[ggiifdfalls]

The only certainties in life are death and taxes, according to Benjamin Franklin.

So you’d think that as we're certain that death will definitely happen to us, one day, we'd make pretty damn sure that we knew a heck of a lot about it.

But no.

We have every kind of instruction, information, advice and guidance on how to live — but none on how to die. And in the West, we live in denial about death. We hide our dead bodies away and if anyone talks about death, they're accused of being morbid.

It wasn’t always so.

Going back into prehistory, the shaman of the tribe would act as the psychopomp, and guide or carry the souls of the dead into the next dimension. As you can see from this Wiki page on psychopomps, he or she appears in the mythology of just about every ancient civilisation. This is because shamanic practises were worldwide and people were taught how to die.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopomp

Many religions include a particular spirit, angel, or deity whose responsibility is to escort newly-deceased souls to the afterlife. These creatures are called psychopomps, from the Greek word ψυχοπομπός (psychopompos), literally meaning the "guide of souls". Their role is not to judge the deceased, but simply provide safe passage. Frequently depicted on funerary art, psychopomps have been associated at different times and in different cultures with horses, whippoorwills, ravens, dogs, crows, owls, sparrows, cuckoos, harts, and dolphins. Charon was the Greek ferryman, or psychopomp, who ferried the souls of the dead from the land of the living to Hades. The actual journey isn’t anything like this painting of it, by Luca Giordana. But it shows how we, in our ignorance about death, have come to view this natural rite of passage as a chaotic and terror-filled nightmare.



The Barque of Charon




Perhaps the most recent literary psychopomp is Virgil, who conducted Dante through the nine circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno. But that work is political more than spiritual and even worse, you can't even appreciate the poetry because it was written in an obsure Tuscan dialect that no longer exists.

However, going back before Dante and the post-Plato Greeks, these mythological stories were in fact used to teach the death journey ... the journey the soul would take at death. And the practice was carried on in the Neolithic and onwards by the Tibetans, the Indians and the Egyptians at least ... and possibly others that we don’t yet know about.

Sadly, in the past two thousand years, the historicisation of myth — making metaphor literal — has destroyed this body of knowledge. We are taught nothing about the death journey because nobody seems to know anything about it apart, that is, from those who return from having a Near Death Experience (NDE).

But it’s still not much help. If a person "returns from the dead", it means that they never got any further than the first gate out — the tunnel, or the string of String Theory that takes us into the next dimension.


Detail from The Last Judgement by Hieronymus Bosch



If you go any further than the tunnel, you can’t get back, unless you’re a psychopomp who has all the right ‘open sesames’ and who knows the way.

So NDEs still can’t give us much information. It’s like if you were trapped in a nightclub basement and tried to escape. You get as far as the door at the top of the stairs, but the bouncers turn you back. Then, on your return, you exclaim:

“Oh my God! You should have seen it! It was so divine! There was a brilliant, luminescent, other-worldly light shimmering over the door,” when in fact it was just the flashing neon sign saying EXIT.







The reason there are no teachers now on how to die is because empirical science has debunked literal Judaeo-Christianity. We know there’s no heaven with angels and harps, or a hell with a horned Devil who roasts sinners who all moan and gnash their teeth. So we’ve rejected the whole lot now.

Imo, we’ve rejected it quite rightly as literal truth about this reality, because it is a fiction – and bad fiction at that. But that bad fiction (for example, the Genesis creation story, Noah’s Ark, the Exodus across the Red Sea, the Crucifixion ... and even the story of Atlantis) was based on much more ancient stories that existed for a very real purpose. They made up different stages of the death journey.

This journey was taken at night by the Egyptians, where the deceeased followed the arc of the sun from sunset to its eventual sunrise in the Land of Manu (the East or India). That is why this night journey of the soul of the deceased is known to the Egyptians as The Coming Forth Into Day. It is a story of death and rebirth, as the soul is reborn with the Sun at dawn.






In other words, it was the manual for how to make the transition into the next dimension at death. It was the manual on how to die.







So in this thread, over the next few weeks, I’m going to look at what these death journeys actually were about by bringing in the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts. The other manual still left to us, of course, is the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And if it is helpful and relevant, I will also use my own experiences as a shaman and psychopomp to make interpretations.

But please feel free to interrupt me at any time, if something doesn’t make sense, or even if it’s just to make a comment or a joke or to tell me I'm talking a load of crap or something. As you all know, I’m perfectly capable of talking to myself for hours on end ... but it’s nice to have company!