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  )

I have always wanted to know everything

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius – Andrew Robinson (2006)

            A Polymath is a person who through experience, study, and thought becomes highly educated in a wide and seemingly disparate variety of subjects.  The common term “Renaissance Man” implies polymathy, such as in the case of Leonardo DaVinci, who became a master painter, engineer, sculptor, and draughtsman, as well as being a very competent mathematician, botanist, anatomist, geologist, and astronomer, among countless other subjects.  His personal notebooks, held mainly by the Vatican in Rome, contain the basic fruits of a deeply fertile mind, one that was curious, flexible, and obsessive when it came to gathering knowledge.  The British physician, physicist, mathematician, linguist, and Egyptologist Thomas Young is another such genius.  He is not as famous as DaVinci, but that may be due to the fact that much of DaVinci’s well-known work is in the form of art, capable of being seen and understood by the whole of humanity.  Thomas Young’s work was more esoteric than DaVinci’s, and more critical to the future development of the various sciences affected by his genius.

            This book is an awesome exploration of Thomas Young’s life, and of the way he went about his intellectual explorations.  It describes the manner by which he became a physician, and first explaining the method by which our eye adjusts the light entering it to project a focused image on our retina, something no one had been able to understand before.  It talks about how Thomas Young’s explorations into light and it’s properties helped explain what we now call “polarization” and finally proved conclusively that light/energy behaved as wave function, something which corrected a misconception by Isaac Newton.  Thomas Young learned to read and write in many ancient languages, and it was because of this interest that he was able to definitely prove that the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians was not just symbolic, but also sometimes phonetic, reaching a climax when he was first able to translate the writing on the Rosetta Stone, something that had stumped scientists and linguists since the stone was brought back to Europe by Napoleon several decades earlier. 

When the Encyclopedia Britannica was first being put together, Thomas Young was asked to write some articles for it.  He penned over 66 different, highly researched and informative articles on subjects as varied as “Egypt”, “Bridges”, “Chromatics”, “Carpentry”, “Tides”, “Languages”, “Herculaneum”, and “Weights & Measures”, many of which are still standard texts studied by University students.  These were major surveys of the then-current state of knowledge in these fields, and in many of these articles Thomas Young actually contributed his own original ideas and work.  He wrote over 40 biographies for the encyclopedia, on men of science mainly.  As the author states, “Very few specialists nowadays would dare to attempt more than one, or at the most two, such major surveys for the Encyclopedia Britannica, even with the help of a co-author.”  Thomas Young did the research, and wrote the articles, all; while doing his other scientific explorations and lecturing at a University.  For the biographies of the scientists he would actually read (or re-read) all of their published work, so as to better aggregate the information for the encyclopedia.  This is a man who truly loved to learn, and whose mind could not only absorb the widest range of knowledge, but could re-arrange it and see new worlds and ideas to explore in that knowledge.

I am personally attracted to anyone whose willpower leads them to explore the different corners of their intellectual curiosity. These types of humans are usually derided by their contemporaries, mainly by denigrating their contributions to any specific field as being those of a “dilettante,” someone who is not serious enough to spend all their time focused solely on one field.  Thomas Young’s harshest critics were people who had labored for years on a subject, only to have Thomas Young come by and, with his deep learning and uncommon insight, propose correct and groundbreaking solutions to problems they had yet to even understand.  He made the so-called experts appear ignorant, or just second-rate.  This bias still exists.  Many experts will dismiss the ideas of someone who does not possess the exact same level of educational “achievement” as them, as if someone without an advanced degree could never possibly hope to contribute anything of value.  Fucking assholes all.  It takes the waters of time to wash away the prejudices and the biases and show the true geniuses for what they are.   The lowly minds, the second-rate intellects, are left in the dust along with their second-rate work.  The existence of men like Thomas Young only serves to shine a light on the vacuity of the “experts” and encourages any of us to explore what piques our curiosity, wherever that may lead.

(This book can be purchased here:  The Last Man Who Knew Everything  )