38 Facts About Christopher Hills

Christopher Brian Hills was an English-born author, described as the "Father of Spirulina" for popularizing spirulina cyanobacteria as a food supplement.

Christopher Hills wrote 30 books on consciousness, meditation, yoga and spiritual evolution, divining, world government, aquaculture, and personal health.

At sea, Christopher Hills had several life and death experiences that formed his views on karma, divinity and destiny.

On July 29,1950, Christopher Hills married Norah Katherine Bremner in Saint Andrew, Surrey, Jamaica.

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.

Christopher Hills became an advocate for Jamaica's Rastafari movement, who were being oppressed in the late fifties.

Christopher Hills gave Rastafarians jobs as woodcarvers, 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 Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Christopher Hills reasoned Gandhian nonviolence with Leonard Howell, activist who founded Pinnacle, a Rastafarian community farm at Sligoville, a few miles from Christopher Hills' home.

Christopher 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.

In Pakistan, Christopher Hills was the guest of Professors Duranni and Walid Uddin at Peshawar's College of Engineering.

Later, when Bhutto was overthrown in a military coup, Christopher 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.

Christopher 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.

In 1959 Christopher 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.

Christopher Hills 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.

In 1968 Christopher 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.

When Christopher Hills arrived in India, he found Nehru besieged by border disputes with China and discussion inevitably turned to Christopher Hills' theories of conflict resolution and how to avoid war.

In earlier travels from Jamaica to Japan, Christopher Hills had formed an aquaculture research company with his friend and colleague, biologist Dr Hiroshi Nakamura, Dean of Tokyo Women's University.

Shastri continued working with Christopher Hills and had his staff prepare a budget request for Parliament to fund the chlorella algae project.

Ghose to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who helped the younger Christopher Hills garner support among India's Congress party and religious leaders for India's largest conference of Western scientists and Indian yogis.

Three years after Jamaica's 1962 declaration of Independence from Britain, the Christopher Hills family moved to London, at the suggestion of two of his mentors, Bertrand Russell and Sir George Trevelyan, 4th Baronet.

The conference generated some controversy when Indian politics intersected with religion, particularly the concept of Christ Yoga, a book Christopher Hills had written linking Christ's teachings to those of Buddha and the Vedas.

John Christopher Hills, helped by his father's prior relationship with Nehru, worked with India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi 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 conference was deemed a success and Christopher Hills was elected by a majority of the delegates to establish a World Yoga University somewhere on the planet.

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 US citizen.

From this base in California, Hills extended his hospitality to scientists, writers, philosophers and scholars such as Alan Watts, Edgar Mitchell, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Allen Ginsberg, Thelma Moss, Hiroshi Motoyama, Haridas Chaudhuri, Sri Lanka president Ranasinghe Premadasa, Menninger Foundation's Swami Rama, Evarts G Loomis, Viktoras Kulvinskas, Max Luscher, Marcia Moore.

In 1975 Christopher Hills wrote the book Supersensonics: The Science of Radiational Paraphysics, widely considered "The Bible of dowsing" The book covers subjects including 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.

The Christopher Hills Foundation donated more than $9 million worth of spirulina products to charitable organizations in the US and abroad.

Christopher Hills donated and shipped $300,000 worth of spirulina, which was packed in by mules with help from Senator Charlie Wilson 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 Christopher Hills and learn more about his conflict resolution concepts.

Later, in 1981, Christopher 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 for the Aztecs but Christopher 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.

Christopher Hills had an association with Cyanotech on the Big Island of Hawaii which grew a very pure Pacifica brand of spirulina.

Three years after moving to the new home Norah Christopher Hills died from Alzheimers.

In 1996, after three decades of globetrotting, Christopher Hills visited Vietnam to invest in a naturally carbonated underground spring water venture.

Christopher Hills contracted a virus which caused a deterioration of his health.

Christopher Hills died at home January 31,1997 leaving his wife Penny Slinger Hills, two sons and four grandchildren.

Christopher Hills' estate is being stewarded by Coongie, a non-profit research institute.