DISCUSSIONS with Dr. AQUINO: Pt.2

"I would want to know what happens after we die"

Lt. Col. Dr. Michael A. Aquino:

Actually there is a very clear and straightforward answer, as the ancient Egyptians knew and explained quite matter-of-factly within their writings, art, and architecture. The first step in understanding it requires an examination into the actual constitution of the “soul”. [I don’t like that term, since it is far too crude and carries with it a great deal of misleading baggage from conventional religions. I prefer the term MindStar, which is the title of my book on this topic, in case you want the really long version of what I’ll try to summarize here.]

Humans normally equate the “soul” with “consciousness”, also a sloppy term. Most people are aware of themselves as a constant experience and reinforcement of in/outputs of the five physical senses. This doesn’t take any effort, of course. Blank it all out, as in physical death or anæsthesia, and you are supposedly snuffed out like a candle. Except that, as the Egyptians realized, you’re not.

Plato devotes his Dialogue Meno to an exposition and demonstration of anamnesis: the faculty that, as sentient beings have lived previously/eternally, their knowledge of the Forms (neteru) - creative, organizing, and preserving Principles of the Objective Universe - is also permanent, recallable through the exercise of dialectic. Through this mental discipline, the conscious mind is inspired through progressively more precise questioning to discard later, coarser, inaccurate concepts in favor of their pure, original substance and clarity.

The key of anamnesis came down to Plato from Egypt through Pythagoras. As Dr. Raghavan LIyer summarizes:

Originally Posted By: Raghavan Iyer

Originally Posted By: Plato, Meno

Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times, and has seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is. So we need not be surprised if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or anything else which, as we see, it once possessed. All nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, so that when a man has recalled a single piece of knowledge--learned it, in ordinary language--there is no reason why he should not find out all the rest, if he keeps a stout heart and does not grow weary of the search, for seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.

Anamnesis is the true soul-memory, intermittent access to the divine wisdom within every human being as an immortal spectator. All self-conscious monads have known over immemorial time a vast host of subjects and objects, modes and forms, an ever-changing universe. Assuming a complex series of roles as an essential part of the endless process of learning, the soul becomes captive recurrently to myriad forms of maya and moha, illusion and delusion. At the same time the soul has the innate and inward capacity to cognize that is is more than any and all of these masks. As every incarnated being manifests a poor, pale caricature of himself - a small, self-limiting, and inverted reflection of one’s nœtic and creative potential - the ancient doctrine of anamnesis is vital to comprehend human nature and its hidden possibilities. Given the fundamental truth that all human beings have played many parts, initiating diverse actions in intertwined chains of causation, it necessarily follows that everyone has the moral and material environment from birth to death which is needed for self-correction and self-education. But who is it that has this need?

Not the shadowy self or false egoity which merely reacts to external stimuli. Rather there is that Eye of Wisdom in every person which in deep sleep is fully awake and which has a translucent awareness of self-consciousness as pure, primordial light.

Raghavan (D.Phil. Oxford) was Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara [and revered mentor and friend during my M.A. & Ph.D. studies there]. He was also a member of the Club of Rome and a Mahatma of the Theosophical Society & its Krotona Institute in Ojai, as well as founder of the Institute of World Culture, Santa Barbara. His writings may be studied here.

That’s the easy part. ;\)

How then can each “soul” find and see itself, since it is a singularity which each individual cannot “get outside of”? This harks back to philosophers such as Descartes, who sought, one might say Quixotically, to “prove” their conscious existence. “Proof” is of necessity external, as discussed above, so Descartes’ famous Cogito Ergo Sum (I think, therefore I am) is futile: It is impossible to describe a “thought” which is not the composite of external sensory input.

No, conceptual thought (Kant’s “pure reason”, Plato’s nœsis, Nietzsche’s “horizon building”) begins from the pure, unsupported apprehension of one’s conscious self as an existential reality: the ba of ancient Egypt, the psyche of the Greeks, the Golden Flower of the Tao.

We are now in a position to identify the elements or “emanations” of the MindStar as the Egyptians apprehended them. This is not a mere recitation for bemusement. It is a doorway, a map, by which the individual can redirect the power of discretionary consciousness to its source, purification, and realization of immortality.

Each of the following eight emanations proceeds from the [more] OU-linked to the [more] SU-linked. Predictably this makes the more basic ones that much easier to identify based on their familiar, if subconscious OU-usage. A comparison may be made to Plato’s “pyramid of thought”, which in his Dialogues he stratified as Eikasia (primitive emotion), Pistis (ordinary active/reactive thinking), Dianoia (precise, logical, enlightened thought), and Nœsis (intuition and apprehension of the Ultimate Good (Agathon).

The Egyptian priesthoods knew that each living creature was possessed of several existence-emanations above and beyond the metabolic mind/body. All sentient beings possess the first four (khat, ren, khabit, ab). Beings endowed with the Gift of Set (awareness of isolate self-consciousness) the next two (ba, ka) as well as in those of initiatory capacity and attainment the next one (sekhem), and in unique instances the ultimate one (akh).

Accordingly each of the following expositions is meant not just as something to be read, but as a personal application exercise. Upon being alerted to each emanation, redirect your thought “inward” until you find and recognize it in yourself. You may be surprised at how effortless this is.

1. Khat

The body-emanation. The khat is integral with the being’s physical body, and is the original of what later, lesser cultures would represent as the “energy body”, “body of light”, “astral body”, etc. In current field theory it constitutes the life-field of the person, controlling and directing its material counterpart’s organization, regeneration, and span of existence. During physical life it is coextensive with its material counterpart. After material death it may remain with the corpse to serve as a medium for the other emanations, or it may merely linger near its remains. Jungians perceived the khat as the “earthbound” anima, and in the oriental vision of the Golden Flower it was known as the kuei:

Quote:

Tao the undivided, Great One, gives rise to two opposite reality principles, Darkness and Light, yin and yang. These are at first thought of only as forces of nature apart from man. Later the sexual polarities, and others as well, are derived from them. From yin comes K’un, the receptive feminine principle; from yang comes Ch’ien, the creative masculine principle. From yin comes ming (life); from yang comes hsing (essence).

Each individual contains a central monad which, at the moment of conception, splits into life and essence (ming and hsing). These two are super-individual principles and so can be related to eros and logos.

In the personal bodily existence of the individual they are represented by two other polarities, a p’o soul (or anima) and a hun soul (or animus). All during the life of the individual these two are in conflict, each striving for mastery. At death they separate and go different ways. The anima sinks to earth as kuei, a ghost-being.

It is the khat which is drawn into or activated from within a corpse in necromantic magical workings. As one may surmise, the khat is also the vehicle for the zombie practices of Voodoo. The khat is also what non-Initiates imagine to be the “entire soul” hence the thing that is reincarnated in another body. From this discussion you can see how utterly ignorant and impossible this supposition is.

2. Ren

The name-emanation. The Egyptians understood the power of names to identify, define, protect, and empower individuals - most conspicuously in the various names taken by each pharaoh. Collectively and separately each name affected the very essence of the person, and the greatest curse [as also illustrated in literature and film] was to be denied all names.

Externally a name can be used to summon or compel, whether physically incarnate or not. The neteru also have the power and the discretion to give names as well as take them, and through such names to take form and voice.

3. Khabit

The shadow-emanation. This is the connection of the still-incarnate khat with the life-forces of the natural neteru, enabling it to function as the organizing and controlling energy (the individual “life-field”). If the khabit is destroyed, the life-field de-energizes and the physical body expires. In Black Magic the khabit can also be sent out by its owner as an instrument of influence upon others.

After the physical body is destroyed or no longer needed, the khabit becomes an avatar of the neter Anubis, overseeing guidance of the [noninitiate] consciousness through the incoherence of the Tuat into the stabilization of Amenti. An initiated consciousness needs no such guidance.

4. Ab

The heart-emanation. The physical locus of individual identity and consciousness, hence the bridge between the Objective Universe of the neteru and the Subjective Universe of the four metaphysical emanations. It is through the ab that an individual realizes and recognizes incarnate identity and uniqueness, and following destruction/expiration of one’s body it is through the ab that one can reenter the OU [as a “ghost”, through “possession” (more precisely merger with another, incarnate ab), or through thought-transference].

It is also in the ab that the strength and quality of one’s maat (inclination to “good” or “evil”) reposes. This is echoed in the later Indian mythologies of karma, and was the reason for the posthumous “weighing of the heart against a feather” in Egypt. After bodily death the maat within the ab overwhelms it completely, so that any subsequent manifestation in the OU is likely to be an extreme concentration of either beneficence or malevolence.

5. Ba

The core-emanation. This is each sentient being’s sense of self-awareness, of unique and absolute distinction from everything else (both other sentient beings and the entire OU).

The ba becomes stronger through increased self-exploration and realization, and it is here that the individual faces a choice between the Horus-path of harmonious MindStar melding with the natural neteru (the OU), or the Set-path of ultimate, isolate self consciousness. [The former is obviously far safer and easier. Non-initiates, unable or unwilling to raise the ba to such levels of awareness and application, dimly imagine it as “Heaven” and suppose it attainable only ignorantly and passively through “redemption” and “Grace”.]

The anamnesis or “remembered knowledge” experienced by the slave boy in Plato’s Meno is perhaps more accurately described as the physical-process, stimulus/response brain reaching in to the ba for bits of its immortal, eternal wisdom. But this is akin to reaching for a coal in a hot fire. It is stressful to do, and the result can be held only for a fleeting moment without further stress. The superficial/physical “self”, which through material “hits” continuously reassures itself that it is the only self, is shaken by exposure to its falseness, its nothingness. It backs away from such “close encounters”, dismisses them as “illusions”, “fantasy”, “imagination”, etc., and hastens to rebuild its fortress of material-sensation walls.

The Horus-ba simply continues as one’s sense of identity, thus the “essential self” around which all of the other emanations coalesce and recognize themselves. Within noninitiates this results in the ba being sensed as a dreamy, meditative “state of being” which, if indulged in with persistence and intensity, leads to its overwhelming the other emanations, hence “nirvana” and similar states of ba-ecstasy.

6. Ka

The transmigration-emanation. The ka is the complete mirror-image of all eight natural and non-natural emanations, fused into an avatar, Doppelgänger, or Horla, a completely metaphysical remanifestation of oneself which can exist and displace without limit, both within the SU generated by one’s ba and within the OU of the natural neteru as well.

It is the ka that, through the ab, enters the OU through “identity gates” such as pictures or statues of the individual, or utterance of the individual’s name(s) (the ren), as well as through conducive locales such as temples and geological & architectural anomalies.

While the ba may, particularly posthumously, lose awareness of itself through the paradoxical expansion of that consciousness into its entire perceptive field, the ka remains immortally finite, distinct, and otherness-separate. Thus in an expressive, active sense it becomes the externally-identifiable individual beyond physical death.

Nowhere is the ka better illustrated than in initiate Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars. Film treatments of this work, such as Hammer’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and the more recent The Awakening, have done it a grotesque disservice. In Stoker’s original text it is in no sense a horror story, but rather a fascinating and romantic mystery: Who was Tera of ancient Egypt, this marvelous sorceress-queen who took with her to her tomb only a ruby scarab inscribed with the constellation of the Thigh of Set (our “Great Bear”) and the hieroglyphs mer (love) and men ab (patience)? Listen to the words of the woman of our own era with whose ka Tera came gently to merge:

Quote:

I can see her in her loneliness and in the silence of her mighty pride, dreaming her own dream of things far different from those around her. Of some other land, far away under the canopy of the silent night, lit by the cool, beautiful light of the stars. A land under that Northern star, whence blew the sweet winds that cooled the feverish desert air. A land of wholesome greenery, far, far away. Where were no scheming and malignant priesthood; whose ideas were to lead to power through gloomy temples and more gloomy caverns of the dead, through an endless ritual of death! A land where love was not base, but a divine possession of the soul! Where there might be some one kindred spirit which could speak to hers through mortal lips like her own; whose being could merge with hers in a sweet communion of soul to soul, even as their breaths could mingle in the ambient air! I know the feeling, for I have shared it myself. I may speak of it now, since the blessing has come into my own life. I may speak of it since it enables me to interpret the feelings, the very longing soul, of that sweet and lovely Queen, so different from her surroundings, so high above her time! Whose nature, put into a word, could control the forces of the Under World; and the name of whose aspiration, though but graven on a star-lit jewel, could command all the powers in the Pantheon of the High Gods. And in the realisation of that dream she will surely be content to rest!

In Love and Patience we are taught the secret of true immortality - not the repulsive reanimation of corpses (anastasis nekron) of Christianity, nor the vague confusion of exoteric reincarnationists - but the infinite radiance of one’s MindStar by its most magnificent expression, and with a serene transcendence of natural time.

The last two emanations are unique in that they must arise from the individual, and require initiate consciousness to do so, per the formula Xepera Xeper Xeperu (”I Have Come Into Being and Created That Which Has Come Into Being.”).

7. Sekhem

The neter-emanation. While the term sekhem is ordinarily translated as “power”, this is misleading, because it is power in a very rarified sense - that emanating from the neteru themselves. For this reason it is also described as “the power of the stars” through which the neteru manifest in the OU. The sekhem combines with the ab (as, in effect, a temple within one’s consciousness), to draw down the essence of one or more adored neteru to indwell therein.

Activation of the sekhem has another effect: every incidence infuses the Initiate with more of the neter invoked, to the cumulative degree that the Initiate’s personality becomes accented by the neter’s: seeing as that neter sees, speaking as that neter would speak, acting as that neter would act. Hence it is the sekhem which makes possible, and ultimately consecrates priesthood of a neter in the individual so aligned. Once this transformation has taken place, it cannot be undone; at most it may be sublimated or repressed, but only at great cost to the priest’s or priestess’ very sanity.

8. Akh

The star-emanation. Beyond the priesthood of the sekhem is the akh, in which the Initiate rises to the company of the neteru as one of their essence, if not of them absolutely. Such one is indistinguishable from the actual neteru except by the neteru themselves. Such a mode of existence departs completely from all concern with physical displacement [within OUl references or boundaries, manifestation, or action, and affects otherness only by the radiance of its presence. While it does not destroy any of the other emanations, it permeates all of them, such that henceforth they all exist in conformity and concert with it.

So your actual adventure of continued, immortal consciousness past the cast-off of your temporary OU-body has absolutely nothing to do with crude, conventional “bodily reincarnation” superstitions. Non-initiates either relax into khat-unconsciousness or a passive ba-state similar to ordinary dreaming. Initiates who become aware of the complete MindStar complex can explore and actualize it in whole or part, eternally and universally. As Obi-wan Kenobi said to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, “You have just taken your first step into a larger universe.”

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Michael A. Aquino