What Is the Connection of higher Consciousness to Ancient Eqypt

Awakening College Consciousness:
Guidance from Aboriginal Egypt and Sumer
Lloyd Yard. Dickie and Paul R. Boudreau.  Inner Traditions
(www.innertraditions.com), 2015. PP. 246. $18.95 Newspaper
Reviewed by James George and Francis Childe

Due westhen two ecologists and biologists, who have spent a twelvemonth together exploring the wisdom subconscious in ancient Egyptian temples, decide to share their discoveries almost enkindling higher consciousness, they face up two issues, fifty-fifty when they are friends and come from the same city—in this case, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. To maintain their academic standing, they must present solid rational bear witness that at that place is any such reality equally higher consciousness, and that, at the dawn of civilization, our remote ancestors may have understood a more subtle level of reality improve than we have.

The 2nd problem they face is to find a mutual fashion of expressing their individual discoveries. Co-authorship is never easy, but these two have yet managed to produce a truly remarkable written report.

In their introduction, Lloyd Dickie and Paul Boudreau, both credentialed scientists, recall Arnold Toynbee's insight—that in a "time of troubles" like ours, ancient myths can help in the search for a better sense of the meaning of life, of the Self, or of college consciousness. For, as our authors affirm, "ancient myths incorporate the oldest expression of who nosotros are….

"We in the Due west can trace our cultural roots directly to myths written down 4,500 years ago! Just the challenges modern societies confront lie in understanding what these myths are telling us and determining how we tin make use of them in our everyday life to awaken our higher consciousness….

"The master purpose of the myths is to urge us to awaken. The wonder is that they seem to exist then hard to hear. The myths also speak of the demand for struggle…. They repeatedly betoken out that the real evil for us is isolation and the separation of parts. Using symbol­ism, they also prove that under the ordi­nary circumstances of life the want for individuality leads to isolation. When 1's desire becomes the opposite of what is needed to achieve wholeness, transformation is blocked. Isolation leads to enmity and partitioning, while inte­gration leads to positive relationships and whole­ness. The struggle in life is the piece of work of embracing and reconciling opposites: honey-detest, joy-sadness, hope-despair, and so forth…. So … we hope that our readers volition see these myths in a new calorie-free that will contribute to their explorations of themselves and the world effectually them—to help them detect and establish a stronger Cocky within themselves."

From these extracts, information technology is clear that this book aims at a new interpretation of what Joseph Campbell called "the Hero's Journey," taking advantage of better modern translations of the ancient texts, and of the insights of Schwaller de Lubicz and Yard.I.Gurdjieff, among others. The "Guidance from Ancient Arab republic of egypt and Sumer" in the subtitle of the book tells us how we tin can learn from these aboriginal myth makers to free ourselves from the ordinary analytical listen, and find the "mind in the heart" that Schwaller de Lubicz speaks of in The Temple of Man. The difference, our authors say, may be "between intuition and thinking, or between induction and deduction." The interaction betwixt these two minds "is the essence of myth itself."

This volume is non just an bookish written report virtually the ancestry of culture. For Dickie and Boudreau, these "stories of wisdom are non nigh others, about the dead, or near the past. They are about us, now. The symbolism of Osiris warns that our part in understanding the differences betwixt decease and awakening to life tin exist played only if we maintain an active role in the continuing struggle betwixt preconception and perception. And so rapidly are our fleeting moments of clarity destroyed by our habitual, twenty-four hour period-to-day preoccupations that we need help to even be more aware of their beingness. We need to be fully aware that we are participants in this myth if we are to maintain attentiveness. Only by awakening can we plow towards the possibilities for living as a re-membered being, existing in the everlasting present…. This realization of the need for help to mount the struggle is behind the religious teachings of all ages."

In this connection, we were glad to learn that the more accurate translation of what nosotros all know as The Egyptian Volume of the Dead is The Volume of the Coming Forth past Day. Yes indeed; let there be Light! "The Egyptians saw [one'due south individual purpose] equally becoming united with the lite and life-bestowing properties of the eternal sun itself." In preparing initiates for life after decease, by learning to "die earlier you die," the priests of Egypt were using esoteric methods that take subsequently entered Greek culture through Empedocles and Pythagoras, early Christianity through the Gnostics, and Sufism through Hafez and Rumi.

Although they recognize these linkages, the authors have said petty almost what is now known about the detailed practices of breathing with awareness that led the Pyramid Texts to speak of mortals feeding on air, feeding "on the gods' food, the food on which they feed." Nor do they connect these practices with the evolution of higher existence bodies that may non die when the physical body dies. However there are many cases where the ankh of Eternal Life is associated with the ka or soul in a ladder of possible transformations. They accept sahu (astral trunk) as significant just "our biological germ plasm." We think it was much more than that, and are including in this review a striking image of Horus, the New Human, "the 1 born not of flesh only of spirit," initiating a student (symbolized by the pharaoh) into the absorption of the higher elements in the air—"the gods' food"—in what Gurdjieff believed were esoteric schools of repetition.

Coming from a scientific groundwork themselves, the authors share their amazement in discovering, through Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend's Hamlet's Manufactory, that the primeval Egyptian architects were using the sophisticated mathematical ratios of pi and phi, and their astronomers were fully aware of the precession of the equinox, long before the Europeans were.

Egypt (credit F. Childe)

We take concentrated on the Egyptian parts of this great book, but our authors have done a neat job in discovering many parallel themes in the traditional stories of Sumer, Akkadia, and Babylon, as well as in the magnificent epic of Gilgamesh. Then readers of this volume take much to look forrard to and bask, even when some parts may seem heavy going.

We doubtable, every bit co-reviewers, that our co-authors have sometimes solved their differences of view by putting both their versions into the book, and this may explain the redundancies. Only this is a minor problem and mayhap in the stop we would practise well to take note of what no less an authority than Gurdjieff says about the aboriginal tales and myths. Writing of his own experiences as a boy listening to his father recount the legend of Gilgamesh, he says: "When the beneficent issue of the impressions formed in my childhood from the narratives of my father finally became articulate to me—a result that crystallized in me a spiritualizing factor enabling me to comprehend that which normally appears incomprehensible—I often regretted having begun likewise late to give the legends of artifact the immense significance that I now empathize they actually accept."♦

James George is a former Canadian Ambassador (to India, Iran and the Gulf States, Nepal and Sri Lanka). He is the author of Request for the Globe: Waking Up to the Spiritual/Ecological Crisis (1995) and The Piffling Dark-green Volume on Awakening (2008). He lives in Toronto.

Francis Childe is a historian and former United Nations diplomat who has undertaken all-encompassing research on ancient spiritual traditions, including those of Arab republic of egypt, Mesopotamia, and Central Asia. He lives in Paris.

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Source: https://parabola.org/2015/07/19/book-review-awakening-higher-consciousness-guidance-from-ancient-egypt-and-sumer/