Christopher Hills

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.

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.

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 5,000 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 90,000 sq ft (8,400 m) solar heated dryer.

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.

Within the campus, Hills founded an experimental laboratory, managed by physicist Dr. Robert Massy, to develop his theories on the Electro Vibratory Body – documenting what Hills’ colleague Stanford University’s William A. Tiller Ph.D, calls “subtle energies” or “psychoenergetics”. Shortly before he died radionics pioneer George de la Warr donated a substantial portion of his research files, library and instruments to Christopher Hills. 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.”

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 chlorella 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.

As the spiritual axis shifted to America, Christopher Hills visited his friend Laura Huxley who urged him to move to the United States where he settled in Boulder Creek, California, and became a U.S. citizen. There, amidst the ancient redwoods, he founded in 1973, an accredited college, University of the Trees, an alternative education and research center for the social sciences to study the laws of nature and their relation to human consciousness. 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”.

In December 1970 Christopher Hills, his son John, and Kevin Kingsland 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.

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.

In 1963, the Sri 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 from Nehru. 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.

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 Baronet. They helped Hills find and purchase a six-story Edwardian building in London’s leafy Kensington. There Christopher Hills and others, including Kevin Kingsland, 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, Sangharakshita and John G. Bennett as well as Sanskrit scholar Dr. Rammurti Mishra, Christmas Humphreys, 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.”

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, Humphry Osmond, Dr. Andrija Puharich, David Ben-Gurion, and Lady Isobel Cripps, among its 500 members.

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.

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 Albert Einstein called Unified field theory. 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.

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 the Young Lama’s Home School in Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh founded by his English friend Freda Bedi, one of Gandhi’s handpicked satyagrahis who became Gelongma Karma Kechog Palmo, the first Western woman to take ordination in Tibetan Buddhism. Freda Bedi is the mother of film and television star Kabir Bedi. In 1968 Hills contributed to Freda Bedi’s building of the Karma Drubgyu Thargay Ling nunnery at Tilokpur in the Kangra Valley and helped organize her journey to the West with the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje in 1974.

Hills also “reasoned” Gandhian nonviolence 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 Rastafari 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 and 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.

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 then Vice President Lyndon Johnson and CBS president William S. Paley, who in 1956, 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. The exhibition was described by the Daily Gleaner as “Epochal in the establishment of a market for West Indian art.” The Hills family spent weekends and holidays at Port Antonio visiting friends and clients including their neighbor, novelist Robin Moore at Blue Lagoon. There Hills met Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza who asked Hills to curate part of his art collection. For five years many classic works of the baron’s international art acquisitions decorated the walls of the Hills’ home. Von Thyssen also granted Hills’ children access to his private island at San San near Port Antonio.

In 1955 Hills had just returned from sailing the Robanne to Havana when he met Adlai Stevenson who had given a speech honoring a visit to Jamaica by Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon. At the gallery Stevenson fell in love with Hills’ George III period Sheraton bow-fronted desk, immediately purchasing it for his own office in Chicago. Over dinner, Hills shared his observations of simmering revolution in Cuba, while he and Stevenson compared their concepts of justice, democracy, conflict and dictatorships — a conversation that inspired Hills to publish his ideas for uplifting the world’s underprivileged masses in his landmark volume Rise of the Phoenix.

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. The Gallery & Antiques showroom at 101 Harbour Street, Kingston was built on the site of Simon Bolivar’s Jamaica residence where, in 1815, the revolutionary wrote his famous letter Carta de Jamaica.

In 1950 Christopher Hills married an English woman, Norah Bremner, deputy headmistress of Wolmer’s School in Kingston. Her father, Bernard E. Bremner B.E.M., was the Magistrate, Chief of Customs, and Mayor of King’s Lynn, Norfolk who in 1951 co-founded the King’s Lynn Festival with concert pianist Ruth Roche, Baroness Fermoy. Lady Fermoy, wife of Baron Fermoy, is Diana, Princess of Wales’ maternal grandmother. The Hillses had two sons, both born in Jamaica. The family 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.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Hills Galleries supplied and exhibited local celebrity artists Ian Fleming and Noël Coward, enjoyed the patronage of British royals and such high-profile clients as Sadruddin Aga Khan, Winthrop Rockefeller, Elizabeth Taylor, Lady Bird Johnson, Grace Kelly and Errol Flynn. Hills Galleries was also the main agent for Rowney’s, Grumbacher and Winsor & Newton art supplies in the West Indies. Through multiple exhibitions, the Hillses nurtured or launched the careers of a plethora of talented Jamaican artists, such as Gaston Tabois, Kenneth Abendana Spencer, Carl Abrahams, Barrington Watson, Albert Huie, Gloria Escoffery, Karl Parboosingh, Vernon Tong and the revivalist preacher/painter/sculptor Mallica Reynolds.

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 Tamil Nadu. 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 Puducherry in 1971.

From 1949 to 1967, Christopher and Norah Hills became influential in Jamaica’s commerce, art, politics and culture.

Born in Grimsby, England to a family of fishermen, Hills grew up sailing the North Sea. In 1940 he enrolled as a cadet in nautical school and joined the British Merchant Navy during World War II. At sea, Hills had several life and death experiences that formed his views on karma, divinity and destiny. At the end of the war, as navigating officer for an Esso oil tanker docked in Curaçao, he set up shop as a commodities trader with branch offices in Venezuela and Aruba. When a client reneged on a deal, Hills moved to Jamaica. There with the help of the philanthropist Percy Junor he founded commodity companies specializing in sugar, bananas, insurance, telegraph communications and agricultural spices pimento, nutmegs and ginger. Financing for the first export corporation came from British businessman Andrew Hay, then husband of best-selling motivational author Louise Hay who in the 1950s was a high-fashion model and family friend.

Christopher Hills (April 9, 1926 – January 31, 1997) was an English-born author, described as the “Father of Spirulina” for popularizing spirulina cyanobacteria as a food supplement. He also wrote 30 books on consciousness, meditation, yoga and spiritual evolution, divining, world government, aquaculture, and personal health.