15 million, while the total metropolitan area has a population of over 18 million...
, he met Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was 9th Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1973 to 1977, and prior to that, 4th President of Pakistan from 1971 to 1973. Bhutto was the founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party — the largest and most influential political party in Pakistan— and served as its chairman until his...
to discuss possible Indo-Pakistan cooperation in algae
Algae
Algae are a large and diverse group of simple, typically autotrophic organisms, ranging from unicellular to multicellular forms, such as the giant kelps that grow to 65 meters in length. They are photosynthetic like plants, and "simple" because their tissues are not organized into the many...
cultivation in the climatically suitable Gujrat-Sind border region, which is where Bhutto and his ancestors were from. Later, when Bhutto was overthrown in a military coup, Hills orchestrated urgent appeals to General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq , was the 4th Chief Martial Law Administrator and the sixth President of Pakistan from July 1977 to his death in August 1988...
for clemency but, like many westerners protesting Bhutto’s imprisonment, was ignored and Bhutto was hanged.
In the 1950s Hills became known to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru , often referred to with the epithet of Panditji, was an Indian statesman who became the first Prime Minister of independent India and became noted for his “neutralist” policies in foreign affairs. He was also one of the principal leaders of India’s independence movement in the...
through his friend the Deputy leader of India's Congress Party, Surendra Mohan Ghose a Bengali revolutionary and relative of Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo , born Aurobindo Ghosh or Ghose , was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru, and poet. He joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule and for a duration became one of its most important leaders, before developing his own vision of human progress...
. Hills invited Ghose to Jamaica, to speak at the 1961 Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference and together they formed a partnership to promote World Union and global famine relief through algae aquaculture. S.M. Ghose was one of the founders of Auroville
Auroville
Auroville is an "experimental" township in Viluppuram district in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, near Pondicherry in South India. It was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa and designed by architect Roger Anger...
, an experimental sustainable-living International Village in Pondicherry. In 1962 Ghose took Hills to Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Sri Aurobindo Ashram
The Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded by Sri Aurobindo on the 24 November 1926 . At the time there were no more than 24 disciples in the Ashram...
for a personal audience with Aurobindo’s successor, spiritual head of the ashram, Mirra Alfassa
Mirra Alfassa
-Early life:Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris in 1878, of a Turkish Jewish father, Maurice, and an Egyptian Jewish mother, Mathilde. She had an elder brother named Matteo. The family migrated to France the year before she was born. For the first eight years of her life she lived at 62 boulevard...
known as "The Mother". Later Ghose arranged for Christopher Hills' son, John Hills, to give the keynote address at the World Parliament of Youth in Pondicherry in 1971.
In 1959 Hills had lobbied Nehru to approve a government in exile for the Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...
fleeing persecution in Tibet
Tibet
Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...
and to grant full refugee status to exiled Tibetans. He had become connected to the Tibetans through his study of Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
and in 1960 provided funding for his English friend Freda Bedi
Freda Bedi
Freda Bedi sometimes spelled Frida Bedi also named Sister Palmo, or Gelongma Karma Kechog Palmo, was a British woman born in Austria or in Derby, England, who became famous as the first Western woman to take ordination in Tibetan Buddhism.- Early life :Freda Bedi was born Freda Swan in Austria or...
(Gelongma Karma Kechog Palmo, the first Western woman to take ordination in Tibetan Buddhism) to start the Young Lamas Home School
Young Lamas Home School
The Young Lamas Home School was a school established by the 14th Dalai Lama and Freda Bedi in 1960. Its funding was provided by Christopher Hills and its early abbot was Karma Thinley Rinpoche....
in Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh. Later he contributed to Freda Bedi's building of the Karma Drubgyu Thargay Ling nunnery in Kangra Valley and helped organize her journey to the West with His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje in 1974.
When Hills arrived in India he found Nehru besieged by border disputes with China and discussion inevitably turned to Hills’ theories of conflict resolution and how to avoid war. Their connection also evolved out of the fact that India was experiencing severe famine in some states. With heavy dependence on wheat shipments from the United States, Hills helped lobby President Johnson for an increase in wheat aid which was granted. But when Hills mentioned his research with algae as a food source Nehru became interested and offered to support cultivation in India. (PDF will be posted)
While in New Delhi Hills spent time with the prime minister at Teen Murti Bhavan, enjoying Jawaharlal Nehru’s rose gardens and meeting his daughter Indira Gandhi. Hills was the guest of Indian industrialist G.D. Birla where on his first day in India he had met Swami Shantananda, an enlightened sage and a remarkably politically connected guru with whom Hills would travel throughout India for two years much like a roaming sanyassin.* On one of his “pilgrimages” Hills was taken by Shantananada and Nehru’s Parliamentary Secretary S.D. Upadhyaya to Brindavan for a private audience with India's highest female yogini Sri Anandamayi Ma, from whom he felt a “genuine sublime holiness” and received one of the most significant blessings in his life.
In Patna, Bihar, Hills, along with Dr Raynor Johnson, were the only Europeans to attend the 1961 Science & Spirituality Conference where seeds were sown for Hills’ decade of cooperation with hundreds of Indian scientists and yogis, many of whom eventually journeyed to visit Hills' centers in the West and who comprised many of the delegates for a 1970 Yoga conference Hills staged in New Delhi.
In 1963, Aurobindo ashram and Gandhi Peace Foundation sponsored another conference in Patna hosted by Dr. Rajendra Prasad
Rajendra Prasad
Dr. Rajendra Prasad was an Indian politician and educator. He was one of the architects of the Indian Republic, having drafted its first constitution and serving as the first president of independent India...
, Mahatma Gandhi’s longtime right hand disciple and first President of India. Prasad was supposed to speak at the conference but became ill and Hills’ guru Shantananda was leading prayers for him every day at the Sadaqat Ashram in Patna. Prasad requested to meet Hills whose goals for World Union he had heard about. Hills considered Prasad the most spiritual of the founders of Independent India and their meeting was a profound encounter in which Prasad gave his blessing for Hills’ global endeavors but then the president lost consciousness tightly holding onto Hills’ hand. Apparently Prasad never recovered and at the time there was a controversy that the man who, through satyagraha, had resisted multiple British governments and Viceroys and been jailed by them for so many years had said his last words to an Englishman.
Microalgae International
In earlier travels from Jamaica to Japan, Hills had formed an aquaculture research company with his friend and colleague, biologist Dr Hiroshi Nakamura, Dean of Toyko Women's University. Dr Nakamura was a noted scientist and a colleague of Emperor HirohitoHirohito
, posthumously in Japan officially called Emperor Shōwa or , was the 124th Emperor of Japan according to the traditional order, reigning from December 25, 1926, until his death in 1989. Although better known outside of Japan by his personal name Hirohito, in Japan he is now referred to...
(himself a marine biologist) who asked Nakamura to research alternative food sources for Japan after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had devastated food supplies. The goal of Hills and Nakmura’s organization Microalgae International Union, was to develop strains of algae as a way of harnessing the sun’s energy for biofuels and human nutrition and as a solution to World Hunger. Presented with M.I.U’s feasibility studies, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru endorsed Hills’ proposal for bringing the cultivation of protein-rich Chlorella
Chlorella
Chlorella is a genus of single-celled green algae, belonging to the phylum Chlorophyta. It is spherical in shape, about 2 to 10 μm in diameter, and is without flagella. Chlorella contains the green photosynthetic pigments chlorophyll-a and -b in its chloroplast...
algae to the villages of India.
With India’s Home Minister, Gulzari Lal Nanda, Hills had co-founded the Institute of Psychic and Spiritual Research in New Delhi. A devout Gandhian, Nanda feared social upheaval and possible communal violence if poor and hungry villagers started migrating to India’s cities so he threw his support behind Hills’ plan for developing rural economies via small footprint aquaculture that could help villages become sustainable. A detailed plan for a pilot project in the Rann of Kutch
Rann of Kutch
The Great Rann of Kutch, also called Greater Rann of Kutch or just Rann of Kutch , is a seasonal salt marsh located in the Thar Desert in the Kutch District of Gujarat, India and the Sindh province of Pakistan....
was approved by the Indian government. However, the initiative became mired in bureaucracy when Nehru died in 1964. Nanda became acting prime minister but only until the new Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri was nominated to succeed Nehru. Shastri continued working with Hills and had his staff prepare a budget request for Parliament to fund the chlorella algae project. However, because it competed with traditional agricultural interests the aquaculture project became victim to political jockeying as well as an outbreak of war with Pakistan. With Shastri’s mysterious death at the 1966 India-Pakistan peace conference in Tashkent, the project lost its key sponsor.
Nevertheless the networks Hills established with the founders of modern India proved valuable when his son, John Hills, was introduced by Nanda and S.M. Ghose to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who helped the younger Hills garner support among India's Congress party and religious leaders for India's largest conference of Western scientists and Indian yogis.
Centre House, London
Three years after Jamaica's 1962 declaration of Independence from Britain the Hills family moved to London at the suggestion of two of his mentors, Bertrand Russell and Sir George Trevelyan, 4th BaronetSir George Trevelyan, 4th Baronet
Sir George Lowthian Trevelyan 4th Baronet, , an educational pioneer, a founding father of the New Age movement. After listening to a lecture by Dr Walter Stein, a student of Rudolf Steiner in 1942, he turned from being agnostic to new age spiritual thinker, and even studied anthroposophy in the...
who helped Hills find and purchase a six-story Edwardian building in London’s leafy Kensington. There Christopher Hills founded Centre House, a self-discovery and human potential community, known as a nucleus of yoga and spirituality in the emerging New Age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
movement throughout the late sixties and seventies. Seekers came from all over the world to study with visiting gurus, such as Swami Satchidananda
Swami Satchidananda
Swami Satchidananda , born as C. K. Ramaswamy Gounder, was an Indian religious teacher, spiritual master and yoga adept, who gained fame and following in the West during his time in New York. He was the author of many philosophical and spiritual books, including a popular illustrative book on Hatha...
, Muktananda
Muktananda
Swami Muktananda is the monastic name of an Indian Hindu guru and disciple of Bhagavan Nityananda. Swami Muktananda was the founder of Siddha Yoga...
, B.K.S. Iyengar
B.K.S. Iyengar
Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar , is the founder of Iyengar Yoga, although he himself would not call it Iyengar Yoga. He is considered one of the foremost yoga teachers in the world and has been practising and teaching yoga for more than 75 years...
and John G. Bennett
John G. Bennett
John Godolphin Bennett, was a British mathematician, scientist, technologist, industrial research director, and author. He is perhaps best known for his many books on psychology and spirituality, and particularly the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff...
as well as Sanskrit scholar Dr. Rammurti Mishra, Tibetan lamas, chief Druids, homeopathic doctors and scientists studying meditation, telepathy and neuroplasticity in Hills’ Yoga Science laboratory. It was here Christopher Hills wrote his magnum opus, Nuclear Evolution - recognized as a definitive treatise on the chakras as they relate to the human endocrine system, light frequencies and human personality. Yoga Journal
Yoga Journal
Yoga Journal is an American based media company that publishes a magazine, a website, DVDs, and puts on conferences all devoted to yoga, food and nutrition, fitness, wellness, and fashion and beauty.-Beginnings and Growth:...
described the book as "Synthesizing a vast amount of information ranging from the structure of DNA to the metaphysics of consciousness" and also as "A giant step forward in integrating science with religion in a meaningful way."
Centre House was an experiment in group consciousness where the majority of residents were well educated students, teachers, scientists interested in the convergence of science and spirituality. For a while the large basement kitchen was a macrobiotic restaurant called Gandalf’s Garden which counted John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
amongst its health-conscious patrons. Its founder, Muz Murray (Ramana Baba), was one of the early residents of Centre House and there published the first issues of Gandalf's Garden
Gandalf's Garden
Gandalf's Garden was a mystical community which flourished at the end of the 1960s as part of the London hippie/underground movement, running a shop and a magazine of the same name. It emphasised the mystical interests of the period, and advocated meditation in preference to drugs...
magazine, a publication chronicling the vitality of London's New Age scene.
World Yoga Conference, New Delhi
In December 1970 Christopher Hills and his son organized the world's first World Conference on Scientific Yoga (WCSY) in New Delhi, bringing 50 Western scientists together with 800 of India's leading Swamis, Yogis and Lamas to discuss their research and establish a network for the creation of a World Yoga University.The conference generated some controversy when Indian politics intersected with religion, particularly the concept of "Christ Yoga" a book Hills had written linking Christ’s teachings to those of Buddha and the Vedas. But the conclave nevertheless emerged as a milestone in the soon to be booming migration of Indian yogis to the West. John Hills, helped by his father's prior relationship with Nehru, worked with India's Prime Minister Indira GandhiIndira Gandhi
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhara was an Indian politician who served as the third Prime Minister of India for three consecutive terms and a fourth term . She was assassinated by Sikh extremists...
and the Nehrus’ yoga master Dhirendra Brahmachari
Dhirendra Brahmachari
Dhirendra Brahmachari , born Dhirendra Choudhary, was the yoga mentor of Indira Gandhi - a former Prime Minister of India. He ran ashrams in Delhi, Jammu, Katra and Mantalai and wrote books on yoga....
to steer a fractious committee of MPs, ministers and often competitive spiritual leaders from disparate religions and castes into creating a uniquely diverse and widely hailed program of events. The actor James Coburn
James Coburn
James Harrison Coburn III was an American film and television actor. Coburn appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances during his 45-year career, and played a wide range of roles and won an Academy Award for his supporting role as Glen Whitehouse in Affliction.A capable,...
, a yoga and martial arts practitioner, described the World Conference on Scientific Yoga as “Very rewarding for me, definitely worth the time and money getting here.”
Post-conference, the select delegates' presentations were published in CHAKRA magazine, founded by Tantra scholar Nik Douglas and Indian art patron Virendra Kumar and co-edited by John Hills.
The conference was deemed a success and Christopher Hills was encouraged by many of the delegates to establish a World Yoga University somewhere on the planet. A mission that would take him from the United Kingdom to the United States.
University of the Trees
As the spiritual axis shifted to America, Christopher Hills moved to the United States, settling in Boulder Creek, California and becoming a U.S. citizen. There, amidst the ancient redwoods, he founded an accredited college, University of the Trees. Students lived on campus and studied subjects as diverse as Radionics and dowsing (Hills was a well known diviner), meditation, hatha yoga, the Vedas, and early forms of social networking he called "Group Consciousness".The campus housed University of the Trees Press which published Christopher Hills' writings and the research of a number of resident students who obtained degrees at the university and wrote books on light & color frequencies and the science of Radionics. A small workshop produced pendulums for dowsing and a line of negative ion generators. With the build up of the vitamin business surrounding discoveries that spirulina had significant weight loss benefits University of the Trees became one the largest employers in the San Lorenzo Valley and leased more than 10 buildings in Boulder Creek for housing students and warehousing a burgeoning nutritional products business based on spirulina.
From this base in California, Hills extended his hospitality to a pantheon of visiting scientists, writers, philosophers and scholars such as Alan Watts
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York...
, Barbara Marx Hubbard
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Barbara Marx Hubbard is a prolific futurist, author and public speaker. She is credited with the evolutionary concepts of ‘The Synergy Engine’ and the 'birthing' of humanity.-Personal history:...
, Alan Ginsberg, Thelma Moss
Thelma Moss
Thelma Moss, Ph.D. was an American psychologist and parapsychologist, best known for her work on Kirlian photography and the human aura....
, Hiroshi Motoyama
Hiroshi Motoyama
Hiroshi Motoyama is a Japanese parapsychologist, scientist, spiritual instructor and author whose primary topic is spiritual self-cultivation and the relationship between the mind and body therein. In doing so, he emphasizes the meditative practices of Samkhya/Yoga, karma, reincarnation and Hindu...
, Sri Lanka president Ranasinghe Premadasa, Menninger Foundation
Menninger Foundation
The Menninger Foundation was founded in 1919 by the Menninger family in Topeka, Kansas, and consists of a clinic, a sanatorium, and a school of psychiatry, all of which bear the Menninger name. In 2003, the Menninger Clinic moved to Houston. The foundation was started by Drs. Karl, Will, and...
’s Swami Rama
Swami Rama
Swāmī Rāma was born Brij Kiśore Dhasmana or Brij Kiśore Kumar, to a northern Indian Brahmin family in a small village called Toli in the Garhwal Himalayas. He became the lineage holder of the Sankya Yoga tradition of the Himalayan Masters...
, Dr. Evarts G. Loomis
Evarts G. Loomis
Evarts Greene Loomis was an internationally known homeopathic physician, surgeon, author, lecturer, and visionary who is regarded by some as "the father of holistic medicine," Loomis preferred to be called Evarts rather than "doctor"....
, Bernard Jensen
Bernard Jensen
Bernard Jensen was a chiropractor, entrepreneur, and the author of numerous books and articles on health and healing....
and countless others in the fields of religion, quantum physics, human potential and alternative medicine.
Supersensonics
Within the campus, Hills founded an experimental laboratory developing his theories on the Electro Vibratory Body – documenting what Hills’ colleague Stanford University's William A. Tiller Ph.D, calls “subtle energies” or “psychoenergetics.” In 1975 Hills wrote the book Supersensonics— the Science of Radiational Paraphysics, widely considered “The Bible of dowsing” The book sheds new light on divining, telepathy, The I Ching, Egypt’s Pyramids, Biblical miracles and discusses the value of low level extrasensory phenomena vs higher levels of insight, wisdom and consciousness. New Age Journal magazine called Supersensonics “A short course in miracles for scientist and seeker alike.”International philanthropy
With the Cold War in full swing liberation from the evils of totalitarianism was a constant theme in Hills writings. He lobbied hard against the KGB's persecution of Aleksandr SolzhenitsynAleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
and the internal exile and police surveillance of Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...
and the denial of an exit visa for Natan Sharansky
Natan Sharansky
Natan Sharansky was born in Stalino, Soviet Union on 20 January 1948 to a Jewish family. He graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. As a child, he was a chess prodigy. He performed in simultaneous and blindfold displays, usually against...
's emigration to Israel. Christopher Hills' lifelong crusade against dictatorships and Man's inhumanity was manifested in the book Rise of the Phoenix while his passionate beliefs against deficit spending were set forth in a book on the global economy — The Golden Egg. A recurring theme throughout all Christopher Hills' approaches to world, local and family problems was a process he developed called "Creative Conflict" — the same principles of solving differences between individuals, political parties and even nations that Hills had debated with Adlai Stevenson, Nehru and Luis Kutner.
Throughout the seventies and eighties Hills focused on international affairs, particularly the emergence of democracy in the Soviet Republics, eventually traveling to Russia to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
where he joined the Soviet Peace Committee. Both President Reagan and President Bush senior bestowed awards on Hills for his commitment to democratic freedom and his humanitarian support for victims of oppression.
The Christopher Hills Foundation donated more than $9 million worth of spirulina products to charitable organizations in the U.S. and abroad. When the Soviet Union had occupied Afghanistan, Hills learned from his friends in Peshawar that Afghan freedom fighter Ahmad Shah Masoud’s mujahadeen troops and many Pashtun tribals were starving because supply routes had been cut by Russian forces. Hills donated and shipped $300,000 worth of spirulina, which was packed in by mules with help from Senator Charlie Wilson (Texas politician) to sustain the Afghans.
In 1989 Sri Lanka president Ranasinghe Premadasa
Ranasinghe Premadasa
Ranasinghe Premadasa was the 3rd President of Sri Lanka from January 2, 1989 to May 1, 1993. Before that, he served as the Prime Minister in the government headed by J. R. Jayewardene from February 6, 1978 to January 1, 1989...
, struggling to find a formula to end the Sri Lankan Civil War
Sri Lankan civil war
The Sri Lankan Civil War was a conflict fought on the island of Sri Lanka. Beginning on July 23, 1983, there was an on-and-off insurgency against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam , a separatist militant organization which fought to create an independent Tamil state named Tamil...
, traveled to Boulder Creek to meet with Hills and learn more about his conflict resolution concepts. The two men shared a spiritual connection and established a close friendship. Premadasa then brought the Ceylon conflict closer to a democratic solution than any other Sri Lankan president had. However, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was a separatist militant organization formerly based in northern Sri Lanka. Founded in May 1976 by Vellupillai Prabhakaran, it waged a violent secessionist and nationalist campaign to create an independent state in the north and east of Sri Lanka for Tamil...
hierarchy had split and in 1993 a faction assassinated Premadasa in a suicide bombing that killed 23 people.
Spirulina: food from sunlight
Hills and Nakamura had a vision of feeding the world from lakes, seas and backyard aquaculture and in 1975 they authored a book, Food from Sunlight which published all their proprietary research as open source for the world to use in the cause against global famine and malnutrition. Their company, Microalgae International, invested in research and technology to find a super food for solving World Hunger. Early research focused on chlorellaChlorella
Chlorella is a genus of single-celled green algae, belonging to the phylum Chlorophyta. It is spherical in shape, about 2 to 10 μm in diameter, and is without flagella. Chlorella contains the green photosynthetic pigments chlorophyll-a and -b in its chloroplast...
but its cellular structure was too small to be collected without expensive centrifuges. However, in 1967, while Dr Nakamura was living at Centre House, they discovered that women at Lake Chad were harvesting an algae in baskets to make dihé, a highly nutritious sun-baked biscuit. After studying the lakes of Africa, Hills and Dr Nakamura developed seed culture for a strain of 70% protein algae called spirulina
Spirulina
Spirulina may refer to:* Spirulina , a health-food supplement* Spirulina , a cyanobacterium group* Ochthephila spirulina, species of gastropod in the Hygromiidae family...
that they had collected from Lake Aranguachi in Ethiopia. Later, in 1981, Dr Hills made an expedition to Lake Chiltu at the invitation of Mr. Wollie Chekal, Minister of Trade for the Ethiopian Revolutionary Government and brought back a new set of spirulina samples to his California laboratory for hybridizing an optimal strain for commercial cultivation.
For millennia spirulina had been a food staple for natives of Lake Chad and also for the Aztecs but Hills funded much of the early experimentation needed for its successful modern day mass cultivation, described in Dr Nakamura’s book Spirulina: Food for a Hungry World.
To manufacture spirulina nutritional products Hills started the Light Force company in Santa Cruz, California which was one of the early models for multi-level marketing
Multi-level marketing
Multi-level marketing is a marketing strategy in which the sales force is compensated not only for sales they personally generate, but also for the sales of others they recruit, creating a downline of distributors and a hierarchy of multiple levels of compensation...
. Customers began reporting weight loss and health benefits from spirulina and the success story was featured in The National Enquirer
The National Enquirer
The National Enquirer is an American supermarket tabloid now published by American Media Inc . Founded in 1926, the tabloid has gone through a variety of changes over the years....
. Sales skyrocketed into the millions of dollars propelling Light Force to 50,000 distributors worldwide. To grow that much spirulina Hills formed joint ventures with Koor Foods in Eilat, Israel, Taiwan Aqua in Taipei and Sosa Texcoco at Lake Texcoco
Lake Texcoco
Lake Texcoco was a natural lake formation within the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs built the city of Tenochtitlan on an island in the lake. The Spaniards built Mexico City over Tenochtitlan...
in Mexico. Hills also had an association with Cyanotech on the Big Island of Hawaii which grew a very pure Pacifica brand of spirulina. By 1995 more than 5000 tons of spirulina a year were being imported for Light Force products. To encourage domestic research and production Hills purchased a 150 acre farm and built raceway ponds filled from the land's own natural geothermal aquifer in Desert Hot Springs, California. Professor Nakamura’s student and protégé Dr Kotaro Kawaguchi relocated from Japan as chief research scientist and working with Sebastian Thomas, an algae cultivation expert from India, they refined desert-grown spirulina into consumable powder using the world’s first 90000 sq ft (8,361.3 m²). solar heated dryer.
While a staff of 40 ran the Southern California "Green Gold Farms," harvesting its own US-grown spirulina for Light Force, Hills built a 13000 square feet (1,207.7 m²) home/laboratory on a mountain in the redwoods of Boulder Creek, California dedicated to researching neutraceuticals and as a gathering place for scientists, innovators and spiritual “map makers”. Three years after moving to the new home Norah Hills died from Alzheimers eliciting an outpouring of affection from the many who had seen her as the “divine mother” and a significant force in all that Christopher Hills had produced.
Santa Cruz sanctuary
At the property he built a Hollywood quality video production studio to produce films on Enlightenment and, through new media, to inspire people to celebrate what he called the "Divine Goddess". The studio is run today by his second wife, artist/producer Penny Slinger Hills.In 1996, after three decades of globetrotting, Hills visited Vietnam to invest in a naturally carbonated underground spring water venture. He contracted an obscure virus which caused a deterioration of his health. Light Force and the research company Biogenics were sold to Royal Body Care which continued to market the products.
Christopher Hills died at home January 31, 1997 leaving his wife Penny Slinger Hills, two sons, John Hills and Anthony Hills and four grandchildren. He believed that “Algae biomass was God’s way of providing an inexhaustible source of energy from the sun”. Today millions of health conscious people enjoy the health benefits of spirulina in myriad products worldwide. Recent innovations have moved algae to the front burner as researchers recognize its efficiency as a carbon sequestration mechanism and alternative biofuel.
Hills' legacy of bio-innovation and commitment to hunger relief is being carried forward by the Christopher Hills Foundation.