I wanted so badly to enjoy this book. I kept picking it up and putting it down thinking, "Maybe I'm just not in the right head space. I'll try reading it in the morning instead of at night... Maybe I'll put on some music to set a more magical mood... I'll read ahead and try the mediations after I've let the chapter settle for a minute..." But no. Nothing I did could help me to glean anything useful from this book. I found parts of it genuinely interesting, but for the most part I felt like I was not just not getting out of it what the authors clearly intended for me to get.
Have you ever had a friend that did mushrooms and then wanted to explain in detail their revelations in an attempt to transmit to you their sense of paradigm shift? Did you experience that shift from hearing them explain it? Yeah, me neither.
I think this might have been very cool as some kind of multimedia project. If I could see video footage of the Sphinx at sunrise and the temples under the stars, maybe I could have felt some impact. Similarly, an audio element would have been cool. Having someone walk me through these mediations for the first time would have meant I could experience them as a journey rather than reading it and having the time to think so much about it before I tried to enact it. I think as a multimedia project this would have been more fulfilling. As just a book, I felt a sense of constant questioning, of wondering why I should or would connect to the imagery and interpretations presented. I just didn't feel a spiritual connection to this work and struggled to suspend my disbelief as I read. The authors present this idea that we can all experience this "Inner Egypt", this archetypal landscape, without ever having seen it. But I just didn't feel a part of the world they create in these mediations.
It's hard to articulate this element of my critique, but this book threw a lot of information out while lacking a feeling of transmitting vital information. It was like jumping into a class halfway through the quarter. They casually drop a bunch of words that are explained in the footnotes, some of which are only used a single time, which felt jarring to me. For example:
"At this moment you must trust in that which you cannot see. Go to your mind's eye and ask yourself the question, "Can I trust in that which I know but do not see?" Sit with this koan* by the river's edge and mediate upon it to see what comes . . . [Pause.]" (forgot to write down the page #, sorry)
In the middle of a mediation exercise, this random vocabulary is just dropped in never to be seen again. So I stop reading the meditation, go down to the bottom of the page, read that it's a Zen Buddhism concept about paradoxes that help you achieve enlightenment, and then wonder what exactly that means for this situation I'm supposed to be crafting in my imaginary journey, and then by the time I got back to reading the mediation itself I just couldn't really get back into it. That just kept happening.
"The gods spin the balls of energy at different times and change the axis by degrees to the earth. The most direct hit is taken by the seraphim (see Glossary of Terms for more information); it passes through them like golden rays of sun. Seraphim are capable of handling radiance far too bright for us to commune with directly; yet it makes celestial tones." (94)
Oh, ok, seraphim. Sure. Did the Egyptians believe in seraphim? I haven't read that anywhere else. But this is just a New Agey mix of whatever spiritual concepts we want to put in a basket and shake up. I don't even really have a problem with that as a concept, but I guess I was just kind of disappointed because I specifically picked this book up because I'm interested in Egyptian beliefs and deities and realized halfway through that this was a very loose, very modern interpretation of everything and I couldn't really take any of it at face value. I felt like important things were glossed over and taken for granted, in favor of time spent on rich descriptions of experiences that felt like "well, ya had to be there."
They quote a lot of Normandi Ellis, and I honestly felt more of a spiritual awakening in the first chapter of Imagining the World into Existence: An Ancient Egyptian Manual of Consciousness than I did in my entire time reading these "shamanic mysteries". Nothing felt grounded in reality or research in this book. It just felt like two friends telling me about their vision quest, and trying to convince me that if I would just take them seriously I too could experience in my imagination what they experienced by going to Egypt dozens of time for both group and solitary rituals in the 70s and later! Like, I got the impression that they knew a lot of things about ancient Egypt, but I didn't feel like that knowledge was transmitted to me in a way that helped me make those connections and feel those strong emotions.
Anyway, take this review with a grain of salt because I'm honestly just kind of bitter because I hyped this book way up in my mind while it was on hold at the library. Guess I should have had more realistic expectations.