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The Duat
The ancient Egyptians put a lot of effort into preparing for the next life. They thought it would be just like life on earth. One would have parties with musicians and dancing girls, one would go wild-fowling among the reed-beds, one would ride in one's chariot or go boating in one's felucca. By imagining this future life one made it real.
And one backed up one's imagination with images. The dead person was launched into the afterlife in a little capsule full of painting and sculpture. Everything she would need was there in picture form. She would open her eyes in the dark and look around and see mirror and comb and fish-spear and fowling-net and heaps of fruit and bottles of palm wine.
It was a very powerful magic. The Egyptian otherworld- the Duat- still exists. With the right passwords, the right nod to the gate-keepers, one can go into it and look around.
I had a friend who did just that. She had friends in the Duat. They told her that after three- four- thousand years the magic is beginning to weaken and many of the old ghosts are giving up on it and dropping back into incarnation.
Three thousand years of partying and wild-fowling and boating and chariot-driving- I can see how it might pall- how one might feel as if one were stuck on a dead end street. Perhaps through the thinning walls of magic one might get glimpses of other worlds and be curious about them.
The afterlife is a static place. We create it from what we know in this life. Once we are dead the stream of experience dries up- and we can add nothing to our store of image and emotion. Our magnificent imaginings may keep us happy in our heavens for a long, long time, but in the end, if we've got anything about us, we'll be craving something new.
And so we come back to earth. It's the workshop of the universe. All other worlds are created here.
And one backed up one's imagination with images. The dead person was launched into the afterlife in a little capsule full of painting and sculpture. Everything she would need was there in picture form. She would open her eyes in the dark and look around and see mirror and comb and fish-spear and fowling-net and heaps of fruit and bottles of palm wine.
It was a very powerful magic. The Egyptian otherworld- the Duat- still exists. With the right passwords, the right nod to the gate-keepers, one can go into it and look around.
I had a friend who did just that. She had friends in the Duat. They told her that after three- four- thousand years the magic is beginning to weaken and many of the old ghosts are giving up on it and dropping back into incarnation.
Three thousand years of partying and wild-fowling and boating and chariot-driving- I can see how it might pall- how one might feel as if one were stuck on a dead end street. Perhaps through the thinning walls of magic one might get glimpses of other worlds and be curious about them.
The afterlife is a static place. We create it from what we know in this life. Once we are dead the stream of experience dries up- and we can add nothing to our store of image and emotion. Our magnificent imaginings may keep us happy in our heavens for a long, long time, but in the end, if we've got anything about us, we'll be craving something new.
And so we come back to earth. It's the workshop of the universe. All other worlds are created here.
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(She was an old woman, almost blind from glaucoma, and her husband had recently died after losing a leg and had left her alone. She had been depressed, felt increasingly frail, and had planned to turn down an invitation for Thanksgiving at her daughter's. Then she had this dream, which she carefully wrote down in the form of a letter to me. When I dropped by that morning, she started crying, and read me the letter. Later we sent it to a relative of hers who was dying of cancer.)
"This morning I had a dream. I am writing this before it fades from my memory. I saw Charles again.
"I was walking on a little track, like a railroad track, but more narrow, and to my left were great white waves, lashing up higher and higher to a white misty sky. Charles came walking to me, in his nice jacket I always liked. I told him I was afraid, but he said, Come with me. I am afraid, I said, and he showed me how to sit down on the track and dangle my legs over the side. I told him we would ruin our clothes if we went out into the waves, because the little track began to move towards them. Charles left me then, and disappeared into a crowd of people. They were talking, and out of the crowd came a man who seemed familiar to me. He helped me up and said, Your trip has been postponed. There is something you need to do.
"Then a pretty young girl came to me, wearing a white dress, and she led me down a path to a beautiful park where rocks were all around a deep pool. I climbed on the rocks like a girl, without worrying about falling or being old and dizzy, since I wasn't.
"These are the most beautiful rocks, I told the girl. Then I saw the pool and was drawn to it. I wanted to go inside it, but the girl took my hand. I'm going to take you home, she told me, and then I woke up in my bed."
I could see, she told me, and Charles was young again, like me.
What a beautiful dream, I said. It was real, wasn't it?
It wasn't a dream, she agreed: it was so clear, I can see it now, just as clearly as anything. . .
I said, Charles loves you, and others love you, not just here; and when it is time, it will be so easy, as easy as your dream.
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She told me many times that the dream didn't fade as usually dreams do.
At the time, I thought (still do, really) that the essence of who she was somehow wandered away from her weighted body.
Further, it seemed to me that her husband was confused when she mentioned her clothing--that's when he disappeared into what sounded amazingly like a "cloud of witnesses"--the woman described it as lots of people all together in a shifting pattern like a kaleidescope, and out of that cloud came another person--she didn't see her husband after that. To me, reference to clothing seemed almost like a signal that she was still a part of the world of matter.
When people describe near-death experiences, so often they find some final barrier that pulls them toward it--in her dream it was the pool of water. I've read also about fences, walls--
(When you think about it that way, Frodo's journey to drop the ring into Mount Doom is fascinating because in some ways it is a similar journey to the one a soul might take at death.)
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The point about the clothes is interesting. It confused her husband because he had ceased thinking in those terms. He had to go find someone else to deal with the situation.
The afterworld may be suffused with a sense of love and companionship, but the dead don't actually know any more than they did at the point of death. They're no wiser than us and a lot less well informed.
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My own feeling is that "heaven" is only really meant to function as a rest house. If we stay there too long we stagnate.
Sooner or later we need to return to earth to continue the journey.
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Did you ever read the strange books of Swedenborg? What odd writing it is.
I had a thick book of his once, and it seemed a little loopy, but it was also intriguing. He said the dead were fascinated with the living and could influence them by hovering around and vicariously enjoying the pleasures of a living body--it was almost like a possession, he said.
(Once I had a dream in which I found the bones of the dead "Bishop of Nevers" in a basket. I think I read something, and in the dream I thought that the dead Bishop could listen to my reading and learn from it.)
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I'm sure he'd read his Swedenborg.
I haven't. Do you think I should?
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Imagine the presumption:
In 1734, satisfied that he had understood the mechanics of the unfolding of the natural universe from the first natural point or the first finite, he turned his attention to the problem of the nature of the infinite and its relation to the finite.
(Italics mine).
I think he's quite interesting. He thought spirits inhabited each of the planets in the solar system, and described each in a rather judgmental way. I think that's what turned me off, finally--he seemed to be reporting visions, but it was rather cryptic and even--amazingly--a little dull.
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For some reason- which I haven't explored- he makes me think of Hans Christian Anderson.
Was Anderson a Swedenborgian?
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For the last 29 years of his life, S felt he was privy to communication with God, who showed him how there was a spiritual realm that co-existed with the earthly realm. His mission was, he said, to explain that realm to those who couldn't see it.
If it weren't for his Puritanical--whoops, an anachronism!--interpretations, I'd find myself fascinated and even swayed.
My own judgement is that he may have had a bi-polar or other mental disorder. Just a guess.
What's compelling about his writing is that he apparently thought for himself (although his own biases seem to have crept into his work), and said occasionally very interesting things:
"All who come into heaven have a place allotted them there, and thence eternal joy, according to their idea of God."
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I'm reminded of Leonardo da Vinci.
I think I shall have to look a little more closely at his work.
I like Keller's view of him as the antidote to the extreme rationalism of the 18th century.
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I'm wondering more about his interpretation of why and how the world was made than about his "visions" of the spirit realm...I'll probably read about that part.
It's been many years--I guess it was the late 70s--when I last read Swedenborg. Something about his "visions" made me feel sort of gloomy. It just felt dark to me, heavy.
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As Chesterton said of Marcus Aurelius "a great and good man- and he knew it!"
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She is very convincing. I guess I should look around a bit more at S's writing, too.
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Another man came back from the dead muttering something about Bell's Theorem--a quantum theory about nonlocal events.
I found that particularly thrilling, since at the time I was all excited about quantum physics being the way to understand God.
(Morton Kelsey, a famous Episcopal priest and writer, lectured at a Jungian conference I attended in the early 90s, and he told us he thought a course in quantum physics should be required for all seminarians. Another thrill. But that was the zeitgeist of the 90s.)
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Jesus the carpenter's son sounds very erudite and scholarly. Lost years, indeed!
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There are so many of these. Remember (did you read) Carlos Castaneda and his wonderful magician mentor?
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I've been looking at the site- which seems to be huge. There's a story about a woman who proves the existence of God through The Torah Codes (which I've seen convincingly debunked on TV) and then this guy who debated with her goes to India and gets drunk and meets a man on a donkey... and yes, it's getting to sound very much like a work of fiction.
But the Gospel of Mary Magdalene is a bona fide gnostic text (of the kind the orthodox church tried hard to suppress.) I don't suppose Mary Magdalene had anything to do with it, but that doesn't mean that it isn't interesting and valuable.
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I wonder about the translations, which sound thoroughly Elizabethan, rather than modern. All those "whithers" and "thous."
In contrast, the translation of Mary Magdalene as shown on those pages seems refreshingly modern.
I'm wondering when these fragments were found.
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How I wish we could more easily sort out what is truth and what is not. One way, I guess, is to look into what the current thinking was throughout the world during Jesus's lifetime and before.
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The codex containing The GoM was purchased by a German scholar in Cairo in 1896, but not published until 1955.
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(Isn't Google wonderful?)
Mother is coming by to do her shopping, and then I plan to look over these sites.
By the way, thanks for this post. I love thinking about these things so much!
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They all seemed so boring.
Well, either that or they were an eternity of torment, which didn't seem any better.
Eternal life is only a blessing if there is eternal growth. Otherwise it's the worst dead-end job you'll ever have.
Bad pun intended. :)
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I found your last line very poetic, is it something you've read elsewhere? I'm sorry, but it's impressed me so much that I couldn't help but play with it. Hope you don't mind.
And so we come back to earth. It's the workshop of the universe. All other worlds are created here.
...and so,
to earth we come,
the workshop of the universe
where decisions are made
and worlds created.
Yours
HePo
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I don't suppose the idea is new. No idea ever is. But the words are my own. They started off rather hammy and overblown and I spent quite a long time wrestling them down into simplicity.
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I would prefer to stay here I think.
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