Dreamland interview transcript with Whitley Strieber
Whitley Strieber: This is Whitley Strieber and this is Dreamland and you have reached the end of the world.
Today I am talking to Paul Boudreau about a book he has written with his close associate Lloyd Dickie called “Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer.” Now this immediately attracted my attention. All of my listeners know that I am very very interested in the past’s awareness of the soul and what it meant, and what this journey meant to them. Because in modern times for two reasons we are losing touch. We are going soul-blind. In the Western World we are going soul-blind because the beautiful, incredibly alluring material culture in which we find ourselves has a message for us, ‘This is all there is. You needn’t look beyond it because there is nothing to see. You are a meat machine.’ In the Third World the grinding agony of poverty is detaching all too many people from any of the traditional human journey. Paul however is very well aware of the long history of that journey. And Paul I would like to welcome you to Dreamland.
Paul Boudreau: Hello Whitley. Thank you very much for having me.
Whitley: Jacob Needleman said of your book Awakening Higher Consciousness, “This remarkable study of myth is a jewel of dynamic scholarship involving both the profound mystical roots as well as the all-too-human dramas of ancient civilization.” And this is where we are going to work today – together. We are going to go back, if you will take us back, Paul, into a very different world in which myth had a very different kind of meaning.
When a person in ancient Sumer was relating a myth they were doing something quite different from what we do I think when we tell such a story. What is the difference, in which way were myth alive then?
Paul: I always like to start with myself and the present and then work back. Obviously myself is the best thing that I could know. Lloyd and I started this exploration, this journey, based on some of our earlier memories of how myth and the stories had been presented to us. And the most obvious ones for connecting with people are of course the myth of the Book of Genesis and the story of naked people running around a garden with a talking snake. And we were mature by the time we got around to discussing it, but we both shared this view that what a silly stupid thing to preserve over thousands of years and present to small Christian children in the modern day world. This opened up the doors to us to share this exploration of whether myths are useful, are they just fantasy? Are they just fairy tales? Or are they actually conveying information that is not just entertaining, but useful to myself, to ourselves, as we are today – as I talk with you right now? Over many, many years – several decades – we had the good fortune to travel the world and experience the inside of pyramids, go to Stonehenge and touch the stones together. What we found was that these ancient myths are not stories from long long ago and far far away, but they are stories of me, right now, in terms of what I am, what I am not, of what I can see, of what I need to see. We believe that through the millennium these stories, these myths, have always tried to provide some critical language, some critical images to whoever heard them that would allow them to advance in their personal development.
So getting back to your question about Sumer, there are many different themes in the Sumerian legends. They were written three or four thousand years ago but they were obviously developed before that. And when we looked in detail at what the myths were saying, such as the Sumerians having a myth of the journey through the Netherworld. When we explored it in the language and the imagery, what we have come to see is a description of what I have to go through in terms of my consciousness, in terms of becoming aware of myself. I think that myths play that role, obviously a critical role, in the Sumerian and Egyptian worlds in helping educate their spirits, their souls, to become, as you said, more than just a pile of meat going through daily life. And you are right that this is being missed in modern day world in general and in the modern day looking at some of these myths.
Whitley: Yes, because in looking at the emotional content and the story in the myth we also imprint on our own souls something that we may very well use now or later in a journey that most of us don’t believe that we will really take.
Let’s talk a little bit about that as you have brought up the Sumerian myth of Inanna who became the Greek goddess Persephone later on, and her journey the underworld and what happened.
Paul: I just want to say that the Egyptians also had a similar story of the journey through the Duat.
Whitley: Would you like to talk about the Duat first?
Paul: I just want to make sure that the listeners are aware that it is the same story. It is the same story told by cultures separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles.
Whitley: But before we go on, let’s get into that difference and that separation and its significance.
We are talking to Paul Boudreau. His book with Lloyd M. Dickie is “Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer.” There website is awhico.com that is the phonetic for awhico.com. There is a lot of interesting stuff there. There is a very good blog, slideshow photos and you can contact them and you can get their book right from their website.
We were talking about the journey through the underworld. Let’s just broaden it out because it is a journey that is universal in the distant past. It was probably the journey that was taken by initiates of Ephesus, it is of course the journey of Persephone, it is the journey of Inanna, it is the journey through the Duat. Can you tell us in general terms what this journey and then we will get into why it is such a universal story.
Paul: The journey through the Netherworld is a story about the necessary trials and tribulations of developing one’s soul. There are a number of key characteristics that are common in the Greek, Egyptian and Sumerian. In terms of the preparation of the individual, motivation – why the person sees the need to go into the Netherworld. Very often there is a concept of clothing, talisman or jewelry that is required to make this happen. And whether it is the Sumerian or the Egyptian, the soul the spirit is challenged. There is no getting away from it – it is not a pleasant experience. Whether it is the Egyptian being challenged by snakes with knives and alligators. Or whether it the Sumerian with ghosts and whatnot. So for us it is a very clear description of those tough times in life that has given rise to an increase in my soul. It would be nice if it happened happily with sunshine, but I see it better captured in these stories of the Netherworld. At the end of the journey, the person doing the journey comes up different – quite different actually as a result of this long process of the preparation, of the journey and from overcoming those challenges.
Whitley: Let me ask you a question. Could this be the Netherworld?
Paul: You may notice that I don’t call it the Underworld so yes I think you are getting close to that. The Netherworld is here, right now. Maybe with a different vibration or something, but absolutely. My attempt right now is to be awake, to feel my breathing. Not to get lost in my emotions, my hunger or my road rage. All those other distractions. Those are the challenges.
Whitley: You are talking with someone who lives in Los Angeles. Telling me not to get lost in road rage would be a major achievement. I would right up there with the angels – ha ha ha.
Paul: Ha ha ha - now the journey through the Netherworld is not easy.
Whitley: Let’s go to some of these specific stories because they are so wonderful and so colorful and so filled with meaning. I touched on the story of Inanna’s journey through the Netherworld and what happened to her and the surprises. Just to start us off, Inanna is a Sumerian goddess and this is a story of this journey that is 5,000 years old and this journey through the Netherworld looks very much like the journey through life. Can you tell us a little bit about her journey?
Paul: I’ve touched on it a bit already in general terms.
Whitley: But can you touch on it more specifically – the jewelry the things she gathers, and the places she went and what to her great surprise happened to her?
Paul: Well as we get into in the book there are certain things that she is required to wear and as she goes through each stage of development if I recall correctly, she loses a piece of clothing or a piece of jewelry.
Whitley: That’s correct.
Paul: And at the end of the day she is naked faced with the greatest challenges and she has to accept that all of that physical preparation that has held her is good stead until that point but there is still that final moment when she has none of her talisman, none of her protection.
Whitley: She ends up kneeling before the Queen of the Underworld buck-naked. This is the last thing that she expected to happen. All of the talisman, powers and jewels that she brought with her have been taken away. Here she is naked as she was born. And what happens to her then?
Paul: I’ll let you tell the rest of the tale.
Whitley: I know all of these stories by heart folks so I can certainly tell you.
She dies and ends up hung on a stake as a corpse. In other words she dies to this life.
Paul: Right – exactly.
Whitley: Exactly – she dies to this life. And then what happens is that she slowly awakened with water. The waters of life are poured on her – 60 goblets I believe – a lot of water is poured on her. And she awakens to this life. Then there has to be a tradeoff. She comes back but someone else has to go into the underworld and makes numerous efforts to escape it and does not. And there she is, forever filled with new knowledge of life and death.
This story of this journey is so powerful it is repeated so many times in human literature. And yet as we sit here today, we’ve forgotten it altogether.
Paul: And the parallels with the Egyptians in the same way
Whitley: Tell us about the journey through the Duat?
Paul: What is referred to as the Pharaoh – and I can’t emphasize enough that we don’t see the Pharaoh as a dead person. The Pharaoh symbolizes the same spirit, soul that Inanna captured for the Sumerians. The journey through the Duat by the Egyptians was recorded in the Pyramid Texts was essentially the same story. He or she goes through these challenges, he has to eat the flesh of the other gods. At the end of the day when he is coming to the end of his journey, he is elevated to the highest level above any other gods. As a result of these challenges and the work that he has done, there is the potential to connect with a world that is not common to us, to ordinary people.
It is the same issue. You can’t sit around drinking beer and kicking back, there is real work that is required. But the work pays off on a different level. That is where the title of our book comes from “Awakening Higher Consciousness”. It is higher than what we are usually in day-to-day life.
And if I may, we don’t provide a recipe for higher consciousness, we just try to see what these myths tell us about getting a little bit higher consciousness if you allow that sort of concept. Driving a car is a good example. Many times in my life I’ve been driving down the road and I “wake up.” And the amazing thing to me is where was I before I woke up?
Whitley: Yeah, that happens to all of us I think.
Paul: Those are the powerful moments that without this language of the Duat, the challenges, these concepts placed before me, I shrug my shoulders, drive on and then fall asleep again almost immediately. But myth has the ability to give us with some background, some structure so that I am in a position to pay attention to those moments and they can have more of an impact. It may be just milliseconds, but that is more than I would have without that structure.
To recognize that the journey through the Duat, the journey through the Netherworld requires these sorts of energies is a very powerful tool in my kitbag in efforts to become more of a soul, spirit, person – I don’t know how to capture it.
Whitley: It is a very interesting this journey. Because there is a sense that we can only engage it when we no longer have the body. When the body is gone and we are facing ourselves in a very unfiltered way. But the truth is you can engage in the journey right now – anytime. The journey is always there and we can take the entire journey while we are still in physical being. It means dying to a certain aspect of yourself in that you have to see ego become a tool rather than you in other words. “I am not Whitley any more, but that is a tool that I use to engage in social interaction.” It is a lovely tool, but it is still not me.
But now let’s go back to the most basic, beginning of this discussion. You touched on Genesis and the first few paragraphs of Genesis are incredible dense with meaning. That is something that I would really like to get to.
I am talking to Paul Boudreau “Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer”. His co-author is Lloyd M. Dickie. There website is awhico.com – awakening higher consciousness.com. They have a very interesting blog and you can get their book through that website.
At the beginning of the show we talked briefly about Genesis. It is as if in Genesis, and I think it is unique to the Jewish tradition, that the discovery of the Self as being separate from nature and separate from God is regarded as a sort of disaster in that God gets annoyed and mankind gets thrown out of the Garden of Eden. We are left to wander in the stones where we still are. But it is also the beginning of an essential and incredibly beautiful journey. Could you expand on that a little bit?
Paul: You lead very nicely into this when you mention that the Western World sees all of this progress, this process is to be done after you die. That is a very Christian concept. And, because we of course look at the world through our world view which is based on our up bringing and so Christian views have had a great impact on how we see the world. And that couldn’t be more true than for the Bible. In the early chapters of Genesis there is this story about Adam and Eve and the snake and you capture it very well that God get angry and they are punished.
We’ve been to the Bibliotheca National, the National Library in Paris, we managed to stumble on this marvelous book by Fabre d’Olivet that we mention in our book. He looks at the Genesis story from a hieroglyphic point of view not a literal view. He looks at each character. Adam is ADM – three letters. He looks at what the three letters mean and we carry that analysis through to the other players in this Genesis story. What we find is a fabulous story about the interaction between the active and passive principles, between the universal and the individual. And we find equivalences with some of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. It is the same as for the Egyptians where there are hieroglyphs and they are put together into words. But rather than our common approach to this where an “A” is an abstract letter, we explore what these hieroglyphs in both the Hebrew and the Egyptian mean and what their underlying power or energy is. Such that if you reverse a glyph or a letter, one transforms a physical food into a spiritual food. Just by the way the different glyphs are placed on the page and how they are presented. Sorry, but this is a long introduction to expose what we do in our book about Genesis in terms of it not being a sin or a falling from grace, but ties very closely with what we just talked about the journey through the Netherworld. It is an awakening to a nakedness that allows us to participate in this difficult journey of life. It is only when one is aware of that and starts work, that is suffering the slings and arrows if you will, then one has the option of progressing and growing in spiritual life. This is quite different from the story that shocked me as a six or seven year old boy about these naked people in a garden. It is a question about what can I see in myself and how awakening to your nakedness is not a sin. It is something that you can use to power your further development. Quite a different story than what is commonly viewed.
Whitley: Yes and these stories, these myths are meant to be used in life. That is what isn’t understood now. We think of them as something that will happen to us after death – after the body dies – a lot happens. It is by no means the end. I can speak to that from personal experience of have lived and been in both worlds for most of my life. And even though we live in a world where we are saying to ourselves, “The soul doesn’t exist and there is nothing after life.” It is not true. But in order to have an afterlife, you have to have a life.
Paul: Indeed!
Whitley: You have to engage and search otherwise you die in a kind of poverty. That is fine as you will be part of the circulation of the Universe. But there is so much more.
Do you think that they were conscious in the past? Let me rephrase the question more directly. Did they know that they had souls or could they actually sense the soul? Do you think among the Egyptians and the Sumerians from a very long time ago?
Paul: Definitely. Every human has the capacity to connect with this level of energy. I have no reason to believe that 5,000 years is a long time for change. I think that the Egyptians and the Sumerians were probably very much like you and I. Their world view was different and many aspects of their life was different, but the myths we talk about from Sumer and Egypt were the very first things written down by humans.
Whitley: And that is a very significant fact. This was the earliest material. How would you characterize it general?
Paul: From our point of view they were writing about important things. They didn’t write about building a pyramid because that was probably easier than developing this consciousness that we are talking about.
Whitley: It was about the search for One Self.
Paul: And when one does connect with this, and I have for brief moments, it is incredible! Much more incredible than building a pyramid. So the fact that these earliest stories that man has ever written down in the World were about journey’s through the Duat, higher consciousness to me is the evidence we need to say that they are talking about important things. We do them a great disservice to consider them as fairy tales or fantasies.
Later on, as cultures developed there were many other things written down. But to have this as the first things written down, to Lloyd and I this is a signpost to pay attention to this, this is important to you.
Whitley: Yes, to pay attention to it. And we have in our world the potential to pay attention to it, to all of it, because it all lies before us. All of the journeys of the past have been recorded and we can use this material in taking our own journey. Over time even as we have begun to forget the soul and to abandon the soul the ability to use these tools has become much more evolved and much more developed. We can do a great deal now that wasn’t possible in the past because of the perspective we have. And when we come back we will be talking about that process. How do we use this material? I’m not awake now. How do I wake up to it? If I was an ancient Egyptian, what would I be like? How would I be different? How would my soul be different? Would I be richer or poorer?
I am talking with Paul Boudreau “Awakening Higher Consciousness.” His website is awhico.com. He and his co-author Lloyd Dickie have provided a lot of blog material and beautiful slideshow photos because they actually went there and did this. These are not armchair detectives.
This is Whitley Strieber and we’re talking with Paul Boudreau about “Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer” his book co-written with Lloyd Dickie. Their website is awhico.com.
Now the Egyptians had connections to higher energies – very advanced. I have a question for you in relation to this. The monuments that they left behind, and the writing they left behind, were of course profoundly connected. I am referring to the stories of the secrets of the Sphinx, and I am referring to the story in the geometry of the pyramids. The story of the journey. I want to get to this in an indirect way. I want to talk about the weighing of the heart. Is this a story about the dead or not?
Paul: Definitely not the dead! What crazy person would think a heart would weigh the same as a feather? But spiritually, psychologically it is a fantastic image. The whole idea of a scale a balance at the moment that we are in now. The balance between the two scales is a fantastic image.
The feather represents the neter or god Maat. She is very much tied with order and truth and justice, bifurcation, one or the other – just get it straight. The heart is the seat of emotion and love – those irrational things. So the weighing of the heart is something that we see as taking place, or should be taking place, in every moment of every day of every waking hour as how am I aware of my rational and irrational and how can I bring them into balance so that I am present at the moment.
It is definitely not about dead people.
Whitley: And that presence in the moment – what is that?
Paul: Awareness? Being? In many ways we still struggle with terminology and imagery as the Egyptians and the Sumerians did. Its hard to lay down. First one has to have that experience of it. In my communication with other people, if the person hasn’t experienced an awakening, or a moment of higher awakening, there is no way you can explain it or describe it. But if they have touched it, however briefly, and they remember that, then you can work to find some imagery that allows that connection to happen and say “Oh yay – that happened to you too.” And the world becomes a bigger place when that moment happens. When you get outside of yourself, your questions and your uncertainties and can say “this is real – this is something that is more than just me.”
Whitley: You know and everyone of us actually has such a moment and many such moments. It is a question of finding that moment when the world suddenly opened up and was completely new – just like that. Maybe you were in an auto accident. Maybe you saw something incredibly beautiful. Some sort of shock to your system. And in that moment that shock gave you this energy to step back, an infinitely small amount of space and see the world as it really is in its perpetual newness.
Now in a sense it is a kind of resurrection. And resurrection is a resonant part of all of this material. When we were discussing Inanna it is about death and resurrection – dying to the world and being reborn. But we can’t go farther without discussion Isis and Osiris. Perhaps the most poetic and difficult relationship in all of myth. Can you tell us a little bit about Isis and Osiris.
Paul: Isis and Osiris. Osiris of course is a neter or god of the Egyptian and his partner Isis when through a long tribulation against Seth the brother of Osiris.
Whitley: What was Seth like?
Paul: Well I guess the easiest way to characterize Seth is entropy is you know that word, disorganization or the winding down of the world. He was disorganization compared to Osiris’ desire to keep everything in order and on the straight and narrow. And Seth through the story actually convinces Osiris to get into a box that is made specifically to fit Osiris. Seth is able to kill Osiris and the box floats down to the Mediterranean. Isis goes and finds the box with Osiris in it in a tree in Lebanon. Osiris gets cut up into multiple pieces. Isis finds most of the pieces and put him back together again. Effectively re-membering him is the phrase that Lloyd and I like to use. He had his pieces cut up and Isis re-members him back into a whole. Then Osiris takes on a whole new form. He impregnates Isis and they have an offspring called Horus who is another manifestation of Osiris.
So you encounter a lot of the same concepts that we have already gone through such as struggle and death but coming out the other side as quite a different being. The whole story of Isis and Osiris is incredible complex and beautiful. But that is what I can come up with as an elevator pitch of what the story is about.
Osiris becomes the god of the Netherworld. He dies and takes on different role in this world that is available to us.
Whitley: You know I’ll tell a little story now that we have gotten to Isis and therefore also to Horus of my cabin in upstate New York. And I will just remind my listeners briefly of this, especially the listeners who have been with me a long long time, some of who know this story but some of you don’t. It is an interesting story I think.
We had a filmmaker and his wife at the cabin one weekend doing a documentary. They were Hollywood types and very much not in the realm of this material. And they were sleeping on a convertible couch in the living room. And early in the morning a figure appeared at their bedside. A small man with a very large head was staring down at them. Absolutely terrified them of course. They had come there to sort of laugh at us. Little did they know what could be materialized. As soon as they felt fear, he turned into a falcon-headed being – Horus in other words.
Could you go from the relationship between Osiris and Horus and the who was Horus and why was Horus so important and why Horus is still so important now. There is a message for us right now.
Paul: Horus as I understand it, and one always struggles to understand what these great people were talking about. For me Horus is more of a present day god. A sort of a step down from Osiris. Horus gets associated with the sun god Ra and various aspects of the sun. The rising of the sun in the morning and the setting in the night. So Horus takes on more of an intermediate role between the things that I see and do and what my higher capacities are. I feel I connect more frequently with Horus that I do with Osiris. But the two are equally important. In some interpretations the two are the same thing so maybe it is just depends on which side of the coin you look at them on.
Whitley: In one strain of Egyptian mythology Horus is seen as the son of Isis and Osiris and is the heir to Osiris and he is the rival to Seth. That is to say he embodies the opposite of the Seth energy which is the energy of dissolution. He is the energy of continuation and of ascension. That is why he is a sky god. He is the god of war because he is there to protect the Egyptian people and those searching for consciousness.
Paul: He is part of my active being more than the passive one. The Egyptians were full of these balancing and contrasting, the Yin/Yang. I don’t know if you are familiar with the Jungian concept of enantiodromia?
Whitley: Explain it to us.
Paul: Jung wrote about the concept of enantiodromia which is the one going against its opposite. One way that we try to deal with enantiodromia in the book is we look at two other neters in the Egyptian, Heka and Maat. Maat we talked a little bit about. Maat is the neter or principle of order and justice. Heka fascinates us because Heka is the neter or principle of magic. If you go through Wallis Budge, the authoritative translation of the Book of Coming Forth by Day, which some people may know as the Book of the Dead, but it is really the Book of Coming Forth by Day. Heka is very difficult to find in the classical, Christian translation of these marvelous books.
What we find is that Heka and Maat are two very powerful and essential pieces to a worldview which is more whole. Again with the Yin/Yang you’ve got the black and the white but they come together to form a circle. Christianity likes to split and divide and certainly they were not very big on magic. They try to push that away. Lloyd and I are biologists/ecologists and there is the magic of creation is a very powerful force. So the Egyptians captured this enantiodromia, the reconciliation of opposites, by these very powerful gods, the god of order and the god of magic. In our lives, both are required. Both are essential. How to resolve those two apparently opposing forces can only take place on a higher level of appreciation. It a bit like the story of Solomon who is about to cut the baby in half and the love of the mother immediately comes to resolve the question and the baby survives.
With Heka and Maat one has to see that they both exist and they are both part of life. Much like my body is part of me and my spirit is part of me. It is fun to think that I could be only spirit but I eat, I get hungry, I get tired. And this whole concept of how does one find that balance to accept as opposed to divide and conquer is a very powerful image for the Egyptians in terms of how they saw the world. You can’t have one or the other – you need both. If that requires that you take a higher view of life, well then that is what is required.
So Jung’s concept of enantiodromia, we talked about the weighing of the heart, these are all concepts that apply to me right now – seeing my different sides and seeing how they have to be weighed.
Whitley: So this weighing now within ourselves is the central theme in the Book by Coming Forth by Day. And can you tell us what it is because it is always thought that after death the heart is placed on one side of the scale and the feather on the other and if the heart is so light that it does not cause the scale to fall, that person is free to ascend. But that is something that is always happening inside our lives. To die and to be reborn.
Paul: It can. But the flip side is that if the heart is too heavy, one gets eaten and gets devoured.
Whitley: By identifications too powerful to resist.
Paul: Habits.
Whitley: Anger. The sense of injustice. All of those things. How do you have a light heart in this life Paul?
Paul: Push it further – how does one become the scale?
Whitley: Good question! How does one become the scale? What is that process? What do we do?
Paul: Your question about how heavy the heart is a good one. That also has to happen. One has to prepare the heart, but how does one become the scales? I don’t know if you play music but there are moments in music when you are hearing everything and your contributing and it is amazing that one can be that active on all those various different levels. I think that the weighing of the heart is the same thing where you have to be the feather, you have to be the heart and you have to be the scales. Those all have to be balanced and operating at the same time. These are just images and I don’t claim any expertise in that I could do them at any moment. It is fascinating to think that I have to be that image. It is not one part of the image, it is the whole image or nothing. The Egyptian carvings in the tombs are spectacular reminders of this. To be exposed to this in the Kings Chamber in the Great Pyramid hearing sounds that one can generate in there.
The Egyptians definitely had tools that we don’t take advantage of that reminded them, the initiate, the shaman in their culture to these higher energies. It is hard to not get too fixed on any one of them.
Whitley: It is very difficult because we have entirely lost the use of sound and sonic vibrations, in this journey. In other words you can use sound to affect the body cellularly – it vibrates in such a way such that the soul is able to separate a little bit and see oneself in a more objective way and therefore to have a larger vision. But that use of sound is almost unknown in our world now – almost unknown but not quite.
Paul: It is a great time to be looking at ancient history. People are studying Göbekli Tepe, I don’t know if you are aware of this
Whitley: Oh yes we have talked about it many time on our program.
Paul: And with the Sumerian and Egyptian, Lloyd and I have benefited from the great breakthroughs in the last 100 years in terms of understanding the language. We’ve made great strides in some areas but in terms of spirituality, we are still immature, still too young to put it together I think. For ourselves personal, Lloyd and I in the book have tried to capture some of that such as what could the sounds mean? What could the pictures mean? What could the hieroglyphs mean? How could they advance my stated aim – if not a living aim to be more than what I am now?
Personally I would like to awaken more than I would like to move a big block of stone. Maybe they are connected?
Whitley: I think they are connected. But it gets to the question of why are we here? Why are we in a situation like this? It is certainly not an accident and people think “who did this to us?” It is part of nature. Nature made us this way. Nature gave us this struggle and that gets me in a very round about way to some figures that you mention from time to time in the Sumerian parts of your book but which are of intense interest to people now because some people believe that they were actual beings. This arise out of some material from various ancient-alien type authors and that is the Annunaki and who they were? Who they really were in Sumerian mythology?
I would like you to comment a little bit about the Annunaki?
Paul: I’ve never met an alien that I know of so I can’t say anything about them. Thinking of giants gets us back to how would we describe a person who we experience as has having a huge spirit or a huge soul other than making them physically larger in the descriptions? Were they real? Were they angels? It is not my direct interest other than what it might relate to in my own life. I have met some very big people in my life. Not people of big physical stature, but people who had more than I did. So that’s my take on what the Annunaki are. To be a whole culture of them is fascinating.
Whitley: Yeah and me to. I’ve met such people as well. I also think that the giant statuary of Ancient Egypt is soul statuary. The Pharaoh was viewed as having a great soul. The soul was there to lead the people. Whether that was actually true in the case of all the Pharaohs, if you look at Egyptian history, you have to wonder if that was more often a more hopeful thing rather than a true one.
Paul: But shamanic initiation would certainly assist people, individuals to accept that role. I prefer the phrase that some of these Pharaohs were experienced as large people – experienced based on their souls.
Whitley: And they had a much larger vision of the world.
Now one of the things about the Annunaki, if you go and Google the Annunaki, you are going to find all kinds of websites talking about the Annunaki as an actual species who lived here. And I find that in a way rather unfortunate because is not the kind of question we can actually answer. And in concretizing this element, we lose touch with the actual energy that it represents. And that has been true throughout human history. Whenever we concretize our myths and decide that they really were physical events, we separate ourselves from them. And the energy Annunaki for example, the energy that they brought to the world at that time was very powerful. It was a spiritual energy though and it was a disruptive as it was enlightening.
In that context do you have anything further that you might like to say about them or in general about the spiritual journey as it was perceived by the Sumerians as a much more intense wandering through an Underworld that contained a lot of desperate urgency in it?
Paul: The real challenge that I have is thinking whether it was just a few individuals or was it the whole culture? Because even today people with large hearts, large souls persist and I think we have both met some. To draw generalizations from a Pharaoh or a couple of Pharaohs who managed to go through an extensive initiation inside of the pyramids, and extrapolate that to everybody is a bit beyond what I would recommend. But having those individuals more apparent in the society would certainly have an impact on the overall society even though potentially all Egyptians or all Sumerians were one step from gods. So they would have had an impact, but it is hard to know the intricacies of that kind of society. There were people that were instrumental in perpetuating the society.
Maybe it is like today, but maybe it is harder to find today. I take hope that there are still shamans in the world today and that there are still people that can teach me something.
Whitley: Well I think we have reason to believe that. I think that both of us have had experience with such people. I can remember a man who had a lot of shamanic power in his life who taught me for many years. He had some very unusual skills. In fact he had the capability of simple disappearing before your eyes. My wife and I often witnessed this. Once he was walking up a path. There was a whole group of people standing waiting for him. And suddenly he wasn’t there anymore and he came up behind us. And I turned around and said, “How do you do that? I’ve seen you disappear like that a number of time.” And he looked at me and said, “You figure it out!” I’ve been working on that ever since – at least 25 or 30 years.
Paul: Those moments in my life are much more fascinating than aliens or giant Annunaki. They are with me now and I carry those moments with me.
Whitley: If we think of the giants of the past as being big souls, it transforms all of those stories completely. It is amazing. It makes them useful instead of turning them into sort of a popular comic narrative.
Paul: That captures the book as much as anything Whitley. That is what we try to expose in the book. These are not fantasies. The myths are as useful today. You have to directly experience them and bring your own person to the myth, and with that they are much more powerful than anything you’ve ever believed before.
Whitley: Well I want to thank you very much for being with us Paul. Paul’s book is “Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer” written with his close friend Lloyd M. Dickie. Their website is http://awhico.com.
Paul: Awakening Higher Consciousness dot com: awhico.com
Whitley: awhico.com
Paul: And if you do a Google search on awakening higher consciousness you’ll find us that way too.
Whitley: Yes, well thank you so much for being with us on Dreamland.
Paul: Thank you so much. It has been a great pleasure.