The modern Ideas about consciousness began in ancient Egypt

The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt: Sacred Science and the Mystery of Consciousness – Edward F. Malkowski (2007)

            The human race has a deep fascination with the relatively ancient Egyptian culture, especially the amazing technological and architectural wonders left behind by the Old and New Kingdoms of several thousand years ago.  To some researchers however, the blind obsession with the physical leftovers of the Egyptian culture blinds people into ignoring the other aspects of that culture that allowed it to survive and thrive for thousands of years.  The philosophical, theological, and cosmological ideas of the Egyptians, and their effect on the history of human thought, science, and religious belief, are what are explored by Mr. Malkowski in this cool book.

            It seems odd that, for all the praise lavished on the Egyptians amazing technological achievements in architecture, writing, and fine arts, not too many people explore the deep roots that our modern religious thought has in the ideas of Egypt.  People forget that Moses was raised in the Pharaoh’s house, taught as any noble Egyptian would be, to read and write, and do mathematics, and analyze theology and philosophy.  The wisdom he learned there was what he later applied while leading the Hebrews to their “promised land.”  The ideas he shared with them, from Mosaic law to the Ten Commandments, all have precedent in the Egyptian philosophy and theology.  These ideas are what scholars refer to as the “Mysteries.” 

            These Egyptian “mysteries” were in fact esoteric knowledge about the biggest questions humans have.  Why are we here?  What created existence? How do we know we are real? What is time?  What is our purpose?  These and many other questions are explored by Mr. Malkowski from the vantage point of the Egyptians.   These ideas are big, shocking to those ruled by religious dogma, and because of this they have been kept “hidden,” taught only to those who actively seek out the information.  For example, there is no moment of creation, after which the world just existed.  We are all a part of creation at every point in our lives, for once creation begins, it does not end.  The entire Universe is in a constant state of self-creation, and consciousness is an integral part of the Universe understanding itself.  Because of this, we are all divine, due to our local consciousness being just a small sliver of the overall Universal consciousness, which many label as god. 

            The idea of “sin” is taken very literally by close-minded believers.  They want a set of rules.  This is good, and this is bad. Do only the good, and ask for forgiveness for the bad.  That is not the truth of sin.  That is how organized groups use the concept of sin to control the population.  The Egyptians, the Greeks after them, the early Christians and Gnostics, and many other groups since have understood sin to be a different thing.  Since humans are a combination of the material (physical body and brain) and the divine (non-local consciousness), a true life is led by those who see and accept both aspects of themselves.  This duality is a critical thing.  SIN, as it was viewed by the Egyptians and the mystics that followed, is the state where a human has become solely obsessed and focused on his physical self, whether that is as a denial of their own consciousness, or in partaking of what people call the Seven Deadly Sins, all of which deal with the obsession of the material self to the exclusion of the divine self.  This is what Jesus talked about when he said that everyone is with god if they so choose, and that being away from the divine is the true sin.
  

            Some groups of people, (the Zoroastrian faith for one) took this Egyptian mystery influence to the extreme and saw the material world as purely base and un-divine.  Instead of striking a balance between the physical and the divine, they sought to purge anything physical and focus solely on the divine.  Other religions, (organized Christianity for example) decided to do away with the “mysteries” and instead focus on dogma as societal control.  They ignored the teachings and words of Jesus, reading them literally (exoterically) instead of as allegory (esoterically).  Because of this, for the last thousand years, much of the Egyptian wisdom has been ignored, and their philosophy and theology treated as just an odd curiosity, a mish-mash of beliefs and gods and conflicting ideas.  This is a real delusion, causing us to think of the greatest civilization of humanity’s past as amazing in technology but ridiculous and laughable in their theology.  What an error we make.  When deep ideas are expressed, they must be expressed in story or allegory in order to make an actual impact on a human.  People do not like being told flat out what they should or should not do or believe.  It is better to share such information in a form that will allow for the receiver to explore the ideas.  This is why, when discussing the biggest issues, Jesus in the Bible spoke in pure allegory.  The problem with allegory is that, once the culture moves on, those symbols no longer mean what they used to.  We modern humans have no basis to understand an Egyptian allegory, much like an ancient Egyptian would not be able to comprehend an allegory containing modern symbols, such as the “mushroom cloud,” “Superman,” “Coca Cola,” etc.

            There is so much more in this book to explore, like the idea that the three great pyramids at Giza are far older than the Egyptian civilization, or that the language of the Egyptians is a hold-over from that previous civilization.  The world is an ever changing place and only our ego keeps us from accepting that the people of the past were not grunting savages, but instead exactly the same as you or I, seeking answers to the difficult questions, and working to help sustain their civilization.  

(This book is available for purchase here:  The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt  )

Ancient human's living spaces shaped their inner world.

Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods – David Louis-Williams, David Pearce (2005)

            I find that a lot of what I read in terms of anthropology and pre-historic archeology ascribes a lot of assumptions to ancient human’s lives and beliefs that are pure unfounded extrapolation.  The focus of the writer’s views is put onto what is usually very flimsy evidence.  So many books have been written purportedly showing how ancient man worshiped this or that, or what rituals they engaged in, with too much fluff and not enough corroborating evidence.  This ends up in biased ideas, meaningless as a result.  Judeo-Christian writers tend to lean towards ascribing monotheism to people who had no clue what us modern humans refer to as monotheism, for example.  This is done even though the available archeological evidence for such beliefs is slight at best.

            Ancient humans did not achieve written language until fairly recently in our existence here on Earth.  This tends to skew knowledge left by writing cultures as being more relevant to us, more advanced and therefore more “true” than what non-writing cultures believed.  It also devalues the knowledge that can be gleamed from ancient people’s artifacts, construction, homes, and other such non-verbal creations.

Non verbal creation.

 

            Mr.’s Lewis-Williams, and Price are two archeologists/ethnographers seeking to ascertain the development of spiritual thought in ancient man through the analysis of the ruins excavated by us over the last 150 years.  It is a very interesting idea which is quite fruitful in detailing how human’s living spaces and their development correlated to the development of their metaphysical beliefs.

            For most of history, humans did not believe in gods or deities or the existence of a soul.  Life was life, and the world functioned in mysterious patterns.  The authors use evidence from ethnographers to show that a belief in a soul was not an initial concern for man.  Instead, humans first noticed our shadows!  Many languages share the same word for a soul as for a shadow.  In English, for example, a ghost can also be described as a shade.  Humans understood the existence of a shadow to mean that all humans have two parts, a physical part, (our bodies), and an intangible part (our shadow/reflection).  Our shadow/reflection grows and shrinks, disappears in darkness, is distorted by ripples in water, but it never goes away.  Once human conceived of this shadow as a literal part of themselves (as opposed to what we now conceive of it as, a demarcation showing where light has struck us on the side opposite the shadow,) they began to think about where that shadow goes after death.  It was this “shadow” of a human that early man feared would wander about and which needed to be appeased or repulsed by ritual of some sort.  This led to the development of burial rituals in human groups.

            Once humans created structures, and the evidence shows that this happened thousands of years before the development of agriculture, they began to build with this shadow realm in mind.  It is these construction details that the writers analyze in this book.  It shows quite plainly how human’s habitations progressed from personal places where the dead shared the space of the living, sometimes for months until the dead were eventually buried under the home itself, all the way to the development of specific separate structures used to carry out rituals related to the spirit world.  In our modern world we see this in churches and mausoleums, yet many cultures of the world live more like man of 10,000 years ago.  They still share their homes with the souls of the dead.

            This book sheds light on what are essentially the beginnings of religion in human culture.  It is fascinating to see the many diagrams of ancient Paleolithic structures and man’s burial methods.  It is a great book and explores many of the lesser known Paleolithic sites not normally discussed in the standard texts.

            The insights into the human view of the cosmos itself are equally engrossing and valuable.  Humans first saw shadows, then thought about living spirit animating matter, then about the place of man and his soul in the cosmos, and only after that did man create gods to personally protect and create the world around us.  Just how people study the progression in art or poetry, these two authors have studied the progress in human habitations to shed light on something that had been ignored for too long by the mainstream archeological community.

( To order this book from Thames & Hudson Publishers click here: http://www.thamesandhudson.com/Inside_the_Neolithic_Mind/9780500288276  )