Edgar Cayce's Tales of Ancient Egypt. John Van Auken

Egypt. Stonemasons were trained. Quantities of granite, limestone, and sandstone were quarried and prepared for the massive building projects.

      The high priest gathered a team around him to manage the services in the temples. His innate celestial awareness helped him find priests and priestesses who could accept the ideas of unseen worlds beyond this physical world and metaphysical concepts of the mind and spirit rather than just the body and matter. He sought those who intuitively sensed the existence of and were willing to use pathways and centers within the physical body to develop their metaphysical consciousness and abilities. He sought those who accepted that there were activities that occurred between incarnate lives and that this bigger view of soul life needed to become a part of one’s whole experience rather than only viewing one’s existence to be a personal, physical life. He sought those who could accept and would use opportunities for soul activity in the higher realms during sleep cycles, dreaming states, and deep meditations.

      Ra-Ta was teaching that this inner life was important and worth knowing and developing. However, most of the natives held more strongly to the material outer life and the enjoyment of it rather than seeking some unseen inner life. The natives of the Black Land were a materialistic people. Ra-Ta brought a new teaching, one difficult to comprehend from a strictly worldly perspective. Even so, the people remembered how he had manifested remarkable abilities during his early years in the Black Land and how he had led people on archaeological expeditions that found very ancient artifacts of First Creation peoples. His reputation grew, and many natives not only began to listen to him but also attempted to understand his strange ideas and mystical practices. Adding to this was the support of the high priest by their scribe-sage, who helped the people appreciate the high priest’s ideas and methods.

      Ra-Ta taught that prior to the evolution of matter, there was an involution into matter from out of pure spirit and energy and that there was a deeper part of each person that was spirit, energy, and mind, living beyond and within the body. He gathered a little band of what we would call today archaeologists. He had them uncover archaeological evidence to support his teachings about the lost history that would demonstrate the existence of the children of God, the fallen angels of the Nephilim, and humanlike beings of the First Creation that were the ancestors of the incarnate people in this Second Creation. These archaeological artifacts of spiritual realities caused many to come to him to learn more. Some of them even committed themselves to the rigors of his temple training and initiations.

      In the temples, exercises for increasing spiritual awareness and attunement to the universal forces were taught and practiced. Several stages of initiation and enlightenment were established. Aspiring priests and priestesses proceeded to advance through these body-changing, mind-changing courses and tests.

      The early phases of training were in a place Cayce called the “Temple of Sacrifice,” where cleansings and purifications were the focus, mostly relating to perfecting the body as an ideal temple for the soul and soul’s mind. Here the metaphysical channels and centers within the human body were activated and utilized. These channels are known in yoga as the sushumna, ida, and pingala, and the centers are referred to as chakras and lotuses. Activating these was a goal of temple training. But in some bodies there needed to first be a correction or cleansing because these had become contaminated or dysfunctional through misuse or abuse in earlier incarnations.

      The next phases of training were in a place Cayce called the “Temple Beautiful.” In this temple spiritual enlightenment and attunement to celestial forces were the focus as well as becoming aware of and enlivening each soul’s unique purpose for incarnating and thus, discovering his or her mission or career in this incarnation.

      It was believed that the body, when cleansed and trained, could help the soul and mind maintain a connection with the heavenly influences while doing good in the earthly realm. The concept that the human body is designed for both physical and metaphysical experiences was known in these very ancient times as evidenced by a much later text, the Yoga Sutra by Patanjali. He wrote down what was previously passed on orally in the ancient temples. His treatise explained that within the human body are pathways and energy centers that may be stimulated in such a manner as to bring about nonphysical consciousness. Patanjali (pronounced pa-tan-ja-lee) published the secrets of our bodies and showed how to use these to experience altered states of consciousness—something that had, heretofore, been exclusive to the initiates in temple life.

      Patanjali explained the most fundamental principle: a unity happens when an entity realizes its oneness with the Source and expanse of life with the Whole. He explained that the “unity happens when there is stilling of the movement of thought. In the light of stillness . . . self is not confused or confined. Then, the seer or the harmonized intelligence—which is ignorantly regarded as the separate experiences of sensations and emotions, and the separate performer of actions—is not split up into one or the other of the states or modifications of the mind.” (Samadhi Pada 1, Sutras 1-10)

      Thus, according to Patanjali, union occurs when an individual perceives that he or she is not simply an individual, but also universal and one with the Whole, the All. This is realized in the deepest stillness when the form-shaping, identity-focused mind is quiet, clear, and alert. Then the inner and the outer are united. In Sanskrit yoga actually means union.

      In addition to these training phases, Ra-Ta’s temples developed life-changing ceremonies on and around altars. The altars were prepared according to inner guidance. They included sacrificial altars and beautification altars. They did not sacrifice animals, birds, beasts, reptiles, grains, or humans on these altars. That came much later after this early connection to God-consciousness was diminished by further immersion into physicality and earthliness. According to Cayce, these earlier altars sacrificed individual’s faults and weaknesses, blotting them out with “the fires of the unseen forces” that were set in motion by attunement to the powers of the Spirit.

      On one of my many trips to Egypt, I experienced “the fires of the unseen forces” while meditating in the seventh chamber of the Seti Temple in Abydos. Here’s the experience:

      My group and I sat on the cold, hard stone floor in this very special chamber and began to still our minds and bodies for meditation. The guards at the temple were laughing and talking; the echo of their voices was so great inside the temple that it was very difficult to meditate. However, rather than give up or get angry I asked myself, “When was I ever going to get back to this temple?” I told myself that I had to succeed now. Then, I tried with all my might to filter out their voices and get into deep meditation. It worked. It worked so well that I not only lost consciousness of them, I completely lost consciousness of the temple and my group, entering into a vivid ancient Egyptian ceremony. It was an initiation ceremony involving water and fire. I found myself standing shoulder-deep in a pool of holy water, naked. I somehow knew it was a purification ritual. As I walked up the stone steps out of this sacred pool, attending priests wrapped a floor-length cape around me. They then anointed my head with oil and combed my hair back. My hair was black and thick with oil. Two of them approached and handed me the two scepters of Egypt, the crook and the flail (see illustration 4). Somehow, I intuitively knew that if I wanted to move, I had to hold them out in front of me; to stop, I had to cross them over my chest. I looked up and beheld a line of ancient Egyptians out in front of me. I tilted the two scepters toward them, causing me to glide across the floor, not walk, glide just an inch above the floor. It was an exhilarating feeling to glide so effortlessly. In front of me were two long rows of priests and gods: a row on my left and another on my right. I glided between them. They nodded their heads and smiled approvingly. At least at first I thought this was approval, but as I nodded back, I realized that it was also a nod of encouragement to continue through the next phase of the initiation. I looked up ahead of them to see what was at the end of the rows. To my amazement and concern, it was the sun, the real sun! At the end of this gauntlet of priests and gods, I was to enter the fire of Ra. But this Ra was the real sun that would burn me to a crisp. I looked hard into the eyes of the priests and gods, expressing to them with my eyes my deep concern about